Lord of the Flies (1963)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ 

Lord of the Flies (1963) – P. Brook

Aito was assigned to read William Golding’s 1959 novel for his Year 7 English class and when he finished, I located director Peter Brook’s film version on Kanopy and we watched it.  He felt it was quite faithful although the filmmakers naturally cut out some sequences from the book (and inexplicably the explanation of the title as well). The film starts when a bunch of English kids, having survived a plane crash, find themselves alone on a deserted tropical island (the film was actually shot in Puerto Rico).  I couldn’t help but think immediately of 7 Up! the documentary series that has followed a bunch of British kids from the early sixties until now (with films every seven years) – the actors in Lord of the Flies could easily be drawn from the same cohort as the “real” kids in the documentary series. So, would those real kids end up reverting to “primitive” tribal instincts as those in the film do, if they were similarly stranded on a deserted island?  That is Golding’s (and Brook’s) premise. The film, shot in gorgeous black and white, feels natural and almost unscripted. Of course, some of the kids are better actors than others. Piggy (Hugh Edwards) speaks with the determined emphatic and slow drawl of a young Alfred Hitchcock – we feel for him, as he is targeted by the stronger popular boys because of his weight and his glasses. Survival of the fittest perhaps but our empathy is strongly with the reasonable rational and perhaps weaker (less aggressive) kids. Brook and his team show us this world through the kids’ eyes (full of spectacle, especially once they light those torches and don their warpaint) but there is a harshness and cruelty here that is not for kids (even if it is characteristic of them, when left to their own devices). An indelible film, directed with an experimental eye but which never loses sight of the narrative.  

Panique (1946)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Panique (1946) – J. Duvivier

Michel Simon plays Monsieur Hire, an outsider, probably Jewish, who is suspected by his neighbours of committing a murder (which we know was really committed by a local thug played by Paul Bernard). When the thug’s girlfriend returns from prison, having taken the rap for him, she moves into M. Hire’s hotel and they become acquainted. He implies that he has evidence that ties the real murderer to the crime and she feigns an interest in him in order to get into his apartment. We learn his sad story (his wife left him for his best friend) and feel sorry for him when he falls for the girlfriend, Alice (Viviane Romance). Indeed, Alice also begins to feel sympathy for M. Hire – but not enough to stop her from planting evidence of the murder (the victim’s handbag) in his apartment, at the request of her lover. Once the evidence is found, the gangster and his friends wind up the community, already negatively predisposed against Hire, and soon a vigilante mob is formed. In this way, the film is not dissimilar from other films which tell how easy it is for malicious rumours to gain sway over a group (see also Fritz Lang’s Fury, 1936). Coming just after WWII in France, it isn’t hard to read the film as a grimly pointed commentary about those who collaborated.  But, as directed by Julien Duvivier, the film takes time to develop its central character (Hire) and dwells enough on Alice’s psychology to give the audience a pang of regret when she suffers her (deserved) fate. The plainly artificial sets harken back to Carné and Prévert’s poetic realism but this film is less noir than melodrama but none the worse for that. 

The Beatles: Get Back (2021)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Beatles: Get Back (2021) – P. Jackson

Growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, the Beatles’ music was all around me – even though the band had been long broken up.  My dad owned the red double album and my sister and I memorized every word.  Classic rock radio played the hits from the blue double album anyway. Over the years, I heard all of their most famous works.  Recently, the library gave me The Beatles: All the Songs by Margotin and Guesdon (which I checked out when it was already “out of circulation”) and my stepfather gifted me four Beatles CDs (I already had Revolver) since he streams everything now.  Let It Be wasn’t among them – in fact, I never had much time for that one and I never watched the original movie (Let It Be, 1970) directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg that included footage from the making of the album (and which incidentally reinforced the narrative that Yoko Ono had broken up the band by driving a wedge between John Lennon and the others). So, when I had the opportunity to watch Peter Jackson’s three-part (468 min) mini-series drawn from the 60 hours of footage shot by Lindsay-Hogg, it came as something of a revelation. Here were the Beatles, around age 28 in January 1969, sitting, first in Twickenham film studios and then in their own Apple building studio, seemingly making up songs on the spot.  We see the gestation of Get Back and its final recording. Other songs seem to have been made up at home and brought in for workshopping with the others. It’s an occasionally tense (George quits the band!) but mostly relaxed affair, with a lot of goofing around by John and Paul. They play their own past hits with ridiculous voices or slow tempos. They work on songs that would later feature on Abbey Road or on solo albums (All Things Must Pass, and a fragment that became Jealous Guy). There are some intense jams involving John, Paul, and Yoko (with her unique vocal style), suggesting that the reported ill will between these three was over-stated by the earlier film. This is not to say that The Beatles weren’t nearing the end of their time as a group – they recorded Abbey Road about six months later and then broke up for good about six months after that when Paul objected to Phil Spector’s production techniques on the Let It Be album. It had been originally conceptualised with a back-to-basics approach, no overdubs or studio trickery, in effect the four Beatles (plus Billy Preston who happens into the studio at just the right time to add electric piano and ease some tensions) playing live again. And to top it all off, after much debate, they finally do end up giving a 42 minute concert on the rooftop of the Apple building (some songs played twice) and a few of these songs, recorded live, ended up on the album. Listening to it now is a much richer experience having seen the genesis of the songs and the working process of the band. Peter Jackson’s presentation of the material, with each day crossed off on a calendar as it passes, including plenty of full-length performances, extended “candid” conversations, some drama, some nonsense, and masterfully edited snippets, is explicitly noted to have been designed to be true to the actual events and everyone involved (Paul and Ringo are executive producers). A must see, if you’ve ever loved the Fab Four.

Back to the Future (1985)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Back to the Future (1985) – R. Zemeckis

I suspect that I haven’t seen this movie since the 1980s, so it was a real head trip this time to reconcile the nearly 40-year difference between “now” (2023) and the “now” of the film (1985 – when I was turning 18 but Michael J. Fox playing a 17 year-old was actually 24) which is actually longer than the difference between the film’s “now” and the year Marty McFly (Fox) travels back to (1955 – 30 years).  In fact, at the end of the film Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) says he plans to travel 30 years into the future, which would have been 2015 (8 years ago).  To add to this, I watched the movie with my 10-year-old son (born in 2012). He was unfazed but my attention was attracted to the telephones, cars, hair, clothes and music (e.g., Huey Lewis) of the 1980s – these seemed more authentic than those featured in the recreation of the 1950s (although how would I know, except from watching movies).  The film itself seemed briefer than I remembered. After some stage-setting scenes with his parents (Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson) and Biff (his dad’s tormentor; Tom Wilson), Marty meets up with Doc at 1:30 AM where he learns about the time machine (DeLorean car) and the Libyan terrorists who want their plutonium back. They kill Doc as Marty flees into the past – to 5 November 1955.  There he meets his parents but accidentally messes up the future by getting hit by his grandfather’s car instead of his dad getting hit; this causes his mother to fall in love with him instead of his father.  In order to set things straight (and protect his own future existence), Marty needs to get his mom together with his dad. I had hesitated watching this with Amon due to the sexual underpinnings of the plot (not to mention the scenes of sexual violence that are pivotal to it) but we skated right through that. The final half-hour of the film is like a master-class in creating tension, as Marty’s ability to return to the present (and also warn Doc about the Libyan terrorists) is nearly thwarted at every turn.  This was, of course, a huge hit for director Robert Zemeckis who has prided himself on special effects throughout his career. There’s a classical charm to the proceedings that makes the film work for both kids and adults, although the datedness of the ‘80s is something that I still find hard to digest.

You Won’t Be Alone (2022)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

You Won’t Be Alone (2022) – G. Stolevski

Folk horror, yes, but not quite what you might expect. Sure, this is a tale of witches who steal babies and drink the blood of slaughtered cottontails – but what makes it different is that, in this film, we take the perspective of the witches and we are encouraged to feel empathy for them. At the start of the film, in 19^th century Macedonia, a horribly scarred witch agrees not to kill a baby when the mother offers instead to deliver the girl to the witch at age 16, claiming that the witch “won’t be alone” if she takes possession of the to-be-teenager later. Fast forward a decade and a half and although the mother has tried to hide the girl away in a cave for many years, the witch still finds her and, through some gory magic, transforms her into a witch as well. Later when they separate after a disagreement, the young witch spies the older witch shape-changing into a dog and learns the ritual which she subsequently uses to transform into various humans that she encounters in the isolated mountain villages of Macedonia. We feel the young witch’s burning curiosity about the life of the humans (female as well as male) and take part in her explorations of their existence – it’s a very sensual film. We also keenly feel her status as an outsider looking in. It seems terrible to be forever on the outside. So, this is not really a genre picture, but something deeper, more original.  It is the feature debut of Macedonia-born Australian director Goran Stolevski who is surely one to keep an eye out for.

 

Cure (1997)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Cure (1997) – K. Kurosawa

On the surface, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s serial killer thriller is just that, a police procedural slash horror film along the lines of Seven (1995), taking place in a spooky decrepit Japan that would later show up in J-Horror videogames. Koji Yakusho is the detective who needs to solve the bizarre murders, all featuring an X slashed in the upper chest of the victims, that are strangely committed by different perpetrators who are easily caught and confess but can’t quite remember their own motives.  Beneath the surface, there are much deeper themes and preoccupations; the film is complex and each viewer might just have their own interpretation of what happens.  Eventually, the investigation settles on the mysterious amnesiac, Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), who refuses to answer any questions but shows a keen interest in asking questions of others. His questions seem to seek to uncover deep resentments in those he encounters and Detective Takabe (Yakusho) is not immune to such prodding, since his wife suffers from a serious mental illness and may represent a burden to him. As the film progresses, we begin to worry that Takabe himself is losing his grip, a cliché in this genre but the supernatural overtones in this case add an extra layer of dread on top of the despair. As in some of his subsequent films, Kurosawa seems to be questioning the ability for humans to really connect with each other, to transcend their selfish and even petty individual preoccupations and bond. Even when organised as a society, the implication here is that “hell is other people” with social interactions and expectations leading to perceived slights and buried resentments. But the film never says any of this explicitly – we never know Mamiya’s motives – and even after the film winds down to its inevitable conclusion, we are treated to one final scene that manages to leave things open-ended. Dark and dismaying but a treat for fans of this genre.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) – M. McDonagh

Martin McDonagh’s Oscar nominated film comes across like a quirky short story, the kind that we point to for examples of irony or other literary forms. That is to say that the characters don’t always act in predictable ways but they might represent an exaggerated aspect of human nature, deployed to highlight or satirise ordinary traits or behaviours. Colin Farrell plays Pádraic Súilleabháin, a regular bloke on the isolated isle of Inisherin (off the western coast of Ireland) who wakes up to find that his best friend Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) no longer wants to talk to him. When he finds out that Doherty now thinks he is “too dull”, he can’t let it go.  The rest of the movie tells the story of their dispute. At times, it is blackly comic. However, there is a deep sadness here too, stemming in part from the situation that this isolated community finds itself in back in 1923 Ireland. There’s a war on the mainland but the more difficult factor is loneliness (felt most acutely by Pádraic’s spinsterish sister Siobhán, played by Kerry Condon). Although he is often annoying, young Dominic Kearney (Barry Keoghan) might be the most tragic character in the film, even if he is thought to be the village idiot. His problems might clearly be attributed to the problems of isolated communities but McDonagh (a playwright who also wrote the screenplay) clearly has a bigger target in mind: the wayward and obstinate decisions we humans make when we think about ourselves rather than others. Cinematically, the film is all rocky cliffs topped with lush green fields above beautiful lakes or oceans. The period setting and costumes are beautifully observed. All four principals were deservingly nominated for academy awards, as was the director and screenplay. Recommended.