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Identikit (1974)
3/10
It really is as bad as its reputation.
10 November 2024
Generally regarded as the worst picture Liz Taylor ever made "Identikit" aka "The Driver's Seat" barely saw the light of day and virtually disappeared until now but then Taylor was always a force to be reckoned with and the director Giuseppe Patroni Griffi was no slouch either so could it be as bad as its reputation? Well, frankly yes. Both the plot and the screenplay are preposterously daft but if you read it as the imaginings of a highly unstable woman, in its crazy way, perhaps it makes sense and when Liz goes over the top she's always worth a look.

On the other hand, for a film clearly dealing with mental illness, you could say it's in the worst possible taste. It plays in English with most of the supporting cast dubbed, (it's an Italian production), so maybe it suffers in translation. If there's comedy here it's mostly unintentional and God only knows what audience it was intended for or what author Muriel Spark thought of it, (she wrote the original novel). A curiosity at best.
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Anora (2024)
10/10
Unquestionably one of the best films of 2024
7 November 2024
Warning: Spoilers
There are very few directors who can make a scene feel both very funny and deeply moving at the same time and almost within the same frame and yet it's a knack that Sean Baker seems to have perfected over a remarkable if relatively short career. His new film "Anora" is arguably his best to date, (it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes), and like all his films it deals with people living, or perhaps just surviving, in the margins of society,

Once again a sex-worker takes central stage. She's Anora but who prefers to go by the name of Ani, an escort and lap-dancer at a club named HQ and who, because she can speak Russian, (her grandmother, she says, never learned English), is chosen as 'girl-for-the-night' for Ivan, the obscenely rich and very horny son of a Russian oligarch. They hit it off, fly to Las Vegas and before you can say 'Putin' are married.

It's then that all hell breaks loose in a magnificent extended sequence mid-movie when the heavies Ivan's parents have sent arrive demanding the marriage is annulled and it's here that Baker pulls his Antonioni or Hitchcock moment as Ivan flees and a new character, Igor, is introduced. Of course, as Ivan's physical presence is needed for the annulment everyone goes off in search of him but, unlike in "L'Avventura", he's found though you may ask yourself was he worth finding.

As our interest in Ivan wanes so our interest in Igor grows with Anora remaining all the while centre-stage and once again Baker has found the perfect actress for the role. Newcomer Mikey Madison is superb but then Baker has the uncanny ability to draw superb performances from all his actors, (Karren Karagulian is another stand-out). As I said it's very funny but also incredibly moving. For all her bravado Anora is damaged goods which the film's final scene amply demonstrates and although we leave her weeping at last she may be with someone who actually loves her and the film's end is just her beginning.
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2/10
Shockingly bad.
28 October 2024
Proof that even Robert Altman can cook a rancid turkey. "Beyond Therapy", which he co-wrote with Christopher Durang from Durang's play and which, to Durang's dismay, he proceeded to change radically, is about the kind of New Yorker's who read 'The New Yorker' or are just found between the pages of 'The New Yorker' and who spend half their lives on the psychiatrist's couch.

It's clearly meant to be a comedy but it's one in which every joke has been drained of humor making it hard to believe that this was made by the man who gave us "Nashville" or that actors as talented as Glenda Jackson, Jeff Goldblum, Julie Hagerty, Tom Conti, Christopher Guest and Genevieve Page would lower themselves to appear in it. Surely everyone involved must have realized what a crock they were involved in. Shockingly bad.
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Stage Door (1937)
8/10
A classic that deserves to be better known.
9 October 2024
Some of the best dialogue ever heard in an American movie delivered by a mostly female cast all of them at the top of their form. The setting is a theatrical rooming house populated by wannabe actresses. There's Katharine Hepburn, (the high-brow Vasser type), Ginger Rogers, (the low-brow chorus-girl type), and the others, (Lucille Ball, Constance Collier, Eve Arden, Ann Miller and Andrea Leeds who was Oscar-nominated as the tragic Kay).

Amongst the men are Adolphe Menjou, (a big producer, what else!), Jack Carson, Grady Sutton and Franklin Pangborn, none of them a match for the girls. Of course, the source material was a play by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman which might account for the sharp wit though this cast certainly helped. The director was the great and undervalued Gregory La Cava who won the New York Film Critics' Best Director prize for his work. Something of a classic, in fact, that deserves to be better known.
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8/10
No masterpiece but essential nevertheless.
7 October 2024
Bresson at his most austere with a subject in keeping with that austerity, "The Trial of Joan of Arc" may lack the formal beauty of Dryer's film and Florence Delay may not be Falconetti but what Bresson's film has are Joan's words spoken directly from the manuscripts of the trial so this is probably as close we are likely to get to what actually happened.

Of course, with no wider backstory, other than what history has told us, it is difficult to place these events in a broader context which isn't to say the film doesn't work on its own terms. What we are seeing is a fragment of the tapestry rather than the tapestry itself while both Delay and Jean-Claude Fourneau as Bishop Cauchon are perfectly cast. Not one of Bresson's masterpieces, then, but quite extraordinary nevertheless.
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7 Women (1965)
8/10
Not the late masterpiece some people think it is but a great swansong nevertheless.
3 October 2024
Now considered in some quarters to be a masterpiece and one of his finest films, John Ford's final film "7 Women" was neither a critical nor a commercial success at the time, (though the magazine Cahiers Du Cinema did name it as one of the ten best films of the year). The 7 women of the title are missionaries in 1935 China; at least six of them are, the seventh, played by Anne Bancroft, is the new doctor who joins them. The only man, outside of a few Chinese servants, is teacher Eddie Albert, that is until warlord Mike Mazurki comes calling with rape and pillage on his mind.

In many respects this is just another Ford western albeit with a Far Eastern setting and a very fine one it is if not quite the masterpiece some people think it is. For Ford it's also quite explicit in its attitude to sex particularly in its barely hidden lesbian subplot with head missionary Margaret Leighton lusting after young teacher Sue Lyon, seemingly unable to live down "Lolita". Bancroft, when she arrives, isn't just a breath of fresh air but a smoking, swearing, sexually liberated outsider who proves to be more than a match for the invaders.

Like "The Man who Shot Liberty Valance" it's clearly shot on sound stages and like that earlier classic is redeemed by an old man's experience of the world at large as well as an ambivalent attitude towards organized religion with each of the characters beautifully sketched and played. Add plague to the proceedings and you have one of Ford's most unlikely films but one as deserving of our attention as any that preceded it.
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6/10
Unintentionally hilarious.
29 September 2024
Unintentionally hilarious exploitation picture on the dangers of drugs in American high schools in the late fifties populated by high school kids played by actors who were at least ten years too old for their roles. Russ Tamblyn is the new student who's really an undercover cop planted in the school to find out who the dealers are. Jan Sterling is the glamorous and liberal teacher, Mamie Van Doren is Tamblyn's sex-pot of an 'aunt' while John Drew Barrymore is one of the bad guys.

Albert Zugsmith produced and Jack Arnold directed "High School Confidential" in 1958 and it was dated almost before it hit the screen. On the plus side it was very handsomely photographed in Black and White Cinemascope and the drag race sequence is certainly effective as is the climatic fight scene between the villains and some more civic-minded students lead by a very handsome and youthful Michael Landon before he built his little house on the prairie.
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6/10
One of the better sci-fi movies of its period.
28 September 2024
One of the better sci-fi movies of the fifties with intelligent direction, (by the great Jack Arnold), and an above average script making up for the lack of sophisticated special effects. OK, so the monsters look like wobbly jellies with one big eye and the acting is as wooden as we might expect from the likes of Richard Carlson and Charles Drake but at least at the time of the 'Red Menace' in an age of paranoia here was a sci-fi movie that said the invaders might not wish us harm after all. Originally filmed in 3D, though it hardly merited the use of the new technology, it has since gone on to be something of a cult classic.
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8/10
'Hamlet' as a deadpan comedy.
26 September 2024
The plot of "Hamlet" transferred to contemporary Finland then filmed in the style of a forties film noir with its tongue lodged firmly in its cheek. Aki Kaurismaki's "Hamlet Goes Business" is yet another of his many multifaceted treats exploring in large part the bizarre relationships between men and women only this time fleshing it out with yet another cod-thriller plot. So what if it steals from Shakespeare, (I can think of no better man), and at least this one clocks in at under ninety minutes rather than four hours. Good fun even if it lacks the emotional density we associate with the very best of its director.
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4/10
By now the rot had set in.
22 September 2024
George Stevens was one of the great American directors of the 1930's and early forties and some of the films he made around this time, {"Alice Adams","Swing Time", "Quality Street", "Woman of the Year" "The Talk of the Town", "The More the Merrier"), have become classics. However, it was clear that by the late '40's the rot was beginning to set in. "I Remember Mama" was heavy-handed and sentimental while the over-praised "A Place in the Sun" was a turgid version of Theodore Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy'.

Momentary redemption came in the form of "Shane", still one of the greatest westerns ever made but "Giant" was an elephantine version of Edna Ferber's novel only partly redeemed by James Dean's performance. Nevertheless, it won Stevens his second Oscar as Best Director and then in 1959 he turned his attention to "The Diary of Anne Frank", adapted not from the diary itself but from the Broadway play of the same name. The result was cloying nobility of the worst kind, reducing the tragedy of the Holocaust to the level of a cheap Hollywood entertainment.

Shot in Black and White Cinemascope, (totally the wrong format for the intimacy required), it was still handsomely photographed but very unevenly cast. An over-aged Millie Perkins made for an insipid Anne while Shelley Winters chewed the scenery all the way to an Oscar, (which she later donated to the Anne Frank Foundation). Ed Wynn, on the other hand, managed once again to steal all of his scenes though Stevens dragged the film out to an interminable three hours. Worse was still to come, of course, when Stevens decided to tackle the life of Christ with "The Greatest Story Ever Told". In 1970 he made a late gem with "The Only Game in Town" but by then it was too late.
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Kaidan (1964)
7/10
Visually superb if a tad predictable.
19 September 2024
Masaki Kobayashi's ""Kwaidan" comprises of four ghost stories, each told in the kind of Kabuki-style that many Japanese films are famous for and all are visually highly attractive if a little on the predictable side, (only the third one really stands out from the others). Indeed, this is a movie in which style dominates with many of the frames looking like old prints but in terms of content the film is sadly lacking in substance. The cast, however, go at it as if they were performing some sacred text even if Kobayashi doesn't want to do anything as crude as breathe life into the proceedings, Still, as portmanteau pictures about ghosts go, it's definitely a cut above average. It's also, I feel, highly overrated.
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1/10
An insuslt, not just to Christianity, but to musicals!
16 September 2024
Never having seen this on stage I must admit director David Greene has done a very good job of opening up "Godspell" for the big screen. The question is, was it worth opening up in the first place? Like "Jesus Christ, Superstar" it's another hippie rock musical based on the life of Christ but whereas "...Superstar" stayed reasonably close to the 'facts' as we know them and adhered fairly closely to biblical locations this, like "Hair, transfers Jesus and his disciples to contemporary New York, turning them into hippies.

This might have worked had its score been on the same level as Andrew Lloyd Webber's classic or if it had a director of the caliber of Milos Forman but here the score is largely insipid and mostly forgettable and quite frankly, not the kind of thing to turn either a hippie or a Christian on and it's unlikely that this thoroughly banal film will convert anyone. In fact, if you are a follower of Jesus, after seeing "Godspell", you might actually start looking the other way.
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8/10
Not a late masterpiece but very underrated nevertheless.
14 September 2024
Unfairly dismissed at the time of its release "Donovan's Reef" now feels like, if not quite a late masterpiece, still something of a classic piece of Fordian hokum and an opportunity for a bunch of actors to enjoy themselves on, as Jack Warden's character describes it, "one of the most beautiful islands on earth". It's virtually plotless and on a formal level it hasn't moved on from the kind of films Ford was turning out in the forties and fifties and it might have been negligible had it been directed by anyone else but frame to frame Ford imbues it with all the affection and Fordian 'touches', including some spectacular Fordian brawls, that made him perhaps the primary director in American cinema.

Naturally, it's highly sentimental, quite misogynist and also highly ambivalent on the issue of race, (the Chinese get short shrift but Ford handles the issue of miscegenation with a lot more sensitivity than might have been expected), and it has in Elizabeth Allen a properly feisty Fordian heroine. Indeed the cast is first-rate. John Wayne, (who else), is Donovan who runs the local saloon, (hence the title), Lee Marvin is his sidekick, Jack Warden the local doctor and Allen's father, (her presence on the island and their relationship is as near to a plot as the film gets), while the supporting cast includes Marcel Dalio, Cesar Romero and Dorothy Lamour. You might call it a holiday film, particularly for the cast and crew, but if it is then you just might wish all holiday films were directed by Ford.
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Posledice (2018)
4/10
There are better ways to pass the time.
13 September 2024
"Consequences" is well directed by first-time director Darko Stante and mostly well acted by its young cast but it is also thoroughly unpleasant and more than something of a downer. Andrej, (Matej Zemljic), is a young thug who winds up in a reform school where he falls in with Zele, (Timon Sturbej), and his group of bullies but Andrej is also secretly gay and it doesn't take Zele long to figure that out and use it to his advantage.

This is a Slovenian coming-of-age movie set in a world of violence and full of characters with no redeeming qualities and where, in view of everything else that is happening, the LGBTQ+ angle is spurious to say the least, Zemljic may be physically attractive but his performance carries no conviction and it's left to the thoroughly nasty Sturbej to walk away with the picture. Still, there are better ways to pass the time.
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Năm Thìn (1985)
8/10
No masterpiece but an excellent crime movie nevertheless
25 August 2024
When Michael Cimino made "Year of the Dragon" he was no longer flavor of the month. Crowned King of the Hill with only his second feature, "The Deer Hunter", his star plummeted when his third film, "Heaven's Gate", became the biggest flop in Hollywood history, at least as far as the studios and the public were concerned, despite its being a masterpiece and one of the greatest of all American films. After its commercial failure it seemed like Cimino might never work again but you can't keep a good man down even if it did take five years before he got behind the camera again.

Co-written by Cimino and Oliver Stone from Robert Daley's novel, "Year of the Dragon" was a gangster epic, part Jimmy Cagney and part De Palma's "Scarface" set in Chinatown with Mickey Rourke as the potentially racist cop caught in the middle of a Triad gang war and John Lone as the Chinese drug lord he has to go up against. It's not a great film with thick-ear dialogue and mostly so-so performances, (though both Rourke and Lone are excellent), and it did little to redeem Cimino's sullied reputation but it's certainly very stylish and fast-moving with a number of first-rate set-pieces and was definitely undeserving of the five Razzie nominations it received.
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Morocco (1930)
8/10
A classic of its kind.
18 August 2024
A classic example of rhinestones turning into diamonds before our eyes Josef von Sternberg's "Morocco" might have been just another tawdry pre-code melodrama that was turned into something approaching art by virtually everyone involved. Firstly, there's Lee Garmes' shimmering cinematography, the crisp no-nonsense and really rather erotic screenplay by Jules Furthman based on the play "Amy Jolly" by Benno Vigny and then there are the matchless performances of Marlene Dietrich as Jolly, a young Gary Cooper as the insolent legionnaire Tom Brown and Adolphe Menjou as the rich older man who thinks money can buy anything including Dietrich.

It marked the second teaming off Dietrich and von Sternberg after "The Blue Angel" and their first in Hollywood and it set the template for the films that followed, particularly in how they looked and in the forthrightness in the way Dietrich's sexuality was portrayed, a seductress and not just of men; in the film's famous opening number she appears in male garb and kisses one woman on the mouth. Cooper, too, was never more sexually attractive and the film clearly made him a star. Too flimsy in terms of its melodramatic plot to be ever considered a great film it is, nevertheless, one of the most memorable of its period and one that stands up to repeated viewings.
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7/10
Romantic tosh of a high order.
22 July 2024
Soap operatic romantic tosh of an unusually high order thanks mainly to the superlative direction of Henry King working, as he so often did, with sub-standard material. The setting is the California vineyards, the period Prohibition and this film, based on a novel by Alice Tisdale Hobart, is clearly a forerunner of such television series as "Dallas" and "Dynasty" with Claude Rains as the ruler of this empire, Dorothy McGuire, his ambitious daughter and Rock Hudson and Jean Simmons his grand-children who are in love with each other, (don't ask!).

It's the kind of film that attracted star players and did the business back in the late fifties with quality usually taking a backseat to quantity but King was something of a master at this sort of thing imbuing the ridiculous plot with a seriousness it didn't warrant. Rains and McGuire and, to a lesser extent, Simmons take the acting credits while Hudson just seems to be having a good time in the sure and certain knowledge he won't be winning any Oscars if he keeps making movies like this. No classic, then, but a very sturdy entertainment nevertheless.
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8/10
One of Preminger's most enjoyable films.
20 July 2024
One of Preminger's 'entertainments' and while "River of No Return" may be no masterpiece it's actually one of his most enjoyable films and one of the best Cinemascope movies of the early fifties, (Preminger was to prove to be a master of the widescreen). A western of sorts, it has Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe and young Tommy Rettig going down the river of the title to escape some less than friendly Indians. With the river itself playing a major part in proceedings as well as several songs courtesy of Ken Darby and Lionel Newman it's not like any other western of the period. Mitchum is his usual laid-back self, Monroe is excellent and Joseph LaShelle's cinematography is outstanding making this a Grade A entertainment and something of a cult movie.
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Monos (2019)
10/10
One of the best films of recent years.
22 June 2024
Boy soldiers are nothing new in international cinema with killers as young as ten gracing our screens in movies like "Beasts of No Nation". In the Colombian film "Monos" the soldiers are a mix of young men and women guarding an American hostage, (Julianne Nicholson), firstly on a remote mountainside and then in some unforgiving tropical jungle. Who these teenage warriors are fighting or why is never explained in a scenario that is part Kafka, part William Golding and part Werner Herzog.

There's only a slim semblance of a plot; instead director Alejandro Landes simply films his young cast, (who go by names like 'Bigfoot', 'Wolf' and 'Dog'), as they mostly fight among themselves, have sex or simply try to survive and what begins as just the kind of art-house movie designed to give art-house movies a bad name becomes, in its second half, the kind of savage 'adventure' movie Coppola might have made back in the seventies, indeed did make back in the seventies; there are sequences here as breathtaking as any in recent cinema. I simply couldn't take my eyes off it but whether it finds its audience is another matter entirely.
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Bad Boys (1983)
7/10
A prison movie with a difference.
22 June 2024
A prison movie with a difference. As the title suggests, "Bad Boys" is set in a reform school and while the boys are certainly 'bad' legally, morally and in the eyes of society the film's message is that they are the products of their environment. Sean Penn is the most recent inmate, a bad kid with a record who, during a botched robbery, accidentally kills the younger brother of a gang member. Of course, we know that while Penn acts tough he's sensitive at heart so what has to go down for him to redeem himself?

All the usual prison movie cliches are here albeit in junior form but director Rick Rosenthal handles them with considerable ease and manages to draw excellent performances from his mostly young cast. Penn, in an early role, shows real promise and young Eric Gurry is very good as his smart, street-wise cell mate. It's hardly ground-breaking but as genre pictures go it's definitely well above average.
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8/10
Not a Minnelli masterpiece but essential nevertheless.
19 June 2024
Another Minnelli movie about the movies and better, in its trashy, glossy way, than his overrated "The Bad and the Beautiful", (cleverly incorporated into this scenario to let us see what Kirk Douglas' character was like as a younger actor). This time he's a washed-up actor offered two weeks work in a film being shot in Rome's Cinecitta studios and directed by Edward G. Robinson with whom he's had a love/hate relationship stretching back awhile.

He's also got an oversexed ex-wife, Cyd Charisse, and women problems generally, (the cast also includes Daliah Lavi, Rosanna Schiaffino and Claire Trevor as Robinson's venomous wife). There's also a talentless young hack involved and he's played very well by George Hamilton. We are, of course, very much in "La Dolce Vita" territory or at least in the world of Eurotrash or Cannes where topless starlets meant more than the films being screened. The film itself is highly artificial which is just as it should be, pitched at just the right level of hysteria. Not a Minnelli masterpiece perhaps but essential nevertheless.
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6/10
Perhaps too clever for its own good.
10 June 2024
Clearly a prestige production, (you only have to look at the credits, both in front of and behind the camera), yet this Sherlock Holmes movie wasn't really a success. Perhaps Holmes was out of favor by the mid-seventies or perhaps the frivolous tone put people off, (it's certainly not in the same class as Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes"), and yet it's a difficult film to dislike even if the ridiculous plot is something Robert Downey's Holmes might have found himself caught up in.

Firstly there's the cast. Nicol Williamson is Holmes, Robert Duvall with a plummy English accent is Watson, Laurence Olivier is Moriarty and Alan Arkin is Sigmund Freud, attempting to cure Holmes of his cocaine addiction, (hence the title). Then there's Vanessa Redgrave, Samantha Eggar, Joel Grey, Jeremy Kemp and Charles Gray while Nicholas Meyer's screenplay from his own novel certainly errs on the smart side and therein lies the problem; this is a spoof that is just too clever for its own good.

Herbert Ross both produced and directed the picture and he gives it that bland touch of class he often brought to his movies while Ken Adam's Production Design and Oswald Morris' Cinematography ensures it's always easy on the eye - there's even a Stephen Sondheim song on the soundtrack. Of course, what audience it was aimed at is something of a mystery; perhaps one even beyond the powers of the great detective himself.
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8/10
Linklater's best in some time.
10 June 2024
Thanks in large part to an absolutely brilliant performance from Glen Powell, Richard Linklater's new comedy "Hit Man" turns out to be one of his very best films. It's something of a 'true' story since the character Powell plays, Gary Johnson, really existed. He's a university professor who also finds himself working for the New Orleans police department pretending to be a hit man so as to entrap potential killers who don't want to do the killing themselves.

It's totally far-fetched but who says that even 'true' stories have to be believable ; as a certain Mr. Hitchcock said, 'it's only a movie' and this 'screwball-rom-com-neo-noir' certainly is no documentary and as a genre piece it hits all the right buttons while still managing to appeal to the usual Linklater aficionados. Chuck in a star-making performance from Adria Arjona as the femme fatale that Johnson falls for and what's not to like.
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Perfect Days (2023)
10/10
Perfect.
27 May 2024
Wim Wenders' idea of an 'action' movie is having someone stumble after silently walking down a street for ten minutes of screen time. He is, in other words, a minimalist who draws you slowly but inexorably into his sagas of lonely men living largely isolated existences and his new film, "Perfect Days", is no exception.

His hero, Hirayama, is a middle-aged Tokyo toilet cleaner, superbly played by Koji Yakusho, (he won Best Actor at Cannes), without doing almost anything at all and Wenders simply follows him through his mostly silent days and nights as he cleans toilets, tends to his plants, takes the occasional photo, reads William Faulkner and listens to a lot of sixties and seventies American music on what we now might think of as ancient cassettes. Considering how fully Yakusho embodies his role this could just as easily be a documentary about a real toilet cleaner.

Of course, it won't be a film for everyone; its simplicity and lack of what we might call a plot could prove off-putting to a lot of people, (perhaps the nearest thing to a plot in the film deals with the love life, or lack of it, of Hirayama's co-worker). Naturally, among the music Hirayama listens to is Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day' and while his life might seem conventional and even boring to most people to Hirayama every day is perfect. So, too, is Wenders' film which, on reflection, you could even call his Japanese "Paris, Texas".
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Possession (1981)
1/10
40 years on it still stinks to high heaven.
26 May 2024
My Turkey of the Year back in 1981 I've naturally avoided watching "Possession" again during the last 40 plus years but then it has built up something of a cult critical reputation and Isabelle Adjani did win both the Best Actress prize at Cannes and the Cesar for her performance so perhaps I was wrong? Let's just say that it's definitely an acquired taste and one that I didn't have back in the day. Now, having seen it again, I can safely say it's a taste I have yet to acquire nor one that I want to.

Back then I thought it was just a 'bad' movie but now it's almost like a parody of a bad movie, part horror film and part send-up of those deeply serious Eastern European or Nordic sagas of failed marriages, shot in English, (big mistake thought I'm sure subtitles wouldn't work any better), and appallingly acted by both Adjani, (Best Actress? What were the Cannes jury thinking of?), and Sam Neill. I can understand it having a cult reputation in the 'bad movie' stakes but I certainly can't understand the critical praise that's been heaped on it over the years. Yes, forty years on it still stinks to high heavens!
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