A purgatorial dirge for a character who is not dead, but choses to be regarded as such. The last major Antonioni I had to check off and a remarkably spare contemplation on life’s dead ends. Feels like a desolate funeral march on a dusty landscape. The in-camera flashbacks and prowling extended takes which move impossibly through an environment (that last shot is rightfully in the pantheon of technical wizardry) add panache to an otherwise spartan and quiet mood piece. Nicholson always worked wonders with the auteurs of his day and clearly had upmost respect for their artistry. This is one of Jack’s best performances, arriving slap bang in the middle of his 70s hot streak (he did One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the same year) but he achieves new heights here by handing himself over to Antonioni’s tempo. Brings new meaning to the title The Passenger.
Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers is a calculated annoyance. Seemingly amateur in presentation, juvenile and crude in its humour and utterly headache-inducing in its aesthetics (the hazy image combined with a soundtrack built almost exclusively from a cacophony of screeching voices and madcap cackles) – this is very close to being the cinematic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. However, despite how off-putting every single one of its elements are, this oddity nevertheless sent me into a cross-eyed trance.
I laughed my through the torture and found myself loving (almost) every minute. Wandering into a Korine movie is usually paired with a feeling of not wanting to stoop to their level by getting in the gutter and embracing the crude, lewd trash he is so smitten with. The universe that is established here – deserted back alleys of Mississippi, all concrete lit by streetlamps clouded by digital noise – as well as its plethora of sad and bizarre inhabitants soon outweighed any resistance I had to Korine’s plea for me to get on board. I found it hilarious, strangely hypnotic and beautiful. The vulgar details Korine finds in the cracks of normality – toenails, smeared condiments and other combinations of solids and fluids – soon amount to a vivid, if fuzzy, depiction of a unique found-footage netherworld. Frightening and wonderful in equal measure. This is a DTV (directed to video) piece of prankster art that you will either love or hate but definitely won’t forget.
Extremely un-deserving of the critical battering it received and its subsequent reputation as a major turkey, Gentlemen Broncos is an inventive, unique and meticulously designed comedy. Jared Hess and co-writer/wife Jerusha, find laughs and sweetness in various un-expected places and materials. The loving care put into the design of all those science fiction paperbacks, for instance, or the differing depictions of Benjamin’s novel, really make this pop with a singularity quite specific to Hess’s sensibility. People really don’t give him enough credit for making movies only he could make. Loved this.
Quite a complex horror-drama masquerading as an ugly slasher joint. Some impressive performances from the young actresses (including a nine year old Brooke Shields) who are thrown into a lot of distressing and uncomfortable sequences. The heavy presence of Catholic iconography and rituals adds an extra-textual layer as does the impressive location work; it’s not often you see a horror movie set in Paterson, New Jersey. It also doesn’t succumb to unnecessary, silly comic relief, instead retaining a straight-faced, weighty tone throughout. Pretty rough going at times, but it’s a slasher with something to say.
I always remember this haunting the shelves of video shops alongside End of Days at the turn of the millennium so there was certainly a twinge of VHS nostalgia pulsing through my veins upon hitting play.
Stigmata is a stimulating visual experience, though dated somewhat by the rock video filmmaking which rose to prominence in the 90s. With the advent of digital editing systems, filmmakers could go cut-crazy and layer all kinds of shots over one another until their heart’s content. It wasn’t long until a new hyper-reality started to dominate genre storytelling, with ferocious, flashy editing patterns, attacking sound design and helter skelter camerawork trumping slower, more cerebral shock tactics; all things which Stigmata is shamelessly guilty of.
There’s texture here though. The New York of Stigmata is icy, chilly, drenched in blue and dominated by pierced and tattooed subcultures as well as grafitti’d back alleys. It’s all on the brink of chaos and collapse. Our heroine is a goth-rock Patricia Arquette who works in a piercing salon. She suddenly becomes tormented by violent hallucinations and suffers symptoms of stigmata which gains the attention of the Vatican and Gabriel Byrne’s conflicted priest. The scene in which they first meet – think “Priest walks into a tattoo parlour” – captures the essence of Stigmata in microcosm. Seeing these two contrasting characters sit down and discuss their issues brings the film together. It’s so good in fact that I almost wish it’s all that existed. Arquette and Byrne both dig into the material, taking it seriously but not too seriously. They’re very good.
At a certain point I started to tune out of the plot and just enjoy the film’s aggressive visuals. Arquette’s visions are similar to watching the first three Hellraiser movies at 1000x speed – all punishing, stabbing cuts, fierce sound and slashes of blood and frenzied eyeballs rendered in blown-out whites, deep blacks and muted colours. Again, there’s probably a fun version of Stigmata that is just these sequences strung together as some kind of wild extended montage of religious violence in ’99 New York; all set to Billy Corgan’s score. It’d make a good companion piece to Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead too (which would certainly be the A picture in the double bill), as a more sensationalised genre-bred vision of the big apple ravaged by rot and catholic guilt. The fact Arquette stars in both only makes the connection stronger. It’s fun to imagine the two films as parallel stories of twin sisters. While Arquette in Stigmata is being ravaged by the devil, her sister is across town having a cigarette outside a hospital with Nic Cage’s ambulance driver. THAT’S THE KIND OF SHIT I THOUGHT ABOUT WHILE WATCHING THIS MOVIE.
In short, Stigmata is every bit the 1999 prestige horror pic it’s remembered as, if it’s remembered at all that is. It aint bad for the 100 minutes it’s on and has some entertainingly committed performances from the two leads but it never rises above its flashy, ferocious exterior. I need to rewatch End of Days now.
This time around (my fifth? sixth?) I really latched onto the movie as a rumination on performance and specifically its contrasting of acting styles. Phoenix represents the angry, visceral, tormented style birthed in the 50s (your Brandos, your Deans, your Monty Clifts) while Hoffman bulldozes his way through as a larger-than-life showman raconteur (Welles, Sydney Greenstreet, Charles Laughton). The Cause therapy sessions have more than a passing resemblance to method acting classes too. As soon as I started imagining Phoenix as a post-crash Monty Clift I couldn’t get the physical similarity out of my head. Love this film. Like liquid, it appears differently and more malleable with every encounter. An elusive, beguiling masterwork which is also vulgar, impulsive and sweet. Not surprised PTA considers this his finest hour. Are these the greatest final lines in film history?
Art History feels like a companion piece to Swanberg’s similarly themed The Zone in the way it zeroes in on the conversations and behaviours that occur around shooting sex scenes. This one is more thickly veiled though, as Swanberg and his actors seem to be playing actual characters rather than themselves, therefore it is nowhere near as uncomfortable, directly confessional and confrontational as The Zone but a lot of the points remain sharpened for visceral impact.
The way Swanberg relies on masters to create a sense of intimate surveillance lends the experience of watching it a feeling of voyeuristic intrusion. The eerie stillness makes it feel like a horror film. There’s a deft use of digital formats to help you navigate where you are, what reality you are in – scenes from the film they are shooting look one way, scenes outside of that look another – and a lot of the low-light DSLR photography is genuinely beautiful. When I think of Art History it is defined by those night exteriors in the pool. Certainly a film with a mood, look and toxicity individual to itself in Swanberg’s back catalogue which, considering the vastness of his body of work, is saying something.
A muscular procedural thoroughly heightened by McTiernan’s piercing, prowling sense of space as well as Jan de Bont’s remarkable skills with light and shadow. The chess-like plotting and limited locations threaten to become tedious at several points making the film feel overlong here and there but the filmmaking and performances push through. Alec Baldwin, for instance, manages to make his reams of dry, term-heavy dialogue actually interesting and alive. Connery gets the meatiest role, though I would argue that his “villain” is perhaps a bit too likeable to be completely effective, and the confusing mix of attempts at Russian accents (Connery’s is non-existent, Sam Neill’s is pretty good) is distracting at best. As a mostly physical exercise in sustained tension which aspires to combine blunt action and psychological warfare with claustrophobic atmosphere, this has aged wonderfully. Very much a film of its time, but one which has taken on a certain level of sovereignty given the high calibre of talent and craft involved. Between Predator, Die Hard and this, McTiernan really had one hell of hot streak.
Antonioni throws us into the eye of the storm, within a circle of love addicts personified by a clique of cruel women. When one of them tries to commit suicide to cure her broken heart, it is outsider Clelia (Eleonora Rossi Drago) who comes to the rescue and from there on out becomes embroiled within the toxic collective. In Le amiche or The Girlfriends in its english translation, Antonioni looks at the faces behind the faces, zeroes in on personal betrayals and the whispers that go on when backs are turned.
This dig into the hypocrisies of Italian social norms in the 50s could easily get it stamped with the neorealist seal of approval but there’s a level of construct here that reaches beyond docu-realism showing Antonioni’s growing disinterest with that form and him pushing towards his own, signature language which would crystallise in 1960’s L’Avventura. Unlike that film though, the narrative here is neatly assembled, placing the troubled Rosetta (Madeleine Fischer) in and out of the centre, letting us feel her plight and then be witness to the backroom whispers which torment her so much, and is bookended by suicide attempts.
It’s relatively conventional stuff for Antonioni, compared to his later work at least, but it’s still a supreme social drama, laced with a deep cynicism and written and acted beautifully. The ensemble of actresses is terrific, all visibly enjoying cloaking their bitchy hostility with smiling face facades. The images of Turin – all sharp edges and vast space – shimmer with silvery precision, showing that Antonioni’s love affair with environments and architecture didn’t just emerge in the 1960s. This is a marvellous and biting early work from Antonioni which may be more widely regarded as a major entry in his filmography if he didn’t change cinema so drastically in the decade that followed.
This starts off like some awful student horror film about a voyeuristic creep, full of student film tics and non-flourishes. Then it takes a turn and becomes something else, something more playful and less insidious and a lot of the bad tics go away. It contains some interesting stuff but for the most part this is a tedious, ugly-looking effort from Swanberg, sorely lacking the on-screen presence of his regular actors who could probably elevate this into something more lived-in and credible. There’s a distance between the actors and the material which I don’t think is intentional, meaning the whole thing never locks into place. Would have probably worked better as a fifteen minute short, at best, as the puncline-like conceit which provides the narrative switch halfway through struggles to sustain interest to the very end. It feels more like one of Adam Wingard’s mumblecore efforts and Wingard would have probably made this somewhat tolerable. As far as Swanberg is concerned, this is about as minor as it gets.
"This Film Should Be Played Loud" 