One moment in: 'Melody' (1971) - sports day

One moment in: ‘Melody’ - Sports day

Waris Hussein, 1971, UK

Wes Anderson is quoted on the cover calling Waris Hussein’s ‘Melody’ (1971) “a forgotten, inspiring gem”, and in the chock-full coming-of-age genre, this as enchanting and as affecting as any. It has that decidedly British 1960-70s feel that’s part rough-and-tumble, part cheeky-chappy, part whimsy. As they were so successful in ‘Oliver’, Jack Wild and Mark Lester are paired again as odd-couple friends. This time, Lester is a doe-eyed kid who just wants to marry his first love, Melody (Tracy Hynde). Wild is the loveable delinquent that gets involved and has pangs of jealousy. His deadpan delivery of “I thought you might” is a highlight. And many supporting faces will be familiar to anyone watching TV during that time. ‘Melody’ scores by treating the children’s romanticism seriously and as a proper put-down to the adult world.

The moment where Daniel and Melody bond through playing their instruments is a peak moment and the whole escapade all ends with some ‘Hue and Cry’ kid’s anarchy; the former scene could easily be chosen for this post, but I am going to go for the sports day sequence. Oh, I am sure there’s some nostalgia at play in my choice here, for anyone that was a kid experiencing sports day in that era will find memories and feelings stirred. There’s bound to be a little shock for younger audiences that it so casually has very young kids smoking, or a teacher asking a boy if it is whiskey he smells on his breath, but it was a very different era. 

Key to the sports day vignettes are that they are set to the Bee Gees ‘To Love Somebody’. It’s mostly through Nina Simone’s devastating version that I came to this song: I'm not a Bee Gees fan yet I have to admit to finding this track affecting. But its placement here is both surprising and transcendent, underscoring the whole school event with Daniel’s romantic longing. The music is like the sound of Daniel reminiscing as an older man about the sports day when he first had a big crush; the song's slight incongruity makes this moment feel like a memory. Yet it’s also music that places it firmly in the era. The song is slick and yearning and gives a gloss and elevation to the sports day montage that could quite easily have come from ‘Grange Hill’ or Ealing Studios. That it feels slightly at odds with the rough edges of an unremarkable school event  provokes a surprising elegance and pathos.

Oh, and watch out for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on the soundtrack too.

Child's Play (2019)

Lars Klevberg, 2019 

Canada-USA

Creator Don Mancini apparently objects to this reboot but updating Chucky for the Bluetooth generation is a smart move.  Slight thematic differences stop this from being a dull retread of the original. Dismissing the whole “possessed doll” origin makes Chucky less wisecracking but more troubling as the threat of modern technology gone awry. More ‘Westworld’ and ‘Black Mirror’ than ‘Annabel’. It also eschews the smugness that dominates the later Chucky films. 

Andy (Gabriel Bateman) feels like a decidedly modern kid, both happy to cry it out and to kick-ass, a reasonably full range of character. And the casual way he’s partially deaf, which barely plays a part in the drama or his friendships, is a detail which is positively normalised by being happily trivialised. His mother (Aubrey Plaza) is a young woman who had Andy too early and sometimes feels more like a big sister. Yes, many other characters come from the B-Movie Catalogue of Archetypes – the bad boyfriend that deserves all he gets; Andy’s new slightly obnoxious friend – which is expected, cliché and undemanding but the film doesn’t quite rub it in and is grounded by the central relationship. Uncle Lancifer doesn’t quite accept the middle section where Andy has to deal with the grim gift Chucky has left him – like a cat leaving a dead mouse for its owner – and this is indeed the most awkward sequence which runs like horror farce and relies on no follow-up questions to get resolved; but it’s not quite out of tone. It has that b-movie scruffiness where a further polish on the script wouldn’t have gone amiss to nudge it up a little. If there is the sense of feeling a little surprised that this is fair rather than bad, that was the dominant take-away. And then it just runs into a standard showdown third act. Oh, and Mark Hamill now voices Chucky.

‘Child’s Play’s most interesting feature is its brush with the themes of nature and nurture. Chucky has had his “violence inhibitors” turned off by a factory work pushed too far so that he fixates on loyalty to Andy but doesn’t know how to process certain input appropriately. Andy is a little old for a “doll”, but he’s new in the area and lonely and this is a fascinating super high-tech appliance. So it’s creepy when Chucky is staring at you when you are trying to sleep, but, hey, every appliance has it’s annoyances. Chucky’s mistaking a toilet roll for science book is just a glitch in it’s trying to be a real friend. These are moments of humour.

Most interestingly, whilst the tweens are laughing at the silly super-violence of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’, Chucky is taking in tips for killing. This isn’t a film to take on such a weighty topic as the responsibility of art’s portrayal of violence, the ‘Chainsaw 2’ moment being a set up for the film’s grisliest moments and for farce, but it’s intriguing that a main source of empathy is Chucky’s clumsy desire to do good and misunderstanding cues happening around him. The kids are laughing – like any innate horror fan, they know the genre is a good source of comedy – but  there is something fundamentally amiss with Chucky and he takes it all wrong. His insistence and faux paus are readable as the behaviour of somebody who is cognitive atypical and therefore deserving of empathy. Until he kills, of course. But then, his homicidal behaviour comes across more as he-knows-no-better than intentionally malevolent, as the violent reactions of a stalker or spurned lover. Which makes him no less scary.

It’s not ground-breaking, but it meets demands with Tyler Burton Smith’s script tweaking a bit here and there to lift it above the in-joke that the original series has become.

Different Seasons - Stephen King

“Different Seasons”

Stephen King 

This is the Stephen King collection of four stories superficially set around the seasons. Two novels, a novella and a short story: ‘Rita Heyworth and the Shawshank Redemption’, ‘Apt Pupil’, ‘The Body’ and ‘The Breathing Method’. Two are best known for being adapted into some people’s favourite films. 

There really isn’t any redemption in ‘Rita Heyworth and the Shawshank Redemption’. A guy who was wrongfully incarcerated escapes prison and his friend goes to him after serving his sentence. It makes for a cool title but where’s the redemption? The same kind of faux-poignancy afflicts the story’s by-line: “Hope springs eternal”. The hope to escape? But the escape seems like something Andy worked for over years and not quite a hope, which is surely something more abstract? I guess he would have hoped his digging away would lead to an exit, but…? And what would the narrator Red hope for? To meet Andy again after getting out? Again, it sounds nice but… doesn’t quite develop convincingly.

What we do have with ‘Shawshank’ is an enjoyable study of character and context. The description of the jail and its frictions are well conveyed. A huge ingredient and appeal of King is his style of some-guy-just-shooting-the-shit which makes him immensely readable. Sure, his skill and literary merit can be argued, but he is very easy to engage with and that is formidable, whatever his weaknesses… and my observations make it clear that I often find him just as wanting and annoying as compelling. 

But, as far as ‘Shawshank’ goes: tales of put-upon protagonists outwitting everyone else are always winning. Despite its ingredients of gang-rape and notes on prison corruption, it all succumbs to sentimentality which doesn’t quite feel warranted. There is a sense that all the ingredients don’t quite gel, that the whole doesn’t quite exceed the storytelling and ultimately that the sentimentality is a little like floral wrapping paper on a rusty cudgel. But the storytelling is gripping with numerous memorable scenes and characters. Although Rita Heyward isn’t even the relevant poster.

‘Apt Pupil’ doesn’t possess any sentimentality. It’s the tale of a couple of sociopaths trying to outwit one another. A teenager discovers that an old local man is in fact a former Nazi concentration camp general in hiding and blackmails him to tell stories about that experience. Just the “gooshy” stuff. 

What’s most striking is how King depicts an all-American boy, a thorough success and virtual prodigy, as an all-smiling sociopath, a budding serial- and spree-killer with a deep fascination for fascism. He’s too smart and introverted for the scruffy anger of, say, the Proud Boy movement, but we get the idea: he’s a wannabe Nazi. Grady Hendrix says of the young character: “[Bowden is] just an All-American kid (as King tells us repeatedly, as if type is a substitute for character) who turns out to be rotten to the core.” Meanwhile, the adults have no idea of the monster in their midst. But I see this as the root social criticism. 

It’s the most unforgiving story in the collection. The tale of the impasse reached by these sociopaths is not undermined or embellished by digressions or sentimentality: they wouldn’t feel right here. There is a deceptively protracted feel, as it takes place over years, but it’s all tightly wound. Aside from King needing to introduce another character later on to make things move on, it avoids succumbing to a trite showdown and it remains upsetting and chilling to the very last line. 

‘The Body’ is, of course, the source for Rob Reiner’s ever-popular coming-of-age hit film, ‘Stand by Me’ (1986). Actually, the change in title can be seen as indicative of the film weighting towards the nostalgic and sentimental. Not that King’s original doesn’t have these elements, but it’s a far more clear-headed and sad affair. It is, after all, a tale of four boys thinking that going to see a kid’s body will be an adventure. All around are backstories of abuse, neglect, bullying and abundant cruelty to give the lie to rose-tinted nostalgia. This is not a safe world for the kids. Indeed, despite the I-am-a-writer intrusions – the self-reflexive kind that can made King tiresome – there is the sense that narrator Gordon doesn’t quite know himself why this particular childhood memory is so dominant and defining for him. After all, it isn’t like he continued to be close to all the gang except Chris. Like ‘Shawshank’, it’s told from the perspective of a somewhat adoring friend – in this case, Gordon’s observations about Chris. Unlike ‘Shawshank’ that seems to lunge for the sentimental to make up for what it lacks, ‘The Body’ has natural pathos in abundance.  

The shortest piece is ‘The Breathing Method’ which is a different kettle of fish altogether, with King evoking a more traditionally Gothic and macabre atmosphere. Like Peter Straub’s ‘Ghost Story’, it’s set around a group of men getting together to tell tales. The narrator is somewhat desperate to join this somewhat abstract group (another men-only scenario, elbowing out the womenfolk) and there are hints of something uncanny at the edges. But its centre is one of the men’s tales of a patient and when she gives birth. It’s a full-bodied set-piece where horror, exploitation, pathos and black humour come to a heady and unforgettable peak. You can almost feel King gleeful smirk as he engineers this and, if the other tales nod at the genre, this is the one that leaves no doubt he is a horror writer. All dressed up in the civility of gothic pretension it may be, but this centrepiece is pure grand guignol.  

This is all a Big Boys Affair where women don’t get much of a look-in. They’re mostly murdered in ‘Shawshank’ and "cunts" in ‘Apt Pupil’ and ‘The Body’. Although ‘The Breathing Method’ focuses on a strong female, she is seen through male reportage; a doctor who stops to mansplain how the pain of childbirth is just female delusion. And this could be seen as a feature of character if there wasn’t a dearth of female representation elsewhere. One of the last insights into ‘The Body’s main protagonist Gorden is that he won’t cry in front of his wife because “It would have been pussy.” It’s probably meant to be a call-back to his adolescence when as boys they would call each other “pussies” all the time, but considering how he earlier chastised his younger self for the immature misogyny of his own writing, this doesn’t hint too much at a personal growth. 

King is immensely readable here and the shorter lengths keeps in check his waffling and digressions, to sharpen the focus. The digressions of ‘Shawshank’ colour the context and are riveting. ‘Apt Pupil’, although the longest, is lean and mean without recourse to rambling detours; even when it seemingly loses concentration to divert to a teacher character, this ultimately has purpose. ‘The Breathing Method’ is the kind of story that has plenty of accommodation for lacunas and irresolution. ‘The Body’ is the greatest offender with its insistent subplot of a young author and The Magic of WritingTM trying to pull attention away from the main tale. I for one have never been fond of the dragged-out pie contest barforama from the film and it isn’t much better here, superfluously filling out fictional-within-a-fiction minor characters that really don’t need the attention. There are plenty of secondary characters of interest in the main tale. And the chapter that’s just a presentation of Gordon’s first writing, adjacent to the main tale, smacks of self-indulgence and the whiff of ego (at least the pie contest is part of the main story). But there is often that with King’s writer characters… and there are lot of them in his considerable output.

I read ‘Different Seasons’ for a book group with a people that, aside from one lady, didn’t read horror fiction at all; but despite its nasty and crude edges, the general consensus was that King was a good writer that drew you in, even if he wasn’t usually your thing. I hadn’t read King for a long, long time, but ‘Different Seasons’ is evidence of how he has a natural gift for popularist fiction, and of both how readable and flawed he is. It’s a good one to convert the curious.  

Buck Theorem album #3: 'Uncanny Clockwork'

Voila! My third musical album effort, the album "Uncanny Clockwork", featuring visits to post-apocalyptic and post-party landscapes, love of music, alien abduction, Tina Turner karaoke, contemplating one's place in the cosmos and an attractive neighbour, and whales. 

And this album features some dancing, too.

Amusements

Conversations with John le Carré

Bongwater with Screaming Jay Hawkins

 

KAFKA'S JOKE BOOK 

by John McNamee

‘Avengers: Endgame’ Has Taken Over the World. 
Let’s Talk About Fan Service and Marvel’s Legacy

Brightburn

David Yarovesky, 2019, USA

Writers: Brian Gunn & Mark Gunn

The ‘Superman’ and the Evil Child premise mash-up in another dissection of the superhero. This one is a family occasion, written by Brian and Mark Gunn and produced by genre favourite James Gunn. 

Childless couple Tori and Kyle (Elizabeth Banks and David Denman) adopt a baby from space that falls outside their homestead. The boy Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn) is mild and smart and, it seems, mostly ostracised/bullied by peers. We know how this goes. But when he hits puberty, the spaceship hidden in the barn starts calling to him and his burgeoning powers make him dangerous and unhinged.

There is solid work from the main actors and a no-fuss modern feel to the characters: for example, there’s a nice mature sexual warmth to Tori and Kyle’s relationship and they have no hang-ups about adoption at all. ‘Brightburn’ looks good and the script skips over the points it already assumes we know from many, many superhero and supervillain backstories (which isn’t quite the same as the underwriting I accuse it of later). This stops things from tripping up with the familiar but sometimes it just leaves lacunas. 

Director David Yarovesky’s 2014 film ‘The Hive’ was an initially intriguing idea but was quickly weighed down with genre cliché. That film’s assurance and play with colour is also evident here, giving ‘Brightburn’ vivid and memorable images – it gets a lot of mileage from Brandon’s red cape and eyes against darkness – but there are just as many techniques that easily veer on the cliché: moving through flapping hanging laundry; recourse to repetitive fading to black or strobe effects: tiresome horror devices done to death by the likes of ‘Insidious’. 

And although brevity serves to speed things along, there’s a suspicion that other points are underwritten. For example, when Brandon actually cuts himself it looks quite bad: wouldn’t he need stitches, and wouldn’t that mean a trip to the ER where more about his invulnerability would be revealed? And everything comes to a head before we can fully explore his burgeoning sexuality, as creepy and frightening as that might be: the sub-plot with his stalking of the girl is just dropped and there feels an important chasm between his last visit to her bedroom and the naked disembowelled woman in the barn. What about that lawnmower? Then there was the threat of a conversation with the Sheriff in the morning… but I guess the car crash put paid to that. Still, there seems a neglect in the writing of some of the finer details. 

And then it launches into something like music video satire for the end credits, skipping ahead to add more story, with a tonally ill-fitting song (Billie Eilish’s wicked rendition of 'Bad Guy' - is that meant to be ironic? Celebratory?). Perhaps this is a parody of the end credits that typify modern franchises, but it’s also a mood-killer … and I don’t think so. It is also what we are now used to for indicating a franchise. It is as if at the end it isn’t self-aware of its barbed subtext.

A.O. Scott writes,

I don’t know if “Brightburn” will be the start of a franchise, but I kind of hope so. Not that I’m necessarily rooting for this humorless little dude with a knit mask and a dumb logo to grow big muscles, acquire sidekicks and all the rest. It’s about time that someone understood superheroism as a dangerous pathology. What I mean is: It’s much too late. 

Where ‘Brightburn’ is most interesting is in its intersection of superhero power fantasies with (white male?) privilege and toxic masculinity. Brandon’s constantly being told he’s "special", a dogma that seems of a particularly American flavour that trumps the individual over the collective. Commercials and brands are always hammering the message that the world centres around you and your choice. Of course, Brandon’s parents are only trying to make him feel worthy, which is admirable, but with the onset of adulthood his interpretation of “special” seems to be the privilege to do whatever he wants, which ultimately means he feels a right to kill others as he pleases. In an American context where currently school shootings seem be a monthly tragedy, where mass murder is the end-result of aggrievement and entitlement (not only, but they’re key elements), where these are means to potency and infamy, this feels like a sharp cultural criticism of the very fanbase wallowing in and taking the wrong message from the MCU and DCU (no, it’s not about how you can “Take the world” or how cool or lethal your power makes you: it’s about how you use that power to help others). It joins ‘Chronicle’ as a bad guy origin.

It’s not as obviously sharp as James Gunn’s ‘Super’, which gets engaged with the limits of power fantasies when carried over to the real world, and perhaps ‘Brightburn’ resembles the contemporary superhero format too closely for its critique to resonate clearly, but it’s there. Dunn’s performance as Brandon is sweet enough and mild at first and then, when the sociopathy sets in with the onset of puberty, he’s opaque and cold and lying, but tinged with confusion and still saying he wants to be good – maybe more accurate for a sociopath than the smirks of Kevin in ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’. Certainly recognisable teenage behaviour. Of course, some may just put it down to shaky acting.

In the end ‘Brightburn’ falls short of the mark. Yet as a scaled-down curiosity with some nice visuals, middling action, some cliché mixed with a little genre and social criticism, as well as some lingering jaw-gore you won’t forget, it entertains.

Booksmart

Booksmart

Olivia Butler, 2019, USA

Written by: Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, 

Susanna Fogel & Katie Silberman

Count ‘Booksmart’ as another film ill-served by its trailer. It’s not a just a ‘Superbad’ for girls, a gender-reversal on the standard hormonal (possibly obnoxious) young men gross-out comedy, although it is that too. It’s the tale of two girls at their last day of school realising that in having made the choice to forfeit fun for a more academic approach, they have been missing out. After all, their peers who apparently have just been goofing around are still going to good universities. So, they embark upon an odyssey to go to a party one last time to make up for what they’ve lost out on. Because partying defines young America.

It’s directed in a no-fuss style by Olivia Wilde that allows Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever to fully indulge in evoking a believable friendship between the two nerds, Molly and Amy. The screenplay is funny all the way through with a couple of surprises thrown in. The fact that Molly isn’t a Barbie doll is never mentioned. The fact that Amy is gay is just an excuse for more risqué gags and for offbeat crushes: no angst here. Even when the girls have a falling out, music mutes the argument and the camera strays to look around, because although the argument matters, ‘Booksmart’ doesn’t dwindle so that it drags the comedy into dull dramatic cliché (although Pat Brown sees this as a misstep). There a real let’s have fun! philosophy at work here.

The cast fully embrace the broad strokes of their archetypes (everyone wants to be in ‘The Breakfast Club’) and, of course, over the course of the film their deeper layers are revealed: Hey, jocks like ‘Harry Potter’! Insufferable dweebs are just trying too hard and are actually sweet and interesting! The seemingly dumbass guy who has re-taken years is going onto coding! Hey, do you think maybe those guys are gay? etc. As Molly and Amy are defined in more complex and believable ways – for example, their ritual of praising each other to high heaven when dressing up is both endearing and cringe-worthy – this does leave a gulf of characterisation between them and others, but the sense of all-inclusivity wins out. There’s a benign agenda of acceptance that eschews, say, the tougher terrain of ‘Eighth Grade’ for an agreeably positive outlook. It’s more like ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ in its message for “get over yourself and have a good time” and “this is just a phase”. They are presented as a very self-aware generation but not with the tiresome privileged and narcissism of ‘Assassination Nation’. Untypically, peers aren’t vehemently nasty or bullying: indeed, these girls are generally welcome wherever they go. It becomes clear they’ve been their own worst enemies when it comes to socialising, that actually it’s they who have been indulging in snobbery. And then, as the genre demands, over one night they learn their lesson and it’s all good. This generosity of spirit makes ‘Booksmart’ highly likeable and uplifting. 

Butler and team wanted to make the kind of teen comedy they loved as adolescents, but ‘Booksmart’ is better than John Hughes candyfloss because it’s less prone to platitudes. It’s not above the broad humour of falling into claymation for a drug rip, but even this turns out to be a jab at the Barbie Doll fantasy. It benefits from updating the perspectives of its influences. It all makes for highly agreeable, slightly edgy and consistently funny light entertainment. 

Godzila: King of the Monsters

Michael Doherty, 2019, USA

So, I recently gave ‘Kong: Skull Island’ another whirl, thinking I may have been too hard on it previously, but a second watch didn’t sway me. There was still something in the drama that aggravated me (and I didn’t change my mind that Samuel L Jackson is just tiresome in it, coasting along as if aggressively bored, as if he is determined not to have fun with the rest in a giant ape movie). But in retrospect it had good monster fights and had a nicely tropical feel.

By contrast, ‘Godzilla: King of Monsters’ insists on being dark and drained and moody, even in the daytime. It often follows on from Gareth Edward’s 2014 ‘Godzilla’ in having the monsters so glumly lit and in the fog of battle that on occasion you wonder if you are actually watching monsters at all. When the screen is lit up, it with the orangey hue of dying cinders. Sure, there’s a large chunk of the city caving in but: monsters? In ‘Kong: Skull Island’, it was brightly lit in dazzling sun so you could see it all. So, you know, there isn’t the excuse for underlighting for hiding any defects of CGI. And digital effects have some so far now that the monsters are magnificent: see the way Godzilla falls into a gorilla’s mannerisms Actually, King Ghidorah probably steals the show.  And maybe that’s also the thing: CGI is so awesome sauce all the time now that it’s hard to be dazzled just by one computer-generated marvel punching down on another. But when you have men in suits or models, there’s charm and mortality that CGI just doesn’t have. There’s a need for more narrative invention for the monsters and to the fights.

For example: Edwards’ ‘Godzilla’ had the parachute jump which nearly transcended the format for a moment: and when Godzilla lights up and gives an impressive light display, all the chiaroscuro made sense. ‘Kong: Skull Island’ gives Kong two great entrances: twice, Kong emerges as other narratives are playing out so that his appearance is unexpected and thrilling. Kong versus the helicopters is a peak for monster battles. It would seem there’s now a studio directive that the monster must appear in the first act so as not to lose the attention-span deficient, but in ‘Godzilla: King of Monsters’ in his introduction he’s just there, demolishing the city; it’s an introduction that’s barely trying. Later, there is maybe one notable fight with Rodan versus the jets: if there is one transcendent image I take from the film it is Rodan spinning in flight to destroy the fighter planes. Oh, and King Ghidoran atop a volcano with a cross in the foreground like a painting of the devil by an old master (and from this you could theorise the film is drawing a line from these ancient titans to the development of religion… but that doesn’t lead too far). But, yeah, we see the tremendously impossible all the time now. Michael Doherty’s previous films ‘Trick’r’Treat’ and ‘Krampus’ were far more alive with attention to detail and quirkiness. 

So: secret organisation Monarch is hiding and monitoring these titans/Kaijū and bad government folk are interfering with things they don’t understand, and then a rogue eco-terrorist group (*raise eyebrow*) frees the titans to risk the world of the plague that is mankind. But they too are messing with things they don’t understand. King Ghidorah takes centre stage and impresses. Rodan gets his moment. Mothra too. The other monsters… not so much. And all this is to now cast Godzilla as a good guy, an apex predator that keeps the others in line. He often appears (tiresomely) just in the nick of time, then King Ghidorah kicks his arse… in fact Godzilla has to be revived a couple of times to continue the fight until he’s a deus ex machina. It’s enough to make you doubt his awesomeness.

But what is most unforgiveable is that when a monster fight is going down between Godzilla and King Ghidorah, we focus on the humans and are supposed to care about the family reunion of the perfunctory human interest. And they aren’t that interesting. It’s a waste of a decent cast. Yes, big monsters are fighting just like mommy and daddy, and now mommy and daddy are making a truce for the daughter - but we’d rather watch the monsters. That’s what we’ve paid money to see. Any splendid stuff just dries up. I mean, even 'Shin Godzilla' made me fairly interested in the politics of it all, so there's no reason for being rudimentary. 

Unkle Lancifer at Kindertrauma gives all the positives but I was left with a feeling of being underwhelmed. Of course, the argument is that aside from the seminal original, all the Godzilla films suffer from silliness and negligible human representation, and that’s undeniably true; but there’s a sense when I go to see a new gorilla-whale film with lots of money and skill behind it, I am thinking maybe this time, it will truly raise the bar more than being half decent. I don’t want to see a mega-budget film with the same flaws because then it just comes across as not caring enough and doesn’t have the same charm. 

There’s a sense these films are just coasting. But there will be some interest is seeing how the tropical colours of Kong conflict with Godzilla’s drained look in the inevitable ‘Godzilla vs Kong’. 

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

John Wick 3: Chapter 3 - Parabellum 

Chad Stahelski, 2019, English-Russian-Japanese-Italian

Well you know what you came for with ‘John Wick’ so it’s a little redundant to chip at flaws when it’s big dumb excess and entertainment. The IQ is low – someone will explain the title, don’t worry – but that doesn’t stop it from trying to open up the Wick-world. Franchises are everything these days. Quietly, ‘John Wick’ seems have snuck in and taken some of the glory from ‘The Raid’ (chalk that up to being non-English, but the people that matter seem to know: after ‘The Raid’, I saw fight scenes everywhere realised they had to up the ante, not least in the ‘Daredevil’ NetFlix series).

   

It starts with the murderous properties of library books, sets a fight in a museum of antique weapons and then delivers a little horse-fu (as Keanu has called it). So, for me, this first act is the strongest sequence of action scenes, funny and outrageous in its excess and excellently executed. This is where director Chad Stahleski’s experience as a stuntman and his history with Keanu Reeves (they go back to ‘The Matrix’) is a major asset: you never feel that the editing is doing all the hard work and every now and again there’s a camera angle that really lands the punchline (eye-piercing, anyone? But the whole antique weapon’s fight contains knowing angles).

It seems to be that different people have different preferences: some think the opening act is weakest, some the middle and some the end. It’s true that when the guns come out, there is less visible invention because the film is not required to be so imaginative in its arsenal. However, Halle Berry and her attack dogs have proven a high point for many (ref. social media).

But then some seem to think ‘John Wick 2’ is better/inferior, so it seems a series more open to flexible audience’s preferences than most. It’s all fights, so maybe repetition fatigue sets in at different points for different people.

But to back-track: this takes off where the previous film finishes with Wick (Keanu Reeves) on the run with a humungous bounty on his head. This time, it’s not vengeance motivating him but simply going to one person and cameo to the next to get to the head honcho of the High Table, which controls this league of assassins. What this really does is take Wick from one fight to the next. It gets a little ‘Black Swan’ at one point and then cod-mystical (in the desert?), but it’s in obvious high debt to ‘The Villainess’, especially with that bike-and-horse fight. So, it’s derivative and undemanding and daft, yes, but it has a nice sheen and colour-scheme – filmed with a clear commercial gloss by Dan Laustsen – and the fights are exceptionally choreographed, filmed coherently without the edits getting in the way. And this is where it truly delivers. 

And it helps that Reeves is more hangdog in demeanour (sad puppy, maybe?) undermining the potential machismo. It follows a trick from ‘The Raid’ in that he is a protagonist reacting in a Why-are-you-all-making-me-be-such-a-bad-ass? way, which allows him to be both persecuted and to show how lethal he is. A film about his being an assassin would have been very different. Still, he still applies so many headshots to make sure potential threats are dead – no one-shot kills all here – that the “15” rating seems ridiculous. Reeves has little dialogue and a couple of one-liners and he’s probably no one’s idea of an exemplary actor (but stories of how nice he is are as legendary as Wick’s kill list) but when he has to show his skill as a physical actor, he doesn’t disappoint in the action scenes. Fighting on a horse is pretty impressive. And when his dourness can’t quite keep things sparking, there’s Halle Berry and ‘The Raid’ guys and Mark Dacascos (an assassin barely able to repress his hero-worship) to keep the momentum up. But it should be noted that this is not a youth-dominated word: the cast is notably mature and happily showing the youngsters how immature ultra-violence is done.

It’s a movie-movie world where seemingly everyone knows Wick by sight and no innocents really get hurt; hell, you can kill henchmen in a busy train station and no one will notice (and the film really isn’t the kind to posit this as social commentary). It’s an assassin’s world and we just live in it. They spread the full class spectrum too, from the glitz of The Continental hotel – a safe-ground for assassins until Wick decided otherwise at the end of ‘Wick 2’ – and the street homeless, weaponised by The Bowery King (Lawrence Fishburne… whose performance is perfectly in keeping with shenanigans, but is probably less embarrassing here than in ‘Wick 2’). In this Hard Man Fantasy, the whole world is against you but, thankfully, your skills and cool can overcome. And it helps that characters have no qualms about referring to Wick as “legendary” or “mythic”: they know their place.

If ‘The Raid’s detractors bemoaned its lack of narrative, its level-up games structure (“Yes, and?” responded director Gareth Evans), its skeletal structure seemed to me to be stripped of artifice, by way of Walter Hill or early John Carpenter. ‘John Wick 3’ by comparison has that pretention to cinematic narrative and world-and-franchise-building that games now have, that can often get in the way of gameplay. But Stahleski gets the balance right here. One can’t blame him for thinking that “Hey, we’re on number three here: shouldn’t we fill in a little background?” But it never gets in the way of the jaw-dropping body-count. 

Maybe this is the best entry for me because I came in knowing

what this would be and just focused on the mayhem. (And, again: such a body-count for a 15 rating.) I was perhaps lukewarm on the previous instalments, but the set-pieces of this third chapter did their work once it did the death-by-library-book. It’s undemanding, but there’s no denying I enjoyed the skill of the action. 

My second appearance on the You Total Cult podcast

I am on the final episode of the You Total Cult podcast where we get together to watch one those so-bad-it's-good films, 'The Children of Ravensback', or just 'The Children', if you prefer. 

In the 1990s, when films were still banned, I used to go to a film fair where you could get all those illicit VHS copies. I bought a rough fourth or fifth generation tape of 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' from there, for example. Anyway, I bought 'The Children' mistaking it for 'Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things' and was most disappointed when I watched it. But then, I showed it to my friend James in outrage and he fell about laughing. So I showed it to others and then we had about two or three parties where a gang of us got together to watch it and laugh. 

I hadn't seen it for decades, but it was released last year by Troma and so it was time to revisit. It is a film where the effects highlights are fingernails turning black and the funniest child dismemberment ever.

We start chatting about this 30 mins in.

Tekkonkinkreet

Tekkonkinkreet 

Tekkon kinkurîto 

鉄コン筋クリート

Taiyō Matsumoto, 1994

In Taiyō Matsumoto’s Manga, two boys named Kuro and Shiro – “Black” and “White” - live in Treasure Town, under the delusion that they “rule” it as a delinquent duo called “The Cats”. However, the Yakuza have designs on converting this part of town into a theme park where money can be made. Whilst White’s babbling seems to be getting worse, Black takes on the Yakuza who unleash superhuman assassins and causes all kinds of trouble.

Of course, Black and White are Yin and Yang: White says numerous times that he has the screws that Black doesn’t have and vice versa. White is seemingly mentally challenged, digesting the world as a toddler who has just discovered he can count and make up songs even though he is about ten. Typically, this subjectivity is equated with innocence in a crazy world, but as these brothers are rendered through symbolism and archetypes, this is less reductive than it might have been. Their friend, the old man on the street, says that he doubts White would have survived if it wasn’t for Black. For Black’s part, he is old beyond his years, bloodthirsty and fearless to the point of foolishness. There is the typical philosophising that runs through Manga, but ‘Tekkonkinkreet’ stops short of the mawkishness that often mars Manga narratives and drags it into tedium; or rather it doesn’t dwell on its sentimentality so much that it gets in way of the action (indeed, each chapter is called a “skirmish”). 

‘Tekkonkonkreet’ is a mispronunciation of the Japanese word for concrete. Its superficial look is all-smiling and hectic, but this is misleading: the tone is despairing and downbeat and Kuro/Black really isn’t a smiley kid, being the dark half of the duo: violent, dour, psychotic: his smile is closer to the psychosis of Snake, the ever-grinning bad guy. Matsumoto’s artwork is often giddy, full of the upper regions and taking a bird’s eye view of the city of Takaramachi – “Treasure Town” – since The Cats seem to be able to defy gravity somewhat and constantly perch and live on rooftops. It’s often overcrowded, angular and slightly off-kilter from realism. Several characters – not least the central boys themselves – come with a streak of the surreal and superpowers, offset by the sad-sack slouch of many adults.

The mash-up of slightly Chosen One kids adventure and surreal Yakuza yarn give this an originality that the story would lack if these elements were independent of each other. Black and White are immediately arresting characters and the relatively straightforward telling means it’s direct and compelling right from the start whilst the art is packed full of dynamism. A. E. Sparrow writes:

"Indeed, it's the blending of traditional Japanese manga, European art-stylings and an indie-comic sensibility that push this book into a realm all its own."

It’s fierce and sentimental in equal measure, but it reaches a balance of surrealism and Manga nihilism that always fascinates. And the collection of the serial, ‘Tekkonkinkreet: Black & White’ is gorgeous.

Tekkonkinkreet

Michael Arias, 2006, Japan

Michael Arias’ film adaptation of ‘Tekkonkinkreet’ does the source full justice. The animation is often breath-taking, keeping the vertiginous perspective of Matsumoto’s original art. For example, the introductory longshot through the city alone is stunning. And likewise, although the design of the faces is cartoonish, the detail of the backgrounds is so chock-full that it surely would mostly prove impossible to take it all in. It often emulates elaborate crane-shots or follows the characters through the streets in a chase sequence, mimicking beats from the action genre and giving the film a more cinematic quality, opening up and getting intimate with the city. 

One of the reasons it succeeds is that it doesn’t mess with the story so much. There’s no need. However, it starts with The Cat’s the conflict with Dusk and Dawn which strikes as a wise choice, starting with a conflict that plays a future part in the plot instead of a random skirmish, but otherwise it hardly deviates. 

It’s an essential companion piece to Matsumoto’s graphic novel. The tone is downbeat but there’s joyful delirium in the art and Arias’ adaptation maintains that. ‘Tekkonkinkreet’ is familiar in its tropes but filtered through an oddness that makes it quite unique and hanging around the upper echelons of its peers. 

Amusements

Darks Corners' excellent essay on the horror films of FW Murnau.

Talk Talk live in Montreaux, 1986.

The Pain behind "Baron Munchausen".

Rob Doyle on Philip K Dick's "Valis"

The art of 

Piotr Jabłoński

Lunar Engine live

A collection of live recordings and a demo from Lunar Engine from years ago. Free download.