From the Vault #8: THE NINTH GATE (1999)

From 2012 onwards, before developing this blog, I wrote a multitude of reviews on the website Letterboxd. In this irregular series called From the Vault, I’m going to haul these earlier reviews out of mothballs and re-purpose them here.

This one is from August 25th, 2014…

The Ninth Gate is a strange one from Roman Polanski, a director who has of course dabbled in the occult landscape he again taps here, arguably to greater success.

Adapted from the Spanish novel El Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, Polanski’s film is quite an elegant, cultured malaise of a story that could almost define the term ‘slow burn’, if it even burns at all. To many undoubtedly it’s subject matter–an unscrupulous book dealer is hired to find a tome that may be able to raise the Devil–would be inherently boring and Polanski’s careful construction of Johnny Depp’s lead character’s journey snooze inducing, yet oddly enough there is just something about the way Polanski shoots this, something about the manner of his narrative and the mysterious, seductive, beguiling characters involved that keeps you entertained – not to mention a sly sense of absurdity lurking underneath which, despite it’s posturing, suggests the director knows how silly the whole endeavour is.

The result is a beguiling occult thriller.

From the Vault #7: THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES (2007)

From 2012 onwards, before developing this blog, I wrote a multitude of reviews on the website Letterboxd. In this irregular series called From the Vault, I’m going to haul these earlier reviews out of mothballs and re-purpose them here.

This one is from October 23rd, 2015…

Having been pulled from release after a limited run, The Poughkeepsie Tapes has been for the better part of a decade a very difficult film to get hold of, until recently when it was finally released on VOD.

Now a whole new legion of horror fans will get to see why John Erick Dowdle’s found footage piece was subdued for so long; not that it was ever officially censored, but upon watching it you may be surprised to hear it wasn’t. Taking the found footage format of a collection of tapes left behind by a horrific serial killer upon fleeing the house he committed his crimes, and fusing it with a documentary format of fake professionals from within psychology, police, the FBI etc… Dowdle’s manages to create a picture truly, deeply unnerving and unsettling. The horror here isn’t supernatural, it’s about a purely human monster – dubbed ‘The Water Street Butcher’ – and how, Zodiac-style, he manages to stay one step ahead of law enforcement and keep his identity concealed. The difference being here this man commits nothing short of real atrocities, the nature of his crimes dwarfing most of what traditional horror films these days show you.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes fucks with your mind too.

From the Vault #6: FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN (2001)

From 2012 onwards, before developing this blog, I wrote a multitude of reviews on the website Letterboxd. In this irregular series called From the Vault, I’m going to haul these earlier reviews out of mothballs and re-purpose them here.

This one is from May 3rd, 2014…

All the way through Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, despite being impressed by the revolutionary photo-realistic animation on show, my prevailing thought was simply… why aren’t they just making this film with *real* people?

Maybe that’s missing the point of Hironobu Sakaguchi’s endeavour in bringing his legendary & critically acclaimed futurepunk fantasy series of video games to the big screen, but on the other hand it employs major Hollywood actors to play these computer generated parts, and indeed the story is about as generic blockbuster as it’s possible to get. Very little about The Spirits Within couldn’t have been achieved with real actors on real sets in actual environments, rendering the whole point of this a little… well, moot.

Ultimately though, that’s not at all the reason this Final Fantasy is a creative failure in the same way it was a huge box-office bomb that sank its production company and upheld the ‘curse’ of video game adaptations.

Film Review: MAKING WAVES: THE ART OF CINEMATIC SOUND (2019)

When considering a movie, how often do you consider how it sounds? Not just the score, which many increasingly recognise as a crucial and celebrated component of a cinematic experience, but the aural aspect of how a film is put together. If your answer is “not much”, then Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound is an eye-opener.

Directed by Midge Costin, a former sound editor who worked on films throughout the 80’s and 90’s (heavily on Jerry Bruckheimer productions such as Days of Thunder and Armageddon), Making Waves shines a light on sound design, a process which has been key to the history and evolution of cinema since the pioneering work of Eadward Muybridge all the way back in the 1870’s captured the possibility of an image on screen. Costin’s documentary roughly chronologically tells the story of sound in film, as Muybridge gave way to Melies and the silent film era of the early 20th century, all of which struggled to sync manufactured sound to film. Theatres would use orchestras or even employees banging equipment to mimic sound alongside image. None of it came from the actual picture at first, movies often shot in locations filled with sound because only image was required.

Then along came Don Juan, with John Barrymore, adding sound to image and finally the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, more infamous now for a blacked up Al Jolson, but which for the first time had audiences hearing someone not just sing but talk on a motion picture screen. Making Waves takes that history and runs with it across the subsequent century.

From the Vault #5: THE SHINING (1980)

From 2012 onwards, before developing this blog, I wrote a multitude of reviews on the website Letterboxd. In this irregular series called From the Vault, I’m going to haul these earlier reviews out of mothballs and re-purpose them here.

This one is from October 31st, 2012, revisited with Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep just around the corner…

I’m going to throw out there a statement that is controversial when you say it about any movie: The Shining is one of the greatest motion pictures ever made. There, I said it. That’s right out there and I’m standing by it.

Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s well-known psychological horror is a remarkable piece of work, operating on an incredible amount of levels. It’s the most chilling movie I have honestly ever watched; other movies have made me jump more, or squirm, but The Shining every time gets inside my bones, gets inside my head, and refuses to go anywhere. The sign of a truly great movie is one that won’t leave you when the credits roll, and Kubrick’s tale sits in a very select group of films that have done that to me, and continue to on repeat viewing.

From the Vault #4: DIANA (2013)

From 2012 onwards, before developing this blog, I wrote a multitude of reviews on the website Letterboxd. In this irregular series called From the Vault, I’m going to haul these earlier reviews out of mothballs and re-purpose them here.

This one is from February 20th, 2015…

My Mom loved Princess Diana. The day she died, she came into my room at 5.30am in shock and horror telling my slightly uninterested, very sleepy fifteen year old self she had been killed like we’d lost a member of the family.

That’s what the press labelled ‘Queen of Hearts’ meant to the millions of Britons who still wanted to romanticise the British Royal Family in an age when they were fast becoming an anachronistic relic; at the same time she was also enormously divisive, with just as many people who saw her as an opportunistic, insincere bed-hopper who courted the press on trips to sub-Saharan Africa as a humanitarian to remain beloved when her husband had turned his back on her. Oliver Hirschbergel’s biopic could have been an opportunity to rip into the guts of that, explore the ‘people’s Princess’ with the candour many have shied away from since her tragic demise.

Diana, sadly, turns out to be an enormously tedious character study which never once has the balls to go beyond its glossed-up TV movie roots.

From the Vault #3: TERMINATOR GENISYS (2015)

From 2012 onwards, before developing this blog, I wrote a multitude of reviews on the website Letterboxd. In this irregular series called From the Vault, I’m going to haul these earlier reviews out of mothballs and re-purpose them here.

This one is from July 3rd, 2015. Having just rewatched this one in advance of Terminator: Dark Fate, I pretty much stand by these four year old words, even if I was kinder then to the central duo than I was on a rewatch and Tweet thread I did…

There is no fate but the filmmakers make. That should be the new motto for the Terminator franchise, which since T2: Judgment Day way back in 1991 delivered what effectively would have been a perfectly bittersweet conclusion to the concept, has been hacked away at to the point of almost complete dilution. Cue Terminator Genisys.

The unfairly maligned T3: Rise of the Machines attempted its own sense of finality until Terminator: Salvation came along and put what seemed like a nail in the cinematic coffin, as leaden and misjudged as it was. Enter Skydance to mop up the rights to James Cameron’s franchise, long scattered to the Hollywood winds, and announce the beginning of a brand new trilogy that will revive the Terminator saga, not to mention revive the post-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger in the most seminal role of his career. That’s fine, right? The Terminator franchise has always poked about in temporal mechanics, with multiple timelines on film and TV versions, not to mention multiple actors in the signature roles of Sarah Connor, John Connor and now Kyle Reese. Genisys would be the start of a fresh new take on the war against the machines, right?

Well no. There’s nothing fresh about Terminator Genisys. It could be described akin to a James Cameron greatest scenes hits package left out to steadily roast in the sun.

Book Review: THE SILVER WIND (Nina Allan)

Nina Allan prefaces this re-issue of her 2011 science-fiction novel, The Silver Wind, with thoughts about material she has inserted back into the book which didn’t seem to fit the first time around, and this nicely queues you up for the kind of treat her novel turns out to be. The Silver Wind is discordant, tricky, eerie and almost entirely non-linear, all in the right ways.

Even giving a broad description of Allan’s fairly short, not much longer than a novella work, is a slippery proposition. Ostensibly the story revolves around brother and sister Martin and Dora Newland, who find themselves embroiled in the mystery of a man named Owen Andrews, a watchmaker who has found a way to control the flow of time. To say anymore feels churlish and unfair to the sweep of Allan’s book which is unusually structured in order to pay off the inter-connectivity of what are, effectively, short stories tethered together by an ever-developing thread concerning time travel.

We might as well get that one out of the way given the novel is science-fiction. Time travel is a factor.

From the Vault #2: THE LAST SAMURAI (2003)

From 2012 onwards, before developing this blog, I wrote a multitude of reviews on the website Letterboxd. In this irregular series called From the Vault, I’m going to haul these earlier reviews out of mothballs and re-purpose them here.

This one is from April 15th, 2014…

The honour and code of the samurai has always been enticing to a Western civilisation that is far removed from such customs, which perhaps makes The Last Samurai such an enticing, enigmatic film.

Edward Zwick crafts quite an epic adventure rich in mythology & thematic resonance that while traditionally Hollywood in its construction still manages to exist a cut above many such movies of its ilk, a touch of class surrounding how the story of Captain Nathan Algren is put together, based as it is on several real life legendary American figures who played key roles in the Satsuma Rebellion in Japan during the late 19th century. This isn’t a direct re-telling of those events but serves as a leaping off point to construct a tale about a stranger in a strange land, of a man haunted by fighting an unjust war who rediscovers his honour & place in the world through a dying culture.

Zwick’s film is slick, sweeping, beautifully shot and frequently involving, backed up by a strong performance by Tom Cruise in one of those roles that remind you just what a good actor he can be.

From the Vault #1: DROP DEAD FRED (1991)

From 2012 onwards, before developing this blog, I wrote a multitude of reviews on the website Letterboxd. In this irregular series called From the Vault, I’m going to haul these earlier reviews out of mothballs and re-purpose them here.

This one is from June 9th, 2014, both my 32nd birthday and the day Rik Mayall passed away…

One of Working Title’s earliest hits outside of the UK was Drop Dead Fred, a movie that has slipped into cult obscurity as something of an unusual comic curio, chiefly thanks to the presence of the late Rik Mayall, who brings his finely honed sense of anarchic British comedy to what is otherwise a redoubtably American production. 

Ate de Jong’s subsequent film is quite an odd beast when you boil it down, never quite successfully gelling on the one hand a quite zany, quite base, scatological, childish broad comedy, yet on the other a surprisingly psychological drama around Phoebe Cates’ girl who never truly grew up. It never quite knows what angle it wants to push more, so aims for both with equal veracity and it’s fair to say only Mayall makes it in any way worth the surprisingly baggy experience despite the fairly tight running time.

The crucial problem of course is that for a comedy, it’s not really very funny. You can guarantee a few laughs when Mayall’s titular Fred turns up–which thankfully is pretty regular once the wheels of plot start rolling–but de Jong’s script trades purely off Mayall’s schoolboy silliness that while always effective given the actor, feels very much at odds with what else the script is trying to do.