Cronenberg’s shiny/grimy adaptation of Cosmopolis (a sharp knife in the shallow guts of 21st Mammonism) retains some of it’s edge despite the uneven performance from Twilight Pattison. The film follows the book quite closely with most of the billionaire-on-the-brink’s varied antics included during his slow limo crawl across a gridlocked city and I’m sure there’s a fair bit of dialogue lifted too but there’s not enough time to give either their significance. It’s a fine looking film and there’s still plenty of smarts behind it’s gleeful, grim comedy so it’s worth catching but I’d recommend the novella first.
Another thought provoking, nuanced novel, Steppenwolf, got a big screen version back in 1974 and although good, similarly lacks the depths of the original. Max von Sydow stars as the melancholic scholar who, adrift after WW1, finds his mind and life lifted by an unusual jazz loving woman oh and lots of drugs and esoterica. The acting is excellent, the production not so much, peppered unnecessarily with some dated, gimmicky animations and sfx . Still there’s an effectively dreamy, dissolute weirdness that pervades proceedings and like Cosmopolis plenty of the big thoughts are intact.
An Italian cemetery whose inhabitants rise from their graves requires a special sort of caretaker and in this peculiar little film it's Rupert Everett that's tasked with dispatching the returners. Directed by Argento protege Michele Soavi and based on a novel from Italian comic book artist Scalvi, Cemetery Man, is a melange of comedy, horror and romance quite unlike anything I've seen before. Everett & his monosyllabic sidekick hammer away with shovels & pistols at the unliving during the night watch but both fall madly in love during the day & after Everett's love dies, returns and is dispatched again he begins to lose his mind and a series of encounters with two doppelgangers finally tip him over the edge. Despite it's disparate elements and the modest budget it's a really enjoyable little oddity with a twisted sense of humour, bags of style and a surprisingly affective plot.
Patrick is a coma patient with a evil streak of psychic juju in the schlocky 70's Aussie horror directed by Richard Franklin. When a new nurse gets a job in a barmy hospital she slowly realises her new ward is behind some of the peculiar happenings around her and it's not long before the men in her life feel the wrath of Patrick's strange abilities. The acting and script are pretty shoddy and I'm not sure it's wise for any film to have it's antagonist in a coma but there's some choice period laughs throughout and enough Australian strangeness to keep this B-movie entertaining-ish.
Peter Sellers made some great films during his long career (despite being a bit of a shit in real life) but I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is distinctly a lesser Sellers. Sellers stars as a stuffy lawyer, sleepwalking his way to marriage and a staid suburban life but becomes tempted by a pretty hippy chick into dropping out and embracing an alternative lifestyle. Unfortunately this is 90 mins of cliche stitched together with a half hearted Sellers performance, some "groovy" music and a couple of pot based wig-out scenes worst of all it barely raised a smile, let alone a chuckle. A vapid, tepid Hollywood attempt to cash in - avoid.
A Safe Place, however, is the real deal, drenched as it is, in the LSD/experimental, counter culture of the era. A beautiful but troubled, young space cadet played by Tuesday Weld beguiles a square into a life of drugs, free love and mystical thinking and the pair's relationship blossoms despite the intervention of a predatory Jack Nicholson and the girl's persistent reminiscences of a tubby magician played by Orson Welles. Directed by Henry Jaglom, who edited Easy Rider & went onto direct Tracks, this is a tricky watch; the narrative is scattered and dream like and the script meandering and stuffed with the hippyburblings of the day. Nonetheless it's at least committed to it's cause and culminates in a strange ambiguous, bittersweet ending.
Enter the Void is a remarkable, deranged hallucination of a film by controversial director Gaspar Noe. The plot centers on a drug dealing 20 something who lives and dies in Tokyo and his post mortem wanderings around the lives of his friends. Gaspar has suffused the film with lurid neon colouring, strobes, demented transition's, CGi drugscapes and disorienting music that will literally blast your noggin in half and the POV meanderings, flashbacks and attempts at re-embodiment by Oscar's consciousness create a bizarrely spiritual atmosphere amid the filth and depravity of the Japanese underbelly. I wasn't a fan of Noe's previous films Irreversible & SeulContreTous mainly as the shocking content appeared to have such limited ambition but the darkness, sex, drug taking and violence here seem to be somehow warranted given the film's nature. Anyways it's a dazzling film I'll watch again - next time hopefully in the cinema.
Essential Killing stars Vincent Gallo and sees Polish director JerzySkolimowski reunited with Brit producer Jeremy Thomas (their first effort together the enigmatic The Shout is a classic 70's oddity, go see). Anyways Gallo plays an Taliban fighter who escapes during his rendition and attempts to evade recapture while trekking through the Russian countryside. While Gallo's performance is strong and it's filmed beautifully, the paper thin plot and spartan dialogue left me a little bored and the nods towards metaphysics and something deeper fall pretty flat. It shares a particularly odd scene with O Lucky Man, a much richer film odyssey which on reflection makes this seem little more than an experiment in chin stroking.
Korean director Joon-ho Bong has made some great films so I'm a little embarrassed about my tardiness in watching his latest feature Mother. Like Memories of Murder before it Bong infuses this film with a strange melange of comedy, tragedy and thriller as Mom starts investigating a seedy murder her simple son has been arrested for. Beautifully shot and perfectly balanced this is a sinister, darkly comic thriller that's pinned by an amazing performance by Hye-Ja.
Funky Forest is an extremely odd comedy that could really only come from Japan. Comprising a large number of disparate vignettes - think Python's Meaning of Life on shrooms - there's a bit of everything thrown in during it's 150 min runtime: there's animation, sketches, musical numbers, stand up routines, aliens, short stories and sitcom scenes oh and some really peculiar Cronenberg-esque musical instruments. It's genuinely funny but be prepared to be befuzzled like never before.
