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Paranoiac

Paranoiac

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 26 July 2010

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Freddie Francis

Writers: Jimmy Sangster

Cast: Janette Scott, Oliver Reed, Sheila Burrell, Maurice Denham, Alexander Davion

UK 1963

80 mins

The quality David Lynch most valued in the late Freddie Francis, his cinematographer on The Elephant Man, Dune and The Straight Story, was not so much the technical knowledge accrued through a long apprenticeship in the British studios of the 1940s and 50s, remarkable though that was, but the more elusive ‘sensitivity’, Francis’s ability to respond evocatively to dramatic situations, characters and spaces.

This was not a quality Francis could use to full effect on projects like The Deadly Bees or The Creeping Flesh, his bread and butter when he became a director, although even in patently absurd projects like the Joan Crawford apeman movie Trog, you can see him striving to inject some interest. But occasionally the scripts he dealt with was just about good enough to allow him to shine. Paranoiac (1963), his third credited feature, is such a movie. Since Francis the director was as sure a hand as Francis the cinematographer at creating atmosphere through lighting, composition and movement, this convoluted country house crime story is rich material.

Now available from Masters of Cinema, Paranoiac is an early entry in Hammer studio’s long line of twisty thrillers ‘inspired’ by the success of Les Diaboliques, and to a lesser extent Psycho. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, a driving force behind Hammer horror, could apparently knock these out in his sleep: weave together at least two criminal conspiracies, add some false identities, leapfrog from one shock or suspense sequence to another as rapidly as possible, and strain credibility until it groans but doesn’t quite give way.

Here, we have a confused heiress (Janette Scott, of Day of the Triffids fame) being driven insane by her wicked, drunken brother (Oliver Reed, playing very much to type), until another, long thought dead, brother (Alexander Davion) shows up. Suspicions quickly arise that this interloper is an impostor, part of a Tichborne claimant-style plot to steal the family inheritance, but where does the eerie, masked figure armed with a lethal hook fit into the puzzle, and who is singing at night in the crypt?

The answers probably won’t startle you too much, but this handsome edition shows off Arthur Grant’s widescreen black and white cinematography to terrific effect - Francis had shot The Innocents just a few years before, and he uses many of the same tricks in this less sophisticated country house melodrama, from the elegant mise en scène to the subtle vignette effect that darkens the corners of the frame. His camera glides and arcs almost ceaselessly, explicitly taking over the storytelling at times, a creeping, constant presence; and then jabbing and swinging in rhythm with Reed’s unrestrained, gorilla-like machismo. When Martin Scorsese hired Francis to photograph Cape Fear, Francis said it was because he would know how to shoot a young lady in a night gown wandering around a dark house when she ought to be in bed. He does indeed have a feel for the modern Gothic. Playing it just straight enough (Reed occasionally mugs too vigorously, but he’s electrifying the rest of the time), Francis uses everything he’d learned as a cinematographer to create a genuinely beautiful-looking movie, moody and powerful, combining the gusto of Hammer with some of the eeriness of the classic English ghost story.

David Cairns

Check it out, Cinema releases

Down Terrace

Down Terrace

Format: Cinema

Release date: 30 July 2010

Venues: ICA Cinema (London) and selected key cities

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Ben Wheatley

Writer: Robin Hill, Ben Wheatley

Cast: Julia Deakin, Robert Hill, Robin Hill, Mark Kempner, Michael Smiley

UK 2009

89 mins

Bill and his son Karl are members of a seemingly normal family living in a terraced house within a nondescript suburb of Brighton. Following an acquittal from an unspecified court case, the two return home to the familiar staple of chores to be completed, tension between the family’s women to defuse and their own tempestuous relationship to address. Beneath this surface, however, lies a far more sinister and interesting truth; the members of this family are career criminals, and are now on a blood hunt for whoever grassed them up.

Welcome to Down Terrace, the feature debut from Ben Wheatley. Far from being merely an episode of The Sopranos directed by Mike Leigh as many reviews have suggested, the film is a fascinating look at the mechanics of a family, focusing on the little things that at once enthrall and irritate, exposing harboured truths and the ties that bind people together. Blazing arguments are abruptly ended by bursts of perfectly timed humour and assumptions about characters are turned on their head at the least predictable moments. Wheatley’s script, co-written with star Robin Hill, is a brilliantly original take on the familiar British crime genre, infusing each character with depth and compassion. We care deeply for each of these characters, which increases s the impact of their irrationally violent reactions towards others. A particular scene of pure visual humour resulting from a sudden action from Karl typifies this perfectly.

It comes as no surprise that Robert Hill (Bill) and Robin Hill (Karl) are real-life father and son, sharing a painfully realistic chemistry that’s as heart-wrenching as darkly amusing. An ex-hippie and regular drug user, Bill is prone to twisted philosophical musings that are highly enjoyable, and at times it’s difficult not to sympathise with the familial and professional weight on his shoulders. Karl is also blessed with some unfortunate situations to challenge his ever-shredded nerves, not least an ex-girlfriend who turns up at the door bearing his child. While plot devices such as this could possibly be viewed as contrived, they perfectly highlight the domestic pressures that bear on the family to the same extent as their illegal exploits.

Featuring a host of familiar faces from cult British comedy, such as Julia Deakin and Michael Smiley, combined with non-professional actors, the film is undoubtedly a lo-fi affair, though at no point is it hindered by its budgetary constraints. More so, the claustrophobic atmosphere is largely achieved through the film’s almost singular setting of the family home (the Hills’ real-life home, no less), and a sense of realism is attained through the use of minimal crew and equipment.

In a genre that boasts as many forgettable flops as Michael Caine or Bob Hoskins classics, it’s refreshing to see a film that finds something original to say without relying on clichéd one-liners or stock characters. Down Terrace has already proven itself to be a hit across the festival circuit, winning Best UK Feature at last year’s Raindance among others.

The Raindance Film Festival runs from September 29 to October 10 in London. More details on the Raindance webiste.

James Merchant

Check it out, Comic Strip Reviews

Martin

George A Romero’s 1977 Martin offers a remarkably ambiguous, playful, disturbing and original take on the vampire. It has just been released by Arrow Video as a two-disc collector’s edition, including the Italian cut of the film (believed to have been re-edited by Dario Argento and missing some scenes from the US version), which is reviewed below.

Comic Review by Adam Cadwell
For more information on Adam Cadwell, go to his website.
Check it out, Home entertainment

Antonio das Mortes

Antonio das Mortes

Format: DVD

Release date: 31 May 2010

Distributor: Mr Bongo Films

Director: Glauber Rocha

Writer: Glauber Rocha

Original title: O Drag&#227o da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro

Cast: Mauricio do Valle, Odete Lara, Othon Bastos, Joffre Soares, Lorival Pariz

France/Brazil/West Germany 1969

100 mins

Antonio das Mortes, or O Drag&#227o da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro (The Dragon of Evil against the Saint Warrior) is the final instalment in a trilogy of films by the self-appointed leader of the 60s Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, Glauber Rocha. Written as well as directed by Rocha, all three films centre around the figure of the cangaceiro, a holy bandit hero or mystic outlaw, which Rocha likens to Saint George the Dragon-Slayer. In contrast to the first two films, in Antonio das Mortes the central protagonist is not the saint, but the dragon; the ‘cangaceiro killer’ of the film’s title, Antonio das Mortes. The story follows Antonio as he is hired by a tyrannical landowner to kill Coriana, the last of the cangaceiros. Antonio and Coriana face each other in a machete duel and, after the fatal blow is struck, all-out chaos ensues.

‘A camera in the hand, and an idea in the head’ was how Rocha defined Cinema Novo, and it perfectly describes the poetical/political guerrilla filmmaking of Antonio das Mortes. The luxuries of classical narrative cinema are stripped clear. Everything is shot on location and in available light; the camera is largely hand-held, or fixed to a tripod to give a detached, blank perspective; the soundtrack fades roughly and abruptly in and out; and the effects (gun shots, knife wounds, etc) are purposefully cheap and hard to take seriously. Antonio das Mortes (and Cinema Novo more generally) is little concerned with fleshed-out characters and naturalistic drama, and occupies itself instead with the rapid flow of ideas, icons, and associations. The characters in the story aren’t really characters, but rather symbols or devices within the film’s dialectical economy. There are no personalities vying for our empathy, just archetypes and actions, the meaning (or host of meanings) of which we are left to interpret on our own.

The most striking thing about Antonio das Mortes is its tremendous energy and confidence. All of the performances (and ‘performances’ is definitely the right word) explode with intensity, certainty and enthusiasm; and this is the case as much in the chaotic crowd scenes, as in the tighter, more choreographed dialogue scenes. The direction from Rocha is excellent, retaining a tight and richly philosophical narrative, while giving his actors an immense amount of freedom. The pastiche mythology of Rocha’s script is inspiring, highly original stuff too. It would seem for example - given that we are encouraged to sympathise with Antonio’s position - that Antonio and Coriana, as characters, are not representatives of good and evil per say, but rather representatives of essential eternally opposed forces that govern the universe (male and female, rich and poor, strong and weak, light and dark, etc). The film has a strong folkloric quality that is redolent of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Legend of the Suram Fortress and it is stylistically just as impressive.

For all its intellectual and stylistic panache, however, Antonio das Mortes can also be slightly dense, esoteric and dry. The bulk of the exposition about cangaceiros and other character types is given in scrolling titles at the beginning of the film, and the audience is then expected to keep up, which it is often not easy to do. Similarly, there is constant reference to and comment on Brazilian politics of the 1960s, which will probably mean little to modern audiences. The way Rocha uses the drama purely as a means through which to expound his dialectical philosophy results in a film where there is no empathy, no great feeling, no appeal to the heart. This may not be the point of Antonio das Mortes, but compare the film to Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, which does something similar. In Godard’s film - in the star personas of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina - an old, human warmth manages to seep through the general fragmentation and pastiche. The actors are clearly performing, are clearly parts of Godard’s philosophical toolkit, and yet they retain their personality. They have a certain meaning (or host of meanings) in other words, and yet at the same time we love them; and thus the film affects us more deeply and on more levels. This maybe hints at the limitations of Cinema Novo as a cinema that thinks too much. Cinema is surely born out of more than just ‘a camera in the hand, and an idea in the head’? Surely it also requires a beating heart in the chest?

David Warwick

Check it out, Cinema releases

Splice

2 Comments
Splice

Format: Cinema

Release date: 23 July 2010

Venues: Nationwide

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Vincenzo Natali

Writers: Vincenzo Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant, Doug Taylor

Cast: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac, David Hewlett, Abigail Chu

Canada 2009

104 mins

While Vincenzo Natali’s four feature films have a few things in common - a single word title, small casts featuring David Hewlett and being situated in the environs of the fantasy/science fiction genre - they couldn’t be more different in terms of (high concept) plot. Cube features six characters with partial amnesia enclosed in a futuristic death trap. Cypher is a Philip K Dick-style spy thriller about shifting identities and corporate espionage. Nothing is a two-hander set in a house surrounded by an encroaching white void. His new film Splice is an update of the Frankenstein story through the lens of modern fears of genetic modification. Compared to Nothing, or even Cube, you’d think Splice would be an easy sell to the financiers. However, while the film has proved to be a reasonable box office and critical success in the US, Natali revealed in his video introduction at Sci-Fi London that getting funding for the movie was arduous until executive producer Guillermo del Toro came on board.

Having seen the film I can imagine why. The story is familiar enough: ambitious scientists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) decide to disregard their company’s instructions not to go rushing ahead with a gene-splicing project that has already yielded satisfactory results and end up creating a dangerous human-animal hybrid. Variants of the story have turned up in a number of films over the last quarter-century such as The Fly (1986), Species (1995) and Alien Resurrection (1997). Each of these have suggested that a creature with mixed human/non-human DNA will have a skewed sexuality, but as Splice adds elements of bestiality, incest and paedophilia to this, it is easy to see why any financier who initially read the script might have got cold feet. Of course, it is precisely these elements that make The Fly superior to the exploitative ‘T&A’ of a movie like Species and Splice an intriguing and relatively daring film. Perhaps it’s something to do with Canadian sensibilities - too much introspection on long winter nights - but Canadian cinema often presents some of the most fascinating explorations of human sexuality on screen, not only in the films of David Cronenberg, but also in those of Guy Maddin and Robert Lepage, and with Splice, Vincenzo Natali has added another notable genre film to that list.

In the TV mini-series Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), writer Christopher Isherwood was one of the first authors to suggest that if a human scientist tried to create augmented life, the creature might turn out to be handsome rather than horrific - visually, if not morally. In Splice, the creature starts off as a cute alien pet, but soon grows into a beautiful young woman (albeit with a prehensile tail and reptilian eyes). This creature, whose androgyny turns out to be important to the plot, becomes an object of desire for both its creators, one of whom is also a genetic parent, and the film explores some of the perverse possibilities of post-human relationships. This section of the film ultimately unbalances the whole project as the shifting attitudes and desires of the creature’s makers are dealt with a little too quickly while the final act is too similar to a dozen other movies.

In spite of its few shortcomings, the film has much to commend it and its ideas are adeptly fleshed out by an excellent cast. Sarah Polley is an idiosyncratic actress with a number of terrific SF/horror performances under her belt - Dawn of the Dead (2004), eXistenZ (1999), Last Night (1998) - and she is equally good here. Adrien Brody preceded Splice with the Dario Argento film Giallo (2009), which continued the director’s downward slide into DVD bargain bins, and while good actors often sleepwalk through genre films, Brody is well used here. His casting against type as an action hero in Predators (2010), not to mention his role in the underrated time travel film The Jacket (2005), shows that science fiction is a genre that suits his brooding demeanour and haunted looks.

While Splice was not the massive hit in the US that ‘geek’ websites predicted, it has the potential to move Natali out of his reputation as a niche director of speculative fiction. While Cube, for example, arrived a little too early to benefit from the success of the similarly themed Saw (2004) and its endless stream of sequels, Splice is intriguing and subversive enough to get the director the larger recognition he deserves. Natali is currently rumoured to be attached to adaptations of a couple of lauded but challenging science fiction classics - William Gibson’s Neuromancer and JG Ballard’s High Rise - and if anyone can tackle thought-provoking SF and do so on a relatively low budget, he’s certainly the man for the job.

Alex Fitch

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Profound Desires of the Gods

Profound Desires of the Gods

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 21 June 2010

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Shôhei Imamura

Writer: Keiji Hasebe, Shôhei Imamura

Original title: Kamigami no Fukaki Yokubo

Cast: Rentarô Mikuni, Choichiro Kawarazaki, Kazuo Kitamura, Hideko Okiyama

Japan 1968

172 mins

Speaking in an interview in 1985 (first published in Positif and republished in the DVD booklet), Japanese director Shôhei Imamura presented himself as something of a dissident among his contemporaries. He criticised Ozu’s ‘aesthetic’ approach and Ôshima’s reliance on trends to dictate his films’ subject matter. For Imamura, cinema presented another possibility beyond visual or technical mastery: an opportunity to shoot the truth. The presentation and unravelling of human nature was his motivation, not stylistics: ‘If my films are messy, it is probably due to the fact that I don’t like too perfect a cinema’.

Profound Desires of the Gods (1968) is certainly a messy film. Three hours in length, with a shoot that took 12 months longer than expected, Imamura’s masterwork is a mysterious and meandering epic; interesting and insightful but equally bewildering and mystifying. Close-up shots are few and far between. For the first two hours, the film is primarily composed of static long shots, its human protagonists becoming distant bodies in a wide and sweeping landscape. The viewer is left, somewhat baffled, to unearth the complicated relationships between these figures: a strange assembly of frustrated men and wild banshee women, who inhabit a fictitious island, Furage, in the Okinawa region of Southern Japan (which was then under American administration).

Explanations are gradually pieced together through snatched conversations and an elderly island inhabitant who acts as narrator through a series of folkloric songs. The lyrics tell the creation story of the island, which was formed through an incestuous sexual relationship between a divine brother and sister, whose actions incurred the wrath of the ruling god. The viewer slowly realises that this ancient myth is playing out for real within the dysfunctional Futori family, the ‘oldest on the island’. Mocked and vilified by the other islanders, this strange clan is locked in a spiral of penance and shame for their incestuous behaviour. The guilt and the role held by women find similarities with Genesis (and snakes are a recurrent symbol in the film); the male god was innocent until he decided that he needed a female to complete himself, but the woman acts as a temptress and symbol of sexual desire, resulting in the fall of man. Indeed, the two female characters (daughter and granddaughter of the Futori family) possess a feral sexuality that brings out uncontrollable, savage desire among the leading men. In Profound Desires of the Gods, sex is a primitive and unstoppable force that motivates humankind. Imamura was fascinated by anthropology and seemed to view humankind more in terms of zoological social structures than in terms of intellectual progression. Speaking in the same 1985 interview, he stated: ‘I am convinced…that despite successive external influences, the basic human qualities of a society will never change.’

So, the fate of Furage is bound up in the Futoris’ actions, and as an engineer arrives from mainland Japan to aid the island’s nascent sugar cane industry, it becomes increasingly clear that this dynasty holds the key to change. The grandson is chosen as the engineer’s assistant but the other family members either refuse or are unable to comply. The Futoris deter the engineer from bringing change by sabotage and seduction. The resulting, sometimes farcical, tussle between the rational plans of the engineer and the animalistic chaos of the Futoris stands as an allegory for the Westernisation and modernisation of traditional Japan. There is one particularly great scene where the engineer stands, sun-dazed and exhausted on the seashore, mumbling deliriously about Coca Cola. And while that may sound a little unsubtle, Imamura does not present a simplistic view about whether a traditional or commercial society is better; indeed, the primitive superstitions that cast a shadow over the lives of the islanders are presented as restrictive and destructive. As the battle between capitalism and traditional society strengthens and the love story between brother and sister deepens, the film begins to pick up pace, building to a tense climax: a welcome crescendo after several sprawling hours!

Profound Desires of the Gods is a complex film: sometimes infuriating in its mess but consistently magical in its strangeness. And, oddly, for a filmmaker so studiously disinterested in aesthetics, it is also very beautiful. Shot in an otherworldly palette of peaches, browns, turquoises, burnt oranges and tropical greens, the natural world of Japan provides a suitably extraordinary backdrop to this lavish, melodramatic epic.

Eleanor McKeown

Check it out, Home entertainment

The Party’s Over

The Party's Over

Format: Dual Format Edition: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 17 May 2010

Distributor: Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment

Director: Guy Hamilton

Writer: Marc Behm

Cast: Oliver Reed, Clifford David, Ann Lynn, Katherine Woodville, Louise Sorel

UK 1963-65

94 mins

Originally filmed in 1962, British melodrama The Party’s Over was shelved for three years after censors objected to some of its themes - most notably that of necrophilia. An edited version eventually received a limited release in 1965, by which time its director had gone on to huge success with Goldfinger. Perhaps nervous of jeopardising his burgeoning Hollywood career, Guy Hamilton had his name removed from the film, disowning it in interviews - and until recently it was thought to be totally lost.

Now restored to its full length by the BFI’s excellent Flipside strand, it’s most interesting for capturing a particular period in British cultural history, one normally overshadowed by the myth of the Technicolor Swinging Sixties. Yes, The Party’s Over takes place in the pre-pop world of the beatnik, where London (Chelsea, to be exact) is a reckless but somewhat dowdy place, where the wild antics of a group of nihilistic artists consist mostly of listening to jazz, drinking pints of mild and wearing baggy jumpers. When they’re not doing this, they’re painting people green, pulling on roll-ups or speaking in mannered hepcat slang (‘I’m just a dead fly in the soup at the tycoon banquet’).

Into this milieu arrives Carson, a clean-cut American businessman who has flown to England to look for his girlfriend, a spoiled rich girl who is being pursued by a wonderfully brooding Oliver Reed, himself the head of the beatnik gang. But what begins as a neat examination of cultural misunderstandings soon develops into something far more compelling, as Carson attempts to find out the truth behind his girlfriend’s disappearance and struggles to come to terms with the gruesome truth that it reveals.

Viewed today, the film is a potent mix of the kitsch and the genuinely unsettling. Written by Marc Behm (who later also co-authored one of the defining pop flicks, Help!) and featuring a zippy score by a young John Barry, it nevertheless occasionally descends into the kind of wearisome moralising and middle-aged prurience evident in other cautionary tales of the era. It’s hard not to attribute this to Hamilton, a man who spent most of the 1970s directing Roger Moore in various pastel-coloured safari suits in a series of increasingly hackneyed and conservative instalments of the Bond franchise. Produced by Jack Hawkins and, oddly, Peter O’Toole, The Party’s Over nevertheless deals with its themes in an intelligent and un-sensational way - even daring to ask us as an audience what exactly it is about degradation and death that we choose to be entertained by. For that reason alone, it’s a worthwhile watch.

Pat Long

Also available in the BFI’s Flipside strand: Gerry O’Hara’s The Pleasure Girls (1965).
Check it out, Home entertainment

Diamonds of the Night

Diamonds of the Night

Format: DVD

Release date: 10 May 2010

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Jan Němec

Writers: Jan Němec, Arnost Lustig

Original title: Démanty noci

Cast: Ladislav Jánsky, Antonín Kumbera, Irma Bischofova

Czechoslovakia, 1964

64 mins

Diamonds of the Night is a very closely focused film, and its focus is the moment-to-moment bodily experience of two young Czechs on the run from the Nazis. At the same time it is loose in structure. The protagonists’ occurrent experiences are intermingled with sights and sounds from their memories and imaginations. The material is selected and edited apparently more for expressive than for narrative purposes. Various distancing and disorientating techniques characteristic of the 1960s New Wave are deployed. Most prominent of these are temporal fragmentation and repetition: there is so much of the latter that a 64-minute film is compiled out of less than an hour’s worth of material. In addition, sound levels go up and down, light effects include overexposure and dazzle, at certain moments of tension the focus of the camera is too close for us to see what’s going on, and towards the climax of the story there are jarring switches of mood and emotional tone. The rough monochrome cinematography imparts a stark realist feel. The mundanity of much of what we see adds to the impression that this is not a story being enacted, but unplanned events being observed.

The film is driven nevertheless by a grim sense of purpose. It certainly makes you feel what is shown, which is something pretty harsh. The ordeal that bodily existence becomes for the fugitives is vividly conveyed in small details - the state of their feet, their pitiful brushwood shelter, the discovery that they can’t eat the longed-for bread because their mouths are too sore. This is a bleak, numb film, almost wordless, turned inward to lay bare the experience of humans in extremis. There is no refuge taken in detachment from the subject matter, such as often makes the New Wave seem cynical.

Peter Momtchiloff

Read a review of Jan Němec’s The Party and the Guests (1966).
Check it out, Home entertainment

Vengeance

Vengeance

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 28 June 2010

Distributor: Optimum

Director: Johnnie To

Writer: Ka-Fai Wai

Original title: Fuk sau

Cast: Johnny Hallyday, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Gordon Lam, Lam Suet, Simon Yam

Hong Kong/France 2009

108 mins

In his recent movies, Hong Kong director Johnnie To has been pushing the crime genre in strange new directions. Mad Detective blended a police procedural with barmy surrealism, while Sparrow was much more light-hearted, a hip caper with plenty of nods to 60s French cinema. But Vengeance marks a return to what To does best - stripped down gangster stories with a hard-boiled edge and slickly executed stand-offs. With this film, he has gone back to the action of Exiled and the detachment of his crime saga Election.

The plot is simple - a woman barely survives the assassination of her family and demands that her father Costello (Hallyday), a French chef, take revenge on those responsible. Costello employs a trio of hitmen (played by To favourites Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Gordon Lam and Lam Suet) to track them down, but there are a number of twists and turns as the group make their way to Simon Yam’s unrepentant crime lord.

The main stumbling block is Costello’s own memory, which is slowly failing him. He takes pictures of people to remember their names and faces and his condition worsens to the point where he can forget where he actually is. While this all sounds a bit Memento, To keeps this theme very much in the background, playing out the shoot-outs and double crosses as you’d expect but leaving Costello’s degrading motivation as a nagging question for the audience - can he take revenge if he cannot even remember why he’s doing it?

Revenge in cinema often falls into two camps; either it is a moment of glorious catharsis or it transforms the protagonist into the sort of person who wronged him in the first place. Vengeance is less clear-cut. Here, revenge becomes a commodity, bought and sold by the various parties involved in the criminal world, so much so that Costello is almost completely removed from proceedings and his original goal ceases to matter. But To isn’t one to hammer these points home, and Costello’s condition is played subtly at first while To wallows in the seedily lit Macau location, showing that he is still very much about style and visuals.

As usual, To provides some memorable set-pieces that are both playful and fraught with tension. One is the climactic shootout that sees Costello’s hired assassins surrounded by gangsters who roll out huge bales of paper ahead of them as protection. The other is the final face-off in which Costello’s enemy is plastered with stickers so that the Frenchman can remember who he’s hunting, and once his target works that out he starts sticking the flags on other people to confuse him. It’s this simple poetry that gives To’s films a distinctive mark, this touch of the bizarre and the humorous that sets his work out from the crowd.

Vengeance might be a little Westernised for some die-hard To fans. It goes at a slower pace and the inclusion of French singer/actor Hallyday might seem like To is pandering to European audiences, but the director proves himself once again to be a master of the crime film. With each new film he manages to approach the genre from a fresh, unexpected angle and Vengeance takes revenge into dark, compelling territory.

Richard Badley

Vengeance screened at the Terracotta Festival of Far East Film in May 2010.
Check it out, Online Movies

The Vice Guide to Film: Mexican Narco Cinema

The Vice Guide to Narco Cinema

Format: Internet streaming

Website: VBS TV

Episode:The Vice Guide to Film: Mexican Narco Cinema

Reading Vice magazine, you get the impression of intelligent writers having to use their skills for an audience to which they do not necessarily belong, sort of like a Daily Mail or Sun for pretentious hipsters (at least, this reviewer does). With shabby-but-articulate Vice co-founder Shane Smith’s casual profession of a love of drugs just a few seconds into The Vice Guide to Film: Mexican Narco Cinema, it seems like Vice‘s new web series is going to be more of the same, which is why it’s such a pleasant surprise when it quickly turns into a well-made, entertaining and easily consumed piece of film journalism.

Smith travels from Texas to Tijuana, on the way doing a great job of putting Mexico’s ultra-violent Narco Cinema of drug runners, fetishised cars and bad cops in context. He outlines the importance of Mexico’s drug industry to its economy and then interviews a film commissioner, who reveals that only 18% of the population can afford to go to the cinema. It’s no wonder then that these straight-to-DVD (the genre is also known as ‘Videohome’), low-budget action movies about poor Mexicans who use drug-running as a way to lift themselves out of poverty and give back to the community have become so popular, both in Mexico and with immigrants in the US. Think Scarface, but without the tragic fall. Or at least, if the characters do get shot at the end, there’s always a family member to take revenge in the sequel.

Each film is based on a ballad (corrido) about a famous criminal, which makes the whole genre reminiscent of the way the Robin Hood legend got started with the troubadours of Europe. However, in this instance both song and movie are almost always commissioned by the narco in question, with serious consequences for not sticking to the agreed script. So of course everyone Smith interviews speaks of the narcos in heroic terms and the genre singularly fails to hold a mirror up to Mexican society. To his credit, Smith has a go at highlighting this irony, interspersing clips of Narco Cinema with shots of real-world victims caught in the crossfire between the narcos and the government forces trying to crack down on them.

The overall message though is that these innovative, $40,000-50,000 films, which are shot on location, with the script written on the fly, where more often than not each character type is played by their real-world counterpart (the prostitute is a an actual prostitute, etc.), are a lot of fun and it doesn’t really matter which of them you watch, so long as there’s a car in the title. On this point The Vice Guide to Film: Mexican Narco Cinema is pretty convincing, although one criticism would be that as there are thousands of these films in existence surely there must be some canonical highlights for newcomers interested in exploring the genre?

Alexander Pashby

The lastest episode of the Vice Guide to Film is Inside Iranian Cinema. In this episode, Shane Smith travels to Iran for the 3rd Annual Urban Film Festival in Tehran where he meets Iran’s top directors, actors, and clerics.