Electric Sheep Film Club

Venue: Prince Charles Cinema, London

Every first Wednesday of the month

In connection with the Electric Sheep Film Club at the Prince Charles Cinema every first Wednesday of the month, we run a film writing competition: film students and aspiring film writers are invited to write a 200-word review of the film on show that month. The best review is picked by a film professional, and renowned Polish poster designer Andrzej Klimowski was the judge of our November competition for Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). The prize for the best review is publication on the Electric Sheep website. We are pleased to announce that the winner is Matthew Pink. Andrzej Klimowski said: ‘All three of the short-listed reviews [the other two were AG Robson and Richard Walsh] of Polanski’s Repulsion were very effective evocations of the film’s powerful emotive force. The film, which I haven’t seen in over 30 years, rushed back to my mind in its entirety after reading these concise but vivid accounts. Matthew Pink’s writing had a quality that resembled a miniature scenario. When reading his piece I felt that I was in the dark apartment with Catherine Deneuve enduring the heightened claustrophobia.’ Here is Matthew’s review:

The first crack creeps along the thick masque of face cream in a beauty parlour. But the cracks run deeper than the surface of the skin.

Polanski’s film plunges into this crack, the line dividing sexual fascination and repulsion, the male and the female, the society and the individual. The face, the eye, the four walls around Catherine Deneuve’s Carol all rupture and fracture. Her mind’s grasp on reality splinters, she withdraws and psychosis sets in; murder the result.

Polanski’s camera, always on Carol’s shoulder, follows her, playing with the dimensions of the flat, condensing, flattening, blocking space and view, disallowing normal perception. The sound too creeps up on us, interspersing gulfs of emptiness on the track with bursts of rush staccato drumming, announcing broken chapters.

Those sounds, which are always present and yet go unheard in daily life, the ticking clock, the dripping tap, are heightened, made alienating and brought to the fore. The additional jazz score starts at regular rhythm only to hit entropy and break down. Image and sound suffer fissures too, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.

An uncooked rabbit carcass festers throughout but the abiding image is the human hand, discarnate, reaching, groping.

Matthew Pink

Next screening: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger with live rescore by Minima, Wednesday 2 December. For details on how to enter the competition, visit our Film Club page.

Format: Cinema

Date: 13 November 2009

Venues: BFI Southbank, Curzons Mayfair/Richmond (London) and nationwide

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Michael Haneke

Writer: Michael Haneke

Original title: Das weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte

Cast: Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Tukur, Burghart KlauíŸner, Christian Friedel, Rainer Bock

Austria/Germany/France/Italy 2009

144 mins

Cruel games, sadistic impulses, repressed violence and arbitrary acts of torture - Michael Haneke is best known for films that fiercely play on the public’s guilt and unease about an unequal world, often challenging his audience to avert their gaze from the screen while relentlessly stimulating both their fears and voyeuristic pleasures. The effect is profoundly disturbing, despite the fact that Haneke avoids conventional displays of violence, preferring instead to convey brutality through the soundtrack or a look at the victim - the omissions themselves contributing to build an unsettling feeling that is eventually overwhelming.

Violence is yet again the main subject of Haneke’s excellent The White Ribbon, which deservedly won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. Masterfully shot in stark black and white, it is the director’s first German-language film since the original Funny Games (1997), and it focuses on the inhabitants of a small rural village in Germany where some inexplicable events and brutal crimes start to occur in the months leading up to the First World War. The story is told by an unreliable narrator, the local school teacher, who is avowedly unsure of the accuracy of his memories. The opening scene sets the tone: the local doctor is severely wounded after his horse trips over a cable deliberately placed on his path. The entire village is baffled and speechless with incomprehension, only the children react in a strangely unemotional manner to the incident. They seem weirdly alert and mature throughout the film, and the only time we hear the sound of a child laughing is at the precise moment we are told that a farmer has hanged himself in the barn. The effect of the chasm between image and sound is unsettling, and it is used by Haneke to illuminate the foreboding of evil. With their lucid, yet eerily secretive faces, the children appear to be more involved in the violent acts than is explicitly revealed.

The White Ribbon is very much a German film, and it is impossible to ignore that the overly quiet and polite children depicted here are the ‘Nazi generation’. But, as Haneke himself insists whenever the question arises in an interview, ‘it is not just a film about a German problem. This is a film about the roots of evil, whether it’s religious or political terrorism’. The film is a didactic play of sorts, but one in which the names of the culprits are as irrelevant as any direct answers or lessons. More important than identifying the criminals is the focus on the characters’ professions and hence their status in the community, with the authority figures revealed to be deluded, repressive or morally corrupt. Outstanding in a cast of mainly German stage actors is Burghart KlauíŸner in the role of the pastor, who forces his two children to wear white ribbons to remind them to stay pure.

It’s the aural landscape that reveals the spirit of the village more than anything else: the silence about the sinister and gruesome events that are taking place is haunting. But along with a finely crafted screenplay, the film’s truly brilliant touch, and what makes this nightmarish fable all the more effective and original, is its stunning black and white photography. It is almost as if Haneke was revisiting old photographs that are slowly unravelling the hidden layers of truths about a generation that would go on to embrace the creed of national socialism.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Date: 13 November 2009

Venues: ICA (London)

Distributor: Third Window Films

Director: Masayuki Miyano

Writer: Tetsuya Nakashima

Based on the novel by: Hideo Okuda

Cast: Tomoko Murakami, Hiroki Narimiya, Saori Hara

Japan 2008

93 mins

Sex comedies: usually neither, right? In theory. Masayuki Miyano’s Lalapipo, a series of interconnected stories following the sex lives of ‘a lot of people’ in Tokyo, adapted from a novel known for its sleazy grittiness, could be grim viewing. It could be too graphic, or disappear up its own over-earnest well-lubed backside (see Shortbus), but the script by Tetsuya Nakashima, the director of Kamikaze Girls (2004) and Memories of Matsuko (2006) saves it with a sheen of knowing, farcical silliness.

It takes a while to build. The film’s first story, centring on freelance writer Hiroshi Sugiyama, makes for uncomfortable viewing. He’s a podgy, sad-sack chronic masturbator in his early 30s, with a talking puppet for a penis. The puppet looks like it’s made of a mildewed towel. It’s mushroom green, looks like a cactus with mange. Besides the puppet, there’s a soundtrack of the kind of smooth disco/treacly r’n’b that’s been filtered through a few muzak factories and third-tier pop producers. They both appear when something horrible is about to happen: rape, manipulation, someone getting beaten up. It’s like a big sign: Hey, this is funny! No, really!

All of the stories are pretty sordid otherwise, so the silliness is necessary. Most of the sex is implied in cutaway shots, like punch lines to jokes, or in OTT fantasy sequences — one guy imagines himself as a robot superhero in a dream sequence drenched in a bright, sparkly, candy-coloured lip gloss overload of neon, daylight, showroom furniture and cute clothes. Even the most squalid porn-filled bedrooms of the film’s loneliest men are kind of cosy. Everyone has shiny hair except for an ageing female porn star, and when she is cast in a mother-daughter-themed lesbian film (with her own actual daughter as co-star — Lalapipo is full of such not-so-surprising surprises) her hair bounces away and she looks a decade younger — and she also gains the confidence to torch her rubbish-filled house. When her daughter is recruited into porn, she wears a sad little pair of scuffed shoes — later, she looks like a pop video babe. Porn saves!

Lalapipo‘s treatment of porn, not just as wacky fun, but as some kind of transformative thing to celebrate, even tongue in cheek, feels like some throwback to a decade ago — actually you could probably take a screengrab from each of the vignettes in this film, make up some internet quiz called ‘film still or late 90s editorial from The Face‘ and confuse just about everybody.

But beneath all this porny, garish in-your-faceness is something a bit more subtle - weird character cards that crop up at the beginning of each vignette subtly undercut whatever macho assumptions the first half of the film brings. All of the women, however mocked or degraded they may be, are making more money than the men who pimp them out or wank to their films. Everyone, male and female, comes off as a little sad, a little vulnerable, and ultimately a bit more humanised — except for the poor karaoke bar manager who sees gangs turn his bar into a brothel, where he ends up anally raped by an errant john. (It’s another 90s twist to see this as humour, recalling the ‘bring out the gimp’ scene in Pulp Fiction.)

There’s no need. And there’s no need for the scene where our freelance writer masturbator friend, early on, is trying to wank while listening through the wall to a neighbour who is about to be raped, or for the scene later on when, after he finally gets some action with Sayuri, a lovely fat girl in Lolita-dolly-style dress, he beats her up and almost leaves her for dead. Why? Because she’s unattractive and thinks she’s worthy of him? It’s pretty gross, and you don’t blame the penis puppet from wanting to escape this charmer. Sayuri’s story, later in the film, makes the first segment less shocking — turns out she’s making specialist porn herself and has seen it all before, and she comes off as wise and compassionate. Most of the time, the humour works, and Lalapipo is ridiculous, offensive, and compelling.

Emily Bick

Format: Cinema

Date: 27 November 2009

Venues: Chelsea Cinema, Curzon Soho (London) and nationwide

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Paul King

Writer: Paul King

Cast: Edward Hogg, Simon Farnaby, Verí³nica Echegui, Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt

UK 2008

101 mins

The Mighty Boosh has been perhaps the most innovative television show in recent years, and although much of the credit has rightly gone to its writers and stars Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, director Paul King deserves much praise for the show’s unique look. After all, this is the man who helped make ‘stationary village’ and ‘the crack fox’ a reality. Bunny and the Bull is King’s debut feature and he certainly keeps up the visually inventive surreal stylings of his television work - in fact more time and a cinema budget seem to have allowed him to take this even further.

Bunny and the Bull stars Edward Hogg (White Lightnin’, 2009) as obsessive compulsive recluse Stephen Turnbull whose super-organised world includes a daily routine timed to the second and an all-inclusive filing system for ‘random old shit’ that is taking over his flat (one box is labelled ‘drinking straws 94-96’). However, one mouse-sized glitch sends his world falling apart and sets in motion the long flashback that tells us how he got himself into this state: the cause being a road trip with his gregarious friend Bunny (Simon Farnaby, Harold Boon from the Boosh‘s ‘The Power of the Crimp’ episode) that takes in Europe’s strangest and most idiosyncratic museums (all real-life institutions) and other even stranger adventures until they eventually end up in Spain where Bunny intends to fight a bull and learn the secrets of the matador.

The film centres on an ‘odd couple’ premise, with Stephen and Bunny as Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison taken to the extreme. This contrast is exemplified by their luggage - Stephen’s meticulous preparation for every imagined eventuality against Bunny’s carrier bag full of lager. Along the way they pick up foul-mouthed love interest Eloisa (Verí³nica Echegui). The plot is slight but it is played with a Bedknobs and Broomsticks mixture of live action and animation and with lively cameos from the Boosh‘s Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding and a great one from The IT Crowd‘s Richard Ayoade as tour guide at a German shoe museum - it is a film where the details overwhelm the main story.

Hogg and Farnaby’s deadpan underplaying stands in stark contrast to what amounts to a creative diarrhoea around them. The film is described as ‘a road movie set entirely in a flat’ as the European tour is recreated from Stephen’s various hoardings. We are treated to a variety of animation styles from claymation to Paddington Bear-type black and white paper cut-outs and a clockwork fairground in the style of Michel Gondry or Alexander Calder’s zoo. The surreal clash of the fantastic and the mundane is reminiscent of the great Czech animator Jan Å vankmajer without ever quite approaching his dark sense of humour. Instead, the whole film is coated with heavy doses of Amelie-style whimsy (which some stomachs might find a bit cloying), but the sheer inventiveness just about pulls it through. Best of all is the bull - when he finally makes his appearance he is a marvel of stop-motion animation and well worthy of his place in the title.

However, the film’s major flaw is perhaps King’s script, which is not up to the standard of the writing in The Mighty Boosh and certainly not as consistently funny. Many jokes seem too obvious while others just fall flat and the film is far more successful at being funny-peculiar than funny-ha-ha. But it is a visual delight and fascinating to watch, and is a strong debut for King, which augurs well for the Mighty Boosh movie that is rumoured to be in development.

Paul Huckerby

Electric Sheep Film Club

Venue: Prince Charles Cinema, London

Every first Wednesday of the month

In connection with the Electric Sheep Film Club at the Prince Charles Cinema every first Wednesday of the month, we run a film writing competition: film students and aspiring film writers are invited to write a 200-word review of the film on show that month. The best review is picked by a film professional, and Louis Savy of Sci-Fi London was the judge of our October competition for Norman Jewison’s Rollerball (1975). The prize for the best review is publication on the Electric Sheep website. We are pleased to announce that the winner of the October competition is Sophie Brown. Louis Savy said: ‘It was a tough decision with so many varying approaches to the
review – but Sophie’s stood out. Well done.’ Here is her review:

‘Does he dream?’ enquires celebrated player of the Houston Rollerball team Jonathan E of his unconscious teammate, left brain-damaged from a game. Norman Jewison’s Rollerball imagines a numbed dystopia, where all decisions are made by higher authorities. The ferocity of Rollerball is cocooned in hypnotic reverie, in a future where this game has replaced wars and corporate aggression. The camera floats, a disembodied consciousness that at times anchors itself to Jonathan’s perception, cynically and resiliently played by James Caan. He faces The Corporation’s menacing scrutiny for undermining the message of rollerball – the futility of individual effort – but stoically refuses to surrender his identity to their faceless destructiveness. Obscure forces of control lurk behind the cool darkness of the corporate spectators. Purring with smooth reassurance and assertive calm is corporate head Mr Bartholomew, evoking the dubious forces of power in early 1970s America. The steel ball thunders around the edge of the arena like a game of roulette in Jewison’s powerful vision of expedient brutality; teams engage in cyclical combat, bloodied men drop, registered by a flickering red light on the scoreboard, while the foreboding imagery of skeletally looming, senselessly scorched trees echoes the bleak dangers of a passive existence.

Sophie Brown

Next screening: Repulsion, Wednesday 4 November. For details on how to enter the competition, visit our Film Club page.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 16 October 2009

Venues:Curzon Soho, Gate, Ritzy, Screen on the Green (London) and selected key cities

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Park Chan-wook

Writers: Chung Seo-kyung, Park Chan-wook

Original title: Bakjwi

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Kim Ok-vin, Shin Ha-kyun

South Korea 2009

133 mins

It may be unfair to continually expect Park Chan-wook to deliver a new movie as thrilling as his critically acclaimed 2004 film Oldboy. But although Thirst, joint winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, lacks its predecessor’s shocking originality, Park’s formidable talents still result in a flawed but entertainingly perverse love story, one that’s also a thriller, a horror film and a black comedy.

Song Kang-ho, star of the hugely successful film The Host, plays Sang-hyun, a priest who is utterly devoted to his flock, so much so that he volunteers for a medical experiment to find a cure for a mysterious but lethal virus. When the trial fails, his life is saved by a blood transfusion that not only miraculously brings him back to life, but also turns him into a vampire - a discovery he makes only gradually, when his skin starts to sizzle in direct sunlight, and ugly, seething boils appear all over his body unless he slakes his thirst for blood. But still the compassionate priest, he is unwilling to let himself be consumed by this new bloodlust and has to find ways of satisfying his needs without harming people.

Things change when, in a plot twist inspired by Emile Zola’s Thérí¨se Raquin, he meets an old friend in hospital, who is now a pathetic, sniffling hypochondriac married to Tae-ju (played by the model-turned-actress Kim Ok-vin). She’s a young, beautiful woman who was taken in by his mother (an imposing, mah jong-playing matriarch) after the death of her parents, and later forced into the unhappy marriage. But Tae-ju’s air of vulnerability - she begs the priest for help in escaping her miserable life - masks a manipulative and strong-minded streak that’s only exposed after she and Sang-hyun become lovers.

The moral dilemmas involving carnal lust and chastity, religious guilt and Sang-hyun’s need for survival are undoubtedly intriguing (and are similar to the themes that course through much of Park’s work), and yet, the heady mix of blood and guts, sex, murder, the supernatural and the Catholic church never quite works as a coherent whole. The film undeniably has some brilliant, darkly comic moments, but it often feels like Park has tried to cram too much into Thirst, without ever really adding anything new to the vampire genre. His continuing collaboration with the cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon means that the film looks terrific, but elements of the plot are clumsily handled while the pacing is often erratic over the 133-minute running time (several scenes, including much of the opening, could have been left on the cutting room floor). In some ways, Park Chan-wook seems to have overindulged his fantastic imagination and creative ambition at the expense of tightness and cohesion. But if the result is slightly disappointing, it’s only because Park has already set the bar extraordinarily high.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 9 October 2009

Venues: Curzon Soho, Gate, Ritzy, Screen Islington (London) and key cities

Distributor: Warp/Verve Pictures

Director: Shane Meadows

Cast: Paddy Considine, Dean Palinczuk, Shane Meadows, Olivia Colman

UK 2009

71 mins

As has been much publicised, Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee - the eighth film by Shane Meadows in 13 years - was made over five days (four consecutive days and one a few months later) and on a budget that seems preposterously low, even for a Meadows film. Shot on two DV cameras, behind one of which we frequently find Shane Meadows (playing himself), on real sets including a Travelodge hotel, backstage at an Arctic Monkeys show and what looks like the same row of Victorian terraced houses used in Meadows’s debut Smalltime (1996), the film makes no attempt to disguise its quickie-cheapness - in fact, it is almost worn as a badge of honour. The cast even wear the same clothes for the first three days - although this is perhaps to make continuity easier, or just to illustrate the poor personal hygiene of roadies.

The film has a simple premise: a Spinal Tap-like pseudo-documentary, it follows Le Donk, roadie to the stars (Paddy Considine), and his lodger-cum-protégé, rotund white Nottingham rapper Scor-Zay-Zee (Dean Palinczuk), as they blag their way onto an Arctic Monkeys bill at Manchester’s Old Trafford cricket ground. The dialogue is improvised around semi-scripted ideas as in HBO’s Curb your Enthusiasm and at times it’s almost as funny in that same cringing way.

Paddy Considine creates in Le Donk a character that is at times charming, cocky, confident and fun-loving, but often boorish, selfish or just plain ‘mardy’ - that particularly childish kind of sulkiness made famous (to certain parts of the country at least) by an Arctic Monkeys song. He moans, fumes and grumbles during an awkward drive from Nottingham to Manchester after being told the budget won’t cover three nights in the hotel. He is a Saxondale for the next generation (roadying for 90s indie-rockers Guided by Voices rather than Deep Purple) but equally out of time in 2009 (and out of place when not on the road). His old-fashioned idea of cool (fake American accent) seems at odds with Arctic Monkeys’ strong provincial identity (although they are starting to look and sound more like Led Zep as I write). But Considine somehow makes him a sympathetic character. Shane Meadows, as one of the two cameramen, can be seen and heard from behind the camera (failing to be a fly on the wall), offering much appreciated relationship advice when he isn’t laughing at or arguing with him.

Considine is of course a brilliant actor (he was easily the best thing about this year’s otherwise rather disappointing Red Riding Trilogy) and the film rises above the slightness of the plot thanks to the depth of his performance alone. But real-life rapper Scor-Zay-Zee proves himself worthy of his equal billing. Gormlessly wandering around, looking for somewhere to plug in his keyboard, or pulling ridiculous rapper poses for a photographer, he somehow pulls it off at the performance in front of the real (unknowing) Arctic Monkeys audience and shows himself to be a genuinely original and talented artist.

Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee was made as the first of a series of five-day features to be financed by Warp Films. Whatever the result of this initiative, Meadows’s film shows what is possible. Its simplicity, cheapness and speed of execution are its virtues, but it also succeeds as a touching portrait of ambitions and dreams and their relationship to reality.

Paul Huckerby

Format: Cinema

Release date: 9 October 2009

Venues: Barbican, Chelsea Cinema, Curzons Richmond and Soho (London) and key cities

Distributor: Artifical Eye

Director: Peter Strickland

Writer: Peter Strickland

Cast: Hilda Péter, Tibor Pí¡lffy, Norbert Tankí³, Fatma Mohamed

Romania/UK/Hungary 2009

82 mins

Just as the hype about the ‘New Wave’ in post-communist Romanian cinema seems to have settled down, October sees the theatrical release of two new films set in that country, although they have nothing else in common. Directed by a group of young Romanian directors and devised by Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), Tales from the Golden Age explores five urban legends from the nation’s troubled past. In contrast, Katalin Varga, directed by British writer-director Peter Strickland, offers a dark fable unfolding in the rural wilds of the Romanian hinterland with an unexcited, outdated look, and little interest in the cutting social criticism that has become the trademark of Eastern European filmmaking in the last few years. The film chronicles the journey of a young peasant’s wife who has to face her demons in the Transylvanian forest and is led to seek vengeance on the two men who violated her a decade earlier. Although the rape-revenge story may not sound original on paper, Katalin Varga is a daring, stylistically confident British feature debut that in its thirst for cinematic exploration and adventure recalls Asif Kapadia’s stunning The Warrior (2001), with which it also shares a spellbinding location and a bold belief in the compelling power of visual storytelling.

But why would a young filmmaker with no money and no knowledge of the foreign language want to make a film in Transylvania? ‘This was simply the place I chose to shoot in because it seemed to offer the right atmosphere for my story,’ says Strickland. ‘In a way, I thought I could be truer to myself with a film that is set in the mountains rather than in Reading, where I come from’. Yet, slim and elliptical as the narrative is, it feels at times as if the story is there to help explore the setting, rather than the other way round. This is especially true in the first part, when Katalin (impressively played by Hilda Péter), banished by her husband (and the entire village) after the discovery that he is not actually the father of their 11-year-old son Orbí¡n, sets out on a mission to hunt down her tormentors. Mother and son ride a horse-cart up into the Carpathians, sleeping in people’s barns, until they reach their destination. As Katalin finds and confronts Antal, the man who assaulted her, Strickland offers no simple tale of retribution, but explores a painfully complex emotional situation in a riveting manner.

Given the film’s precise aesthetic and increasingly chilling, expressionistic feel, it comes as little surprise to learn that Peter Strickland’s key points of reference for Katalin Varga were Werner Herzog and the great Russian film poets Tarkovsky and Paradjanov. A good part of the film alternates between sun-drenched expanses of the Carpathian fields and mountains, looming forests and murky nocturnal rural interiors. All are equally unsettling once Strickland abandons conventional art-house meandering camera pans and cryptic myth-making to opt instead for an increasingly rough photography with abrupt scene changes and searching close-ups. Infusing his elegantly wrought images with a throbbing, electronic-choral score that is very much at odds with the naturalistic setting, Strickland is clearly more concerned with the human dimension of the morally intricate scenario, revealing the astonishingly beautiful landscape as a place where a brutal sort of justice will eventually prevail.

Showing an obvious talent for creating a misty atmosphere of dread, Strickland keeps the time setting eerily vague. The horse-cart suggests a bygone era until Katalin picks up her mobile phone for the first time to talk to her husband, and it is to Strickland’s credit that he makes use of a number of different tactics to subvert our expectations. ‘It makes people angry when they see Antal,’ he says, ‘because they expect him to be this evil monster. And Katalin does too. But evil people are not evil every single working hour, and by not showing the crime he committed against her I’m furthering our confusion, so the audience is almost like a jury in this sense’.

Some may feel that Strickland veers a little too much into metaphysical territory at the expense of keeping the tension up. Others may dislike his partiality to painterly compositions and Tarkovskian cinematic poetry. Despite such arguable flaws, Katalin Varga often hits a note of genuine otherworldliness, and the power of this slow-burning, nightmarish tale is utterly compelling, contrasting with Strickland’s modest expectations when he was making the film: ‘I really thought we would fail,’ he admits. ‘But I also thought, if I screw up I might as well fail in style. On a very personal level, this film was an adventure, and we reconciled ourselves to the fact that we had the memories of making it - because filmmaking is so difficult when you are outside the system that you have to at least try to have a good time with it.’

Pamela Jahn