KinoSis

“Condors Aren't Buried Every Day” - to which one can only say, how true that is. This Colombian obscurity (not obscure in Colombia, apparently) is an almost plotless, low-budget film that puts to shame many over-praised epics on the same theme – which is the nature of power and evil (yes, that's all). At first the film seems maybe amateurish in its refusal to develop its course with any plot-twists, but that absence is the clue to what the director Francisco Norden has done. Plot summary tends to be dead weight in a discussion about a film's virtues, but here there is so little of it that we’ll need to dig in to see the point.   It tells the story of “the Condor”, an asthmatic, middle-aged bookseller in a loveless marriage (he can’t stand to see his wife naked) who is mocked and dismissed for his political views by the liberals who at first have power in the small town where he lives. All the rich successful people in town are Liberals and treat him with contempt as a...

Unlike the constant anxiety faced by nervously sweating white directors as they await the imperious verdict of critics on their latest performance in the gladiatorial arena, a black film director enjoys the guarantee that he or she is pre-destined to get thumbs down either way. When McQueen made two films not about race, he was criticised for trying to assimilate into Hollywood by not upsetting American conservatives, whereas when he made a film directly about race, he was criticised, naturally, for trying to assimilate into Hollywood by playing to coastal liberals. What could be less controversial than a film condemning slavery? Of course it won the Oscar. Sheer commercialism. His first two films were much better. They were much more dangerous.  Basing Hunger and 12YAS on true events puts McQueen at a bit of a distance from high-modernist art films of the Holy & Divine Era, but the sheer seriousness and political obviousness of them made both films feel like proper films...

OK, so, yes, as a first impact, it’s a cinephile’s love-snuggle. The opening scenes to Otto Preminger’s classic Western are a glorious extravagance of background activity soaked up in magisterial camera sweeps. One far from soon forgets that first sequence with a cocky tracking shot through a vibrantly recreated tent town at night, ostentatiously packed with a parade of bustling events going on in the middle distance as Robert Mitchum strides through this world. I especially like the puckish insouciance of staging a whole minor drama with sumptuously gowned ladies being helped off a carriage stuck in the water, which goes unacknowledged by Mitchum and the other character he’s speaking to. There’s colour splashed all over Preminger’s compositions like an abstract expressionist, like when Marilyn Monroe talks backstage with her boyfriend and the screen becomes a casually glowing pattern of vivid dabs here and there.  A lot of this fades away when we leave town and head out to t...

David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary, doesn’t like Kim Basinger and asks “Is she even that good looking?” I thought this was slightly offensive and wildly unobservant. If her film Nadine has one basic problem, it’s that it doesn’t really play up her naturally wow glamour. Here they’re trying, in a vehicle made just for her, to make her a safe “relatable” mainstream actress, attractive but not too intimidatingly hot, more of a Southern comedienne. Jeff Bridges plays a roguish cad we’re supposed to like, but only do because it’s Jeff Bridges. Establishing him as a two-timer gives us the most inventive scene in the whole film, done almost in one take and seemingly designed to win a bet: proof that you can, albeit briefly, do a French farce in a mobile home. It’s the best bit of the film and the best bit of the scene is a split-second deadpan from Basinger. It’s all over too soon. There are a few other laughs and neat touches here and there, but considering she was the most eye-...

A film by Philip Haas of a John Hawkes novel I briefly considered for my “top 50 novels since ‘68” list but culled. I wish I could call it a draw – what the film loses from the novel’s intricate literary game-playing and layers upon layers, it gains in immediacy and concreteness. But I can’t – once again, the film of a novel is not as good as the novel, because There’s So Much More In The Novel. In fairness, there’s not vastly more in the novel, but I do miss what was left out. This far from trivialises the film, though. It’s still a fucked-up movie from a fucked-up book with all the same creepy unease, all the uncomfortably unsexy sexuality, all the atmosphere, so mysteriously indefinable, and those intimations of Gothic horror peeking from the edges, only just kept at bay by the sun.  The basic set-up is this: Cyril (beautifully played by Charles Dance) may or may not be a charming psychopath, or he may just be a very woke, hyper-mature, forward-thinking guy who has transce...

The Servant (1963): Yeah, the 60s! Now we're talking. So, is this Harold Pinter’s film or Joseph Losey’s? Going into it, you would guess Pinter will dominate, but Losey has such a good time with perfectly crafted shots and long takes that it ends up being a nice partnership (I am assuming the shots are not dictated in the screenplay). It plays out, on one level, like a film noir, a psychological thriller about con artists laying a trap for their victim, with beautiful double-layer dialogue where one character incorrectly interprets another character’s remark as innocent when we know it’s sinister, or where both know that the remark was vaguely seductive, a trick I don’t think I’ve seen anyone pull off in recent films. But the mood seeps obscurely from psychological thriller to psychological horror. Dirk Bogarde’s character Hugo Bennet is so nasty – in effect, the Devil - that you’d think this was a right-wing warning about the perils of the lower classes forgetting their place...

Lo! High in the mountains, snow and ice, a family settles into a hotel. Although it should be the time of their lives, a brooding unease gradually unravels the family until husband and wife are in a state of ruin. Name that film. It’s The Shining! Correct. It’s also Force Majeure and the long shots of the winding road up to the hotel suggest Ostlund noticed this. Also the pace, and the excellent, somewhat Kubrickian totalitarian cinematic control, privileging frosty perfection to give it a sense of being seen through God’s eye of judgement. Adjectives that occur to me are “stern” and “unwavering” because of that implacably damning steadiness of gaze.  For its central setpieces, the film downplays eye-candy visual moments in favour of long dialogue scenes that feel like the kind of play that makes you hold your breath a bit. Fairly quickly it becomes an excruciating film, like a scroogish embarrassment-comedy demanding a higher price for the laughs. It's sour but not squalid....

Hello and welcome to a new blog of film reviews - specifically, old films, with an emphasis on those in my possession. Previous blogs have never recovered from the ambivalent reception to their second posts, and so it is only to be hoped that this one endures a bit longer or, whisper who dares, prospers.  I now turn us over to the formal opening of this new endeavour by the Foundation for DVD Abundance. Thank you.  Foreword:   2019 bears witness to the embarkation of a major cataloguing project of signal importance and interest to the cinephile community. This long reputed and mooted project centres on the vast DVD collection amassed by Mr. R. Murphy Esq over a period of two decades, much coveted by some, speculated upon by innumerable fantasists, though by others dismissed as vitiated of value by the aleatory and self-indulgent lack of principle behind its composition. The following weblog utilises the most cutting-edge “inter-related network” computer tech...