KinoSis

Sometimes I write rather loosely, do I not, so on this occasion I am toying with a more essayistic approach which I suspect will be a passing fad to the mutual relief (or common relief, as Fowler would say) of the author and his readers. The object of this fine writing will be Valmont , an adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons from an interesting and - to begin the flourishes - heady collaboration between the director of One Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest and the screenwriter for Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,  subversively doing Dangerous Liaisons against itself.   They clearly don’t like the book and redo the whole thing in the polar opposite genre – get ready for Dangerous Liaisons as a dry comedy with some occasional slapstick. You may wonder what that’s like. Well, here’s how I’d put it: Milos Forman’s film of Dangerous Liaisons can be slightly jolting if you know any other version of the story – it’s quite an imperious display of the auteur’s prerogative to tu

In light of my recent revisitation of The Mother & The Whore, here's something I wrote in 2020 (hence the WAP reference) and never got round to posting on another film which expresses scepticism about the Sixies and similarly concludes in favour of traditional marriage. But it is not a similar film.  Elegaic, quiet, gentle, Acts Of Love is a film about life’s disappointments which, it might be said, embodies its theme too well. It’s beautifully written, constructed and acted and I’ve seen it many times but every time I do, even if it’s convincing in its parts, I’m yet to be convinced either by its anti-60s bias or its reliance on that bias to tell us how true love works. This flaw doesn’t lie in the initial premise. We lay our scene, by implication, in the late 60s or early 70s in what looks like Minnesota, specifically a farming town, where Joseph, a school teacher with emotional baggage and a bad leg (played by Dennis Hopper), has a hot fling with Catherine, a 17-year old blo

The above title is a little reference. Long ago, there was a parody of F R Leavis titled “A Few More Books To Cross Off Your List”. This post possibly inaugurates a series in which I devote some short(er) reviews to films which may be passed over without dishonour to the cinephile. One has to doubt that there is no lesson to be drawn from the fact that every film in the following selection is English. A Good Year (2006) : ah, bless Ridley Scott – he really flunks the Turing test with this one. I don’t know who told him he should go anywhere near comedy, never mind rom-com. This is an excruciatingly, violently schmaltzy, Richard Curtis-y exercise in perky winsome performances and painfully naff humour (sped-up footage of a car going round a roundabout??), a kind of contrived plastic forgery of a rom-com where a super-rich Square Mile prick (Russell Crowe doing an English accent) happily finds the best in life on a French vineyard by learning a little lesson about his feelings, with a

You may have often wanted to see Sylvester Stallone as a heroic terrorist bomber and Sharon Stone, aged 36, as Hot Blonde In Her Early 20s With An Air Of Mystery And Trouble. In the same film. Well, Warner Bros agreed wholeheartedly and that's what 1994 was like. This very mid-90s thriller makes the very mid-90s decision to be a hybrid of action movie and neo-noir, both of which were still runaway popular then (and, looking back, they saved the whole decade). The Getaway did the same thing, same year. Guns were briefly out of fashion in Hollywood so Stallone’s character just blows people up with explosives instead of mowing them down, a really unimprovable example of Hollywood being socially responsible. It was based on a series of 80s pulp novels I used to read and has nothing much in common with them except that he’s an ex-military guy for hire who, in every book, gets hired by a sultry babe to do a revenge hit on a Mafia boss (usually in New York, but the film goes for Miami), a

I really like films about artists – I don’t know what it is, but they’re consistently quality. Usually, you have to wait a decent number of decades before you can make a film about a real one, you can’t just rush in like a sheepdog, you have to be a bit patient and let the test of time tell you who’s worth the celluloid. When films do get around to doing famous painters, or the odd sculptor for some reason, the sensible interval means we get cute little period pieces, sometimes costume dramas if it’s one of the proper good artists and not a modern one. But it’s different with JMB because it felt like more of a now or never situation. The chances were pretty slim that anyone was going to know who Basquiat was in another fifty years, let alone act like he was up there with Van Gogh or Picasso, so they couldn’t hang about. Less than ten years after he overdosed, along came his biopic (before there was even a biography) and that almost-decade wasn’t enough to stop it feeling like a rush-jo

Hello, strangers of the world, thank you for stopping by again. Today I thought we would reflect on the mighty river of a film that is Mummy & The Ho, an interesting work by short-lived genius Jean Eustache, who cast his eye over the great generation of the 1960s and realised that, in Twitter parlance, “it’s so over.” Reaction at the time was generally scandalised, though it won Special Jury prize at Cannes, Cahiers said it was the greatest film of the decade and, in this century, it got picked as the second-greatest French film of all time in a survey of French film-makers and critics, only missing the top spot to you-can-guess-what. It was elegantly characterised as “New Wave twilight” but that seems a bit gentle to me. It sounds romantic and wistful, and that’s not how this one rolls. At all. As I watched this weird mix of docu-neutrality and torrential stagey speechifying, it took a while for me to grasp what I was seeing. But eventually it occurred to me that this is the anti

Military coups aren’t nearly as in demand as they once were, why is that? The heyday was the 1960s, they really got into couping back then, and it remained hugely popular throughout the 70s. Like much else from those decades, there’s a retro trend that carries on the once-beloved genre to this day, but they feel a bit played out now, I think there’s only been about fifty coups in the last decade (shout out to Myanmar). Still, don’t be disheartened - fifty or so is enough to give a perennial quality to this serviceable, if sometimes draggingly slow, and notably low-budget conspiracy thriller. It’s a Canadian film, nobody has ever heard of it, and those two things are related, but had it been American, who knows if notoriety or obscurity would have followed? Any film that takes a pro-military-coup stance at least has political novelty, but perhaps the kind of novelty that compounds its not wholly unfair oblivion. So there’s this country, no name, sort of implied to be Latin America but