Everything Has A Limit

Birdbox (Susanne Bier, Netflix, 2018)
Overlord (Julius Avery, 2018)

I very much enjoyed Birdbox, which is elevated above the standard disaster plot of mysterious contagion / followed by road trip i.e. quest, simply by quality direction and quality acting.
There are two main narratives. The first is the present day, with Malorie (Sandra Bullock) taking two four/five year olds on a river trip to a mysterious destination which she hopes wil offer sanctuary. The catch? They have to wear blindfolds all the time. To remove them means death.
The second (and main narrative) starts five years earlier, with a pregnant Malorie. Suddenly people the world over begin committing suicide. A mysterious (possibly alien) presence causes most people to immediately decide to die within seconds of them "seeing" it.
Malorie manages to find refuge in a house full of various eccentrics, including John Malkovich as a marvellous curmudgeon. The main aim is survival. For example, getting to the supermarket a half-mile away and back is not too easy when you have to do it without opening your eyes.
An additional spanner in the works is the discovery that some insane people do not kill themselves when they see whatever it is, but they do feel the urge to force other people to see "the wonder".
Gradually these two factors reduce the numbers. Malorie and one of the other members of the group both give birth at the same time.
The film is good because nearly all of the characters have depth, even those who get killed off early, and even the "baddies". Sandra Bullock in particular is brilliant as Malorie, a far-from-perfect mother with more than her fair share of personal problems, and yet one who wants to "do the right thing".
A strong performance too from Trevante Rhodes as Tom, o ne of the other survivors. Malkovich looks to be having a great time as a miserable old bastard, and Tom Hollander provides a neat mid-film cameo. Of course, we as viewers know that it will be a cameo, because his fee and schedule would have been swuch that he probably couldn't manage to be on set for more than a few days' shooting time.
And the kids are, of course, guaranteed heartstring-pullers.

Overlord, by contrast, was fairly terrible. Perhaps it was a success according to its own parameters (lots of rather unpleasant gore as people die in variously unpleasant ways), but in terms of characters, plot development, acting, whatever, it doesn't hack it.
Let's assume that you come to this film knowing *nothing* about it (this is basically impossible as the film's publicity tells you the "reveal" about a third of the way through).
It opens with a group of American paratroopers preparing to drop into France just ahead of D-Day, with a mission to take out a communications tower. The plane comes under fire from the ground, the parachute drop is rushed, the group get separated.
Eventually a few of them come together and manage to make oit to the town, where a young lady (Chloe, played by Mathilde Olivier) hides them in the attic.
Mysterious things are going on in the town. We catch our first glimpse of the results of this -- Chloe's aunt, who looks to have become some kind of monster, is hidden away in another room.
Enter Pilou Asbaek as stereotypical German baddie (the German troops are never any more than carboard cut-outs).
Gradually the truth emerges (you know, that truth we were already told about in the publicity) that the location of the communications tower is also a place where a scientific programme is underway. Cue the excuse for shots of lots of people who have been subject to those experiments.
The film heads towards a thoroughly ungripping conflagrational climax.
I mean, it's terrible. I fast-forwarded through a fair bit of it because it seemed obvious what was going to happen. The film is termed an "alternate history" World War II film. Well, my idea of "alternate history" is "what if Churchill had been killed in a bomb during the blitz?" Not "what if the Nazis developed a serum that turned people into monsters? Asbaek spends quite a bit of the film doing a Dr Phibes impersonation. Wyatt Russell as Corporal Ford also takes the serum so that we can have some kind of Captain America vs a Nazi super-hero baddie fight at the end. Jovan Adepo does his best as the lead role, but surely he could see that he was trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. Mathilde Olivier (who also had a main role in 1899) does't seem stretched at all. Asbaek gives his all, but it's a bit of a comedown from the days of Borgen.
I mean, the film *must* have something, as its target demographic seemed to like it. But, as one critic observed, it's just a collage of standard plot devices, stitched together, which don't really make any sense as a coherent whole. Therefore all that you get are what (to me, at leas), seemed a sequence of disconnected set pieces constructed as either a visual gore-fest, a super-hero vs super-hero battle, or a World War II drama battle scene. We've seen all of these before, done better, in other films that made some dramatic sense.

Birdbox: 8/10
Overlord: 2/10

Giuseppe Tornatore's Baaria was not treated particularly kindly by the UK critics -- The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw was particularly harsh, seeing it as something like a two-and-a-half-hour Stella Artois ad – and perhaps for this reason it has not entered the public consciousness here in the way achieved by Tornatore's most famous film, Cinema Paradiso.

But I'm not quite sure what the critics want. Sure, Baaria is sentimental. And it's beautifully shot, and it has a Morricone score. The same kind of accusations could be levelled against Once Upon A Time In America, with which it shares some structure.

Baaria is the local name for Bagheria, where Tornatore was born, and this is an adult's sentimental memory of his childhood, heading through the more cynical period of adulthood. I suspect that critics would still prefer all Italian films to be in the mould of Bicycle Thieves – gritty and in black and white – or Gomorrah a far more modernistic take on the Italian south. Tornatore is, in other words, too much of a sentimentalist for them.

The narrative covers the entire life of one man – Peppino, who as a child in the early 1920s was sent away to work for his shepherd uncle because the family simply did not have enough to eat. He becomes a Communist, and much of the film covers his adult life working through the Italian political system.

There are scores of minor characters (most of them related either to Peppino or his wife), and back stories cover both Peppino and his wife's parents, and their five children. Other characters reappear throughout the story as kind of extensions of Bagheria. I particularly like the man who stands in the same spot, throughout the film, shouting (for the first half) "I buy dollars" and for the second half "three pens for 60 lira". He never ages. Why not? Because he is not a human being. He is as much a part of Baaria as the pavement. He is part of the lead character's memory. And we all remember people like that -- who seemed old when we were young and who seem exactly the same age now.

I think the UK critics got it wrong on this one and that Baaria will, in time, be seen as one of Tornatore's best – his Once Upon A Time In The America compared with The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.


Carl Dreyer's Mikael (Michael) is a great discovery. Long thought lost, it was recompiled in the 1990s and a DVD released in Germany 2004. There are still a couple of continuity errors and three or four points where I think they have got the order wrong.

However, as Brownlow has observed with Napoleon what happens is that you are never reconstructing a single film. You can never be sure which bits of film that you have got were actually the final versions used in the original film. In effect you might be putting stuff back in that the original director had left out. In a couple of places it looks to me that they had a bit of footage that looked suspciously like a bit of footage earlier on -- probably a bit of film that Dreyer did not use. For that reason the running time is put at "84-93 min".

Michael is a film about a famous painter's love for his model Michael. It's a "Chamber film". It's mostly shot indoors, and, for a silent movie, very "talky". It seems plain to us today that the painter, Claude Zoret (played brilliantly by the then famous Danish director Benjamin Christensen) is homosexual, while Michael (Walter Slezak) is less absolute in his sexuality.

A gold-digging Russian Countess, whose accustomed style of living was no longer matched by the size of her funds, looks to get some of Zoret's money, but "the master" as he is called, is less responsive than the Countess would wish. Michael, however, falls for her, and promtly starts spending money on her that he does not have. The Master bails Michael out time and time again because of his devotion to his muse. But, as we know, once love is lost, no amount of kindness or expenditure can win it back.

It's a deeply touching film and not for nothing known as one of the finest early examples of "gay cinema". That's a rather stupid piece of genre classification (you might as well call it "intergenerational love cinema". It's a film about love and about the unequal balance in all relationships, about the frequent occasions when it's given in one direction but is not given in the other. Or, as that great philosopher the cook Mrs Patmore said at one point in Downton Abbey "You're all in love with the wrong people!"

Of course, not many movies made in 1924 are going to be of much interest to the modern film-viewer from an objective viewpoint. But from a historical angle this is a fascinating film. Dreyer was only 34 when he made it, and there has been speculation that there's a certain degree of autobiography about Dreyer's own sexual preferences. The directorial technique is in places very forward-looking (his use of close-ups are very different from the mode at the time, although they are so standard today that we do not notice this) while in others it seems very old fashioned (the "iris" technique to make us focus on a particular person). Dreyer was extremely influential, not least on Hitchcock, who borrowed many of Dreyer's innovations for his own silent efforts.

But what makes it most interesting is that here we have a film that isn't horror, or comedy, or "blockbuster". It's a quiet serious film about human relationships. The "commentary" version is both good and bad -- the Danish academic makes some interesting points, but does so in such a fashion as to make them boring unless you are determined to sit it out. Academia does not have to be boring and you do not need to read a commentary as if it is a written thesis (which I suspect this commentary is). But, better there than absent!

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You really have to visit AOL's "Shopping Buddy". Many years ago, Doonesbury mocked the Apple/Microsoft dichotomy with a new Apple interface called "mellowspeak" -- kind of a Dude Lebowksi behind your monitor screen. AOL's Shopping Buddy is more like the infuriating toaster in Red Dwarf. In fact, if it spoke, I'm sure that is how it would sound. "Who R U Shopping 4?" "My secretary." "OK, I'm searching for matches for you. Gimme a sec."

You feel like saying. "Look, I'm not your friend. If you were a human, you wouldn't be my friend. But you aren't even human. You are a piece of software. Just GET THE FUCKING PRESENT SUGHESTIONS!"

++++

A truly significant film on TV in the UK this weekend, rarely shown. Wise Blood (John Huston, 1979) features Brad Dourif, John Huston, Harry Dean Stanton and Ned Beatty. Dourif founds "The Church Without Christ" in the south, after returning from Vietnam. Is it a satire? Is it an anti-religious tract? Huston returned to this kind of attitude to religion with his last film - an adaptation of Joyce's The Dead. Perhaps it's the film's ambiguity that made me like this film. Hard to credit that the guy who directed this directed The Maltese Falcon.

+++++

Bill Hicks used to do a short piece in his shows which ran roughly along the lines of "Anybody here work in marketing? Yes? Well, kill yourself now. (Nervous laughter from audience. Bill pauses, looks serious). No, I mean, it. Kill yourself. It will be your one positive contribution to humanity".

It sometimes feels as if all the myths, all the problems relating to promises about products and services that can't be delivered, all the unfair expectations suffered by ordinary joes and joellas, causing them to pile up debts that they can't afford, can be laid at the door of marketing. Arthur Miller spotted this long ago, in Death of a Salesman and the wife's addiction to the new consumer culture. Hicks, as one might expect, was less tangential about the point, but it was essentially the same. Marketing is the scum of the earth, the soul-sucking hole of hell.

So it was nice to read a confirming story this morning, and one in which the bad guys lost and (I hope) were sacked as a result. Sony has been ordered to refund the ticket price (presumably to anyone who asks for it, because it's hard to imagine people keeping ticket stubs from three years back) for anyone who suffered the misfortune of paying to see "A Knight's Tale" and "The Animal". A Knight's Tale apparently contained Hollywood's "hottest new star" in Heath Ledger (yes, well....) while The Animal was "another winner". Or so said David Manning of The Ridgefield Press in various publicity pushes. Which would have been all well and good, except that David Manning was made up by the Sony marketing department.

I mean, what drugs were the department on? Did they think that no-one would notice? Or did they think that people would notice, but that no-one would care (marketing people, unlike the courts, have a twisted view to the degree that truth is important)?

Anyway, the whole deal will cost the company about a million bucks. Good.