A Christmas Story

Posted on February 12, 2012 by jaycluitt

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts recently. A friend of mine turned me onto the Adam Carolla Show, essentially a man complaining about rich white guy problems on a daily basis, but with great guests and an excellent sense of humour. From this, I’ve branched out to several others, some film related, of which I can recommend Doug Loves Movies, the Film Vault and How Did This Get Made. A regular guest on the Adam Carolla Show is Larry Miller, whose distinctly bald head you may recall from Pretty Woman, 10 Things I Hate About You, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and about a million other films you’ve seen and gone “Hey, it’s that guy. He’s funny” and then promptly forgotten all about. He has his own podcast, This Week with Larry Miller, in which he, in a very good natured, old fashioned and entertaining way, tells tales of his life in LA, diverting constantly on such subjects as Kim Kardashian, hotdogs and anything else he may have thought of that week. Since I’ve started listening, he has mentioned rather frequently a little film called A Christmas Story. If, like myself, you live on the more cultured side of the Atlantic, chances are you’ve never heard of this film, yet across the pond in the States it seems to be something of a festive phenomenon, its viewing a mandatory tradition for all families involving children or anyone who’s been one, so had it not been on the List I’m sure I would still have sought it out, if only to see what all the fuss is about.

It turns out that this is another of those cases where the event in question has been so over-inflated in my mind before taking place that it just couldn’t live up to expectations. Miller’s near constant praise for the film set my sights at the sky, expecting to file it alongside It’s A Wonderful Life, Die Hard and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation as my Yuletide movie go-to, but alas I remain thoroughly disappointed.

A Christmas Story follows 9 year old Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) on his quest to receive a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, but is confounded at every turn by his parents, his teacher and a shopping mall Santa with the repeated warning that he’ll shoot his eye out. There are kid-friendly fantasy scenes where Ralphie saves his family with the aid of the gun – vanquished foes have ‘X’s drawn on their eyelids – and Ralphie and his family deal with the usual child issues – run-ins with bullies, the first swear in front of a parent, the disappointment of a toy arriving in the mail, as well as some genuinely original moments – the frozen tongue on a flagpole – but it’s all just a bit too twee. There’s no sense of drama, no tension. Only children would understand the sense of urgency Ralphie feels at having to have that gun. Anyone older knows he wouldn’t remember it 2 months down the line, so there’s no real problem if he doesn’t get it. The ending is trite, but the narration, by an adult Ralphie, is well used and executed, but there is definitely a reason this hasn’t caught on over here in the UK.

Choose life 6/10

I Walked with a Zombie

Posted on February 12, 2012 by jaycluitt

Have you ever been really disappointed by the title of a film? I’m talking about films like Monster’s Ball, Elephant and Free Willy, films that, when you hear the name without knowing the plot, your mind heads off in completely the wrong direction. I was very disappointed when I found out the Tyrannosaur from the title of Paddy Considine’s recent film was an abusive drunk rather than a giant carnivorous lizard rampaging around a London estate. And so it is with I Walked with a Zombie, less a heart-pulling romance of a woman falling for the reanimated corpse of the man she loved, more a nurse caring for a patient who cannot feel, talk or think, but obeys simple commands and can walk around. Continue reading →

Dirty Dancing

Posted on February 12, 2012 by jaycluitt

We recently booked tickets to see this on stage at the Mayflower theatre in April (not my idea) and I’ve never seen the film. I know, shocking. I’ve seen Crazy, Stupid Love, so I figure I’d seen the important bit already, but enough goddamn Empire readers voted it onto the top 500 films list that I had to see it. Motherfuckers.

It’s the summer of 1963, and Wayne Knight is working as an entertainer at a holiday camp. He makes a deal to steal some dinosaur DNA hidden in a shaving foam can and smuggle it out during a storm, but doesn’t bank on a dilophosaurus with a penchant for fat, sweaty guys. Some kids nearly diea few times, Laura Dern gets terrified by Samuel L. Jackson’s disembodied hand and a T-Rex eats Patrick Swayze whilst he lifts Jennifer Grey up in the air. Well you can’t blame me for dreaming, can you?

Alas, all we have here is a rather tepid story of a girl getting it off with her rather ‘hands-on’ dance instructor at a summer holiday camp, whilst her parents would rather she dated a rich, boring guy instead. Before this film I’d only ever seen Swayze as a sinister paedophile in Donnie Darko, so to me he comes off as creepy and predatory, praying on the naive young dancer as they are forced together, Swayze’s sleeve-phobic Johnny Castle having to teach Grey’s Baby to dance professionally in a matter of days, so the relationship that built up between them may have appeared more Sordid than perhaps it was supposed to.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no dancer – mainly because that means I don’t have to dance – so any dancing seen on film is lost on me. I can’t tell when people are dancing well, or even in time, so showing long routines or montages of improvement have a similar effect as me listening to someone gradually improving their Cantonese.

Grey is a terrible actress – her miming to Mickey & Sylvia’s Loverboy is excruciating, and the most famous line in the film (some crap about a corner) is tossed away so haphazardly I doubt it would have been missed had it been cut.

Anyone want to buy a theatre ticket?

Choose life 3/10

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Posted on February 4, 2012 by jaycluitt

So you’ve written a fairly standard, almost boring script about a young man and woman in love, with many obstacles in their way in the likes of a failing umbrella shop, a disapproving mother, an ill aunt, a rival rich suitor and a war, hired two capable but not great leads, utilised a sickeningly candy-coloured colour scheme and obtained a soundtrack that sounds like someone is randomly sitting on a piano, but don’t know how to make it stand out from the slew of identical dramadies? Well why not make the cast sing every line of dialogue? Every. Damn. Line. My God this is intolerable. I’m all for musicals occasionally breaking into song in ways that are integral to the plot, well written or just entertaining, but please stop for the occasional conversation. It may have worked on paper, but as soon as someone sings a response of “Yeeeeeeeeeeeeees” I wanted to throw a slipper at the screen.

Choose life 3/10

Eraserhead

Posted on January 29, 2012 by jaycluitt

I think this is David Lynch’s idea of a romantic comedy. Shot in stark black and white and sounding like it was filmed underwater or near a busy factory, we follow the bizarrely coiffed Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) through the trials and tribulations of an average young man – meeting his girlfriends parents for dinner, encountering a beautiful woman living in the same apartment building, watching a woman with hideously deformed cheeks dancing deliriously on stage, you know, the usual.

Coming across like a 90-minute montage of nightmares I would not advise watching this before bed. Henry and his partner’s baby has the appearance of a mechanised cow foetus (possibly because undenied rumours suggest this was what was used), the aforementioned dinner sequence involves a tiny roast chicken still moving, bubbling and bleeding on the plate, and a scene where Henry cuts open the deformed baby has it becoming a bile volcano, one of the most horrific images I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure what happened to Lynch growing up, but I damn well hope it doesn’t happen to me.

Choose life 2/10

Peeping Tom

Posted on January 29, 2012 by jaycluitt

After making this film, director Michael Powell, here working without regular co-director Emeric Pressburger, had to move to Australia, for no-one else would employ him. This is a somewhat extreme reaction, especially by today’s standards, as through the eyes of a 21^st century film viewer there is nothing here to shock or frighten anyone, but back then the tale of a socially awkward young man filming women’s last moments as he kills them with a specially designed camera with a blade attached probably pushed boundaries beyond what the public was used to, though it was released the same year as Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Like his lead Mark, Powell focuses more on the reactions of the characters than on what they are experiencing, and the film is at times cold and passionless, yet Mark (Karlheinz Bohm) is a chilling, disturbing protagonist; an influence to fan Scorsese’s Travis Bickle, as well as Sex, Lies & Videotapes’ Graham, making this an adequate, if not necessarily exceptional, character thriller.

Choose film 7/10

Winter Light

Posted on January 28, 2012 by jaycluitt

My first Ingmar Bergman film does not make me want to watch any more, though several appear on the list. Winter Light opens with a 12-minute long church service by a vicar in front of a very small congregation, including hymns, prayer and the breaking of bread, and from there remains bleak and uneventful, as the vicar meets with a member of his flock contemplating suicide over concerns China could start a nuclear war and travels to a neighbouring village. The scenes are unbearably long and tedious – a man waiting by a body then helping to load it into a van with the only sound being the river flowing behind him, or a static shot of a woman reading her own letter staring straight into the camera, and overall there is little dialogue, camera movement or anything to engage the attention.

Choose life 2/10

Five Easy Pieces

Posted on January 28, 2012 by jaycluitt

Jack Nicholson is Bobby, a talented pianist who gave up his life of potential greatness to slum it on an oil rig, with a waitress girlfriend and spending his time bowling and gambling with his buddies. The movie is comprised of several great scenes – Bobby playing the piano on the back of a moving truck, trying to order French toast from a difficult waitress (“I want you to hold it between your knees”) and being ‘recognised’ by two girls at a bowling, only to be accused of being bald, but everything between these scenes is forgettable and bland, with only Nicholson’s performance – his reaction at the bowling alley is priceless – being worth paying attention to.

Choose life 5/10

In This World

Posted on January 25, 2012 by jaycluitt

Michael Winterbottom’s semi-documentary uses a novel approach in setting up and suggesting situations, then filming the reactions of Pakistani refugees at Shamshatoo Refugee Camp, Pakistan in February 2002, blurring the line between fact and fiction. We Follow Jamal and Enayat, a boy and his uncle, as they attempt to seek asylum to London, being smuggled across borders packed behind orange crates or hiding amongst sheep on a truck, but more information would have been appreciated on the details of why they are seeking asylum when their other countrymen aren’t, and some shots – a cow being brutally sacrificed, twitching as its life is forcibly removed – should have been omitted.

Choose life 2/10

Happy Together

Posted on January 25, 2012 by jaycluitt

One of the clearest examples of style over substance I’ve ever seen on screen, this tale of a Chinese gay couple emigrating to Argentina before breaking up but being repeatedly drawn back together again uses every trick in the film school handbook to distract from the lack of anything worthwhile happening on screen.

Slow motion, fast forward, lens flares, film stock used upside-down, freeze frames, narration, super-fast editing; they all come together to create a whole reminiscent of a film students first picture, using everything they’ve been taught whether it adds to the film or not, just to show that they can. Hell, I’m surprised no-one talks directly to the camera, as the two opposing personalities – the sensible introvert Lai and irresponsible, reckless Ho repeat their relationship cycle in a desperate need to connect with someone.

The cinematography is excellent, with shots from sun dappled games of street football to the couple standing by the side of a road all framed with a poetic beauty, but there is barely enough going on to fill a short, let alone 96 minutes.

Choose life 3/10