Chicago Reader review: I can’t vouch for its fidelity to Homer, but this version of the Iliad,
scripted by David Benioff (25th Hour) and directed by Wolfgang Petersen,
is clearly more than a prequel to O Brother, Where Art Thou? It has
plenty of visual sweep, fine action sequences, and, thanks especially to
Brad Pitt (as Achilles) and Peter O’Toole (as King Priam), a deeper
sense of character than one might expect from a sword-and-sandal epic
(even if Pitt’s character has some of the beefcake accoutrements of
Leonardo DiCaprio’s in Titanic). Far from lost among the zillions of
extras are Eric Bana (Hector), Brian Cox (Agamemnon), Diane Kruger
(Helen), Orlando Bloom (Paris), Sean Bean (Odysseus), Rose Byrne, and
Julie Christie. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is part of the excellent Mubi Weekend Festival at Hackney Picturehouse. Full details here.
Time Out review: The
truly great ‘LA noir’ movies – ‘Point Blank’, ‘The Driver’, ‘Straight
Time’, ‘To Live and Die in LA’, ‘Heat’ – share common characteristics
beyond the basic clichés of the crime genre. These are movies informed
by the city in which they were made, a city constructed of gleaming
surfaces – six-lane highways, vast industrial wastelands and endless
suburban sprawl – and a place where crime is grubby and small-time,
carried out by empty, hopeless loners in hock to dapper despots with
unpredictable personalities. It’s in this world that we find the
near-silent hero of ‘Drive’,Nicolas Winding Refn’s self-consciously slick, synth-scored throwback.Ryan Goslingplays the unnamed Driver, a mechanic and occasional getaway guy whose life is overturned when he meets Irene (Carey Mulligan),
a struggling mum with a husband in the joint. As all the above implies,
this is a film built on familiarity, in terms of narrative and style:
neon lights flash, rubber tyres screech, Gosling broods, Mulligan swoons
and a trio of wisecracking, overdressed character actors –Albert Brooks,Ron Perlmanand
Bryan Cranston – provide both levity and dramatic weight. But ‘Drive’
never drags: this is an entirely welcome riff on old material, a
pulse-pounding, electronically enhanced cover version of a beloved
standard. Sure, it’s shallow, but it’s also slickly compelling,
beautifully crafted and so damn shiny. Tom Huddleston
ICA introduction: Wanda, a dominatrix and businesswoman, presides over a gallery in Hamburg’s seedy port district. She stages sadomasochistic rituals as elaborate spectacles for her eager audiences. As Wanda’s many lovers become entangled in her meticulous web, the shifting dynamics between pleasure and pain, performance and reality, love and obsession, salaciously intertwine. Inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Treut and Mikesch queer the conventions of the S&M classic, placing a woman’s bisexual desire at the centre of its narrative. Pairing the glamorous and commanding presence of Mechthild Großmann with an achingly submissive Udo Kier, Mikesch’s cinematography oozes with New German Cinema cool. Banned for 18 years by the German Federal Board of Censorship, the exquisitely controlled staging and charged psychosexual tension have since established the film as a seminal work of queer cinema.
Time Out review: A reflective drama about a college professor in her fifties. On sabbatical to write a book on German philosophy, Marion (Gena Rowlands) rents an apartment for the necessary solitude. There she starts overhearing sessions in the psychologist's office next door, in particular the disclosures of Hope (Mia Farrow), who has cause to question her marriage, the meaning of life and death, etc. Marion gets to thinking, and is appalled to realise that so many assumptions about her own life and marriage are largely unfounded: in her desire for a controlled existence, she has evaded the emotional truth about relationships with her best friend (Sandy Dennis), brother (Harris Yulin) and husband (Ian Holm). The film shows a refinement and development of recurrent Allen themes, particularly in the characterisation of what is arguably his most complex female character to date. But in choosing a stylised approach, Allen too often obscures points in overstatement and intellectual posturing. Where the film gains considerable momentum and richness is in the marvellous performances: Rowlands' perfectly pitched approach to a demanding role is particularly stunning.
Time Out review: This is the one Elmore Leonard fans were waiting for, the one that lost
least on the swings and roundabouts of translation to the screen. It
has, damagingly, exchanged the precise economic placing of Detroit for
impersonal LA, fiddled a bit with the plot, but courageously sticks by
the unheroic tone of the book. Married Harry's passing fling with a
young 'model' places him in the hands of a trio of extortionists. They
show him the evidence on video, and when he refuses to pay up, execute
his mistress with his gun, and play him the subsequent snuff movie.
Harry's survival depends upon his ability to play the unstable trio off
against each other. Excellent performances. Best of all is the casting
of Clarence Williams III as Bobby Shy - as shamblingly conspicuous as the brother
from another planet, golliwog hair and a too-tight raincoat that clings
like a hobo's fart, this is a guy who wants a good leaving alone.
Brian Case
Time Out review: First and foremost, an extremely uninhibited satire on American sexual
dreams and nightmares. Kathleen Turner, a career woman who doubles by night as
the ultra-hooker China Blue, acts out every male fantasy in the book
until she picks up a cop, sees him turn into a piece of meat beneath
her, and gets carried away with her stiletto heels and his nightstick.
She meets her Baudelairean match in Anthony Perkins, a deranged fundamentalist
consumed by lust and slowly mustering the energy to act out his own dark
fantasies. In between, the film lays into an 'average' suburban couple,
living a sexual fantasy of their own - of marital fulfilment. It relies
on sheer pace and stylistic bravura, and talks dirty more wittily than
anything since Bogart and Bacall. There are lapses, but this is in the
main a comedy so black that it recaptures some of the cinema's long-lost
power to shock. Tony Rayns
This is part of the Shōhei Imamura season at the ICA. Full details here.
ICA Cinema introduction: Set on the fictional island of Kurage which, as an islander sings
throughout the film, is said to have been forged by discarded objects
thrown by incestuous brother and sister gods, Imamura’s final fiction
film for almost a decade builds upon many of the obsessions that
characterised his work throughout the 60s, namely the clash between the
primitive and the civilized.
At the heart of the film sits both the Futori family, outcast from the
rest of the islands inhabitants due a variety of indiscretions, ranging
from incest to infidelity, improper fishing practices to mental
instability, and Kariya, a Tokyo engineer sent to the island to oversee
the opening of a Sugar manufacturing facility.
From its lush tropical forests to its shining turquoise seas, all
captured in mesmerising technicolor, Kurage appears to be an island
paradise. However under its paradisiacal surface Kariya quickly
discovers that the island is not only teeming with the animals and
insects Imamura regularly trains his camera upon - but also with deep
rooted superstitions, privation, and duplicities. Despite his attempts
to complete his work, Kariya finds himself engulfed by the primal urges
of the Futori family, and as the months pass under the beating sun, he
slowly finds himself drawn into their way of life. Profound Desires of the Gods expands the obsessions that had
animated the first decade of Imamura’s work to his largest canvas yet
and in the island of Kurage (Okinawa in reality) he finds the means to
examine the entire strata of a society from its messy familial dramas to
its political machinations. However, the film is by no means an
exercise in intellectual study, whilst Imamura’s famous anthropological
outlook is ever-present, its blood, flesh, and feeling that sits at its
heart. A history of Japan made myth, Imamura traces the evolution of a
nation from the agrarian to the industrial, the primitive to the modern,
but all the while taking great pains to remind us that no matter how
things change our foundations are as desirous and ritualistic as ever.
