Film Review: Edgar Wright's The World's End

They call it the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy.  First came Shaun of the Dead in 2004, a genre satire taking on the zombie film, and the best damn rom-zom-com out there.  Next came Hot Fuzz in 2007, a satiric take on the cop buddy genre, and now, in 2013, comes The World's End, a satire on aliens and the oh-so popular end of the world scenario.  They by the way - the ones that call these three films the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (or the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy on occasion) - are Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost.  All three films are directed by Wright, written by Wright and Pegg, and star Pegg and Frost.  All three films are also quite subversively brilliant, are possibly three of the finest satires in all of cinema, and quite cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs hee-larious.  Oh, and the reason for the trilogy nickname is because a different flavour of Cornetto ice cream is used in each film, each symbolizing each film's theme (strawberry for the blood and guts of Shaun of the Dead, original blue flavour[??] to represent the blue of the police in Hot Fuzz, and mint chocolate chip for the aliens of The World's End).  But really, the trilogy is merely a marketing ploy (not even named a trilogy until someone pointed out to Wright that he did indeed use two different Cornetto ice cream references in his first two films) and is only mentioned here because this critic gets a big kick out of such things.  Otherwise, these three films are no more a trilogy than Antonioni's Trilogy on Modernity.  How's that for some name dropping?  Anyway, I digress.  Let us move on to just what this damn movie is about anyway.

The End of the World is a fast paced, even faster quipped action comedy about a group of forty year old former high school buds, who are brought back together by their ne'er-do-well pack leader Gary King, in order to perform "The Golden Mile" a pub crawl consisting of a dozen pubs, culminating at a pub called, yeah, you got it...The World's End.  While the other four ex hooligans have grown into responsible adulthood, Gary is still trying to live past glories as a grown child-man.  Of course things get a bit hairy when these (mostly) reluctant pub crawlers come back to their home town to perform the aforementioned "Golden Mile" only to find it may have been taken over by aliens, a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Of course hilarity ensues, and being that it is Wright, Pegg, and Frost, said hilarity is of the wryest, yet most maniacal set.  With allusions to many past films and such (the official poster is a take-off on a similarly-themed 1977 b-movie called End of the World), and a slew of self-referential inside jokes that range from the five lads all having courtly names (with surnames of King, Knightley, Prince, Page, and Chamberlain) to the names of each of the twelve pubs associating themselves with the actions that take place there (at the Crossed Hands the boys get into a fight, at The Mermaid, they are lured by evil women, etc), Wright's film is on equal par with the previous two - maybe even above par.

The real revelation of the film, other than the amount of growth Wright and Pegg have had as writers, from parody to satire to genuine classic-styled filmmaking, is the central performance of Pegg himself.  Frost, as well as costars Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan, Martin Freeman (Bilbo himself), and Rosamund Pike, all do wonderful jobs with their parts, but it is Pegg, in his black trenchcoat-clad, Sisters of Mercy t-shirt-wearing best, who goes above and beyond anything this critic has ever sen him do before - and considering how much I have enjoyed the guy in the past, that is saying a hell of a lot.   After a carer made out of playing nice guys (well, for the most part) Pegg now takes on the role of a self-centered and quite damaged asshole, though a self-centered and quite damaged asshole with an inevitable heart of, well maybe not gold, but at least some sort of lesser precious metal.  Pegg plays this role to near perfection (I know if I had an Oscar ballot, his name would surely be written as one of my Best Actor choices) and even though his filmic friends are sick and tired of his antics, I would do "The Golden Mile" with Gary King any day.   And then we have the film's finale.  I am not prone to give anything, but I will say this - it is freaking brills, baby! And Pegg keeps it going all the way to...well, to The World's End. 

This review can also be read over at my main site, All Things Kevyn.

Susan George Ooh LaLa's Herself Around the Giddily Exploitative Motifs of Pete Walker's Immensly Fun Die Screaming, Marianne

When a film, after already spending an almost ten minute long prologue fixated on the scantily-garbed protagonist, the titular screaming Marianne, running from the bed she shared with a hapless sailor who, like a post-coitus satisfied puppy, happily goes along with the masters-at-arms when he is arrested for going awol, to the speeding sports car of a stranger, has an opening credit sequence involving star Susan George, now dressed in nothing but an appropriately alluring string bikini, gogo dancing to Kathe Green's haunting song, Marianne, you know you have hit the veritable jackpot of any self-respecting expoitation/grindhouse junky, such as I.   In fact, it is the kind of film that, when you look at the newly released blu-ray case (wonderfully done by Kino Lorber's Redemption label, but more on that a bit later), you are surprised to not find the words "Quentin Tarantino Presents" scrawled across the top.

Okay, okay, maybe everyone isn't as into this style of filmmaking as QT and I are, but really, even those unfamiliar with such "low brow" art as this, would probably, at the very least, get a kick out of Die Screaming, Marianne.  Right?  Okay, probably not, but for those horror/thriller fans, those Pete Walker fans, those denizens of the dark cellars of underground cinema, this is truly a great joy to watch.  The needless running about of beautiful women, flauntin' what god gave 'em; the cheap language and, let's face it, pretty awful dialogue and acting; the giddy split-screening moments; the swelling music and genre-specific luridness.  All of it equates to, not art cinema, not mainstream cinema, but the trash of the film world.  But oh darlin', what fun and alluring trash it is.  And yes, as I am a shining example of, one can like the so-called higher art of cinema - you know, the canonical stuff that always makes those greatest films list (many of which adorn my own favourites list) - and still get the biggest kick out of what many would call trash cinema.  

Pauline Kael, a critic from whom a generation of acolytic Paulettes, myself included, have been born, said of such things, "Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them."  I don't know if I agree with such a statement, at least not fully, but it does have some merit indeed.  Kael also spoke of such trashy ideas, when she wrote, "When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable."  Again, not something I would totally stand behind - I like Citizen Kane as much as the next film snob - but one sees where she is going with such talk.  The staid academic flavour of an Antonioni or a Tarkovsky, even if they are creating solid pieces of cinema, or the pedestrian manner of all those high-falutin' arthouse pics that try to be something they just are not, the kind of films that the enfants terribles of the Nouvelle Vague were rebelling against, or the achingly middle-of-the-road fodder that spews forth from Hollywood at a ratio of about 100 to 1 against that auspicious creature, that rare mainstream work of art.  All of these beasts can make way any day, for what Kael calls trash cinema.  Sure, it is great to play the cinematic intellectual - and god knows I can play the film snob with the best of 'em - but it is just as fun to wallow in the so-called trash of the film world, and even though visually, Die Screaming, Marianne is quite the work (can a film this obscure be this influential, or is it just that this film is influenced by  the obvious usual suspects), it surely is pure trash cinema - and I mean that in the most complimentary way.

But enough of this trash talk (see what I did there), let's move on to exactly what all this trash is about, shall we?  Die Screaming, Marianne was the third of what would eventually be fifteen films, by English writer/director Pete Walker.  Walker specialized in horror and exploitation films throughout his career, and even amongst that crowd, which included such directors as Mario Bava and Jess Franco, he was one of the lesser known quantities.   Never getting much respect at all, often derided by contemporary critics, Walker made movies for the sheer fun of it.   The filmmaker is credited as having said, "I was the uninvited guest to the British film industry. Nobody wanted to know me. I knew I wanted to make films, but I would see these serious-looking guys going around with scripts under their arm, spending three or four years trying to get their films made. I couldn't be like that - I had to make a living and I wanted to get behind a camera and shout "action". So I would go out and shoot something like School for Sex - God, that was a terrible film - and a few weeks later every cinema in the country would be showing it."  Walker would kind of denounce his own self-criticism later by saying, "But recently I had to record commentary for the DVD releases, so I saw the films for the first time since making them, and you know what? They're not as bad as I thought. But searching for hidden meaning . . . they were just films. All I wanted to do was create a bit of mischief."  Granted, Die Screaming, Marianne is the first, and so far only, Pete Walker film this critic has seen, but it is more than enough of a whistle-wetting, to make me search out the director's other works.

The basic gist of the film, is this: twenty year old Marianne is first seen running from the hoodlums sent after her by her sadistic ex-judge father.  We find out that upon Marianne's mothers disappearance/death, the young girl was given the number to a Swiss bank account that held several hundred thousand dollars, as well as papers that would put her father away for life.  And all this will be hers upon her twenty-first birthday.  Of course, her evil dad, and even more evil half sister, want that number, and will do anything to get it.  There is a lot more twisting and turning in the film, but this is the basic storyline.  Full of sex, violence, torture, and even a hint of incest thrown in for good measure, Die Screaming, Marianne, is a perfect example of the great trash that Kael spoke so fondly of.  Influenced, judging from the artistry of Walker's style here, by the Italian Giallo genre, it is far from a great film - one may be able to associate his love of cheap cinema with someone like Ed Wood, but his talent, at least judging from this one film, is far superior - it is however quite a lot of fun, and actually, as I just more than alluded to, quite artistic in its style, camerawork and overall mood, but the thing that makes the film go splash-and-a-half, is the aforementioned screaming mimi in a string bikini, Miss Susan George. 

The film was made and released in 1971, the very pinnacle of George's rather brief rise to the upper echelon of acting.  Out around the same time as Sam Peckinpah's subversive yet  influential Straw Dogs, George was the very epitome of raw sexual desire, and directors used that to their best advantage.  George would only make a handful of films of any note (Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and the oft-overlooked Mandingo among them), and would eventually semi-retire from the movies, doing the occasional British TV show, and raise Arabian horses on her stud farm, but that raw sexuality, even if it was inside someone who really was never the greatest of thespians, is more than enough to get the home town thugs of Straw Dogs all riled up, and it is most certainly enough also to get pretty much everyone, even a father, in a tizzy right here in Die Screaming, Marianne.  But truly, the film is a fun creature indeed, and its new release on blu-ray, via Kino Lorber's enigmatic Redemption label (see, I told you I was going to get back to this in a bit) is a godsend for any genre fans out there.  As clean and as crisp as one can expect from such a low budget, and let's face it, mostly ignored, and therefore probably not cared for like a classic film would and should be, the bluray transfer is quite good.  It really is a rather intriguing piece of work from Pete Walker, and I cannot wait to check out his other work.

The Archers and Their Masterpiece Theat...er, I mean Cinema

The good folks over at The Movie Waffler have posed a question to those of us who care enough to listen.  Which director (or directors in my case) has had the best/most productive run/streak of great films.  Now one could easily make an argument that certain directors have never made a bad film and therefore their entire careers would constitute this run.  But even those directors of whom such a claim could be reasonably made, those with a small enough oeuvre, but a powerful enough one as well, to make such a thing possible, if not probable (Kubrick, Welles, Visconti), have a lesser film or two snuggled away in there to stop any ideas of a perfect game.

Sure, Welles' The Stranger is a very good film, but it is certainly no masterpiece, and therefore would break up any streak that would lead Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons to The Lady From Shanghai and Macbeth.  Now Kubrick, with Lolita, Strangelove, 2001, Clockwork and Barry Lyndon would make a strong case for this theory, but Spartacus at one end and The Shining at the other may say otherwise.  Though, I might be tempted to keep it going through The Shining (unlike many, I quite enjoy that film) as well, but I am here to talk about a different streak, from a different time.  It was the 1940's and the directors were Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known collectively as The Archers.

English born Michael Powell and Hungarian born Emeric Pressburger first came together during the war.  Already semi-established as a director and writer respectively, these two were brought together to work on propaganda films for the British war effort.  Some of these earlier films (Contraband, The 49th Parallel) were Hitchcockian thrillers, and quite good, but still nothing compared to what was about to come.  In my not-so-humble opinion, The Archers have created seven - and I do not throw such a term around willy-nilly - bonafide masterpieces.  Six of which were made successively between 1943 and 1948, and it is these six films, in these six years that we are here to talk about - so please allow me to praise great movies.

Starring Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook and, in three roles, the lovely Deborah Kerr (at the time, Michael Powell's lover), and based, at least in name, on a newspaper comic strip, Colonel Blimp, the first of our run, takes place over a fifty year period in the life of a cocksure British officer and the woman/women (all Kerr) who he can never get out of his mind.  Splendid picture indeed.

A Canterbury Tale is probably the least seen and least known of our six film run.  This haunting, otherworldly film tells the story of a group of wayward pilgrims, played by Sheila Sim, Dennis Price and Sgt. John Sweet, an actual U.S. Army soldier in his one and only screen appearance, in the Kent countryside, which incidentally is beautifully filmed by the great cinematographer Erwin Hillier.

Another otherwordly-style film from The Archers, I Know Where I'm Going stars Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey (and a twelve year old Petula Clark long before she went "Downtown") as a pair of wouldbe lovers trapped by a storm in the highlands of Scotland.  The film's penultimate raging sea scenes and the inevitable finale, make an already great picture into a true blue masterpiece.

Renamed Stairway to Heaven for US release (something that goes against the whole idea of the film never mentioning Heaven or any specific afterlife) A Matter of Life and Death is the magical tale of an RAF pilot and the American woman he falls in love with - after he has supposedly died - is a beautiful film to watch (Earth-bound scenes in Technicolor, After-Life realm in crisp monochrome B&W).   

Black Narcissus, my second favourite Powell/Pressburger, is the haunting story of a group of nuns - headed by the always great Deborah Kerr - temporarily inhabiting a mountaintop nunnery (previously a princely whorehouse) and deals with the ideas of spirituality and the loss of faith.  Archer regular Kathleen Byron, as the bewildered Sister Ruth, is the sexy/creepy highlight of a film already filled to the brim with highlights.

The Red Shoes is not only my favourite Archer's film, but my favourite film of all-time - period.  Starring the beautiful flame-haired ballet star turned actress Moira Shearer as Victoria Page, who lives to dance, and Anton Walbrook and Marius Goring as the men who are splitting her emotions tragically in half.  Shot by Jack Cardiff, one of the finest cinematographers in film history, Martin Scorsese has called this the most beautiful colour film ever made - and who am I to disagree with that.

*************

There you go.  Six films, six years, six masterpieces.  Now one could make an argument that I could go on and add the duo's next film, 1949's The Small Back Room, to this list, but I am going to back off from such a thing since I do not think it quite reaches the heights of these aforementioned six works of art.  As for their next film, The Elusive Pimpernel, I cannot say, as it is a film that, having been in itself rather elusive, I have never seen (believe it or not, there is a Powell/Pressburger that has not been seen by yours truly).  After this, we could add another film to the list (if we were not going for that unbroken thing) in the form of 1950's Gone to Earth, with Jennifer Jones and David Farrar.  This film is that seventh bonafide masterpiece I spoke of in my opening salvo.  But alas, we are going for a streak here, so it will have to just sit and watch its six brethren take their day in the spotlight.  Well, that is it for now folks.  Have a good day.

Film Review: The Deep Blue Sea

With his dark, somber colours and foreboding cinematographic style echoing the emotional state of his smouldering-at-the-edges heroine, Terence Davies' latest haunting, seething melodrama-cum-subversive post WWII betrayal drama, the director's first feature film in eleven years, is something on par with his earlier works, only perhaps a bit smaller in context - a bit more intimate one might say.  Now this is not to say his earlier films (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes) are not intimate portraits of their respective characters, because they most certainly are, and with The Deep Blue Sea, this intimacy is even more contained in smaller spaces and more personal moments of fear and angst and implied tragedy than the aforementioned earlier films.  Let us face facts, this new film is pure Terence Davies, and once again the oh so English auteur has brought his characters into a terrifyingly up close and personal state of being.  But then, this is what the director does best.

Written by West End legend Terence Rattigan in 1952, Davies, who has said that it frightened him to adapt a play, has taken this already powerful work and molded it into the epitome of a Terrence Davies film.  Taking off from his younger self, Davies' has left the children of his previous films behind and instead focuses on the adults that would have been from the director's parent's generation, those who came of age as war began to spread its evil yet eager wings throughout the bubbling cauldron that was 1940's Europe.  Set in 1950, Davies shows us the tragedies not of war itself, for actual physical battles are never shown, but of what war leaves behind in its inevitable wake.  Hester, played admirably (and a bit more low key than normal) by Rachel Weisz, is a woman heading toward forty, who finds herself out of love with her older, well-to-do husband, and in essence her staid upper middle class lifestyle, and obsessed with the sexually desirous Freddie, a younger former RAF ace who has been floating lost since the end of the war.  Like many of these lost boys - these forgotten men - Freddie has come home from the terror and excitement of war to find a dreary, destitute London, still in financial and emotional shock from The Blitz.  It is this thrill of the exuberance of youth that lures Hester in but it is also this longing for a life unlike what he has fallen into that begins to rip asunder Hester's dumb blind love for her Freddie.  He is not her knight in shining armour, nor does he have any desire to be such.

Tom Hiddleston, the fine English actor who is currently best known for playing the Asgardian prima donna Loki in Thor and The Avengers, does a smooth, almost too-real-to-be-acting kind of performance as the brash, befuddled Freddie (and I mean that in the most complimentary manner), a performance that may remind some old classic Hollywood heads of someone like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. or even the sadly forgotten David Manners, but this is Hester's story, and therefore it is Weisz's picture.  The actress, usually more vocal, hands in a subtle and tragic performance as a woman for whom everything has fallen apart, and while her scenes with Hiddleston are electrified with mislaid passion, her scenes with stage actor Simon Russell Beale as her stoic, yet cuckolded husband, are things of quiet beauty.  Beauty between two people who are not out of love with each other, no matter how hard at least one of them tries to hide it.  But no matter the performances, in the end, as has been stated more than once here, this is a Terence Davies film - and a disarmingly honest one at that - even with its inherent melodramatic flare.   With allusions to the 1950's weepies of Douglas Sirk the director grew up with, as well as David Lean's wartime classic of disillusionment Brief Encounter, Davies goes about his business of building intricate characterizations around the misleadingly simple moments of a landlady handing out mail or a group of frightened Londoners huddled in the shelter of the tube, singing quietly amongst themselves as bombs blare above ground (and this is done with the most elegant of tracking shots).  In other words, this is a Terence Davies film - and that is more than enough.

Apparently, I Am Too Racy to Discuss The Archers

As I was perusing the web one day, surfing if you will, I came across a notice for an upcoming movie blogathon.  For those of you who do not know what a blogathon may be, it is where a gaggle of blogospheric writers (aka, we cyberspace nerds) get together and discuss a certain subject, the certain subject of that particular blogathon.  Well the certain subject for this particular blogathon happened to be the certain cinema of a certain Mr. Michael Powell and and a certain Mr. Emeric Pressburger - collectively known amongst we cinephilia-bound folks in the so-called know, as The Archers.  Well hot damn, this was a thing I just had to get in on, so I quickly dashed off an e-mail to the appropriate parties, clamoring to say that I would love love love to write a piece for this exciting sounding blogathon event, and asking if the oft-forgotten masterpiece Gone to Earth was still available as a subject.  The aforementioned appropriate parties said yes to my rather exuberant pleas and everything looked like it was a definite go for lift-off.  Well, this is where everything fell apart and my mission was effectively scrubbed.

You see, a day after receiving an e-mail saying they were happy to have me aboard (my exuberance must have won them over immediately) I received a second e-mail saying, "After checking out your blog, I think it's a little too racy for the blogathon."  Racy?  Me?  Really?  Okay, perhaps I am not a G-rated site, but to say I am too racy to participate in a blogathon is kind of pushing it.  Saying that they are afraid if their regular crowd were to begin to peruse my site (which they did say later in the aforementioned e-mail) that they would take offense to what was written inside, is pretty ridiculous if you ask me.  Now granted, this may all be in the timing as when those appropriate parties from earlier "checked out my blog" the most recent post was that of one of my Retro Reviews.  It was a review of the 2007 film Teeth.  You know, the movie about a girl with vaginal dentata - the girl with the snapping hoo-hoo.  Well, needless to say, my perverse side may have come out a bit in that review (c'mon, how could it not!?) and this same said perversity would have been the first thing these appropriate parties partook of.  In other words - I was too racy for their kinda crowd.

Now normally I am not as perverse or racy (loose terms indeed) as I was in the writing of my Teeth review, but then again I never really think in those kinds of terms.  I just write.  What others glean from my writing is up to them.  I do not bother to tone down my rhetoric for a G-Rated crowd, nor do I try to up such vulgarities as to pander to the NC-17 crowd.  I simply write, without worries of what is proper or what is not.  Looking back, I suppose I am probably best categorized as R-Rated, or even PG-13 in many places, but certainly not too racy for most.  I try to use words as art, for the touchy crowd or the real world crowd.  I never care if I am using what society deems as an ugly, taboo word or not.  I simply write.  I am certainly not overtly racy for fuck's sake!!  Yeah, that was pandering, but I had to throw that word in to prove that no one is going to become a bad person by reading and/or hearing that word.  Fuck, fuck fuckity fuck.  Okay, really, I am not normally like this.  When I was first dismissed, as it were, from the aforementioned blogathon, I replied with a whole "no hard feelings" attitude, but the more I thought about it, the more am getting pissed off.

Now do not get me wrong, I really have no hard feelings (the cocksure attitude here is merely for playful show) and am still an avid supporter of the site that is hosting the blogathon - and all those associated.  I suppose everyone needs their rules, and I suppose that some are inexplicably put off by something as simple as a four letter word, but still, kinda silly if ya ask me.   Extra silly when you consider that this blogathon that all the hullabaloo is about, is a blogathon on, for their time period, a pretty racy filmmaking team.  The lustful nunnery of Black Narcissus, the debauchery hidden away in Colonel Blimp, the seductive factors of The Red Shoes, the naughtiness of Oh...Rosalinda!!, the sexual concoctions of A Canterbury Tale, the giddy sexuality of Gone to Earth.  I will not even bother to go into Powell's solo pet project Peeping Tom.  Perhaps all this carnal knowledge goes over the heads of the kinds of readers who are offended by the word fuck, but nonetheless, it is all there in the fabulous films of Powell/Pressburger.  C'mon people, Kathleen Byron's lusting, desiring, feral, lasciviousness  Sister Ruth cannot be mistaken for anything but a sniffing animal with wanton instincts of a cat in heat.  Racy?  Nah.  Hell, The Red Shoes is one of the most sensual films to have ever been made.  The idea of willing rape in Gone to Earth, or the leering eyes of Mel Ferrer as the playboy ex-pat officer in Oh...Rosalinda!! are enough to make the term racy seem like suddenly not enough.  And I am too racy for them?  Bah!

Film Review: The Woman in Black

I think what surprised me most about The Woman in Black was not the post Potter acting of Daniel Radcliffe - he is a capable actor, if nothing else, and that was to be expected - but how out of time the film seems to be.   In this day and age of the paranormal found footage films and the omnipresent torture porn taking the horror genre way off course, The Woman in Black plays out as an old fashioned ghost story, even while still using more modern tricks of the so-called trade.  Set at the end of the Victorian Age, in an appropriately creepy looking gothic house, in the middle of an appropriately spooky looking foggy moor, just outside an appropriately cursed small village, this appropriately old school horror movie takes on aspects of Jack Clayton's eerily designed 1961 haunted house tale The Innocents (which in turn was an adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw) while simultaneously playing out as a sort of retooling of The Ring.  In other words, this film takes both the old and the new and blends it into a surprisingly hearty and quite fun horror movie.  Imagine that.

Now granted, the film does leave something to be desired - some more scares would have been nice, and perhaps a stronger actor than Radcliffe - but when compared to the sheer gross out factor so rampant in what passes as horror these days, this is a film more people should be seeing - especially those who think chaining a woman up and systematically carving her up is the be all and end all of horror.   With strong supporting turns by Ciarán Hinds and Janet McTeer, Radcliffe's rather stunted acting does get by here - the way the story is told, for the most part he need only react to what is going on around him, and he seems capable of doing at least that - and we are allowed to ignore such and just let the story, which is basic but well honed, engulf us in its appropriately scary (though never too scary - my main criticism) tale of a long dead woman whose ghost makes the village's children kill themselves in order to fulfill her revenge on those who locked her away and took her own child away.

Directed by James Watkins, who's only previous directorial effort was the the horror film Eden Lake, about a gang of teens chasing down and torturing a young couple (and of course one of the couple is played by Michael Fassbender - seriously, is he in everything?), The Woman in Black, in all its old school charm of ghostly wet footprints and dead-eyed children and dolls and toys come to life (seriously, that shit is scary!), is enough to remind one of those great woebegone B-pictures of the genre that permeated the 1950's and early 1960's.  This too is appropriate as the purveying studio that brought many of these ghost and monster stories to life, the iconic Hammer Films, is out of seeming hibernation and has their logo front and center at the opening of the film.  All in all, a classic tale of wickedness and the netherworld that never falls prey to the siren call of the modern day torture porn set - and a film that ends on the strangest happy note one can imagine.  That is a happy ending, right?  No?  Really?  C'mon, you know it is.

Film Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Moody and melancholic, its foggy London atmosphere chilling the screen, its grey squat buildings of 1973 Eastern Bloc Europe deadening its hopes, this latter-day adaptation of John LeCarré's 1974 classic spy thriller is near pitch perfect in its boulevard of broken dreams demeanor.  The spies shown here, played by a slew of brilliantly understated actors, have never come in from the cold (to paraphrase another LeCarré novel), and as broken down and beaten as its main protagonist, George Smiley, played with a deceptive canniness by Gary Oldman, seems to be, that too is how weathered, how battled and bedraggled this Cold War remnant shows itself to be - and that is exactly how this film should feel.

Much of this aforementioned gloomy, though appropriately so atmosphere is given its form by the apt direction of Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish director who gave us the atmospheric horror film Let the Right One In (and that's how you do a romantic vampire movie!).  A great pic to direct a pic as perversely period as this one.  Add to this the melodic setting-appropriate score by Alberto Iglesias, the composer of choice for the majority of Pedro Almodóvar's films, and the mood-setting cinematography of Hoyte van Hoytema, the man who photographed the aforementioned Swedish vampire film, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an intriguing blend of neo-noir, spy thriller and wouldbe psychological horror movie, all rolled into a chilling, classically-styled cold war entanglement of red herrings and MacGuffins galore.

But it is in this very same convoluted screenplay where TTSS begins to unravel - or perhaps never quite ravels enough.   Many have said (I have not read the book myself) that LeCarré's labyrinthine novel is way too much to capture in a feature length work of cinema, and that even the nearly five hour 1979 UK mini-series version could hardly handle the multitudes of twists and turns that LeCarré had put into his bestseller.  This may very well be true as we see a lot of random threads go in and out here, without ever receiving any sort of denouement, and even though the film is not that particularly difficult to follow (many of its detractors claim it to be close to incoherent), the screenplay by Bridget O'Conner and Peter Straughan, seems at times lazy, but at others downright bewildered and bewildering.  But then this may just be bellyaching on my part considering how in tune every other layer of the film is with what this spy thriller needs to be. 

So while the acting is top notch - not just Oldman, but John Hurt, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch and especially Tom Hardy and Colin Firth - replete with immaculately enunciated spytalk and desperate longing, and Alfredson's concoction of 1970's period drama is near pitch perfect, the film seems to fall a bit flat when it comes to its rendering of a storyline.  This is no truer than in the end, when we finally find out just who the searched for spy actually is, and a feeling of ending not with a bang but with a whimper reverberates throughout this cold cold work of cinematic fiction - especially  when the films leads, crescendo like, to what should be a big bang.   Then again, this is just the culmination of a rather workingman ethic of the time period, so perhaps it does work in a way. - and perhaps this is just bellyaching on my part.  But whatever the case, just to feel the long dead paranoiac atmosphere of Soviet spies and wondering just who is listening in, is worth having to put up with a little less than what meets the eye.

Film Review: Attack the Block

An ode in many ways, to John Carpenter's classic 1976 subversive genre work Assault on Precinct 13 - so much so in fact, that there is no way in hell that writer-director Joe Cornish is not a fan of the aforementioned Carpenter pic - the UK hit import Attack the Block takes the typically B-movie idea of the alien invasion film, tosses it on its head and hands us its deconstructed carcass like a trophy of its cinematic bravura and chutzpah.  In other words, I really really liked this movie - and you probably should too.

Starting out on the dangerous streets of a South London project on what appears to be Guy Fawkes Night, as the fireworks sis boom bah through the night, a gang of five masked teenage hoodlums mug a young woman walking back to her flat, only to be interrupted mid-mugging by a falling projectile that demolishes a parked car nearby.  Needless to say this is the beginning of an alien invasion that ends up forcing muggers and muggee, along with the local drug lord and a pair of seemingly clueless potheads (one played by the ubiquitously goofball Nick Frost) and a couple of cocksure little kid gangbanger wannabes, to team up and save the planet - or at least save the block since it appears to be an extremely localized alien invasion.  With alien beasts replacing the L.A. gang members of Carpenter's Precinct 13 (which in essence were just that director's answer to the walking dead in Night of the Living Dead), and with a tongue-in-cheek satiric tone (Edgar 'Shaun of the Dead' Wright acts as exec producer), Attack the Block is a real kick in the head - for genre fans and non-fanboys alike.

As the hulking, black-furred aliens, impossibly giant sets of fangs glowing in the dark like fluorescent shards of impending death (think the gargoyles from Ghostbusters mixed with the blackest of black bears and something out of an acid-induced Dark Crystal nightmare), make their way into this towering den of iniquity, trapping our not-so-intrepid heroes inside with only each other, enemy and friend alike, to count on, Cornish's film - his directorial feature debut btw - becomes more and more claustrophobic and more and more dangerous.  Fighting the seemingly inevitable destruction of the world, or at least the titular block, collateral and non-collateral damage being ripped to shreds through the halls and elevators around them, this ragtag band of survivors - again, much aligned to the same sort of doomed group from the aforementioned Carpenter classic - Attack the Block is a nearly non-stop adrenaline rush from start to finish.  All-in-all, pretty fucking nifty for such a supposedly B-picture mentality - or perhaps pretty fucking nifty because of its B-picture mentality.

The Cinematheque Reviews: The Trip

If you are into that certain kind of wry British humour one finds on BBC America (via the original BBC of course) then The Trip is the film for you.  If you enjoy watching two rather annoying (but charmingly so) British comics bicker and snipe and psychologically jab at each other over meals of scallops and pigeon and martinis with the consistency of snot, then The Trip is the film for you.  If you have always wanted to see an impressionistic Michael Caine-off (and for that matter Woody Allen, Al Pacino and Richard Burton) then The Trip is the film for you.  Right now my review of that film that is for you is up and running over at The Cinematheque.  Go over and read it now.  Please.

Read my review of The Trip at The Cinematheque.

The Cinematheque Reviews: The Arbor

The Arbor, directed by Clio Barnard, is an intriguing film.  Part biopic, part documentary, part Brechtian stage play, part (almost) art installment.  A strange fruit indeed.  But I will not dwell too long on the subject here since I have many other new reviews to get going and anyway my review of this odd cinematic amalgam is up and running over at The Cinematheque as we speak - which means you can on over there and check it out as they say.

Read my review of The Arbor at The Cinematheque.

My Quest to See the 1000 Greatest: A Canterbury Tale (1944)

A Canterbury Tale is #581 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films

Screened 02/09/11 on Criterion DVD at Midtown Cinema

Ranked #381 on TSPDT

*this is one in a series of catch-up reviews in my aforementioned quest (which should explain the rather old screening date above).

There is a certain something about the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  Of course they are visually stunning.  The look and feel of their films are beyond reproach.  Many filmmakers would give anything to make films like them.  But there is more than just this obvious visual and audible style.  The films this duo made together - especially during that perfect six-movie streak that ran for Colonel Blimp to The Red Shoes - have a certain, for lack of a better term, otherworldly charm about them.  It is as if these films are of a magical time and place all their own.  The windy snow-capped Shangri-la-like terrain of Black Narcissus; the tragic fantasy and that final dance of The Red Shoes; the dreamlike quality of the two lovers in A Matter of Life and Death.  And A Canterbury Tale, though sadly lesser known among the duo's oeuvre, is no different.

Seeming to be out of time and out of place (even though set then-contemporarily in the midst of WWII) A Canterbury Tale (loosely based, of course, upon Chaucer's epic poem) tells the story of three travelers on their way to the titular sacred place, whom all get tangled up in a strange mystery just one town over.   The three aforementioned travelers are Allison, a young "Land Girl" (part of the Women's Land Army - civilian girls who helped out with the war effort - for those non-Anglophiles out there) played by the lovely girl-next-door type Sheila Sim, British Sergeant Peter Gibbs, played by up-and-commer (and later down-and-outer) Dennis Price and American Sergeant Bob Johnson, played by real life Sergeant John Sweet.  These three get entangled in a strange affair wherein a mystery man is running about the village putting glue in young girl's hair.

This odd mystery (which isn't really a mystery since it is pretty obvious who the culprit is from the beginning) is really only a sidebar to the ideas of God and time and space and love and all those other deeply felt philosophical comings-and-goings in life.  It is in these ideas that Powell & Pressburger fashion a movie that is probably even more otherworldly than the afterlife parable A Matter of Life and Death.  As Powell's camera (courtesy of cinematographer Erwin Hillier, most notable for being DP on Fritz Lang's M) moves so effortlessly through the English countryside, we are transported to another world in both mood and feeling.  The Archers' films were (to coin a rather tired, but completely appropriate term) magical, and A Canterbury Tale, though perhaps not as vibrant as Colonel Blimp, nor as seductive as Black Narcissus, nor as downright succulent as The Red Shoes, shows these filmmakers in top magical form.  I personally was transfixed as I watched this film unfold on the big screen in front of me.

The film would go on to have a strange life of its own then.  Not a success at the box office (a first for the Archers) Powell was made to re-edit the film for post-war US release, shortening it by twenty minutes and tacking on bookends which featured Kim Hunter as Sgt. Johnson's girl back home (Hunter would incidentally get the female lead in the next Powell/Pressburger project, A Matter of Life and Death).  The film was eventually restored to its original and proper form (no offense to the lovely and talented Miss Hunter) by the British Film Institute, in the 1970's.  Still often overlooked when considering the entire Powell/Pressburger oeuvre, A Canterbury Tale is considered a classic today.  Personally it is my third favourite film of the Archers - following The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

My Quest To See the 1000 Greatest: A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

A Matter of Life and Death is #577 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films

Screened 01/28/11 on DVD at Midtown Cinema

Ranked #137 on TSPDT

Inexplicably retitled Stairway to Heaven for US release (an arrogant irony considering Powell & Pressburger took great aims to never directly refer to the afterlife in the film as Heaven), A Matter of Life and Death is a stunning movie, in both character and form, and easily one of the Archers' greatest collaborative works - second only, in this critic's opinion, to that high watermark of grand cinema The Red Shoes).

It is the story of a World War II British pilot, played by the always congenial David Niven, who is shot down and supposedly killed (ever congenial and ever "English" to the bitter end) - another in a long long long line of casualties of war.  Only thing is, he doesn't die.  Washed ashore, presuming himself in the afterlife, Niven's pilot instead finds himself very much (and very miraculously perhaps?) still among the living - only to run into, and fall in love with, the American radio operator who was the last person he talked to before his untimely dea...er, near death experience.

Enter an envoy from that place that is not Heaven (except in the aforementioned US release version) enlisted to take Niven's pilot to where he belongs.  You see, here we find out it was merely a clerical error of sorts that has kept our intrepid hero amongst the living, and he is due in that "other world" immediately - if not sooner.  But our hero refuses to go.  You see, when he was on his dying plane, and was about to meet his maker, he was ready to go - a real proper gentleman about it, but now he has fallen in love and has a reason to go on living.  This brings us to the trial - a matter of life and death as it were - with the whole of human history at its beck and call.

Shot with remarkable beauty (in a roundabout from The Wizard of Oz, the Archers portray the real world in colour - Technicolor at that) and the other world in crisp black and white) and given a sheen of overwhelming sentiment, while at the same time hitting deeper topics (both political and scientific, as well as the obvious religious quandaries) than what merely lie on the sublime surface.  This was Powell & Pressburger at the height of their joint career.  Right in the middle of their remarkable run that also included The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I Am Going, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.  Never has such a six-year run been equaled in the annals of world cinema.

The film also features Kim Hunter in the role of the radio operator, Richard Attenborough as a fellow pilot, Raymond Massey as the prosecuting attorney in the aforementioned trial (Massey, when asked if he would take the part, immediately cabled the response of "For the Archers anytime, this world or the next.") and two of the Powell/Pressburger stable of regulars, Kathleen Byron as an angel who takes an interest in the case and Marius Goring as Cunductor 71 (as a rather fey, and quite hilarious French revolutionary who is the blame for the error that has caused everything to unfold as it has), later seen as mad Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus and Julian Craster in The Red Shoes, respectively.

To toss out just a few adjectives to describe this film, we have astonishing, brilliant, magnificent, breathtaking, majestic, sensational, mind-blowing and utterly sublime.  Perhaps I am gushing like a lovesick schoolgirl, leaving my critical chops in the back pocket as it were, but one cannot help such hyperbole when discussing the works of Powell & Pressburger - especially at the epicenter of their already stunning oeuvre.

The Cinematheque Reviews: Another Year

Director Mike Leigh has a curious habit of creating films that defy definition.  They are not comedy, yet they are not drama either.  They are some cross between the comically tragic and the tragically comic.  His films at once portray a world that is so realistic we easily find ourselves trapped inside them, yet so alien, we feel we are watching some sort of cosmic experiment run its course.  Drab and squat and gray, and lined with a certain hopelessness, yet also full of some sort of otherworldly eternal hope.  The director's latest, Another Year, is no different in playing around with such contradictions.  Desolate and at the same time, elegant. It's a wonderful little trick Leigh always seems to have up his sleeve.

Read my review of Another Year at The Cinematheque.

The Cinematheque Reviews: 127 Hours

One arm, no waiting.  The story of Aron Ralston, cocksure spelunker who thought it a smart idea to go off into the wilderness without telling anyone where he was going.  Idiot?  Douchebag?  Typical outdoorsy type (how I hate them)?  Probably all these and more, which is how James Franco portrays Aron Ralston in Danny Boyle's highly-anticipated one-man-show blow-out, 127 Hours.  A pretty good movie actually - with Franco's stellar, 176-note performance the number one reason why.   Of course, as we find out in the final post-movie, pre-credit tag, Ralston still goes cave-dwelling, but now he always leaves a note as to where he is going.  Reformed idiot?  Repentant douchebag?  Perhaps.  One arm, no waiting.

Read my review of 127 Hours at The Cinematheque.

The 1000 Greatest Films: The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

The Thief of Bagdad is #577 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films

Screened 09/24/10 on Criterion DVD at Midtown Cinema

Ranked #306 on TSPDT

*this is one in a series of catch-up reviews in my aforementioned quest (which should explain the rather old screening date above).

Big and bold and beautiful, this deliciously rapturous eye-candy work of early Technicolor filmmaking, made by a committee of at least five directors (some credited, some not) working under uber-producer-cum-showman Alexander Korda, but seeming to have the strong auteurial stamp of Michael Powell (the only member of this directorial committee to become a name one day - and what a name he will become), The Thief of Bagdad, 1940 style, is a remarkably fun movie to watch (especially on the big screen) even if the misbegotten youth of today would say it was thoroughly outdated and even more thoroughly cheesy.  But then again, this very cheesy nature of the film (and I must succumb to the misbegotten youth on this one, and agree to a great deal of cheese factor) is what helps make it so damned fun to watch.

Borrowing heavily from the 1924 Raoul Walsh version, this Korda spectacular goes beyond the grandeur of that already quite grand film (the special-effected fantasy scenes in the original silent are well ahead of their time to begin with), and gives us something that can be placed among the greats of that early fantasy genre - topping nearly everything in that same said genre, save for The Wizard of Oz and King Kong (though it can certainly be spoken of, agreeably so, in such company).   Yet, no matter how epic and swashbucklery this movie gets, with its visual opulence and stimulating colouring (foreshadowing the work Powell would eventually do with partner Emeric Pressburger over the next two decades), it is the performances of the young Sabu as the titular little thief (seven years before he would work with Powell again in The Archers' stunning Black Narcissus) and especially the perfectly cast and ever-evil-playing Conrad Veidt as the murderous Jaffar.

By this time, the German actor, having made his way out of Germany as part of the anti-Hitler exodus that also included such actors and directors as Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Peter Lorre, Douglas Sirk and others, had already made a name for himself playing the reluctant, tragic villains in both The Kabinet of Dr. Kaligari and The Man Who Laughs.  Here though, as the mythic personification of evil Jaffar, that reluctant part would be cast out of his villainous characterizations (just two year later, after making his way from the UK to the US, Veidt would play the Nazi officer, Major Strasser in the classic Casablanca).  Veidt here, even with the grandiose special effects and bigger-than-life djinn steals the show away.

A huge influence on those Disney imagineers when they made Aladdin (the character of Jaffar is drawn as a cartoonish dead ringer for Veidt) Korda's Thief of Bagdad is still as gorgeous now as it must have been on the screen back in 1940 - those misbegotten youths be damned.  A succulent, if not quite cheesy, masterpiece of fantasy cinema.

The Cinematheque Reviews: The King's Speech

Colin Firth should have won the Oscar last year for his devastating performance in A Single Man, but Jeff Bridges won it instead, for a performance that was well below his usual work (more of a we-never-gave-him-one-before Oscar).  Now both Firth and Bridges are up against each other again, but this time it is sure to go the other way, as Firth, though giving a fine performance indeed, will win his own we-never-gave-him-one-before Oscar.  None of this of course has nothing whatsoever to with the supposed quality (or lack thereof) of The King's Speech (as we all know - or should know - the Oscars rarely have anything to do with deserving accolades).  As far as my own personal opinion of the movie goes (the frontrunner for Best Picture as well btw), well, one would have to read my review to find that out (which, for your viewing pleasure, is conveniently linked just below).  For now let us just say it was better than expected but not as good as hoped for.

Read my review of The King's Speech at The Cinematheque.

My Quest To See the 1000 Greatest: Black Narcissus (1947)

Black Narcissus is #576 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films

Screened 09/10/10 on Blu-Ray at Midtown Cinema

Ranked #154 on TSPDT

*this is one in a series of catch-up reviews in my aforementioned quest (which should explain the rather old screening date above).

Can one truly describe a Powell/Pressburger film as batshitcrazy?  Does one dare?  Are The Archers above such a low class term?  Does their cinema transcend the insane and instead take its place in a more Heavenly, spiritual place of honour?  Probably, but I am going to stick with the term anyway.  Whether someone has this auteuristic team named as their religion on Facebook (and yes I do), and therefore puts them in the highest regard or not, the terms stays.  Batshitcrazy it is.

Seriously though, Black Narcissus, the film The Archers did just after their first masterpiece, A Matter of Life and Death, and just before their second (and greatest) masterpiece The Red Shoes, is a psychologically brilliant (though not quite masterpiece, for one does not want to overuse such a term, but awfully close I must say) look at faith and lust and love and how all three intertwine, often to dangerous, and quite inevitably tragic outcomes.  Set in a remote Himalayan mountainside makeshift convent, where an Indian general has offered his ancestral palace to a group of nuns (in actuality, a former brothel, which of course adds to the skewed juxtaposition of faith and sexual desire), Black Narcissus, starring Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Sabu, a young Jean Simmons and Kathleen Byron as the tragic Sister Ruth, plays out as a socio-religious thriller.  And in the hands of The Archers, and their regular cinematographer-extraordinaire Jack Cardiff, it plays out as a gorgeously photographed work of art as well.

But back to the batshitcrazy comment from the beginning of this piece.  The term comes into play with the erotic nature of the film, set against the restrictive Catholicism of its main characters. It is this very clashing of cultures and ideals (East vs. West, sexual desire vs. spiritual faith) that gives Black Narcissus its intensity - its batshitcraziness.  

Marina Warner, introducing the film on BBC2, called it a masterpiece:

"The suggestions continually hover on the brink of hyperbole. The film achieves its extraordinary impact by daring so much against all bounds of decorum, far in excess of realism. The crimson lipstick Sr. Ruth applies turns her into a kind of werewolf, the kittenish wiles of Jean Simmonsalso convey, in a different mode, a fantasy of female sexual appetite. The crazed and sometimes cruel flapping of Angu Ayah adds yet another flourish to the portrait of female hysteria. In this convent, this house of women, all the women are mad."

And later:

"Again and again Powell submits Sr. Clodagh to visitants from the world of chaos and passion she has foresworn in order to touch her, shake her, break her down. First and foremost David Farrar's Mr. Dean, all bare, hairy legs, insolence and roguish eyes, erupts into her convent, the spirit of maleness embodied. The holy father in the grounds issues a mute challenge to her faith. Luxury, desire, pleasure, humiliation all thrust in upon her in the forms of the young General with his emeralds and perfumes, and of Kanchi, the young Jean Simmons in dark panstick with a jewel in her nose, and Katrhleen Byron's famous pent up, ravening portrayal of Sr. Ruth finally holds up a mirror of the abyss into which Sr. Clodagh too might fall, and indeed only just escapes in more ways than one. As in Clarissa, Samuel Richardson's classic novel about prolonged seduction and embattled virtue, Powell pits the chaste and steely Deborah Kerr against all these assailants and watches her thrash about with relish. While Lovelace had to rape Clarissa to achieve his end, Powell only has to show that Mr. Dean was right and Sr. Clodagh was mistaken. The ending of Black Narcissus vindicates the world against the cloister, libido against superego, male against female."
 

To end on a quote from the man responsible for the film itself, in Michael Powell's own view this was the most erotic film he ever made. "It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image from beginning to end. It is a film full of wonderful performances and passion just below the surface, which finally, at the end of the film, erupts."

An Education Reviewed at MovieZeal

I first saw Lone Scherfig's An Education in NYC about a month or so ago.  Now, finally, it has made its way to Midtown Cinema here in Harrisburg.  I suppose that means it is about time for a published review - so here it is.  It is incidentally, my seventh review written for MovieZeal.  As far as the movie itself goes, it is a serious mood piece.  Well, a comic-serious mood piece, but whatever.  Scherfig has created something that is a stunning period-pitch set piece.  Designed with a unique flare that makes it seem both more real (an honest portrayal of late fifties/early sixties London) and more cinematic (it is a dreamlike fantasy world) than most movies of its ilk.  Granted, the film is let down a bit by Nick Hornby's loquacious yet cliche'd screenplay, but pulled up again by the central performance of Carey Mulligan as Jenny.  It's a role that could win this twenty-four year old newcomer an Academy Award for Best Actress.  But enough of that.  Read my review if you want any more.

Read my review of An Education at MovieZeal.

Pirate Radio Reviewed at The Cinematheque

It was called The Boat That Rocked when it first opened in the UK.  Now its name has been changed (I personally liked the UK title much better) and nearly twenty minutes have been excised from the running time (mostly the parts that fleshed out characters and gave a certain amount of depth to the rather light-hearted story).  Welcome to America Pirate Radio.  Still though, truncated or not (I certainly prefer the UK version, now out on DVD across the pond) the film still manages to elicit a boatload of fun.  And yes, that very bad pun is used by one character in the movie.  And what a killer diller soundtrack.  Rock & Roll people, Rock & Roll indeed.

Read my review of Pirate Radio at The Cinematheque.

1948 in New York City (cinematically speaking that is)

Okay, it's actually 2009.  November 7, 2009 to be exact, but it felt as if I were transported back to 1948.  Why, you ask?  Well, I'll tell you.  The two films that - by large margin - hold the top spots in my list of the best films of 1948 were playing on the same day in the same city and this avid - or should I say rabid - cinephile (damn those who say the term is long out of vogue!) was able to see both films on the big screens of two Manhattan art houses.

The first was Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, playing at Lincoln Plaza Cinema.  As the black and white print popped and hissed and stuttered a bit at times - as old 35mm prints are apt to do - the nearly sold out crowd laughed, gasped and awed at what is undoubtedly one of the greatest films ever made.  I had never seen the film on anything larger than a 40 some inch TV and it was an amazing feeling to do so.  To watch poor Antonio desperately searching for his stolen bicycle, and thus his very livelihood, was a strange melange of heartbreak and cinephiliac giddiness.  But we were just getting started.

As I boarded the D train bound for The Village and then proceeded to make my way down Sixth Ave toward Houston and in turn, Film Forum, my heart began racing a bit.  Then a bit more.  And then a bit more.  It may sound ridiculous and quite dramatic (I do have a penchant for the overdramatic at times) but I was shaking with some weird sort of uber-anticipation as I drew closer and closer to the cinema.  And there it was on the marquee - Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes.  

Lucky for me I had bought my ticket online the night before because as I entered the cinema the glaring, somewhat obnoxious sign read 7:00 show sold out.  Shortly after this the even more obnoxious sign went up reading 9:45 show sold out.  It was great to see so much interest in The Red Shoes (as damn well there should be!) but if I hadn't already had ticket in hand I would have probably dropped to my knees right there on Houston and wept like a child.  In fact the picture below of the lovely Moira Shearer would have been my reaction if I had not already procured my golden ticket.  I did tell you I had a penchant for the overdramatic.

So, to get back to my story of cinephiliac glory (overdramatic again), I entered the very crowded theatre - about eleven minutes prior to showtime - and took my seat in the front row.  Legs outstretched and head resting on my seatback, the lights went down and the projector motor whirred from the back of the theatre.  After a trailer for the soon-to-be-released 35mm restoration of M. Hulot's Holiday (opening at Film Forum on 11/20) The Red Shoes began and I (overdramatizing once again) was in Heaven.

Martin Scorsese called The Red Shoes, "The greatest technicolor film ever made." and I whole heartedly agree with the great filmmaker and fellow cinephile.  This was going to be the closest thing to a religious experience this semi-agnostic, ordained minister (yes, I really am) has ever had.  The vivid blues and reds and greens and yellows were mesmerizing as I stared in wonder at the glowing screen.  By the end, my legs and back (and yes, my buttocks) were aching but it mattered not for I was able to watch the effervescent, the gorgeous, the remarkable Moira Shearer dance her dance all the way to what is probably the greatest (and most tragic) finale a movie has ever had.

With cinephiliac orgasm in tow, I left Film Forum and made my way home - after a quick bite with my lovely wife Amy and her friend Molly - and dreamt of the greatest technicolor film ever made.  Fin.