Swept Away vs. Swept Away (1974/2002)

Directors: Lina Wertmüller/ Guy Ritchie

Screenplays: Lina Wertmüller/ Guy Ritchie

Cast: Giancarlo Giannini as Gennarino Carunchio, Mariangela Melato as Raffaella Pavone Lanzetti, Riccardo Salvino as Signor Pavone Lanzetti

Madonna as Amber Leighton, Adriano Giannini as Giuseppe Esposito, Bruce Greenwood as Tony Leighton

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

Swept Away as a premise is a problematic one - in which a spoilt rich wife of a businessman and a working class male crew member of a sailing boat are stranded on an island - but only depending on how it's made. Bear in mind the original, which is more transgressive as the crew member Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini) is a misogynist who uses the scenario to dominate over a businessman's wife Rafffaella (Mariangela Melato), is made by one of the few women working consistently in that era, Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmüller whose willingness to tackle complex material I witnessed in Seven Beauties (1975), one part sex comedy as the lead is a woman crazed chauvinist, only to be set in World War II and evoke concentration camps as our lead is shipped off to a work camp, as bleakly as it should be depicted. That particular film made her the first woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, which is a big detail to consider). Wertmüller wouldn't just make a film like this, to be blunt, as a female artist unless that uncomfortable misogyny of Gennarino, as Rafffaella becomes seemingly subservient on the island, with even an attempted mock rape taking place, unless that's the point of discussion.

And Swept Away, tragically the only Lina Wertmüller film ever released in the United Kingdom during the DVD era, is complicated and uncomfortable, also a film made in the turbulence of seventies Italy and hence unlike any modern day film in that, like a lot of films from that era (even pure genre films), it's made in a country that was turbulent in its history at the time, and as a result unspooled in films like this. Gennarino is a communist and his punishment of Rafffaella is excused by him as punishing capitalism, Rafffaella shrill as Melato plays her as obnoxiously as possible at the beginning. His apparent justification is suspicious even before he's revealed to be a bad human being too. That he eventually falls in love with her adds to the tension.   

Now this is where we should introduce the 2002 remake, as probably the only reason the film was likely released in the UK (by Arrow Films before they were a boutique powerhouse) was because of the infamy of when Guy Ritchie and his then wife Madonna remade this film. Ritchie came to be through crime films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), and whilst he has made tangents in his career and a stint helming Disney's Aladdin (2019), probably the only infamous change from his bread and butter of crime stories were the notorious one-two punch of this film, and Revolver (2005), which is a crime film but a metaphorical attempt at a cerebral one, which would have to be covered for another day.

Madonna, not to be confused with the Virgin Mary, is the legendary pop musician whose entire career just in terms of flirting with cinema is worth an entirely different discussion, her chameleonic career even in music in general as much part of this. Ever since the Vogue music video she has kept knocking at the door of cinema¹, and as she has changed her appearance and tone with her music, likewise the cinematic interactions have too. This was an older Madonna, no longer the Marilyn Monroe stand-in of Vogue or the esoteric Kabala obsessed singer of the nineties, the time of embracing English culture through Ritchie, staring in one of the worst James Bond films ever made Die Another Day (2002), and having already worked with Guy Ritchie on The Hire, a series of BMW sponsored shorts². This was clearly meant to be a way for her to be depicted as an erotic woman too, as whilst its toned down from the original movie, Swept Away still has occasional sights of nudity contrasted with the male lead no longer being the hairy and burly Gennarino, but a very hunky co-star Adriano Giannini with his shirt usually off.

The remake is just okay for most of its length, pretty much a straight forward remake. Its notable Adriano Giannini replaces Giancarlo Giannini, replacing an everyday guy, whose Sicilian origins are explicably part of the tension against a Northern Italian woman, with a hunk for a romantic drama. Giannini was over the top but even in terms of a troubling story, the 1974 film was designed as such that his moral righteousness was being attacked, as he is able to make Rafffaella beg for fish as he is capable of surviving on the island whilst she cannot, shown as a hypocrite alongside little details fed to us onwards. Adriano Giannini is toned down, not a misogynist whilst deliberately cast to be attractive and be part of the goal to promote Madonna. And yes, before there's any confusion, Adriano is Giancarlo Giannini's son, which adds such a peculiar relationship with the films as they mirror each other even in terms of bloodline.

Madonna herself isn't good, let's get that out the way now. Mariangela Melato is over the top and exaggerated anyway, but Madonna is considerably wooden in comparison. The clear desire to worship her is where I have to ask what possessed Guy Ritchie and Madonna to remake such a dark and uncomfortable film thinking it's perfect romantic melodrama. The 1974 film could look at first like a sex comedy, but over two hours it's a slow burn of festering drama, taking its time before the leads even get on the island. The 2002 film, at only ninety or so minutes, is bright and sunny, even finding a way to turn into a music video where Madonna, in a fantasy on the island, turns into a cabaret singer backed by a full jazz band as she produces odd objects like a rabbit as a comparison to her song. As an attempt to show her as still glamorous, it is a paradox. She was and still is glamorous, but the film itself is deeply inappropriate as she is meant to be obnoxious, off putting at first, with the sense of this just being another dead end in a career in cinema which never hit the ground running.

Oh, and the remake still has it that Madonna is to be forced to be subservient to this macho man, even if it means her being slapped or recreating the mock rape scene, chased until he can pin her down in a sand dune, rip her clothes off and then denying her sex when she "changes" her mind. The original film clearly has layers and [Major Spoiler] there's a real sense Rafffaella is manipulating Gennarino as he thinks he has won her. The very egregiously wrong minded nature of the 2002 film only takes place halfway through, that it plays this premise as accurate as before, with these dark and discomforting moments, but eventually as a tragic romance.

That is where the film jut goes from merely existing, baring a spark in brightness seeing Bruce Greenwood of John From Cincinnati (2007) as Madonna's husband, to being a misguided and awful as its notoriety suggests. The original Swept Away leaves you with no one sympathetic but not in an empty nihilistic way, difficult but with a lingering sense of complexity. Swept Away the remake gets soppy and maudlin in this love based on submission being broken up, which just reads with so many wrong messages in the modern day. Certainly, this is not held as a high point for either Guy Ritchie or Madonna, who'd separate years later. For the original, this is just one point in the career of Lina Wertmüller, sadly under seen least here in England but highly regarded especially in the United States, getting a special Academy Honorary Award in 2019 with photos showing a ninety plus veteran with Quentin Tarantino and Greta Gerwig at the ceremony. Whilst her Swept Away will be too uncomfortable for some, and the acting exaggerated to an extreme, it's at least a complex take on politics, gender and class set within seventies Italy that you could only get from that era, and stands out as something to behold.

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1) I cannot attest to real knowledge of her music, as of 2020 not well versed in the slightest, but the films and music themselves are out there to consider and learn of.

2) The Hire shorts are of interest. A handful of legendary filmmakers - among them Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai, John Frankenheimer, Tony Scott etc. - allowed carte blanche to make car related chase and action films, as long as they use the BMV and make it look awesome, with all of them starring Clive Owen as the mysterious nameless driver who is the protagonist, whether he's driving Madonna around or, in Scott's, racing for the soul of musician James Brown from the Devil played by Gary Oldman.

Terror Toons 3 (2015)

Director: Joe Castro

Screenplay: Joe Castro and Steven J. Escobar

Cast: Herschell Gordon Lewis as Himself; Beverly Lynne as Cindy; Lizzy Borden as Candy; Lizet Garcia as Sheriff Hate; Jonah Nemetz as Red; Brashaad Mayweather as Bad Wolf

In 2002 director and practical effects designer Joe Castro made Terror Toons, an incredibly low budget slasher film about killer cartoon characters. Come 2007, Terror Toons 2 was pretty much a remake of the original, in which Satan (or Satan's son in that film) has decided to release deadly cartoon DVD compilations into the world. Terror Toons 2 was this premise with a larger cast, a significantly larger body count¹, but still a micro budget production which relied on computer effects and superimposition, ones obviously artificial. The only real change was that the sequel introduced a desire to take fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel in that film, and pervert them. It's a film that, even though I confess that the original Terror Toons wasn't my cup of tea, does feel like under the shadow of the prequel which was at least the first and distinct. Literally it's a remake in many ways but trying to boost off an idiosyncratic work in itself I had a strange nostalgia for.

Terror Toons 3 is something completely different.

I had some inkling of this - I was intrigued by the trailer in its hyper artificial computer effects drowned form - but I wasn't expecting something this unpredictable, grotesque and utterly bonkers. The detail to bear in mind, which isn't promoted in the trailer, is that under seventy minutes the film has an unconventional structure, that it beings with the recapping of footage from the original Terror Toons, before attempting to set the film the same day of the events from a film made thirteen years previously. It was a challenge when Halloween II (1981) followed Halloween (1978) just in Jamie Lee Curtis' hair, but this was a considerable risk here. Castro went as far as cast all the actors, who were already clearly adults playing teens back then, even if it means bringing them back to life. Since we were last with them, Beverly Lynne has been in a lot of softcore, whilst porn actress/director Lizzy Borden had ended up in jail between the films, due the an obscenity trial against the transgressive porn films she was directing into the 2000s, to which she was released in 2010 and back to projects including this film.

Ironically, it's not even worth bringing up whether they have noticeably aged or not, as Terror Toons 3 is barely about those characters baring a cameo. Instead the film is divided into two. The first piece are the reincarnated antagonists of the original film, Dr. Carnage and his killer monkey assistant, going on a bloodbath rampage in a hospital. The second piece has splatter film innovator and exploitation legend Herschell Gordon Lewis, in one of his last onscreen apperances before his 2016 passing, narrate a twist on fairy tales where Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf are two male friends being targeted by the Three Little Pigs, i.e. a corrupt trio of cops.

The fairy tale is the actual film as it takes up most of the length and, amusingly, Terror Toons 3 leaves on a "To Be Continued" with the Dr. Carnage and Max Assassin story, which is just a string of gore and perversion. The fairy tale itself has Red Riding and his homestead, a group of red hooded gang members and a grandmother played by an old man, eventually getting into a brawl with the evil cops. I will get to the aesthetic of the film later on, but suffice to say it's a fascinating and perverse experience, absolutely not for anyone but one I found actually unique even if I felt dirty afterwards. Castro has an eccentricity which clearly grew over a decade, playing to both a desire for misanthropic humour and grotesque splatter, less torture porn now like the first Terror Toons but overt lunacy here, in which eventually not even cannibalising bodies to hide the evidence will work as they all collect together into an Eldritch blood blob monstrosity of CGI. Even the world of this fairy tale looks like a horrifying video game downloaded off the deep web, clearly aware that it doesn't look realistic in the slightest, and making the viewer want to feel queasy with distorting actors or a world of giant creepy teddy bears on the side of streets.

Terror Toons 3 as a result is significantly weirder than any before, here a film that is frankly grimy as Castro fully embraced superimposed sets and deliberately fake inserts and distortions over time after dabbling with them for the first two films. I originally referenced the Black Hole Sun music video for Soundgarden for the original Terror Toons, but now I can legitimately make a comparison to *Corpus Callosum (2002) and make it stick, a sadly difficult to see film by Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow. *Corpus Callosum was a series of vignettes, set around mostly an office, where Snow deliberately used fake and cheaper looking computer effects to mutate and distort the human body, open to crude jokes such as an ever growing giant cock.

This exactly applies to Terror Toons 3 but even more rancid and nasty on purpose, not as despairingly nihilistic as The Summer of the Massacre (2012) thankfully, but the tone finally out of the trilogy fitting the darker streak Castro has with his splatter. Also aptly there's giant cock here too, giant werewolf cock as among the many things that will boogle the mind as it manages to come up with ideas even I had to have a double take on and admire in its sick originality. The Red Riding Hood story is proud of this, alongside also a clear camp edge belied that Lewis, who even here is a charismatic man who could wax lyrically about good business practice, was hired like a macabre horror show host holding a homemade evil looking text, or the cops (including a strict female leader) not just eat doughnuts when we first meet them, but have them cut in half and filled with chilli and cheese. There's another drag actor following on from a reoccurring trend in Castro's work, here playing a female Robocop, and probably the most overt homoeroticism I have encountered so far as, whilst there is some female nudity and a woman inflated into a giant skyscraper sized breast, here's a lot of topless manflesh and werewolf cock, the fake exaggerated kind or real. This even includes an actor superimposed humping a giant actress's leg in a moment so kinds of fucked up it has to be applauded even if it feels wrong to.

The story does get illogical - a random witch cameo near the end even gets a baffled reaction from the leads of the fairy tale segment - but it is a strangely compelling experience, the extremity of the aesthetic interspaced with practical effects. This applies as much to the other half, the massacre at the hospital which is really a series of CGI exaggerated set pieces with no conclusion, in which Dr. Carnage returns as a constantly reforming giant monstrosity, and the effects in the midst of the CGI tampering are spectacular, one in mind the creature inside Dr. Carnage's body making everything work whilst looking like a horrifying plus toy. That example is among the many that show Castro's work has jumped beyond what he was doing with the first two films, not dismissing the work he has probably done outside this trilogy since before the franchise, but that he's worked on it further in this context and world. Even the CGI, if you accept it, has an immensely surreal effect now, such as setting up a shot of a toy vehicle for a baby, only to have it later as a giant object ploughing through victims in a hospital corridor.

That it doesn't have an ending, baring carnage having taken place, does pose an issue as there never was a Terror Toons 4 in the 2010s. The fairy tale does end, with Herschell Gordon Lewis befittingly regretting trying to cook a pig's head, a final scene he'd have probably found great, but it's curious that Joe Castro clearly had plans to continue this series, like to pepper in more perverse fairy tales, only for that not to happen¹.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Perverse/Psychtronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

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1) Joe Castro really likes to up his ante in body count numbers, as Terror Toons 3 shows and that The Summer of the Massacre would break a Guinness World Record for the largest body count.

2) At the time of this review, in February 2020, it does list on IMDB that Terror Toons 4 & 5 are in post production, with Lizzy Borden's twitter account informing readers that number four is actually about to be released in a moment of synchronicity at the time this review will be up. I will leave this review with curiosity of if they are released and what to expect....

The Wandering Soap Opera (2017)

Directors: Raul Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento

Screenplay: Raúl Ruiz and Pía Rey

Cast: Luis Alarcón, Patricia Rivadeneira, Francisco Reyes, Roberto Poblete , Liliana García, Mauricio Pesutic

How befitting Raul Ruiz as a director, when he made a career of characters that even when passed from the mortal plain still wandered around the living, who made over a hundred plus films in his life as elaborate labyrinths and mysteries in themselves, still releases films long after his 2010 passing. This is entirely due to him having so many fragments he recorded to film, secret productions that may still be uncovered or just known about online filmographies and yet to be fully available, but it is a specific virtue he can now add to his reputation, his widow and fellow filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento making such an admirable effort in finishing unfinished projects like this with the advantage that she was his editor for many of his productions since the beginning. With a career full of dreams within dreams and mysteries, he feels the right person to become a ghost who can still release cinema in the 2020s, as an unfinished 1967 production next to be premiered at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival. Even the fact that Orson Welles has managed this feat, releasing The Other Side of the Wind (2018) decades after his mortal passing, feels symbolic as Ruiz influenced by him.

The Wandering Soap Opera itself is vignettes with actors playing multiple roles. It was one of many workshop projects as Ruiz would in his career also teach, becoming a film studies professor even at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland for a brief period alongside two volumes of film theory texts. The workshops being filmed isn't surprising in a career of a man who worked regardless of the type of project or any restrictions.

The most prominent historical detail, which adds a lot of context to this project, is that this was made the first time Ruiz set foot back in his home country again after fleeing in the seventies at the beggining of the Pinochet regime, Augusto Pinochet leading a dictatorship that would end in 1990 when a 1988 national referendum voted against him extending his rule a further eight years. Fleeing his country with his wife Sarmiento led him to France, eventually working in various multi-national projects over the eighties onwards to the end of his career. The Wandering Soap Opera is a film that, whilst a fun series of odd fragments, has a darker side which makes sense learning this detail. It says a lot that, with chapters with titles, one is a quote by Ruiz himself saying that when you die, you could be stuck being a Chilean.

The title refers to this being a Chile, as the initial idea was, where it was all actually a giant telenovelas, a special form of soap opera found in Latin American countries. Whilst there are differences, soap operas are something which the English like myself can attest to the powerful aura of and see his idea for implementing this, as TV magazines are devoted in their covers to the lives of fictitious characters played by actors as if real people, in decades long ongoing "soaps" like Eastenders (1985) which rarely end if successful. Ruiz takes it to an extreme where everyone in Chile is in a soap opera, sometimes watching other people in other soap operas, even soap operas entirely devoted to watching to soap operas and commenting on them. Effectively Raul Ruiz predicted Gogglebox (2013-), a British series entirely about ordinary families being watched watching TV shows viewers also watch and commenting on them which has lasted at least seven years.

There's no sense whether anyone has a job outside from being in these soap operas, and everything has a sense of a) being in a heightened absurdity in Ruiz's mind, and b) a sense of everyone being watched by everyone else, which just evokes the dictatorship that existed a year before this film's initial creation. Some of the skits explicitly show this, the first segment in-between a man trying to seduce another man's wife and showing her his muscles, i.e. producing two pieces of meat out into her hand and offering to eat them raw with lemon with her, hinted at this with them aware they might be watched. (Even the joke, when the husband appears, that he's more concerned about the lemons likely being poisoned, alongside a whole array of lemons of various shapes or just other types of fruit, suggest paranoia of a metaphorical level). One of the soap operas, watched by a star of another show and a man (who turns into a priest and another person by an edit on the sofa) leads to him pointing out the humane rules of torture of the Catholic Inquisition, that they made sure the families were warned ahead of time and the tortured still had to be able to leave on their feet, juxtaposed by only sound and dialogue of the programme they are watching involving people being tortured and crucified.

The best segment for myself too is entirely explicit in what it is parodying, in which one duo of political assassins get killed by another as they procrastinate trying to write a note about their political message over their slain targets, only for the other duo to procrastinate about their message and be killed by another pair of assassins and so forth until its repeated ad nauseum to ridiculous lengths. The Wandering Soap Opera beyond this is a very whimsical work with moments of darkness, reflected in the fact that this is Sarmiento's film as much as her husband's, bookmarked by behind the scenes footage of his filming, one that reflects his reoccurring motifs between light weird humour and darkness. The later is found prominently in moments like a soap opera within a soap opera where young wives discover their husbands have died (their ghosts wandering past) only to decide to stay as a friendship of young widows. The lightness is found continually, such as the segment of people who all have "H" at their forename which eventually leads to someone growing tiny eggs out of their person (which are eaten) to the titular Wandering Soap Opera, a Turkish melodrama whose heckling as an outside program feels like a comment on xenophobia in itself.

The production, even in mind that this was a workshop originally, looks handsome with the additional symbolic weight that this and The Golden Boat (1990), a production in the United States, feel like the tail end of Ruiz's eighties period. That was a decade which managed to be more prolific and bizarre than even than any other of his, involving the fact he could make up to over four productions a year at his peak, alongside crystallising trademarks such as bright coloured lighting (pinks here particularly in The Wandering Soap Opera) and striking visual set pieces. Eventually it gets to the point cast are on TV screens watching other TV screens, and this level of delirium is inspired. This is more significant as this is a rare case of being able to view a Raul Ruiz film as was intended, as my admiration for the director is confounded by the fact his eighties period let alone any other is usually available only by a low resolution VHS rip, versions online being the only way to see them.

Seeing The Wandering Soap Opera as intended, Ruiz had an incredible visual eye as much as in his ideas, a visual richness which was always happy to go for cheap visual techniques too as much as an incredibly heightened style, from shooting on everyday streets on location to an erotic dancer (the daughter of one of the characters in the audience) being only seen in silhouette. The result is special for me, and it's certainly abstract. Quieter than most I've seen by the director, who can be insanely surreal, but the format actually helps especially as the cast have multiple roles, everyone doing well with such idiosyncratic material, and providing the film an added weirdness in that everyone literally changes places and roles like soap opera cast members.

The final segment, involving male cast members with a piglet and a kitten and a rabbit whilst attempting a spiritualist channelling, ends the film on further dark humour and melancholy, death and two mysterious sewing women alongside a man appearing inside a crystal ball presenting his suicide note like a broadcast host. It perfectly encapsulates Raul Ruiz's style before the end credits. It's probably a film to tackle later if you are new to him, due to the archival context, and sadly it's a film not likely to be as easily accessible as one hopes, just for the fact that Raul Ruiz is still despite his reputation not as highly regarded (and accessible) as he should be. But I've nothing by happiness that it exists and I saw it. Knowing another film is to be restored and finally released in the 2020s, and that there's probably more material Valeria Sarmiento is going to find from her husband, adds to his enigmatic aura for the better especially as he was a great director already.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Surreal/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

The Bride of Frank (1996)

Director: Steve Ballot

Screenplay: Steve Ballot; Allan Galperin; Billy Moran and Alley Ninestein

Cast: Frank Meyer as Frank; John Kolendriski as Johnny Horizon; Rena Ballot as Miss Grimble; Arnell Dowret as Dennis / Mother; Steve Ballot as Vichelli; Eric Kaplan       as Tony the Thumb; Eddie Regan as Louie the Loan; Sal Mogavero as Sal the Mouth; Bernard Briley as Bernard the Tongue; Sergio Lopez as El Pulpo; Chick Carter as The Nerd / Edna / Bob; Alley Ninestein as Aphrodite

The best way to describe The Bride of Frank is what happens if Jim Hoskins' The Greasy Strangler (2016), a divisive film based upon awkward torturous comedy and strange grotesque humour, wasn't deliberately made to be provocative by someone more known for watching art films but an entirely unknown quandary whose awareness of the joke cannot be attained, but making a vulgar film for the hell of it. Certainly, this was a passion project as director/co-writer/co-star Steve Ballot never made anything else after.

Though its ultimately revealed as a dream sequence, the opening where an old dishevelled man (who we will come to know is the titular Frank) picks up a young girl in a truck, gets angry when she doesn't want to kiss him, and runs the child over with fake head crushing practical effects gives away what to expect with this dirty little micro budget production.

Shot in New York City, this old man when he wakes up is revealed to be a formerly homeless man who works at a trucking company, the kind of man who hordes cats in the office he is allowed to live in and washes his underwear (still covered in brown strains) with a toothbrush. Frank is clearly played by a non-actor, who they even have to subtitle onscreen as his voice can be difficult to discern. From then on, don't expect the politically correct and always expect the unexpected as, grimier than a sewage pipe, along with his friend and colleagues Frank goes on his way to his desire of meeting a girl with big breasts, to the point of his manager putting a dating ad in a newspaper. Unfortunately for any woman who follows through with the ad and meets him, anyone who angers him he kills, all with a super strength that is belied by him visibly being an older man who has lived.  

Clearly not shot on video, but with computer added text onscreen of the era, you could also make comparisons to John Waters but this film is considerably meaner. Waters for all the transgression he had in his work, infamously managing to convince real life friend Divine to eat actual dog faeces on camera, still loved even reprobates and deviants, a kind man with a big perverse heart. The Bride of Frank feels nastier, where there's grotesqueness in how characters are depicted until a major plot I will talk about later. At first, it's really sordid. Be it the woman who answers Frank's ad being a gay stereotype in disguise that gets beat up and mutilated, played by an actor who earlier played a stereotypical geek who gets maimed and killed for wandering in on Frank's birthday party and insulting him. Or the manager being slime as he tricks a Jewish woman by claiming to be Frank and even pretending to be a Jewish mother, in-between gross close ups of his teeth, affirming Frank is a stand out guy. Or the childhood flashback for Frank which gets weird. I think in truth a lot of this film's content it is tonally inconsistent with itself or with a heavy reliance on shock without camp.

Some of it would just come off as being meant to be funny in a way that's questionable now, like that gay stereotype, but other aspects revealed complicate this film considerably. A tangent of a bed ridden old woman ringing Frank is a sweet moment which catches you off guard. That the band at the end scene at a wedding includes guys in drag does so to, or that Frank's mother is also played by a man. The scene stealing actress who, though her song to Frank that he's not her type is cruel, is actually sung by her in a full operetta voice whilst she even juggles halfway through was glorious to see. Then there's the fact that, whilst Frank is played as a monster for most of the film, he does meet his true love in a woman in her fifties or sixties, which to any viewer's surprise leads to an actual happy ending which is totally incongruous in how sweet it is, with a day out in local New York City on the streets for good measure.

Really the issue here is whether it was all intentionally shocking, in on the joke and/or if everyone's aware of the joke. The Bride of Frank does not have a retrospective documentary, so you have to ask how with some difficult what is deliberately knowing shock value, as with a film like Street Trash (1987) which was purposely out to offend everyone and has a retrospective documentary, and what might've been the people on the set improvising with what they have. This tonal shift issue is a virtue to wanting to see where The Bride of Frank does next, but a huge flaw too as it also means you have to ask what the point was.

Unlike even a Street Trash, closer to John Waters, is that whilst the acting can be rough, and a few people need onscreen subtitles, a commitment to casting people who you rarely see in Hollywood and even b-movies cinema is a virtue. This is real New York here, places rarely seen in dank alleyways and streets people work on, where the most glamorous person is an erotic female dancer, likely a real employee whose job is that. A lot of it is natural, both in grossness in the literal cat shit in the corridor sort of way, the natural interesting world in the carnival attraction Frank brings his romantic interest to. This if anything else is the real thing to take from The Bride of Frank as it's not exactly abstract, mostly a string of scenes strung together only to eventually tie together somehow, still memorable regardless of this. Authentic grime, just odd to witness and your acquired tastes would have to be very specific for this to work in any way.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Love on a Leash (2011)

Director: Fen Tian

Screenplay: Fen Tian

Cast: Jana Camp as Jana; Aneese Khamo as Prince; Gloria Winship Ayon as the Mother; Shane Ayon as the Store Owner; Michaelina Lee as the Friend

[Major Spoilers Throughout]

The cover of this straight-to-DVD film looks ridiculous - a blonde woman hastily put together with a Labrador in a suit, holding a leash in its mouth and extending a paw out. For whatever reason, it's developed a little cult specifically on the film website Letterboxd, the reason why I even learnt of this film in the first place. It's a dumbfounding project, and as the 2010s leaves us it is littered with these oddities, this up there alongside The Evil Within (2017) and Flexing with Monty (2010) in the level of strangeness, but when one was a Getty using his millions to make a film, the other an unfinished psychodrama of perversity and Catholic guilt, Love on a Leash is a very low budget and haphazardly made interpretation of the Princess and the Frog with a dog.

The first question to ask is who director -writer Fen Tian is. There's not a lot on Tian barring the fact her IMDB talks of her having one acting role, a tiny one, in The Joy Luck Club (1993) and that she made one other film beyond her debut, Forbidden Kiss (2012).  The production company Fenix Pictures who made the film is better known for many films of Ulli Lommel, the former Rainer Werner Fassbinder collaborator who became a director but eventually made a lot of straight to DVD horror this is not highly regarded. There's also a suspicion, beyond the many issues and aspects of Love on a Leash to deal with, that there's a cultural barrier at hand with this Chinese-American production. Tales with this idea, of a man who is turned into a dog before the film and can only change if he finds love, do exist in the West, but this type of modern day folklore tale is not commonly adapted in Hollywood films anymore barring a joke, let alone this elaborate and eventually getting into doomed love. A lot of this is just admittedly that, even if the tone found in Chinese cinema can be incredibly jarring in tone shifts for outsiders not used to it, this film is just strange without any real logical reason.

Love on a Leash is also quite a film of tragedy, belying its silly looking DVD cover. Before we even get into that however, you have a roughly put together work, and that's an understatement. A lot of Love on a Leash is a Frankenstein composite of scenes edited together with many improvised scenes surrounding a surprisingly well trained Labrador. It's a mess to be honest, probably one of the most technically disorganised I have seen even from someone who watches many low budget productions struggling against adversity.

There's also the dreadful decision to give the dog the voice, only heard by the viewer, of a chauvinistic arsehole who is meant to be funny. Out of everything in Love on a Leash, I adapted to how technically bad the film eventually but that creative decision to have a guy recording jokes at inappropriate moments is egregious, especially as he is a sexist pig for most of the film. Even when the character softens, and even becomes sympathetic as he learns humility onscreen, the version voiced in the other scenes is only acceptable when he abruptly starts to sing constantly.

Mostly this is egregious because, contrary to the look of the film, Love on a Leash is a depressing film whose tonal films are fascinating, ninety minutes an emotional rollercoaster between the presentation and then the various aspects of the film dramatically. It initially starts as the secondary tale of Jana (Jana Camp), a meek and henpecked young woman, on an incredibly peculiar start, where two tangents with two possible suitors involves two potential separate films, one effectively Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993), when her Chinese co-worker is a gay man wanting a fake marriage to hide his real self from his family, the other a perplexing tale in itself of adoptive families of matriarchal women against forced sterilisation and creepy Oedipal restrictions. That the film discards both, in favour of a plot that's just as perversely compelling, is a sign of this being something very different.

For starters, Jana's story gets dark, even if an attempted suicide by pills is undercut by the talking dog making jokes before and after whilst blundering about. The tone is a huge aspect with the film you need to adapt to even after you accept it's been cobbled together in post production to an extreme, with sound cutting around harshly or nonexistent for added dissonant effect. This is where you have broad stereotypes, like a broad foreign female neighbour trying to get the female lead to be hitched for her mother's sake, only to get bleak. Jana losing her friend, losing contact with her family, only because in spite of eventually a romance where the dog is finally able to turn into a stud Prince Charming, he can only become human at night because he wasn't sincere enough.

All of this is belied by the chaotic tonal shifts. It gets kinky - can a woman love a man who becomes man's best friend in the day, putting on a dog collar on him for sexy photos at some point never explained - and played for slapstick, such as the diner with her boss that goes amiss with her inexplicably falling into the swimming pool and needing canine rescue. Its chaotic keeping up with the film, which unlike many in this however never falls into a slump of predictable storytelling, which is the aspect which redeems this mess in many ways; so much is roughly put together, shots likely stolen and abruptly put together, even David Bowie's China Girl making an audio appearance with a sense it wasn't even paid for. There's always something in terms of a twist or an emotionally shocking plot point that is going to frustrate some viewers, be it all the depressing material where lead actress Jana Camp is continually crying or ridiculous, but is compelling nonetheless.

Production wise, many of the film feels like it was shot on a store bought camera with the most distinct trademark being the prominence of green in production design in Jana's apartment and some low budget computer effects, mainly due to the mysterious magical figure behind the dog's situation found at a duck pond in the park. There's an unexpected rawness to the film, particularly with the locations used in the film that in some cases do deserve credit for being distinct, particularly as there are clear excuses to show Chinese American culture which I am all in favour for, such as a gallery exhibition where memorably the dog is not allowed in to his annoyance.

The other thing Love on a Leash does that few films in this possible possess is to stick to its ambitions. "Bad" cinema, when viewed ironically or not, can have really generic plots, many ultimately bad in the truest sense as they have no convictions for taking risks. Love on a Leash is a rare exception that Fen Tian is playing for a bitter sweet tragedy, where a true love is stuck with a friction that cuts Jana off from her friends and family, with the dog even being run over and dying. I'd never expect a film like this, which is an utter mess, to suddenly warm the heartstrings when, in old age makeup, Jana will meet her true love again in the conclusion. There's clearly a story type here more in common with Asian cinema of the normalcy of the supernatural, which actually has to be applauded for its bravado. That's ultimately, somehow, why I admire Love on a Leash as one of the few films that can overcome such crippling technical flaws, and misguided creative decisions such as bad talking dogs making jokes, to be something honestly rewarding to sit through.

Abstract Spectrum: Bizarre/Psychotronic/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez! (2012)

Directors: Everything is Terrible!

Cast: Hundreds of dogs and James Belushi's reaction faces

To begin with, this compilation of existing footage comes from Everything Is Terrible, a video blogging website whose origins go as far back as 2000 but properly launched their website in 2007, collecting together various pieces of filmed ephemera, for YouTube and online videos, publics screenings and DVD releases. In this case they can be can be seen as cinema's version of "plunderphonics", a term especially with the group Negativland who used existing sources to subvert their content and wider meanings.

Everything Is Terrible were likely helped through their existence by the burgeoning fascination with eighties VHS culture, purveyors and archivists of all the bizarre self released material even into the nineties that was available in the United States, even commercial tapes from that era onwards that we look on in hindsight at on YouTube dumbfounded with. The British like myself know this through anything from exercise videos and instructional films, but the United States is a significantly bigger country, with a bigger industry, and Everything Is Terrible can also add to this the likes of public access television, able to draw on the religious (Christian work about a dog puppet praying to Jesus) to whatever odd things are possibly found at the back of a garage.

Poochiewoochies admittedly, in its tale to retell Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (1973) with dog videos, pulls from more Hollywood films and straight to video work, but when you see the likes of the dog message segments, that's the type of work EiT is famous for, cutting out some of the choice titbits alongside the most banal of dog films to create this production. Also, yeah, let's step back as The Holy Mountain in cult circles is a big film, Jodorowsky off the back of funding from the Beatles manager Allen Klein making a tale of spiritual discovery which was surreal and truly bizarre. The initial text is already weird, so this framework retold with dogs is admittedly intriguing. It is one of Doogiewoogiez's crutches to hinder it however as, whilst it could work perfectly as a template for an odyssey, it's barely used and vague here as a structure.

Why was it used? Possibly the idea of "God = Dog" joke and there is the scene where the group of followers wishing to become enlightened have their consciousnesses connected to an actual dog, a sequence whose sound clip to first person dog shots from various sources does work in Doogiewoogiez. As a result, the vagueness of the structure means this still requires the other film to work, which wouldn't be an issue weren't it not for the fact that it's left as a disjointed collection of pieces which can tire without context. The structural choice only works occasionally when it's explicitly pulling from the source material, including the introduction of those followers, who were given little stories each within The Holy Mountain, here used to go into segments such as dogs and sex, dogs in sports etc.

It does tap into the really questionable attitudes we have when it comes to our pets, and I say this as someone who grew up with dogs (specifically boxers) all my life and love them. Alongside our habit to fixate over animals even over fellow human beings - such as is the case with us British - alongside the complacent view we have about how unique human beings are. This works both ways as, in one of the best aspects of the film, the research done, you see just how much embarrassing material our four legged friends have had to put up with, be it being forced into costumes or a cavalcade of badly animated mouth movements plastered over their faces. Even before I consider my own opinions, that as there is no Dr. Doolittle available, and thus we cannot truly talk to dogs and gauge a similar intelligence to ours or not, the deep pit of dog films and television churned out since the dawn of cinema, be it monochrome scenes of dogs being dressed like cowboys to Marmaduke's artificial distorted facial features, is a real sign of how we've come to abuse this is cinema, even before the film shows all the times in fiction dogs were kicked, threatened with being shot or having a blowtorch to their face in stories.

I say this as someone who argues no idea, even a dog being allowed to play American football as in one film here, is inherently bad, and that a great funny dog film can be made, but that the evidence here shows all the ways we miss the mark without having to see the entire length of them. Some pretty infamous material makes its appearance. Poochinski (1990), a failed TV pilot about Peter Boyle being killed and returning back as an English bulldog puppet, or Karate Dog (2004), one of Bob Clark's last films about Chevy Chase as a dog who has eventually has a fight with Jon Voight in the finale. James Belushi also becomes the unofficial mascot for all the reaction shots he has over the film, all possibly because (like Cuba Gooding Jr and even older Vincent Price) he made one film involving a dog, K-9 (1989), which is gone to constnalty through the film for clips.

Many mainstream films like Snow Dogs (2002) and Air Bud (1997) appear. With all the narratives excised, you forget how bizarre a lot of these films are in hindsight, and there is a good moment where, in pain staking research, the same plot points are repeated together from these films, from child protagonists always losing parents to vague film disease/car crash incidents off-screen or how dog related genital/buttock trauma is a common joke throughout these films.

The reference to Negativland is appropriate as, honestly, there was many missed opportunities in terms of subverting their material. Negativland can be humorous but also hit salient points, and the only time Doogiewoogiez stands on that band's shoulders, heavy handed but perfectly justified, is the segment that starts with racial stereotypes (both dogs literally dressed as stereotypical African tribes people to the obsession with "urban" slang even from young male characters let alone dogs) before getting into the idea of dog breeds I myself have always had a concern about. The idea that the obsession with breeding exact breeds and marginalisation of "mongrels", if applied to human beings, would be eugenics, which EiT in their one great moment here don't pussyfoot around mocking, alongside bizarre clips like a British woman being interviewed and presuming because she has a Chihuahua, a dog of Mexican origins, it presumably likes Mexican food.

Mostly Doogiewoggiexz goes for obvious jokes, some choice cuts of weirdness that are too many to pick out, from farts being used to stop dog chupacabras, to dogs playing baseball. It does cause one to be amused that, in a hundred years, we've covered so much with dogs you can have the aforementioned brawl between Jon Voight and a CGI dog, or that certain actors like Cuba Gooding Jr. appear in these films in their long, varying careers. It's a shame the structure isn't enough still, the weakest material all the manipulation of used images into psychedelic video collage material, not exactly compelling to be frankly. The only aspect of those sequences, which look like the kind of online videos that became dime a dozen on YouTube, is how Harry the Bigfoot, from Harry and the Hendersons (1987), is an honorary member of that collage despite being a cryptozoological ape creature that the creators clearly were obsessed with since childhood.

The other issue is that frankly Doggiewoggiez is ironic to a fault. A sarcasm does feel pronounced throughout, and it's felt especially with the use of Christian material as there's always a cheapness to the humour, a laboured nature when the material itself, when bad, should be allowed to hang itself on its own petard, and other moments like the humanoid dog puppet who prays to God, who in scenes is panicked and scared, would be far more fascinating for me to see in their original context to unpick. Material like a young boy dancing and singing Magic Dance by David Bowie with actors in dog costumes, after a talking well has told him he can do so if he wishes to, is weird but there's a charm too, a production like this not realising that for every eyebrow raising and questionable piece there's others which are more sympathetic for me beyond taking lines of dialogue out of context for crude jokes or to be just laughed at. Yes, some of it deserves to be questioned, like Tim Allen in a family film being naked in front of his wife and kids after turning back from being a dog, but even the dippy and strange things like people who believing their dogs are psychics and reincarnated spirits are still human beings to be considered. And all of this is in knowledge that the project was always meant to be fun first; it's just that it needed to be more focused and sharper.

Abstract Spectrum: Kitsch/Psychotronic/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Benzina (2001)

Director: Monica Stambrini

Screenplay: Anne Riitta Ciccone, Monica Stambrini and Elena Stancanelli

Cast: Maya Sansa as Stella, Regina Orioli as Lenni, Mariella Valentini as Eleonora's mother, Luigi Maria Burruano as Padre Gabriele, Chiara Conti as Pippi, Marco Quaglia as Sandro, Pietro Ragusa as Filippo

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

Benzina, which translates to Gasoline, is a forgotten film that is of interest in hindsight to LGBT cinema, from an female Italian director, about a gay female couple who run a petrol shop. A premise that feels post-nineties in aesthetic, its a post-nineties work with a slick punkish energy. Benzina's closest contemporary is Bound (1996) which was made by the Wachowskis, who back then before they came out as transgender decades later could've accidentally made a crass film but even went as far have an advisor to get its depiction of its female characters right, all with a slick looking genre film that just happened to be about two women in love.

Certainly Benzina is stylish, not excessive but neither of the Italian neo realistic genre in the slightest. It wears this on its sleeve by having a print of Nina Hagen etched as a wall mural on the garage wall, a legendary East German post punk singer, and even references her in a character's backstory, in which Maya Sansa's Stella talks, as someone who didn't know her mother picturing Hagen as her instead. One particularly piece of aesthetic style is even made part of the plot with the main antagonists, two chauvinistic males, whose girlfriend tagging along has a film camera that is recording everything they see and we the viewers see through constantly.

Structurally, the film is set up with the mother of Lenni (Regina Orioli), enraged by her daughter living in a romantic relationship with another young woman named Stella (Sansa) running a garage, is accidentally killed, the pair trying to dispose of the body with setbacks in the way, including those two men who are encountered many times in increasing escalation of dangerousness just because, as two loud mouth chauvinists, they're initially set off by Stella scratching their car out of spite. The film never becomes over the top with this, and honestly never becomes dated either, with the obvious exception of the drum and bass soundtrack. That musical choice is definitely of the nineties but works nonetheless.

Benzina is a loosely plotted film, the roadblocks in the way of the main duos' plan continuous as their own drama is told, including even when they are stuck having to let a disillusioned Catholic priest hitch a ride, providing them a monologue about the falsity of love as they drive in urban Italy at night. Its meshing with genre cinema is poignant for the simple reason it is cantered around a romance between two female protagonists, the more strong minded Stella and the quiet Lenni, which is arguably still not common decades later still outside of LGBT productions as it should. The Bound comparison feels right as, like it, Benzina is entirely matter of fact about its protagonists being two women in love with each other, mostly shown in their interactions. The few times it's shown physically, as in Bound, are slight but erotic without being objectifying.

And credit to Orioli and Sansa, they stand out as the leads. In a film which plays to some obvious plot tropes done many times before even this film - being forced to move the body around, a car pursuit that eventually leads the leads to a giant indoor party in the middle of a field, and a lot of scenes at the garage including the tumultuous sequence of property damage for the climax - their relationship is always at the forefront, always about their conflicts in their relationship and the clear love for each other too. Even the main antagonists have a sense of why they are who they are due to toxic machismo, even the sexual threat not inappropriate but a result of problematic behaviour and the characters throughout the film being drunk on alcohol and later drugs, factors which make their dangerousness not cartoonish nor tasteless as they eventually get riled up and high on coke like a pair of obnoxious idiots who cross a line. That the film's McGuffin happens to be one of the main character's dead mother, for a character with clear emotionally issues which causes her to act erratically under immense trauma to the scenario, feels natural to the plot and of weight. Especially as Orioli, in vast contrast to Sansa's confident body language, plays the bespectacled and mousy woman in the couple who is visibly with personal issues, and does it well, she makes a lot of the conflicts and quirks in the way of their task credible.

Obviously, there is the issue that the film does end with a tragedy without spoiling too much. This is more of an issue due to many films having tragic endings for gay female characters, the unfortunate result of repetition and stereotypes rearing up in cinema that naturally would make this an issue. In Benzina's defence, even this has a triumphant blaze of glory attitude to it that is exhilarating. Beyond this, the result is a good film, one I'm surprised is this obscure. I learnt of it when, back in the 2000s getting into cinema, I collected magazines for DVD release news and reviews, once ago when that could actually be lucrative. The review for this when it was released was negative, but the little it talked of, of this transgressive film which described early on a death and puking, which does happen, caught my attention and lasted over a decade plus. It's not as transgressive as it was painted, but thankfully, Benzina was something of great interest to finally uncover. Sadly, whilst she has still made films to the current day, director/co-writer Monica Stambrini has become obscure as well.

Best of 2019: 10-1

A link to Part 1 here.

A link to Part 2 here.

A link to Part 3 here.

A link to Part 4 here.

And with this, we conclude with the following...

Bonus Entry: Sarazanmai (2019) [Global Streaming Premiere]

First of all though, I would kick myself not to mention the following, which has to have this special entry for the simple fact this is an eleven episode animated show, one whose co-director/creator Kunihiko Ikuhara is a true auteur, but is as a series an odd one out here just because (annoyingly) TV series get discounted off certain film listing sites.

Sarazanmai marks a great end to the 2010s for Ikuhara, whose after an absence in the 2000s, came back to directing anime in the 2010s with three truly unique television anime - Mawaru Penguindrum (2011), a complex and sprawling piece of surrealism explicitly dealing with the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway; Yurikuma Arashi (2015), explicitly about the persecution of gay women by way of a tale of a forbidden love between girl and girl-bear; and Saranzanmai, which is the first work of his which is entirely about a male cast, a magical realistic musical drama comedy in which three teenage boys are transformed into kappa, sent off to deal with ghosts who are manifestations of desires left to turn toxic.

The show, as with everything from Ikuhara, is significantly more complicated than this as beneath his pop surrealism, the auteur deals with very dark or/and adult material throughout his work, this one dealing with everything from anti-capitalist ideas, mocking Amazon with all the delivery box motifs, to a gay male character with a conflict in his love for another character, or two villains whose sympathies we gain when the pair, two male lovers, are in their own tragedy. Probably the one detriment to Sarazanmai is how brisk this show is at just eleven episodes, but it doesn't deny that it's an impressive return from the director I was grateful to see.

It's also utterly unique on a visual standpoint, constantly weird and hilarious, has musical numbers and manages, due to real life kappa mythology, have a plot point entirely about having to suck people's souls out of their anuses, which is even more hilarious as it was revealed Ikuhara didn't even let the producers know he was including that detail until the production started.

10. 24 Frames (2017) [UK Blu-Ray Premiere]

This top ten proper is going to run with two reoccurring themes, one of veterans in their older years making some of their best work, reflecting back on life, and the number of these inexplicably not readily available or shown in theatrical screenings. Thankfully, 24 Frames was released by Criterion in the USA and UK, so it's able to be seen.

The film also marks the fact that its creator, legendary Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, wasn't even able to fully complete the production as he died of cancer in 2016. The 2010s felt as if it was the legendary auteur going around the world - Certified Copy (2010) a puzzle set in Italy, Like Someone in Love (2012) in Japan - but it is sad that this never came to be.

He nonetheless left on a work as idiosyncratic as everything else, a man who gladly straddled naturalism and overt experimentalism, ending his filmography with what are living photographs, heavily reliant on computer effects but with a visible sense of the unnaturalness adding to the beauty of the material. It's not hard for me to create a parallel with the film that has the number one spot, which we will get to, in a number of reasons, but 24 Frames was a beautiful echo to a man with a great career in itself.

9. Let the Corpses Tan (2017) [Streaming Premiere in UK]

From the beauty to irritance, as probably one of the least explainable things is how the latest film from Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, who have been served well in the UK and got a US theatrical release for this production, had this unique film just dumped on Amazon Prime without even a barebones DVD release. This is the kind of thing that makes me leery eyed about the streaming boom, in the sense that we are going to be unfocused on actually making films readily available to the public in favour of just promoting your wares.

A shame as, starting off with reinterpreting the giallo genre in avant-garde form, Cattet and Forzani have managed to avaid becoming one trick ponies by switching to the poliziotteschi (Italian crime) genre and western motifs, interpreted through their delirium and experimental style following a film length shoot out between thieves and cops in the middle of nowhere. Brimming in surreal and sexy imagery, Cattet and Forzani haven't missed a beat, for me as a duo among the most consistent working filmmakers. It's just a shame about the poor treatment of this film in terms of distribution, especially as there are scenes here, golden shower and all, that would look sumptuous on the biggest theatrical (or home theatre) screen at hand.

8. The Wandering Soap Opera (2017) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]

And for another film that will be difficult to see, The Wandering Soap Opera offers the feat that whilst Raul Ruiz passed in 2010, he is still making films years later with one planned to be released in the 2020s. All entirely based on unfinished or unreleased projects, but Ruiz is like a character from a Jorge Luis Borges story in that, with all the tangents and labyrinths in just how his films were made let alone what was inside them, Ruiz was the perfect man perfect man to defy mortality and still direct, his widow (and filmmaker) Valeria Sarmiento committing to an accomplishment anyone can admire by making films like this available.

The Wandering Soap Opera offers a great example of a) how much Ruiz filmed to be able to accomplish this, and b) how he was the most extreme form of working director who gladly took projects, as this originates from a student workshop, one of many he helped work with over his life. It is also felt with greater significance as this was the first time the expat, who fled his homeland of Chile in 1973 due to the military coup d'état led by future dictator Augusto Pinochet, sat back forth on his home soil. This is found in this series of vignettes of their mix of dark humour and surrealism, even this little project having so much that stands out as inspired and lasting in memory, even a man offering a woman to see his muscles and dropping two pieces of raw meat in her hands. Especially seen in a restored version as intended, rather than a VHS rip as is usually the case in watching a Raul Ruiz film, it offers how much of an accomplished director he is. Bold colours, striking images from the unconscious and a lot of weirdness I had to appreciate.

7. Mektoub, My Love [Canto Uno] (2017) [UK Theatrical Premiere]

Out of this top ten, Abdellatif Kechiche's film is going to be the one that I will have to defend as its one many will probably have a negative reaction to. Immediately off the bat, the bigger concern for myself is the fiasco that surrounded the sequel of this apparent trilogy, Intermezzo (2019), that if the scandal is entirely truth means Kechiche crossed a line that I cannot find acceptable. If the accusation is true, that he coerced his main actress Ophélie Bau with a male actor into an explicit (possibly real) sex scene with alcohol, that it's disgusting and a black mark to a director whose work I have seen is exceptional. Even if this horrible aspect wasn't there, the film had such a negative reaction that its disappeared since its 2019 Cannes Film Festival premiere, with suggestions that Kechiche wants to cut out all of Bau's scenes in it, which is absurd knowing how much she is integral to the first film's many virtues.

Sticking to what is called "Canto Uno", barring one very explicit sex scene in the first few minutes, and certain camera shots, the dirty coat brigade would be disappointed as this is a three hour plus film which is an example of slow cinema, with lots of dialogue, and whose biggest scene is the real life birthing of farm animals. As for the issues of the male gaze, the film yet (co-written with the Ghalia Lacroix) puts all the power in the female cast whilst the male characters aren't likable in the slightest. The women, especially the older ones including Kechiche regular Hafsia Herzi, are opinionated and completely sympathetic, with all the issues surrounding Ophélie Bau even more tragic as she's a huge virtue of this first film, a character full of life whose home life, working on a farm, is devoted to with utter sympathy. In contrast, the men visibly come off as problematic, like the kind old uncle who is unfortunately too comfortable with young women to the older womens' horror, or the boyfriend of one character is an arsehole. Even our protagonist is luckless, a man who cannot even get a nude photography session in the end, let alone anything else, as his trip through the film is an endless cycle barring those two animals.

To think Kechiche squandered this project, which plays to the extremity of slow cinema immersion with its constant scenes in night clubs, to the point it lulls you into a trance, in a terrible creative decision, tragic more for the people who worked on this film than him, more for his films as this means a film as great as Couscous (2007) is now marked with this if confirmed. The irony is that the first Mektoub, My Love would've worked by itself as a single film, even if a piece of a source novel, as it fittingly ends where it should've always been for the protagonist, getting nowhere but humbled.  

6. November (2017) [UK Blu-Ray/DVD Premiere]

And here is a case of a film that should've had a theatrical release too, and it's a tragedy it didn't, only the fact Eureka released the film as part of their Montage releases series a consolation.

And this is an example where this smarts, as this is a new and exciting voice whose style is visually gorgeous in its monochrome and not like anything you've witnessed before. Inherently this taps into my favourites for one reason - any film that depicts the real life mythologies and folklore of its home land is always worth seeing, even a micro budget Nigerian Nollywood film, as it stands out with something to say about that culture. From Estonia, this film has made good in drawing eyes to this Eastern European country's cinema whilst the source, a novel by Andrus Kivirähk, taps into material from their folklore that is truly unique. This is immediately informed to you the viewer with the first shot introducing a kratt, a mechanical creation that can be brought to life if you are willing to trade Satan your soul by way of three drops of blood, servants of farmers unless they have no work and thus either kill them or, in this case, get bored and becoming a proto-helicopter, trying to air lift a poor cow before that concept would properly exist in the 20th century.

November keeps in this direction throughout, between the dead returning back as giant chickens or ways to trick Satan in terms of that soul, whilst also eventually becoming a bittersweet romantic tragedy and a scathing view of ideals, in which baring the sincere love of a young farm girl everyone else is usually superstitious, greedy, jealous and even stealing objects from the church. The result is something truly unique, hence that initial lament that this never got a proper cinema release, with only hope director Rainer Sarnet makes more from the back of this.

5. Pain and Glory (2019) [UK Theatrical Premiere]

For Pedro Almodóvar, I'd qualify this as a "small" film in his career, a film which is not about grand gestures like his "large" film, The Skin I Live In (2011) an example starting the 2010s for him, but one of small scale scenarios and emotions. This is not a detriment as these "small" films in an auteur-director's career are as important as the grander scaled ones, and Pain and Glory slowly crept up the list to this spot with very good reason. Like many of the films here from older veterans, Pain and Glory is self reflective, Antonio Banderas' aging and ill director frankly a blatant stand-in for Almodóvar himself, once a transgressive and hot new talent in the 1980s like the main character, now a revered master in his older age.

Pretty much anything else I could say is frankly trifling when the wiser thing would be to just recommend you the reader to go track the film down, whether you have seen many of Pedro Almodóvar's films or even none at all. It'll do you good.

4. In Fabric (2018) [UK Theatrical Premiere]

In vast contrast, a younger auteur gets presents us the bizarre tale of an evil dress, which gets significantly weirder and complicated than that premise sounds. Peter Strickland has spent a career through the 2010s of making truly idiosyncratic films, with In Fabric really impossible to define, both in that it is actually a film of multiple plots and that, whilst meant to be a horror film, also gets into strange comedy when Julian Barratt and Steve Oram as senior bank managers encourage their staff to role play their stress by putting on one of the many period costumes inexplicably in their shared office.

A lot can be gained from the film, be it the scathing view of modern society being oppressive and bland, to the aesthetic, even down to using old archival imagery to stick this film in a phantom zone between 1970s and modern Britain. When it's freakish, it's also strangely sensual, and when it's humorous, it's also surprisingly emotional.

There is a glee in knowing a film this openly odd was possible to be made, a sense of Peter Strickland already developing a fascinating auteur status of high art genre filmmaking, but that which surprises. I mean, this film manages to get away, in a film suitable for fifteen year olds, a lot of transgressive material that I don't you could in an earlier decade, even in one scene masturbation and menstruating mannequins, which has to be one of the strangest sequences of this entire list I've witnessed all year.

3. Happy as Lazzaro (2018) [UK Theatrical Release]

If Alice Rohrwacher's film had stayed in its original form in the first half, a naturalistic film about a community in a form of manipualition, as they are within a peasant position in an unknown modern time, I might've found Happy as Lazzaro disappointing and sluggish. Then a major shift takes place - [SPOILER] a bit of Rip Van Winkle inspiration in the plotting [SPOILER] - and Rohrwacher's film became excellent. Like the film coming up on in this top ten, her story is about human decency, as its startling jump into magical realism nonetheless is a pretext to a humanity in which our titular figure, a true innocent named Lazzaro who brings around him the best in people regardless of their position. A scene in this film is entirely about finding weeds and naturally growing vegetables people ignore growing on backstreets, and it's compelling alongside the more dramatic scenes, a warm and heartfelt tale about anyone.

There's still a political side though, which is made more striking due to this. A sense of rage being held back in a world which crushes on the poor, coming together in an ending sequence at a bank that has lingered with me. This was my first Alice Rohrwacher film, and as someone who has started in the early 2010s, the Italian director has immediately caught my attention as a potential new great auteur if she is consistent, my hope being that her other work from before will come together as a strong and unique voice too.

2. The Mule (2018) [UK Theatrical Premiere]

Speaking of human decency, it's amazing to think Alice Rohrwacher, with clear Left leaning sympathies, and Clint Eastwood, a right leaning libertarian known for films like Dirty Harry (1971), can share similar views but Eastwood as a director also made Unforgiven (1994), always reflecting on the human condition in the few films I have seen with a greater wisdom as he has aged. Even a film I have found troubling, the Chris Kyle biopic American Sniper (2014), is complicated by scenes that question him and deal with post traumatic stress syndrome. Eastwood is a director I am growing in admiration of, someone regardless of politics who takes his work with a greater sense of perspective than most.

The Mule is such a film, and with the film at number one a MUBI streaming exclusive, The Mule itself is the best film seen at a cinema for me this year, in which Eastwood manages in deal with a real life tale of an elderly man who transported drugs around State lines through an incredible amount of weight, growing it into such thoughtful and intelligent ways. The morality is never to question as it is about a man showing decency, stuck in this scenario due to fate, and learning more, both reconnecting to his family and just learning still in his old age. A scene does far more better in dealing with a man overcoming politically incorrect ideas, when he accidentally uses a now unacceptable term whilst helping an African American family with a broken down car, and learning from them just in how it presents how he with grow within the moment we never see when it cuts to the next scene. The film is funny, odes to the simplest things in life like a pulled pork sandwich, and also deliberately neutering action tropes with the most relaxed highway pursuit you could have onscreen. He even manages to get away with his own character  having a threesome with two younger women without it becoming scuzzy, instead sweat and likely to delight men and women who are older in the audience with the knowledge that aging doesn't mean you lose out on the fun in life.

Again, on the surface the man who interviewed a chair wondering where Baraka Obama is, doesn't fall into any cringe worthy attitudes and instead suggests this profound sense of humanity. Clint Eastwood as a result is a smarter director than most who, on the right or left, just tub-thump and embarrass themselves. He's still making films, with Richard Jewell (2019) in British cinemas in January 2020, and now I am becoming more interesting in him, there's a huge filmography as an auteur let alone onscreen to entice me.

1. Hanagatami (2017) [MUBI Streaming Premiere]

The only reason Clint Eastwood didn't get the top spot is that a Nobuhiko Ōbayashi film that I may sadly never see again in a long time was streamed on MUBI and was incredible. In spite of the fact House (1977) is rightly become a cult classic, none of Ōbayashi's work beyond it has been released in the West.

This, reflecting on Abbas Kiarostami's final film, was supposed to be Ōbayashi's last too, diagnosed with cancer and with the fear he could die before even filming Hanagatami. He didn't in a miraculous turn of fate, going on to make Labyrinth of Cinema (2019), but the ending of this anti-war period film, following young adults in the shadow of the Pacific War on the side of the Japanese and the spectre of their country's defeat, clearly was meant to be a goodbye, the director himself onscreen as part of a hair raising lament for humanity as a man born during the spectre of the militarisation of Japan and the lasting effect of its end.

Hanagatami can connect to many films on this top ten. An older veteran director in his most reflective. A deliberate artificiality in his juxtaposition of enhanced colours and images for a delirious effect. An ode to humanity and human decency, undercut by the darkness of what is expected; found in startling moments like a classmate in the film hanging a pet cat, trying to force another person's eyes open, or a character whose succumbing to a terminal disease in her youth. The result is one that, tragically, is going to be a series of vague recollections in my memories because, again, Ōbayashi hasn't had any of his films made available in the West barring House. At least MUBI had the decency to show this at least once, this near three hour gem having such a lasting impact that it deserved to be in the number one slot.