Poor Things (2023)

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Screenplay: Tony McNamara

Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray

Cast: Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, Willem Dafoe as Dr. Godwin "God" Baxter, Ramy Youssef as Max McCandles, Christopher Abbott as Alfie Blessington, Kathryn Hunter as Madame Swiney, Jerrod Carmichael as Harry Astley, Hanna Schygulla as Martha von Kurtzroc, Margaret Qualley as Felicity, Vicki Pepperdine as Mrs. Prim

An Abstract Candidate

 

There was something perversely delightful in seeing Poor Things in a multiplex in the afternoon, rather than at night at a specialist cinema. Despite having been a big prestige production, with a Best Picture nomination at the 96th Academy Awards, we are still dealing with a horror/dark comedy with very adult content and subject matter, sexually explicitly and proudly weird. Based on the work by Alasdair Gray, an acclaimed Scottish author and artist, and involving Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, behind transgressive and idiosyncratic productions in his homeland like Dogtooth (2009), it makes me proud that a director I always admired in Lanthimos managed to find a way to enter the British film production industry, with this a British-US-Irish co-production, and not yet compromise his interest in the idiosyncrasies and weirdness of human behaviour.

What we get is a retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein if taking the next logical step in how, once Victor Frankenstein created his being, the being becomes Dr. Godwin Baxter as played by Willem Dafoe, a begrudgingly accepted member of Victorian society and a teacher of human anatomy and surgery in London. Central to the film, as a huge contributor as a co-producer and the lead, is Emma Stone as the logical extension of the Bride of Frankenstein, or in this case the Daughter of Frankenstein in Bella. It is a slight spoiler, but she is a woman who originally committed suicide, throwing herself off London Bridge, only for Baxter to resurrect her with the mind of her unborn child in her womb placing the mother's mind, bringing to life a figure who starts as a grown woman with the mind of the child until she begins to mature psychologically. One of Baxter's students Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) is hired to record her progress, falling for her but with Bella herself always the central character, as her growing self awareness leads her to want to leave the house she has lived in all her life.

It is fascinating to see Lanthimos break through over the years, and here he gets to have the most visually ambitious of his work, an alternative Victorian era world where Bella is our centre, beginning to grasp the world around her slowly in a confined and artificial world under a father she literally calls God. Her journey, played as absurdist and deliberately provocative, is learning back to Dogtooth in the prologue, under her loving father's thumb until he relents to let her have a worldwide affair with a chad named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Dogtooth was about a patriarchal figure forcing a confined world on his adult children with their own logic, but here there is the inverse to that film where God relents and lets her, after her discovery of adolescence and her sexuality at the dining table, go off with this womaniser aware of the necessary to let her grow. To the growing frustrations of Duncan, Mark Ruffalo eventually becoming one of the funniest figures in the film for how increasingly exasperated he becomes, Bella's journey becomes existential as she grows and learns of the world in her own way.

The obvious themes, set in the Victorian era, is definitely with "civilised" society as reflected in all the men in Bella's life, how she is meant to be to them in terms of acceptable behaviour and manners, but it does avoid locking this theme to the past, thus neutering the thought experiments of this theme, entirely because this is also set in its own exaggerated world. This forces one to experience Bella's journey personally without necessarily the danger of a realistic historical depiction of the past possible to use as a distancing tool to how this still connects to the current world. It becomes more hypothetical, with its incredibly luscious set designs and fictional worlds, Lisbon turned into a fantasy land with cable cars in the air, but still dealing with the problems which Bella starts to pick up from around herself, all whilst growing awareness from her impulsive interest in the outer world to awareness of others and empathy. I have heard of readings of her as well in terms of the autistic spectrum which, as someone with autism myself, should have been obvious but does consider how much nuisance needs to be considered, from a female viewer with autism, to give a proper reading on this. Certainly, with Bella, though she is initially set up as the child-woman who gains weight to her life as she matures, I do see something I have come to develop as I become older as an autistic person, seeing normalised behaviours meant to be rational as more increasingly subjective and even questionable in their acceptable in behaviour ticks. This is reflect especially here with the taboos Bella casually cuts down as pointless as she learns basic pleasures, learns about her sexuality and her liberation, and all with eventual self awareness. Even if her own perspective separate from others, which is bolstered by the profane sense of humour, hers is a progress towards to better.

It is a great performance by Emma Stone. Committed certainly and willing to work with a sense of complete trust and skill to pull it off, as was the case for the likes of Angeliki Papoulia in his earlier made films, it is not for the obvious aspects like the numerous scenes of nudity which makes this a difficult role, but the initial version of her as a child-woman which she documented was insanely challenging to accomplish without some emotional strain¹. With the help of the script by Tony McNamara, hers like everyone's dialogue is full of idiosyncratic language alongside her own idiosyncratic movements, really needed together to make Bella succeed as a character. Wordplay to her distinct turns of phrase filter through the many subjects she has to deal with, such as her befuddlement of not behaving as she is supposed to be to men, or the wrongs of sex work as a credible method of liberation for her and for pay. This is alongside that idea earlier mentioned, as an autistic viewer, that you can see her finding the negatively weird and irrational behaviour which is supposed to be "normal" with the curiosity I and likely others on the spectrum have felt.

At one point in Lisbon, especially with the distinct costume designs by Holly Waddington, I could not help but think of Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker (1990), a deliberately tasteless title for a ridiculous premise he literally had to create within seconds in a pitch meeting but made into a memorable horror-comedy, but this becomes the logical progression of what that film hinted at but could not get to. That being how male figures built the perfect woman literally and metaphorically, a daughter surrogate here for Godwin and a perfect lover Duncan, only for her to become fully of her free will, a force of energy stomping around whilst the men are the exasperated ones who cannot comprehend she will not just be their idealised template for them to own. Ruffalo, who got a Best Supporting Actor nomination alongside Stone for Best Actress at the Academy Awards, is the perfect figure for this, the erudite git who gets the funniest lines when he cannot control and dictate what Bella is as a person, finding her way in her own logic and prodding his contradictory mood swings.

You tend to forget, when multiplexes are a place of usually teen friendly films, that we still can have very adult films in violence and sexually explicit themes once in a while, but normally not screened in the middle of a pleasant afternoon, especially when this gets to Bella eventually learning the complex realities of life and how to be empowered whilst working in a brothel in France. The deadpan nature depicting this type of content, even moments of extreme violence, however has been with Yorgos Lanthimos since his earlier films. What I did not expect him, whilst his cinematographer Robbie Ryan was inspired by Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Dracula², was to also have gone from a template for the New Greek Weird Wave of films of stark minimalism to possibly being inspired by Tim Burton all whilst retaining his own maximalist style.

The first act, Bella's childhood before she leaves her father's home, is almost entirely monochrome with a fish eyed lens to distort the world around her. A part of this helps lead the viewer gently into this world, as much as a film with prominent CGI effects alongside the practical ones as Godwin's home is populated with incredibly strange and well done animal hybrids never explained but he clearly created, like bulldog chicken hybrids or the duck dog. Burton is apt a comparison as, whilst sexual desire only occasionally crept into his films, Burton liked played with the macabre and sickly humorous, and with some of his films being as gory as this occasionally gets into, there is unexpected bedfellows with this film even if we get into themes of its own creators. Lanthimos is not that different in the morbid humour here, barring that he adds as well his own touches, his own influences in the artistic style of the film and his interest the viewing humanity like a scientist watches bacteria under a microscope, examining their weird behaviours since Kinetta (2005).

The more explicit politics is different to Burton too, at least in how they are treated here openly, really cemented when we get to Bella being on a ship between oceans and beginning to learn the harsh realities of life through a legitimate cynic played by Jerrod Carmichael. It never becomes heavy handed here due to the sense of humour this introduces between these moments, be it Mark Ruffalo having a meltdown learning his money has been donated to charity, to the brothel Madame in France played by Kathryn Hunter, covered in tattoos, having a frank and thoughtful attitude to her profession, open to Bella's inquisitiveness and for all her female employees whilst with a habit of playful love bites for her young female employees. The one moment where this gets close to heavy handedness to a detriment is addressing Bella's origins, needed to close her arch and introduce Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is arguably a stereotype due to the little time we get to fully flesh out his true evil. Of her past, he represents what is evil, the colonial soldier who says Jesus would beat her up with a baseball bat, as her husband from the past, for her sins, and yet abuses his staff for fun and believes in female circumcision. He is still worth having as he presents the last example of masculinity needed to be castrated in the film, the toxic patriarch, and the one closest to the period setting whose form still sadly permeates Western culture, the colonialist who with his home full of weapons and appropriate African icons distort the likes of the Christ's teachings to be pure white male empowerment fantasies, that of dictating the world to everyone not Anglo-Saxon or male. He is the true villain, as even Godwin for his crimes, including trying to create a new Bella, becomes in a nuisance to the film's virtue the father to her daughter she accepts and loves even for all his mistakes. In contrast, Blessington is the figure you need to see who makes even Ruffalo's Duncan just misguided. He argues, for a film already close to two and a half hours, that it needed to be three hours, to deal with the real challenge that enforces Bella's full growth as a figure, particularly as we could have gotten into more explicit issues of class conflict and colonial attitudes, and without losing the resolution we get, [Spoilers] involving goat's brains [Spoilers End].

In context to mainstream cinema, the stereotype rather than the reality including the image perceived of Best Picture Oscar nominees in the past, Poor Things is magnificently bonkers, transgressive and visually resplendent cinema that is to be appreciated. It is a delightfully expressive film, dealing with grim subjects still of the director's cinema but at a point he was able to escape being stereotyped to one form of cinema only. He fully emphasises the true meaning of the auteur theory, that this is his film but where we have to rightly credit as well the differences that came from the figures who contributed to this specific film - great performances, great scriptwriting, great production design from the sets to the model shot work, and a great score from Jerskin Fendrix, making his debut here in composing for a film, who at times evokes the scores Michael Nyman enriched the films of Peter Greenaway with, a huge compliment from my part to nod to. With knowledge Lanthimos tracked down Alasdair Gray before his 2019 passing to adapt the novel, only to learn of Gray's admiration of Dogtooth the film itself¹, adds a wonderful emotional bow to the work, which this was clearly a labour of love for Yorgos Lanthimos. He was able to clearly make a film without compromise, and Lanthimos and everyone in the production of this should pat themselves on the back, on the image onscreen or behind them, for the accomplishment.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

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

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1) Exclusive: Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos on Creating a Woman Free of Shame in Poor Things, written by Emma Specter and published by Vogue for May 31th 2023.

2) Poor Things’ cinematographer on lighting a sex comedy, being inspired by Francis Ford Coppola, written by Jason Struss and published by Digital Trends on December 9th 2023.

Mad Dog Time (1996)

 

Director: Larry Bishop

Screenplay: Larry Bishop

Cast: Jeff Goldblum as Mickey Holliday, Richard Dreyfuss as Vic, Gabriel Byrne as Ben London, Ellen Barkin as Rita Everly, Diane Lane as Grace Everly, Gregory Hines as Jules Flamingo, Kyle MacLachlan as Jake Parker, Burt Reynolds as Jackie Jackson, Larry Bishop as Falco, Henry Silva as Sleepy Joe, Michael J. Pollard as Red, Christopher Jones as Falco, Billy Idol as Lee Turner, Angie Everhart as Gabriella, Billy Drago as Wells, Paul Anka as Danny, Rob Reiner as Albert, Joey Bishop as Gottlieb, Richard Pryor as Jimmy the Gravedigger

An Abstract Candidate

 

Mad Dog Time was one of those films flashed up into my attention at one point, in a context long vanished from my memory but occupying the space now given it, one which did initial come with a negative baggage whether it deserved it or not with how it was talked about. My first encounter with Larry Bishop, son of Joey Bishop, one of the members of the "Rat Pack" with Frank Sinatra, was negative when my younger self was not a fan of Hell Ride (2008), a Quentin Tarantino co-produced biker film, which I will have to return to with so much time having past that the old opinion has been forgotten let alone my memories of that film. That film was not helped as I was getting into cinema at the time of the "neo-grindhouse" wave of genre films, in the shadow of Tarantino's own 2007 project Grindhouse with Robert Rodriquez, which I was not a fan of back then. Ironically, Mad Dog Time found itself caught up in the shadow of Tarantino as it was lumped into the films post-Pulp Fiction, when it blew up in 1994, which led to a lot of self-reflective and dialogue heavy crime films come in from its wake. Mad Dog Time was cursed by a zero star review from Roger Ebert¹, one I am going to commit a blasphemy in saying is actually a pretty terrible review. It really does not get into anything about what the film is barring its obsession with dialogue eccentricities, such as the leads having similar sounding names, which is definitely absurd, but spends most of its time trying to think of absurd ways to describe something being pointless without actually needing a film to critique involved. This is something, as time goes on, and as I came to cinema in the time of the greater weight of amateur voices and the internet in opinion, where I find myself realising the film critics who became huge, usually the American ones like Ebert or Pauline Kael, were still figures with their own personal opinions even if they are still worth reading the reflections of.

That may seem insanely blasphemous to start this review with, but Mad Dog Time is definitely one of those subjective films you think is being too smart for its own good to the point of pretention, or you vibe with, and the Ebert review really does not get into what exactly Larry Bishop's film is, especially as it really sticks out next to other self reflective crime films I have seen from the nineties. For me, built with the help of Larry Bishop being friends with some of the cast and others willing to work on this lower budget film, Mad Dog Time from the get-go has an absurdist artificiality to the proceedings which was immediately interesting. This premise has been seen before and that is clearly the point as the film goes through with deconstructing this premise, in which a mob boss Vic (Richard Dreyfuss) is going to be let out the mental health hospital, and everyone is going to be dragged in and then likely dragged into a body bag, such as Mickey Holliday (Jeff Goldblum) for being with Vic's estranged girlfriend Grace (Diane Lane). From the get-go, there is a voice-over set against the cosmos itself explaining this is an alternative dimension, starting with an illustration of a nightclub only to turn into the real set, mostly locked into artificial world based on locations and sets. The best comparison points here, for the set up, is that for a film which Larry Bishop openly admits was inspired by the likes of Samuel Beckett²  this brings to mind too Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987), author Norman Mailer's infamous adaptation of his own novel which is a bizarre, sick humoured subversion of crime film tropes, and Jean-Luc Godard's Detective (1985), which does also fit into Ebert's criticism of Mad Dog Time, of being a film about "two or three characters [starting] out in a scene and [reciting] some dry, hard-boiled dialogue, and then one or two of them will get shot"². Godard's film, which was made as much to be able to make his controversial take on the Virgin Birth in Hail Mary (1985), has more of his introspective musings on art, and significantly less people being shot, but is as much an artificial dissection of the crime films he grew up with as much as Tough Guys... is a fresh take from a veteran author who would have started his literary career at their boom in pulp literature, and Larry Bishop’s film which comes from hindsight to them too.

This Godard comparison is apt, likely as for the late Swiss director’s film, the crime genre were always artificial for me. They are films I have seen from my youth, and they exist outside the reality of crime as artificial stories of morality, unless you see the films like his or even these pulpier versions which undercut and dissect these stories. Vic is going to finally leave the asylum but already chaos is brewing. By the first minutes, actor Michael J. Pollard of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) has been shot dead, and this beings the absurdity clearly here, that this is a world of mindless violence and power games where the sole outside world is a mortician, frequently mentioned, who clearly gets enough clients to work on in the crime world he can afford on-bench advertising. Roger Ebert's criticism of Mad Dog Time was that this was about characters just standing around and pontificating, which would sound pretentious if this was just meant to be cool. Despite some of these characters giving their opinion on the philosophy of life, this dialogue usually leads to funny one liners or the character coming off as ridiculous on purpose. So much is clearly written by Larry Bishop as a joke, everything clearly unhinged and pointlessly violent, beginning with whatever Gabriel Byrne managed to channel as “Brass Balls” Ben London. His is a deeply odd performance just in the accented cadence he chooses, but as the film goes, this becomes one of the best performances, as a rare comedy performance from the actor, and a sign of how artificial the film is.

It can be too "clever" with the naming of certain characters and its symbolism, which seem too obvious when you realise what is hinted in them, but with the eccentric wordplay, such as imagining all of Vic's personalities visiting his nightclub, you see Bishop was never interested in making these characters "cool". They are instead amalgamations of eccentric figures inspired by crime cinema and the Rat Pack, the group his father was part of and the music throughout nodded to. You could figure out a way to stage this in a theatre performance, which is a virtue, but the production design by Dina Lipton does add a lot to its playful eccentricities. Attempting to be the Iago to this Shakespearian tale, but coming off as a lame sleaze weasel, Kyle MacLachlan's base is literally a warehouse barring the abrupt cameo by his own personal aircraft, which is a hilarious non-sequitur alongside being introduced to his cronies, even Billy Drago, eating sushi. Throughout, the fact many scenes stay within warehouse spaces or Vic’s nightclub does not attempt to hide, as much as Godard’s Detective did in a hotel, these plot clichés being forced through this world and puncturing them inherently in the locations used.

The least expected people popping up adds on a first viewing, but to this film's credit, everyone gets something to work with which would grow on other viewings. Yes, that is musician Billy Idol of all people in a small role to challenge Jeff Goldblum to a duel, first revolver to kill the opponent to win, and he stands out, looking like he wandered off another crime pastiche, Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind (1985), just for telling Goldblum to fuck himself. This also presents the most cinematic part of the film, that all pistol duels are done sat down, usually behind desks, which is the type of thing I could see Seijun Suzuki having done, with the Hachiro Guryu team who worked on his films^a, when he dissected yakuza cinema out of boredom of the templates demanded of him by Nikkatsu studios. That is part of the reason why this grew on me as I was watching it, a film trying to be cleaver but undercutting its pretensions by both the quality of the performances and that it is deliberately exaggerated on purpose. All the films, many more well regarded, I have mentioned may be viewed as an excuse to defend Mad Dog Time with comparison, it is, but because this shares so many of their traits and their quirks, a few even maligned themselves, sharing a collected DNA between them all in doing different things to undercut this genre.

This also includes the fact Mad Dog Time is incredibly funny, with the fact that ninety percent of the cast dies by the end becoming part of its sick sense of humour, more so because the cast is full of diverse names who all get idiosyncratic touches, like cult legend Henry Silva as a narcoleptic heavy to the least expected Burt Reynolds cameo possible. That your two female leads are figures above this lunacy - Diane Lane standing as calm and collected, Ellen Barkin captivating as someone whose irritable energy is nonetheless contrasted by her character's love for Mick - does emphasis this too. The two figures who keep this world sane among the men are, ironically, Richard Dreyfuss despite being the character meant to be the ticking time bomb, playing the role in a calm of a man after having stripped everything away, and Jeff Goldblum, who radiates film noir charm that makes this, even if you hate the film, one of his best performances. Goldblum is trademarked for his nervous energy, but until he is caught off-guard and forced to try to outsmart his enemies by talking his way out of the situation, his character of Mick is cool and absolutely in control. Even if he has cheated on two sisters, in Grace, who they both know are not meant for each other, and her sister Rita, who is meant to be together with Mick in their love-hate chemistry, the character is still likable and it is because Goldblum plays the role so well.

Even that he can be rattled as a character works, because of Goldblum’s performance. Like a character from many older film noirs, he does play it like the underdog leads in that he is always precariously doomed, but always has the one liner to stick it into someone. Even one of the more abrupt turns, a fake copy of a hit man eventually played by Larry Bishop himself, feels like a pastiche from old pulp radio stories, emphasising how with all the back stabbings and shootings here, nothing is for certain and Mick has to figure out how to survive it. Considering someone pretends to have a heart condition, using Tic Tacs as a fake medication, for as long as they can for the right moment to kill someone shows the absurd lengths for nothing this deals with, the film playing to the idea of the pointless machinations of these gangsters striving for power only leading to chaos. Mad Dog Time was kneecapped itself when it was realised, one where the film won me over in the prolonged joke of Vic threatening Ben London to leave town, only to shoot him in the kneecap when he refuses and telling him to hop off from town. The pointless amount of death is the joke, and it is telling the sanest act is to decide to not draw the trigger on oneself and save another even if one last person is shot to accomplish this. Even that this ends with a sentimental finale, whilst part of the many aspects that may make this an acquired taste, made this a film that vibed for me perfectly. Film opinion is subjective, but with Mad Dog Time, it is weird now seeing this elusive film, dismissed back in the day, only to find myself looking at its negative reactions with surprise. Not necessarily because the film would appeal to everyone, truly an “acquired taste” in how much of it plays against conventions, but because whilst I absolutely see the imperfect moments and all that would put those off in its choices, I have seen a lot of films undermine the tropes of crime cinema like this even before Quentin Tarantino, the supposed reason for this film existing, and see this share all the virtues I have found in those films as here, winning me over as a result as an underrated production.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

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

 

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1) Roger Ebert's Mad Dog Time review, originally published on November 29th 1996.

2) Larry Bishop's interview as part of the Projection Booth podcast's review on Mad Dog Time, released August 20th 2021.

a) The collective pen name for Seijun Suzuki himself, Takeo Kimura, Atsushi Yamatoya, Yōzō Tanaka, Chūsei Sone, Yutaka Okada, Seiichirō Yamaguchi and Yasuaki Hangai.

Touch of Death (1988)

 

Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Brett Halsey as Lester Parson; Ria De Simone as Alice Shogun; Al Cliver as Randy; Sacha Darwin as Margie MacDonald; Zora Kerova as Virginia Field; Marco Di Stefano as the Tramp

A Night of a Thousand Horror Movies / An Abstract Candidate

[Warning: Spoilers Throughout]

The set-up to Touch of Death would win anyone over as long as they had a strong stomach, or cause him or her to turn the film off if they did not. An older man is shown, when not killing women, cooking pieces of her flesh for TV dinner, then disposing the corpse gorily with a chainsaw. This sounds like the worst nightmare for a moral campaigner, but my first introduction to Touch of Death was weirder, that it is one of the films of Lucio Fulci's own, with those of others, re-contextualised in A Cat in the Brain (1990), his deeply weird meta-commentary on his own work where he was the central character. The chainsaw and subsequent meat grinder dismemberment definitely raises the bar in feeling ill with Fulci gore, even if you know its fake. In itself it already sets off that we are if getting into the absurdity, reminding me in particular of when British band Carcass got to their album Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious (1991), which stills plays to the grotesque morbidness of the type of music they helped contribute to, but by that point even in imagining someone turning a victim into glue to huff, you are seeing them parodying the idea of gruesome horror imagery to offend and traumatise audiences. Touch of Death itself, starting from that initial scene, sets itself quickly as a sick hearted comedy with a deeply unconventional trajectory, in which older bachelor and gambler Lester Parson (Brett Halsey) constantly has to pay off debts for an illegal horse racing group, having found a novel way of acquiring the funds needed by skimming the lonely hearts pages for wealthy women. Where things get weird is that, seemingly, Lester has a copycat killer reported on TV claiming his victims and implicating him with each news report. Considering his radio is talking back to him in his own voice, it is not really a spoiler to know he is not a conventional state of mind, but the film takes it in an odder direction.

In general, there are strange entries at this point in Fulci's filmography by the mid eighties even for a director who invested into the nightmarish and dreamlike with his horror films – Conquest (1983) is a border line, the least conventional fantasy film you could ever watch, and Aenigma (1987) springs to mind too – whilst Touch of Death was one of the many films either directed by Fulci or had his brand naming upon it recycled as clips for his truly bizarre, quasi-autobiographical oddity A Cat in the Brain. Made the same year as the infamous Zombi 3 (1988) production where he only finished a large portion of it due to illness, and the team of Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei finished the final film, Touch of Death itself is a strange movie to my surprise in its own way. A perplexing mix of comedy, nasty splatter and his reoccurring obsession with reality slowly ebbing out of grasp as the film continues on, this does stick out among the films before and after. The premise has a dark reality, in that you have the likes of the Honeymoon Killers, couple Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck who targeted real women for money and killed them, but here as played by Brett Halsey, Lester is a foil who, despite getting away with a few murders, also gets a speeding ticket at one point when disposing of a corpse. Halsey is among many actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood and of fifties television productions who, as he got older, started appearing in Italian productions such as their spaghetti westerns, finding himself in his later career in a string of late eighties Fulci films at this time. Even in mind that Italian productions are post-dubbed, his character just in presence here. Whilst looking creepily like a real serial killer would in his conventional dress sense, he also has an absurd aura of a man constantly under strain, far from control. His cat Reginald, even if using human corpses, has better luck just from least having good meals.

The character being a putz really adds something here, the tonal shifts themselves effecting. Most of the narrative, until it builds to Lester's increasing paranoia and his fate being sealed, is the character interacting with a string of various female victims, and in spite of the stereotypical Fulci gore that became synonymous to his work at this point, it is played as a black humoured farce. John Waters springs to mind, for playing up bad taste deliberately. A strange quasi American environment, meant to be Florida but entirely in a nether realm of Italian cinema's interpretation of it, is where we find ourselves, one where Lester is an unapologetic sociopath but in a world which makes him look ridiculous. The illegal horse gambling organisation, ran by an older Caucasian man and a still older Asian man assisting him, who exist in their own world wary of the police, seem like a budget restriction expected from a micro budget horror film, in that they have no fixed office; in context however it adds a weird edge that, having to keep an ear for police helicopters, their lack of fixed location is ridiculous on purpose. Lester's female victims are exaggerations, and even a glamorous actress like Zora Kerova is given pronounced prosthetic disfigurements like a mere birth defect on the top lip or a vague moustache to undercut their appearance. It is not flattering in the slightest, and can be seen as sexist, but in general the film's tone is a peculiar ode to the tasteless in a weird way. The exaggeration of the women for broad comedic effect, the most extreme an opera singer with masochistic streak, is balanced out by Halsey playing a strange, pathetic man himself. Charming enough to woo these women, and played by Halsey with charisma even with the ghostliness of him having to dub himself, but slowly finding that he is even having to run over homeless men trying to blackmail him. Considering he is a man unable to keep hold of money, because he is actually terrible at gambling, it is clear he is about to slip off the deep end.

The realistic advice from the voice, similar to his, on the radio is a clear sign early on not all is what is expected, very early in the film and already showing its hand. That moment was enough to push Touch of Death into the abstract before it went further, becoming more unconventional with how this plays out with a streak of melancholia from this. It is clear the film is entirely from inside the mind of a man losing what sanity he had, the copycat himself in some form, but the dreamlike lack of clarity famous from Fulci taking this to an extreme. One where it can be as argued Lester is already dead or a literal doppelganger situation is actually involved. Everything is unexplained, the grotesque broadness of the female caricatures or the depopulated world of a low budget Italian genre flick, alongside the stranger details. Horse racing commentary constantly in the soundtrack is one of those many unique touches to this film I have not seen many "weird films" do, but it works, at first presumed to be on the radio constantly for Lester, but becomes apparent in being part of his psychosis at it continues.

That it is played for comedy is a surprise too. Fulci had made comedies early in his career, (fans proclaim that one, The Eroticist (1972), is actually a hidden gem from his filmography), but he was known at this point and still as a serious, nasty director of gore. Unintentional camp which appeared in the late eighties films was one thing, but deliberate humour catches you off guard. Obvious jokes stretched out at length such as Lester struggling to get a body in the boot of his car, due to rigor mortis, stand out when one has seen him direct some of the most gothic and notorious films from the eighties Italian cycle of cinema. One is legitimately a great moment, his attempt to add a Mickey Finn to a potential victim's drink only for it to continually switch which glass belongs to who, but even that scene is violently contrasted against the violent gore that happens afterwards, which adds a punch to this. The gore’s over-the-top actually fits in a sick way for this type of film too, more glaringly fake compared to his early work and with such exaggeration, as even when Fulci has someone hit in the head with a stick, an eye has to pop out. It becomes a heightened wreck of conflicting reactions as a viewer. That Fulci is credited as the sole screenwriter adds a fascinating touch to this film, that this is his interests unedited and leading to this concoction. 

Fulci, bless him, even when background material states the film was undercut by its low budget still managed to make a memorable film in Touch of Death. Its obscurity is not surprising as, compared to the stereotype of his career of lurid horror films, even the gore found here does not off-set that most of it is a melodrama black comedy of a sociopath. The film eventually gains more meat, whilst fascinating before, when you suspect the rug is going to be pulled from under Lester's feet at any moment, helped because Fulci's history of the unexpected always happening in his work adds to this, able to wrong foot the viewer even if it breaks the logic of before. Even the music, which is chintzy, works for the strange humour because it sounds like cartoon music. The tone eventually leads to an ending that can be interpreted in different ways, which is applaudable, Zora Kerova's femme fatale (who yet has that distinct lip disfigurement) a warning of Lester meeting his matched, followed by an emotional conversation with his own shadow for a very unique ending scene. It is kind of twist you would want from Italian genre cinema, and absolutely distinct from Lucio Fulci's filmography as its own quirky surprise.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird/Grotesque/Quirky

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

Scary Movie (1991)

 

Director: Daniel Erickson

Screenplay: Daniel Erickson, David Lane Smith and Mark Voges

Cast: John Hawkes as Warren; Suzanne Aldrich as Barbara; Ev Lunning as Sheriff Pat Briggs; Mark Voges as Jerry; Zane Rockenbaugh as Billy; Jason Russel Waller as Brad; Virginia Pratt as Shelley; Ernie Taliaferro as the Laughing Man; Zeke Mills as Basil; Butch Patrick as Eddie; Lee Gettys as John Louis Barker; Lorne Loganbill as Otto

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

The existence of the parody horror franchise, started by the Wayan Brothers, makes covering this independent Texas film more difficult than it should be, as that title fits Daniel Erickson’s movie perfectly but is also very generic to sell, especially when a big franchise ran with it. It belies what a fascinating little piece this is, beyond the fact our fresh face lead would become Oscar nominated John Hawkes and that Erickson himself was only nineteen when he made Scary Movie. The latter is incredible in context, as in the midst of all the horror films churned out at this point in history, someone that young made an accomplished production like this.

It is Halloween night, and  Warren (Hawkes) comes to a haunted house attraction less than in a great state of mind, nervous already having had a vivid nightmare the night before of a Grim Reaper-like figure which is also found at this gruesome local haunted house. There is a potential romance - with a near sighted girl with raven black hair, bold eyeliner, in a white virgin maiden costume and with a kleptomaniac habit - but he is still jittery. It does not help either a man has escaped from the nearby mental asylum that same night.

Do not expect a slasher film however, which is where things get interesting here. It is a make-or-break detail for this as this instead plays to its immediate plot detail, that Warren is already on edge and everything is subjective. A very late era regional horror production, it has a playfulness where pulling the rug is what reoccurs over and over, breaking expectations by mixing between what is happening as a staged moment in the haunted house, and what may be a threat that Warren is stuck into. It is also a compelling time capsule as a result of this, to community haunted houses which stands out. Halloween is an important holiday in British, but especially for the Americans, the traditional has greater weight even in terms of this type of yearly spectacle, where even the Evangelical Christians built their own "Hell Houses" to scare people to Jesus. This one in the film feels a lot closer to reality, to the point of potential verisimilitude, in how it is an immense creation but clearly the product of locals in a small town with enough elbow grease and cooperation between them, right down to the ghouls inside committing horrors being buddies likely to be drinking in the bar the day after. That this is a stage for what is a psychodrama, where a man already on edge becomes more scared just getting near the entrance, makes it a perfect context for such a story.

It is an interesting mood to latch onto, and what is here is strange in slight doses in the best of ways. Even without Roky Erickson and the Butthole Surfers on the soundtrack, large portions of Scary Movie are incredibly eccentric. The kleptomaniac who takes salt shakers from restaurants to the reoccurring large man, the same one wearing a red top, who is always there to laugh at the appropriate moment, the film is openly peculiar, and contrasts this with the scenes following non-central figures around this haunted house just getting on with the night's work. It also helps the film wrong foots the viewer deliberately to an advantage, in general the local flavor even in terms of side characters onscreen adding an incredible charm and personality to the material.

A lot of the film is also at a great advantage of both the director and production creating a very atmospheric film, one also aided by John Hawkes in the lead. The film is built more on tension, as rather than a lot of deaths or a jump once in a while, Scary Movie takes its time housed in Warren's mind and his fears by the moment he is literally shoved into the haunted house. In dark, claustrophobic corridors and rooms, the homemade world of the set is idiosyncratic, and thankfully, Hawkes plays the neurotic main character exceptionally well, even with the fact he is clearly been based on Bruce Campbell's character Ash in the Evil Dead series in look. It follows a similar logic if not as cruel as what happens to Ash, but including climbing over pumpkins, the same tension is to be found with a killer in the same environment, and a sense of paranoia which becomes the central concern of the film with its dénouement.

For any criticism that Scary Movie is a slow eighty minutes, Daniel Erickson especially as a nineteen year old filmmaker managed to pull out a morbid plot twist with a nuance, the idea of a killer being involved entirely subjective until the end, where it is a psychological breakdown and tragedy which is of concern, a horror pulp story twist to be proud of. It befits as Scary Movie has toyed with the viewer like a haunted house would, and considering how Hawkes' performance is great, the building anxiety from the start to the end is masterfully done. Laced with an incredible cynical and black sense of humour at the end, Scary Movie does so much to admire, sad in knowledge that it took so much longer for the film to be properly seen. The film only had a semblance of release originally by a few VHS distributed locally in Erickson's home in Austin, Texas. This was the reason the film was unavailable, even if things thankfully changed over time. The composer of the original score Hank Hehmsoth, who should be praised for his startling electronic score, put the film up online, and in 2019, the American Genre Film Archive released the film for cinema screenings with plans to be released properly in genera which thankfully came to be. Erickson himself never made a lot of work sadly, though intriguingly he did return, with John Hawkes also returning to voice a character, with the utterly compelling premise of Eve's Necklace (2010), a neo-noir entirely acted out with mannequins.

 

Yes, mannequins...which is an inspired creative idea worth investigating for myself...

La Poison (1951)

Director: Sacha Guitry

Screenplay: Sacha Guitry

Cast: Michel Simon as Paul Louis Victor Braconnier, Germaine Reuver as Blandine Braconnier, Jean Debucourt as Maître Aubanel, Louis de Funès as André Chevillard, Marcelle Arnold as Germaine Chevillard, Georges Bever as Mr Gaillard

Ephemeral Waves

 

He has something of a chimera and of a clown.

A twee French comedy...about wanting to bump your spouse off their mortal coil. Even the opening credits have a whimsical politeness to them in contrast to this central premise, and that does not include the sweet natured tribute to the production team and lead actor Michel Simon from director-writer Sacha Guitry himself, letting everyone on staff out of character and job say hello to the audience before turning it into an admiration for Simon's talents. This is all in context of an incredibly misanthropic premise which makes this pleasant opening more striking with hindsight. This is pre-French New Wave cinema, a quietly spoken work from a time when the directors would be lambasted by this incoming wave as antiquated, or in the case of Guitry, gaining admiration by the likes of Francois Truffaut in his work and in his position as a director-writer with his own voice. The quaintness from the get-go is perfect for the premise, where in a quiet French village a man named Paul Braconnier (Simon) cannot stand his wife, and at fifty three, is contemplating murdering her, even consoling the local vicar on his hatred for her.

Telling the small town chemist's is busy with selling aspirin, products to help customers who cannot sleep, and seventy percent of the locals being constipated, presenting a bleak view of "harmonic" community life, especially as Blandine Braconnier (Germaine Reuver), the wife, is not an innocent either, wanting to buy rat poison in consideration to murder him too. Not a good look at "wholesomeness" in the slightest, and in context, when Guitry would pass in 1957, this belies the idea of how a director as they got older is stigmatised for getting "softer" in their attitudes and themes. Moving away from adapting his plays as he was in the early part of his career, and branching out into modern set works between historical pieces, the plays its content with a light grace, but you find yourself at a deeply miserable dinner between the central couple contrasted ironically by a love song on the radio making comparisons to being pigeons mating together despite the absurd contrast it has in the scene.

The film itself is quiet, clear filmmaking with no elaborate editing or camera set-ups. Documented is how Guitry, who admired Michel Simon, went out of his way to explicitly request the crew on the production were as efficient as possible, to only to one takes for scenes is possible, making this a short shot¹. Clear and precise in filmmaking, it is itself still loaded, its light hearted presentation bringing a barb like a beautiful spring flower which turns out to have thorns within it, like a scene where the shopkeepers, believing that having a spectacular event like someone giving birth to quadruplets would bring attention to a town from curious tourists and more customers, ask the vicar to his horror if he can perform a miracle on the spot if they bring someone's daughter to be healed by him. This constant undercutting of the tone is still, in context to a film plus fifty years old, incredible in its gleeful subversion.

The plot itself concerns when Paul, contemplating his plan, learns of a lawyer through his radio with an idiosyncratic take on murder and searches him out, even lying about having already murdered his wife to plan one which can be defended in the defendant box at court, a twisted idea of being able to reconstruct a fake murder to be innocent of self-defence. Here there is a historical context which likely influenced the content, where Sacha Guitry was accused of collaborating with the Nazis and imprisoned, which more than likely emphasised contempt for the French law system. A prolific stage actor and playwright as well, Guitry was still able to perform in the German occupation of France during World War II and, with his reputation as an artist even of interest to German soldiers, he was seen as a collaborator despite friends of his being imprisoned by the Nazis and one scenario, taking advantage of an officer's admiration of his work, to get prisoners of wars releases¹. Even without this personal context, there is a legitimate contempt, witnessed in the final scenes when even the kids ask and try to rationalise what murder and justice is, playing mock murders and trials with even a homemade guillotine stand-in built.

It is still transgressive in the modern day, and it reflects in its own way the contradictory and inadequate problems one could have with crimes being deal with legally. Trials are meant to rationalise and stick to logistical facts, something I can attest to having done jury service at least once in my life like so many readers of this potentially have, but when it comes to thinking about the reason why people would commit a crime, law as a concept has to struggle against the existentialism, alongside the fact you can bend and distort the way a trial works to win your case as this deals with. Even if in this case the justifications by Paul eventually are all extreme, not meant to be justifiable to let him get scot free but in context of a fabricated story, meant to fantasise about this taboo subject safely, let one cheer him on as he thumbs his nose at the institution. The only thing which has not aged well, or is going to be understandably challenged, is that his wife is an alcoholic shrew stereotype playing off to wife jokes. Not to defend the interpretation of the character here, but also factoring in how this broad stereotype found itself through pop culture for a long time, not just in one French film, so many are to be challenged for these stereotypes, it is also clearly part of the misanthropic edge to this entire work.

Sacha Guitry here does present how, with older films, you find works whose style and production do feel of an entirely different time in attitude, but where their content regardless of age remind one how these films were written as far as they could, as now, to shock and strike against what they felt needed mocking. The term "don't judge a book by its cover" is a cliché that is beneath the auteur, but I did come to La Poison with a sense of it being a film playfully whimsy with the subject of murder, but was not expecting how its gentle nature has a very wicked grin I also shared by its end credits.

 

=====

1) From On Life on Screen: Miseries and Splendor of a Monarch, a documentary by Dominique Maillet focusing on the film and its director-writer's life in connection to it which was included in the Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray release for La Poison.

Babylon (2022)

 

Director: Damien Chazelle

Screenplay: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad; Margot Robbie as Nellie LaRoy; Diego Calva as Manny Torres; Jean Smart as Elinor St. John; Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer; Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu; P. J. Byrne as Max; Lukas Haas as George Munn; Olivia Hamilton as Ruth Adler; Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg; Rory Scovel as The Count; Katherine Waterston as Estelle; Tobey Maguire as James McKay; Flea as Bob Levine; Jeff Garlin as Don Wallach; Eric Roberts as Robert Roy

Ephemeral Waves

 

Looking at Babylon, whilst I am going to be incredibly positive about the film, I still think of what film critic and writer Manny Faber meant by “white elephant” art in cinema, films ripe in ambition and scope in resources which, when he coined the term, was a negative in how bloated and pretentious they were next to “termite art”, which were usually the lower budget genre projects which could be braver, subversive and more free in being able to communicate their themes. In the modern day I think Faber’s ideas, whilst still salient, need to be re-contextualised as, whilst films like Babylon are timed for the award seasons, which are about big and heavy weighted dramas about big themes, things have changed. The award season does potentially present to us high minded films of large budgets Faber, and even regular audience members, could view of saccharine and pretentious, but most of the cinematic season in the United States in their industry, as films appear outside the summer season, are becoming the superhero and licensed media blockbusters, which carry the largest budgets and promotion. Babylon is now are a less frequently made breed of films. The white elephant and termite art discussions also did not think ahead to a film like Babylon either, as most films in this subject, about the history of Hollywood, did not open with a close up of an elephant's anus defecating on the camera, mountains of cocaine, nude bodies everywhere and a dwarf actor on a pogo stick shaped like a penis which emits fake semen before the opening credits. Now with a film like this in the Hollywood Oscar seasons, the question need to fit specific titles of how their themes and how they tell them, and whether they are successful or not, as whilst a rare moment, we have a lavish Hollywood production of a significant cost which is subversive and as unpredictable as even an exploitation movie from the old days in context and pacing.

Most films of this type, the grandeur of Hollywood and its downfalls, have toyed with this type of salacious content, but director-writer Damien Chazelle comes to the subject with a surprising level of excess and tonal jumps in its three plus hours. All of I have mentioned is just the tip of this decadent iceberg, surrounding a party opening the film which introduces Diego Calva’s Manny Torres, a Mexican immigrant whose job working at the part is for him a potential stepping stone into Hollywood. Starting in 1926, Torres with stars in his eyes and love for cinema at the time is the closest to a protagonist in an ensemble piece, a wildly toned and chaotic film which will go through into the talkies era when sound was introduced into cinema, both a time to consider whether cinema could be art and one which for its director-writer lets him explore the lives of figures who went through it, between those losing their popularity to the increasing push for moral policing.

Babylon's main thesis is frankly a mess at times, to be truthful, if portrayed with a lot to admire. It is an ode to classic Hollywood which however realises it stands on the grounds of the profane and unnecessary sacrifice, something which it has to dance around and honestly is struggling to try to come to grips with. In this case not, that is not even a negative but the inevitability of the subject. It can pay tribute with the legends of cinema, but even before the talkies brought unnecessary restrictions and racism, the first half has the drugs, the excess and that the way Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) gets her way into the door as an actress is another having an overdose at the opening party. There is a reflection, even if the film cannot put a proper mark on its theme, is it at least admits its art from this era, the masterpieces and unsung gems, are still built within horrifying scandals and hidden secrets. As with the director’s breakthrough film Whiplash (2014), where Damien Chazelle was channelling his own struggles with learning to become a jazz musician, through a film showing the ultimate sacrifices a stand in takes to perfect his jazz drumming art form, he here is channelling the struggles with creating the art of cinema in this period of scandal and the profane.

One of the film's obvious issues, which cannot be hidden and does explain its chaotic tone, is that this could have easily had an extra hour to sort itself out. Brad Pitt is front and centre in advertising, but this is a film about multiple people, looking at a huge turn in Hollywood's history from the silent era into the talking pictures era. Even if one glaring absence is mentioning Will Hays and the Hays Code, which forced more adult content to be more subtly referenced, this is still a period of Hollywood having to bring in self censorship to avoid the government breathing down its neck, including the cost this change in cinema, from this to bigotry, causes to a set of characters. The film's ode to cinema is sincere, not necessary suggesting that someone has to die on a film set due to accidental impaling in a mock medieval battle, but that the chaos of silent cinema as depicted here, almost always about to fall off the rails and a mess of shooting, broken cameras and pure chance is however passionate. The clear sick sense of humour throughout the film which Damien Chazelle deliberately helps greatly with this. The film when vulgar and funny fully succeeds, not turning a blind eye on all that was wrong at all, contrasting this with even the act of filmmaking being painful but ultimately successful; the hell of early talkie film production shown when Nellie LaRoy has to repeat herself over and over per take because someone sneezed is one of this film’s many scenes, even if a failure for some audiences, that will linger as a successful one among many. Even the most potentially pretentious aspect of the film - a flash-forward hallucination for one character, a huge montage into the history of cinema where Ingmar Bergman, Ed Emshwiller’s Sunstone (1979) and blue cat aliens make a cameo - is sincere, admirable pretention that says, for all the agony and huge piles of cocaine used onscreen, the joy of cinema is the desired outcome. These films can be salvaged from all the tragedy and unnecessary decadence, and stand as gems whether entertainment or with more thoughts in mind.

The ensemble nature of the film adds an interesting pace, where everyone is connected to the casualties of this momentous change. With Manny Torres central, linking everyone else, he himself is a casualty too in being the Hispanic fan of cinema who, in his passion, falls into compromise and sells his soul, even playing to a cultural stereotype by masquerading as being from Spain instead of Mexico, his climb up the ladder in the industry greasing the wheels of compromise in other areas. The desire to look at how non-white actors and non-acting staff in the industry is one of the film's most honourable aspects, but again that sense this needed an extra hour to complete this task is felt even if a lot of great material is still here. Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a black trumpeter who becomes the lead for a series of "race" film, as an accepted black face to white Americans, is a film premise in itself, a whole mind field of concern into the modern day of how specifically a male black actor can find themselves in this position of being marketable to white viewers but with all the patronisation, and potential stereotyping, we still scrutinise in the modern day. Even the straw which breaks the camel’s back involves burnt cork, all because of the issues surrounding how the South, racially segregated, had completely aberrant rules in regards to race even on the silver screen. Whilst a story with a proper closure, and a happy ending, Palmer is however one of the figures here missing a few beats, even if it deals with the persecution and the patronisation, that could have added more to Babylon’s virtues in depicting this character.

More disappointing in her lack of onscreen role is Li Jun Li’s Lady Fay Zhu, fascinating as a character from a working class Chinese family in the United States, going through Hollywood as a silent minority, and as much because she explicably evokes Anna Marie Wong, the real Chinese American actress she is clearly a stand-in for. It is fascinating to see a character like this in context, not least because Li Jun Li is good, but also because the character is another who had an entire film to flesh out from her story; Wong would struggle against bias, even in terms of being depicted onscreen, as an Asian woman but also had a career in cinema which moved outside of the United States, such as Piccadilly (1929) in the United Kingdom, which would have been fascinating to see more of here in Fay Zhu. The character also gets the best entrance of everyone in the film even if explicitly evoking Marlene Dietrich’s persona, of wearing men’s suits for cabaret numbers, apt as Wong and Dietrich would work together on Shanghai Express (1932) for Joseph von Sternberg. Again, there is so much here that I wish this was a longer film.

The two white characters in this ensemble do however offer as much in terms of casualties. Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad may seem an outlier, a white man whose success comes with his drinking, luxury and terrible habit of marrying women quickly after meeting them, but he is still a tragic figure worth having sympathetic for even if his self destructive and id-like streaks, like getting shattered on booze before his take, are played for comedy. Pitt’s performance does so much to help, having developed least from the 2000s a combination of old school star charisma but a gleeful nature of playing goofy or charmingly naive figures, but as much of this is also because of this archetype. Hollywood tragically has so many real cases of male actors who were once incredibly popular and then were not even decades from this era, for them as much as for actresses, leaving those behind in its wake to try to find their purpose again, star in lower budget films, or leading to tragic conclusions. The immortality he is said to have, in one of the sombre scenes where the inevitable death is talked of, is the one hopeful spot, but there is still even cynicism in knowing that if anyone is going to remember Jack Conrad and preserve his films, it is as in real life the film fans themselves rather than the studios. Between studio fires losing prints from poorly handling their protection, silent films being junked, or Hollywood’s lack of interest in showing old films on streaming sites, immortality for these figures came from the Manny Fabers of the world and the regular film goers who caught the bug, from the specialist magazines, to preserve even the work of Poverty Row film stars. Even Damien Chazelle himself making this film in the first place, showing his own cinema obsession, is as much to encourage interest in this cinema that could still be forgotten.

Likewise, Margot Robbie is as good in her role, hers the tragic figure of someone with her own personal issues entering cinema, proudly her own person but unfortunately too much her own person when the screen wants a cleaned up image. Fighting against both the morality police and bias to her as a New Jersey woman, Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy is someone who, barring her flaw of gambling and substance abuse, is only committing a crime of being both brash and proudly vulgar to speak her own mind. As a woman meant to represent others’ desires of her onscreen, even when needing to be a respectable maiden instead, the character does stand out as one of the most important, even if any hers includes touches which would have added even more detail; such as her connection to Fay Zhu, as the censoring of their romantic relationship for “morality” is another enticing subplot we barely get.

Babylon is with a lot of ambition, content and scenes in performance to perfectly timed moments of humour which succeed, but also a lot which left me wanting more. This is not a bad thing at all, but it shows even in somehow managing to get the budget it got for some of these profane scenes, even to have a golden shower onscreen from a Paramount Pictures production this resplendently depicted, it was still clasping for a larger scale that, sadly, is not practical in terms of film as commerce; even this three hour plus length, outside of awards, is considered taboo as, unless a superhero film, most cinemas would want shorter films to be able to screen them more than once, as well as in multiple screens, to earn profit first. I cannot hate a film, even beyond its sincere attempt to tackling this story in terms of what cinema is, just for the seemingly ridiculous notion they cast Eric Roberts, as Nellie LaRoy’s father, in a small cameo and having an extended scene entirely based around him fighting a snake. Considering Roberts’ own meta textual context in being cast, the old brother of Julia Roberts who had some prominent large budget roles but has been a journeyman in cinema in all budgets, that just adds to his entertaining role and what proved to be the best sequence of the entire film. A farce set around this scenario in the desert, it could as with the whole film being considered blasphemous to Hollywood, showing its old side ridiculous and full of drunk mishaps, but alongside letting these characters be human, the scene is also hilarious for all the right reasons, even in showing Eric Roberts’ talents, as with the small role of Flea, bassist of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, in an almost unrecognisable but memorable role as one of the silent figures in Hollywood’s staff who get stuff done without wanting much credit back.

Some of the tonal choices do feel as if Damien Chazelle’s ambition were struggling with the prestige of the premise, as if he could have even taken further risks than he already did, as my thoughts turn to when Manny Torres ends up being Dante Alighieri in the arsehole of California, entering the Ninth Circles of Hell with the worst Virgil you could get, a coked out lounge lizard Tobey Maguire who will have him sleep with the fishes if he is not careful. It is a strange scene even in context I have to admire, even if it does have the questionable choice of casting actors with physical disabilities as denizens, even if chained up against their will, to depict the hellish nature of the location. The sequence with just details like the crocodile (a real one, rather than the CGI elephant earlier), and how it feels like the film is attempting, even struggling, to enter the tonal shifts one would presume from Takashi Miike, not a Hollywood Oscar contender, does bring up how Damien Chazelle took on risks and challenges for himself which do feel erratic, even in a good way, put together. Just the fact he had carte blanche with Babylon and that it is pulling at the seams with what he was attempting is to be admired if going to always catch me off-guard in noticing the tears.

That it comes with the full arm of Hollywood’s resources made Babylon feel greater, a film where everyone from the cinematographer Linus Sandgren to the costume department are on fire here, a vivid lived-in experience here in what is seen onscreen. (The music in particular, composed by Justin Hurwitz, is its own virtue, a vast of multiple instruments interlocking throughout, providing at many points the backbone to the film.) That it is all for this vivid and utterly unpredictable take on a plot line you could have told more conventionally does reveal in itself a virtue, Babylon growing for it. Again, returning to the prologue, this is a white elephant, but in a world where I habit in reverse time, getting out for these type of films in the winter into the spring, than usually run the opposite way by late spring when the blockbusters arrive, that concept of what Manny Faber meant now needs to consider the paradox of genre and franchise films, once b-movies, are now the big films Hollywood want to sell; this is neither a cheap and off-done condemnation of them either, just a considerable that, if the ideal film Hollywood wants to make is no longer the grand drama with a message, that the terms of what folly and pointless expense is now is complicated, especially as, whilst message is muddled due to the subject, God how much I would prefer more Babylons in existence.