Reviews

Just back from a screening in Hollywood, and this is I'm afraid something of a disappointment. Come Oscar time, I suspect her peers will throw the award into the much-loved Streep's lap, but the problem with a biopic is that however skilled the actor - great, even, in Streep's case - there is a tricky, unavoidable element of impersonation that inevitably creeps in and begins to dominate the characterization. It's particularly so in the scenes with Thatcher's Cabinet members, during which I also found myself distractedly thinking "Oh look, there's Mike Pennington, just like Michael Foot! Isn't Richard E. Grant the living double of Heseltine, and what about Anthony Head, the spitting image of Geoffrey Howe!?" And indeed, Spitting Image, the brilliant UK puppet satire show, often managed a more precise evocation of individual politicians than anyone here is achieving. Perhaps part of my irritation stems from the fact that I lived through the Thatcher era and all the nightmare years of strikes, garbage in the streets and rolling blackouts that preceded her and paved the way for her disciplined and dominating approach. She was like a mother-figure to the United Kingdom, telling the country it was time to clean up after itself and put its toys away (and indeed she often seemed, literally, that patronizing). She also did immense damage to the UK, to its cultural life and the social fabric she so brutally unraveled, witness her famous claim "there is no such thing as society", the mantra of the era's ethos and the rationalization of greed. The consequences of her tenancy of No 10 Downing Street were in part what persuaded me to emigrate. Her brutal order, during the Falklands conflict, to sink the Belgrano (which had been steaming speedily away from the conflict zone) seemed to me then, as it does now, a callous and indefensible action. She papered it over with obnoxious displays of public piety and jingoism ("Rejoice! Rejoice!") and if I were a believer in such things I'd hope she spends a long long time in Hades for the Falklands war. The movie effectively skitters over all this, ignores her de-regulation of banking, sets one rather brief scene at the Brighton hotel bombing minus the presence of Norman Tebbit and his unfortunate wife's awful injuries, makes no mention of Arthur Scargill (relying on archive film of the miner's protests and the subsequent riots which galvanized the nation), and uses the Poll Tax conflict to suggest she was by then well advanced into a mental instability which marked the beginning of the end of her reign. Her daughter Carol appears as a sort of goofy, endearing helpmate (no mention of Carol's quiet disappearance from public life after her throwaway racism leaked to the public) and her son Mark, a nasty piece of work by any measure, is merely a distant presence on the phone from South Africa - no mention here of his involvement in an attempted coup in Africa. Most annoying is the movie's framing device - Thatcher is a doddering old lady beset by Alzheimer's (as indeed she is) and the memories which surface through her confusion form the body of the film. Alas, skilled as J. Roy Helland's makeup job is, the aged Thatcher kept reminding me of Catherine Tate's foul-mouthed Granny comedy routine, and the thought just wouldn't go away. Thatcher was a giant presence in the global arena and literally changed the world. This oddly unaffecting film, prone to sentimentalizing its subject (which normally is a very un-British approach), is essentially a virtuoso star turn and is not the biopic Thatcher warrants, demands, and deserves.

The Independent Film Channel has been screening the full length version of Kontroll (111 minutes by my reckoning), widescreen, with nice clear subtitles. I watched the first 3 minutes and was hooked, open-mouthed, for the duration of the movie. The stunning "railing" sequence, a spine-tingling dolly shot that simply refuses to cut away, is like one of those dreadful nightmares wherein one is being chased by the dark, hooded figure who gets ever closer ... in fact the entire movie is a dream-state, a blossoming of those flowers of evil any city dweller has sensed in a subway late at night, when there are few people around ... it took me back to my days (or nights) working late in the West End of London, and catching the last, late underground train home ... Strange that nobody has commented on the way the movie navigates the low-key sexual tensions between the (almost entirely male) characters, with the leader of the rival "railing" gang making a gay-baiting comment about his antagonist ... and thus it is even more interesting that the young woman - Bela's daughter - is reductively described by many reviewers as Bulscu's 'girlfriend' when she doesn't really fulfil that prosaic a dramatic function, any more than the 'pusher/shadow' is a literal serial killer in the manner, say, of Lustig's 'Maniac'. She occupies a similar space to the magnificent owl, a being that sees what is going on in the darkness (and that also is sacred to Athena, goddess of -among other things- wisdom). And while the subtitles refer to her as wearing a "bear" suit, viewers on IMDb and amazon seem to think she's in a "bunny" suit, while I would swear she's in a kangaroo cozzie. In fact the presence of real or masquerade animals in the movie is mythically interesting - I counted 3 dogs, for instance, and was reminded of the 3-headed dog Cerberus, the Guardian of the Underworld in classical mythology (also a reference Fincher made in 'Se7en') I could write reams about this astounding movie. Dream-like, nail-biting, humane and terrifying in equal measure, it's a work of which all involved in its making must be amazingly proud. And can anyone identify the brilliant young man who plays the dazzlingly choreographed fare-dodger, spraying Tibor's face with ... what ? Crazy Foam ? Shaving cream ? ... and parcouring magnificently down the escalator before meeting his (shocking) fate ?

I saw Goke in a movie theatre in Kilburn, London, in the early 70s. A friend was the theatre's night manager; he and I sat and watched Goke in some sort of dazed disbelief - I suspect that our ingestion of psychotropic substances may have contributed to our great joy in the movie ... that and the remarkable fact that we were the only people in the theatre, which made the whole experience gloriously surreal, totally in keeping with the dreamy tone of the picture and consequently I have never forgotten this wondrous gem of a movie. As I write this it's playing - yes, right now - on TCM. Turner screenings often coincide with a new DVD release so I have my hopes. Meanwhile bombard TCM.com with your requests for the movie. And by the way, another poster comments on a defective first pressing of the Criterion release 'Jigoku'. I bought a copy of this movie on the day of its release and there was nothing wrong with it.

How strange - the previous reviewer remembers this on a double bill with Warhol's "Bad", and I saw it in Leicester Square, London, on a double bill with "The Hills Have Eyes" in 1977. Those were the days of creative programming gone mad. All I remember is being slightly irritated by what I thought was a rather self-conscious attempt at a half hour of "Art". But having said that, I was somewhat the worse for a bevy of Scotch and was impatient for the Wes Craven movie. I was also young and ... well.. in many ways a self-consciously "Arty" youth. So work out the psychology. I always liked Peter Barkworth's work, endearing and low-key, very British, like that other fine character actor Geoffrey Keen. I remember once talking to Barkworth in a Hampstead supermarket and complementing him on his work in "Telford's Change". He was of course suitably modest and charming. Gone, and not forgotten.