Reviews

It's a vanishingly rare occurrence for the occult to crop up in popular entertainment outside of the horror genre, but "Strange Angel" is that rare breed.

If you dial back a few decades from the birth of the 1960's counter-culture in California and look for the precursors of psychedelia, LSD & Hippies, you could trace some of its parentage to the bohemian experimentalists in "Strange Angel".

It's 1939 and as William Gibson would say, the future just isn't very evenly distributed yet. Jack Parsons can see the future is in space. That still sounds futuristic when Elon Musk talks about it in 2018 and like Musk, Parsons wants to do something to make it happen. What happens next is the true story of the man who helped spark that future and his unlikely tutelage under the teachings of Aleister Crowley.

One episode in and this is already looking good. I'm especially enjoying Rupert Friend's turn as a wild eyed mercurial next door neigbour, who initiates/baptises Jack into the Crowleian mysteries via a swimming pool.

I'll be curious to see how this show does. The real Parsons died at age 37 under mysterious circumstances, but certainly packed enough drama into his short life to fill out several seasons if it all works out for "Strange Angel".

I should start by saying, although I've never read the James M Cain novel, as a fan of classic golden era Hollywood films I love the original version of Mildred Pierce.

That didn't stop me enjoying Todd Hayne's new miniseries. It was fun to see the story retold and this is first class film-making for TV that easily outclasses a great deal of what gets pumped out for contemporary cinema. It's hard to say anything bad about the great cast and a beautifully photographed and realized recreation of 1930's Los Angeles.

Many reviewers seem to be posing the question Why? to a remake of this particular story. On one level there are obvious similarities to the Great Depression and the present times we live in coloured by an ongoing financial crisis. So is this a parable for our times ? Is there some deeper symbolic meaning to this storytelling that illuminates aspects of society ?

From what I've read of the novel, it seems this may have been James Cain's intention. Although Mildred Pierce is credited as his most ambitious work no one has ever mentioned it in the same breath as "great American novel". Is Mildred's vain pursuit of Veda's love and approval an allegory for ordinary folks pursuit of a chimerical and ultimately false credit card maxed "good life", that is ultimately a betrayal of who they really are and their true values Maybe?, maybe not.

It seems clear we are to think of Mildred as an tragic heroine on an operatic scale. Someone who's one blindness and weakness, her love for an ungrateful daughter, is her kismet and will be her ultimate downfall. But the story never really succeeds on this level and it's telling that it seems so well suited to it's styling as a Joan Crawford melodrama.

What's stopping it ? I think the problem is for this story to touch the greatness it's striving for this that its two central characters are never quite believable. Veda comes off as an almost cartoon or pantomime baddie. On the one hand we can understand (if not sympathize) with her disgust of lower middle class Glendale and aspirations for the finer things in life. But this never explains the level of hatred and sadism she displays towards her mother. Perhaps there is no explanation for this, the Italian teacher who so aptly sums her up is right, perhaps she's just an exceptional one off, a beautiful poisonous snake to be admired from afar, but never touched.

Even if we except this and take Veda's exceptional malevolence as believable the problem is that Mildred's character doesn't quite gel either. In almost every other area of her life we see Mildred as not only being clever, resourceful and capable but exceptionally so. The story of her entrepreneurial rise to success shows her dealing with people and situations with insight and astuteness. Yet this so completely deserts her when dealing with her daughter ?

Of course that's supposed to be the whole point of the story and in the tradition of capable heros with ruinous great flaws, something she can do nothing about. It's just that somehow here it never seems to quite work on the subconscious level these stories need to succeed at if they are to satisfyingly tap into the great archetypal themes they are aiming to communicate with.

So maybe Joan Crawford's version wins in the end, never the less HBO's mini-series is well worth a spin as a very superior soap opera told with cinematic flair.

I'll start with what I liked about 'Heartbeat Detector'. It's poetical, discursive style is something I love in cinema when it's done well. I long for stories that break from the formulaic and say what they have to say while stretching the boundaries of cinematic story telling; 'Heartbeat Detector' is aiming for that. It's beautifully photographed too, it's washed out colours and florescent glare a study in disjointed alienation.

Oh, and there is some great acting going on too, but I'm going to have to get trite at this point, because I'm afraid it's all a wasted effort.

At heart this is a morality play, but it's lesson is a perversity, in that there is none at all. It's a meditation on the horrors on the Nazi death camps, that leads the protagonist to realise his role in firing employees in a downsizing European multi-national may equate to the culpability of Nazi functionaries involved in the slaughter of the death camps.

Many people will find this insulting, and it is, doubly so. Insulting to those who died in the Nazi death camps and insulting to victims whose deaths could be found comparable today.

A message to the film makers. Do you want to make a film about a man who slowly realises the banality of evil that lead to the death camps is still with us in the 21st century ? Perhaps ponder questions like why several million children in Africa die every year from diseases due to a lack of clean drinking water, while we in the West spend more than is needed to prevent this on the frivolity of bottled mineral water.

Instead how ironic under the banner of exploring awareness of social problems, the film makers show about as much social awareness as the aristocracy before the storming of the Bastille.

One of the great things about the internet having become a semi-official film distribution channel is it giving people the chance to view films they never otherwise would have had a chance to see, particularly first time film-makers and those trying to make a name for themselves.

Little Erin Merryweather would fall into that category for me. I have no idea how writer, director and actor in this piece David Morwick, feels about his film being available in the high quality divx format on the internet, but maybe he should be glad, as it will create an audience for his work it's unlikely he would have had any other way.

With the constraints of first time film making, especially lack of experience, it is always good to focus on the positives in reviewing these films. You will of course expect mistakes and it is a measure of the films success in how far the positives outweigh the negatives.

Little Erin Merryweather succeeds abundantly in scoring positives.

Already mentioned in its reviews here are its art work and photography, they're beautiful. Beautiful photography is always an asset to good story telling and in this case, along with the art work, ties in especially well with the theme of the fairy story within a story.

That theme itself is another plus for LEM. The genre is turned on its head by it's rewriting of Little Red Riding Hood and I like the idea that that was played with. Also clever was the fact that the film doesn't allow it's self to be neatly categorised into any one genre, and that too is a strength that lends originality.

All in all (and given that it had just turned midnight on Halloween!) I enjoyed watching LEM. However there always has to be negatives in criticising too! What puzzles me with LEM, given how much Mr Morwick got superbly right for a first film, is that it's actually quite silly things that let him down.

The policeman and his intervention was very, very unrealistic. I realise there were budget constraints, but if a serial killer has killed three people in three days, there will be more than one police officer involved, who will not just be sharing information with a college lecturer.

A small point maybe, but it made the last twenty minutes of the film seem more contrived and the eventual denouement a bit silly. I think he could have waited until further into the film before Erin's identity were revealed and that would have helped maintain tension for longer. If I had to sum up LEM's flaws, it would be that if explored just a bit more deeply, it's story would have had a great deal for nuance and subtlety to give up and that it would have elevated the film from excellent to something really special. Where Mr Morwick scores B+ here, you feel he definitely has the potential for A's.

Still, given its freshness and originality, I'm glad I spent the time with Little Erin Merryweather; it has a lot to recommend it.

Stardust is a little charmer of a film. Yes, the story has been told a million times before to you since as early as you can remember. But it's how it's told that matters and Stardust does such a lot to get this right.

Great to look at visually, all the fairytale elements are wonderfully created with reference to everything from Shakespeare, classic European fairytale tradition, a brilliant airship very reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki and a fair smattering of Lord of the Rings.

The two leads are engaging and charming and I couldn't fault anyone's acting. I haven't read the books these are based on but there are enough fresh ideas in this magical universe to keep the storytelling engrossing.

Kudos all round, this film manages to get it just right on almost every area that counts. If you think you might like this film by all means go to see it, you almost definitely will.

Oh Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood, why can't you invest just a little of the millions of dollars you obviously put into special effects, paying for Nicolas Cage and the rest into a decent story ? Next has a brilliant premise, which is what drew me to it in the first place (and some misleadingly good reviews on here !) but it's such a let down. Entertaining enough if all your simple brain demands is yet another guy on the run with FBI, must stop bad guys, explosions and chases type film to add to the identikit hundred or so you've probably seen already. But you'd expect a little bit more than utterly pedestrian with Mr Cage and Miss Moore at the helm. It doesn't deliver.

Things start out well enough, but then they always do with these types of films. We're introduced to Cage's character and how the rules of his future seeing world operate through an entertaining spin through Las Vegas. Then things start to go wrong.

SPOILERS AHEAD

So my first gripe; the terrorists. They're French. What ? . I mean, great break out of film stereotypes and don't make all terrorists Muslims. But I expect some credibility and backstory for the ludicrous notion that French terrorists want to blow up LA with a nuclear bomb. We're never told and it's never explained. What a load of rubbish, why not make them Canadian or from Iceland, makes about as much sense. You've got to lose bucket loads of respect for a film and the imaginary world it's trying to create for two hours with a plot hole this stupid.

But it's symptomatic of the lazy storytelling that is such a letdown in this film. The 'rules' of Cage's future seeing universe are explained to us and then conveniently broken whenever a deux et machina plot moment requires it at will. But at this point it's all gotten a bit silly and I've given up caring. Except maybe to wonder why Julianne Moore thinks it's worth wasting her time with this sort of stuff. Can't she get any better work? Oh and the 'twist' at the end. For a moment I thought they we're actually going to do something clever. No, it just gets sillier as yet again they arbitrarily break with the rules they've created. No French terrorists waiting this time, though there should be.

Yes, it's entertaining enough, if that's all you want but disappointing in so many areas.

It makes you wonder if Hollywood is such a dog eat dog world where only the most talented survive how it can turn out so many dogs of films like this. An internet forum of movie buffs could have rewritten this into something so much better.

Jimmy & Judy overcomes it's limitations to be a film I'd definitely recommend even if intriguingly it points to greater things that it never achieves.

It's the first time I've seen a film filmed entirely from a first person point of view and I found this very striking. In many ways approaching film narrative through this device is very fitting for our age. We are surrounded as never before by video cameras, on phones, on CCTV etc and we spend more and more of our time viewing the end products of all of this on the internet. It stuck me watching me Jimmy & Judy just how rich the possibilities are here, developed further it could become a new genre of film. These possibilities aren't deeply explored here, but none the less where they are, it's surprising who naturally they seem to fit into the narrative. We see this as a story told about Jimmy, yet he's it's creator. People are frequently aware that they are speaking to camera, yet somehow we feel they are being filmed speaking to camera, as if there was another camera there filming this. It's a tribute to the skill of the directors that all of this works as smoothly as it does.

As other reviewers have pointed out another arresting feature of this film is the chemistry between to the two characters, fortuitously helped by the fact there was real off screen chemistry there as they actually ended up getting married in real life. Although I'd no idea watching at the time, this helps to keep their journey intriguing and watchable. Edward Furlong in particular gives it all with this character and as OTT as it can be it's all very watchable. I'd have to point out some great dark humor at the beginning to where Furlong's character films some scenes between Mommy & Daddy that really should have stayed secret – very funny.

This is a great film and all the more impressive for being made on a budget of close to nothing in 15 days. However it's not without it's flaws. All things considered it would be nitpicking to go after anything small, but there are two things that stop it being in the ranks of real great film making for me.

The first is that cliché of clichés in American cinema, guns. I know Raymond Chandler said whenever he ran out of ideas when writing he always fell back on having a man walk into a room with a gun. Perhaps it takes a non-American from the outside looking in (I'm Irish) to see it but characters with guns has become utterly tedious in American cinema. It's been cinematic shorthand for drama and angst since the days of film noir and while it's been reinvented successfully over the decades, it's formulaic in the extreme. So hence Jimmy & Judy's Bonnie & Clyde style crime spree becomes a little, how can I say this, done so many times before. People using guns, dealing with guns, or having guns seem to be in about three quarters of American films. Boring, boring, boring – can't you find some other way to talk about the human condition.

The second problem is their characters motivation for this angst driven spree. The film has a brilliant monologue near the end from William Sadler, a sort of white trash Declaration of Rights that speaks rivetingly of alienation, anger and despair. It seems to form a sort of denouement, the trouble is it's nothing to do with Jimmy or Judy who seem to have grown up in nice, well off, middle class homes. It's a shame having established this brilliant level of passion in Sadler's character, something similar couldn't be found for the leads, but apart from their love for each other it never is. By way of explanation we're offered their characters social ostracism in school but given their reaction to it, it doesn't come across as convincing. So as watchable as their journey, given its level of alienation and anger, it's never truly credible or believable.

Still that's not to gripe too much, as a debut this is excellent and well worth watching.

I've always said that no film can really scare you as an adult as films scared you when you were a kid. My benchmark for that being watching 'The Omen' on video when i was about 13, nothing has ever quite lived up to it in the effect it had on me.

Rewatching 'Threads' a while back makes me change my mind.

I remember first seeing it in Ireland on the BBC when I guess i was about 14. Even in Ireland, a neutral country, anxiety about nuclear war was a big thing when we were kids in the 80's.

'Threads' does really get to you, its very unsettling and disturbing. Unlike fictional horror films, 'Threads' is hugely different in one respect - it's real. This is what would happen, you can't distance yourself by saying it's make believe. There are still thousands of nuclear weapons armed and primed to be launched within minutes, 24 hours a day, everyday. Now we even have a country, the US, that says it's ready to use them, even if no one else does first.

Rewatching it, the dated production values don't detract from the film's power. It seems to bring the film even closer to the ordinary and the everyday. It's the film's ordinariness that makes it so viscerally disturbing - Hollywood special effects would at least have allowed you to distance yourself from it somewhat. In fact the film is more realistic for not having them. Someone else mentioned the scene of the woman in the shopping centre urinating where she stood out of pure terror as she sees the bomb go off a mile or two away from her - thats the scene that stayed with me the most too.

Its depressing to think in 2004 we are living in a world where politicians are again talking about 'winnable' wars using nuclear weapons. In many things in life you get a second chance if you make mistakes, I don't think nuclear weapons use will give us the luxury of finding out afterwards was it all worth it. Watch "Threads' and see if you think 'winnable' nuclear war is something you want to give yourself or your children.