It’s been a while since I published a compendium of Letterboxd reviews so, of course, here are two at once. In the past couple of years, I’ve been writing more and more on Letterboxd, Mostly just brief snippets and short texts, but I like them all, however small, however fragmented they may be, and I’m keen to keep a record of them here. So here we go. Part one of a bumper crop. In case you missed it, here's part two. The texts in this post were written between April 2021 and September 2024, and are presented in alphabetical order. I hope you enjoy reading them.
The 400 Blows | Francois Truffaut, 1959
A brutal portrait of "adult" life built entirely from inference and assumption. Antoine sets the table for dinner without thinking because he knows what will happen if it's not set. He tells lies, not to avoid responsibility but to buy himself time, to prolong his moments of peace a little longer. A film about crushed hope, and holding on to something as a means of staying alive. The rules are the rules. Nothing will change, and obedience is death, so rebellion is all that's left for a boy who wants to live. And failing that, running. Leaving it all behind in search of something better. Of course he ends up on a beach, both a dream and a prison, offering a world of possible futures without any means of reaching them. Faced with everything and nothing all at once, how do you know where to go?
A.K.A. Serial Killer | Masao Adachi, 1975
A man of Japan. Places and words intertwined to contextualise the biography of a mass-murderer within the spaces he may have inhabited. No attempt to diagnose this man, no speculation or sensationalism. Just the places, as mundane as any others, the facts of this man's life, as they're known, and the four murders he committed, across four cities, with the same gun. Adachi builds an equation and leaves the answer blank but shows his working anyway.
Ambulance | Michael Bay, 2022
An interesting counterpoint to Tony Scott’s Unstoppable, partly in terms of its unwavering commitment to a high-octane, fast-cutting visual style, but specifically in terms of its approach to transportation. As a filmmaker, Scott seems most at home on a train, with everything headed in one direction and geographically mapped from station to station. The dramatic tension stems from an ability to foresee and predict a situation, prepare for it, and deal with it: a steep bend ahead, another train on the track. It's more methodical than Bay, whose approach is almost entirely the opposite. He’s most at home on the road, with infinite moving parts causing chaos. There’s freedom on the highway, so nothing is controllable or predictable. A tyre could blow out, or traffic could build up, along with a million other possibilities. The drama of Bay’s work comes from an ability to react to situations as they happen and maintain that forward momentum at any cost, and his chaotic visuals provide enough of a sense of what's happening. It doesn't matter where you are, just that things are moving forwards. And just as Scott knows the track has to end somewhere, Bay knows that all roads can lead to any destination. Whether you can see it happen or not, one way or another, A will always lead to B in the end.
The Boy And The Heron | Hayao Miyazaki, 2023
Several traumatic experiences befall a young boy in quick succession and he retreats into formalities and silence, rehearsed gestures in public that give the impression of normality while he's lured into a well of sadness, in which a chaotic encounter with a magical world filled with magical creatures threatens to overwhelm him. The boy has to face this world and its bizarre rules and rituals, in all their labyrinthine complications, and by doing so he comes to terms with the fact that controlling this chaos will not save him. The only way to manoeuvre through grief and pain and parakeets is by rolling with the punches and finding a way to live with reality, not as it ought to be but as it really is — and then life can go on.
The Fog | John Carpenter, 1980
It’s dangerous to cherry-pick your history. The fog billows in from the ocean as a small coastal town celebrates its centennial. A spectacle first, a glowing freak of nature drifting against the wind, and eventually an inexplicable threat — a brutal reminder of a long-buried past, but the party carries on regardless. The local radio station broadcasts from a secluded lighthouse, but only at night, the soothing voice of host Adrienne Barbeau the perfect soundtrack for rest and relaxation, and an empty church is only ever occupied for business or shelter. The priest's warnings fall on deaf ears. Illumination is an afterthought. Anything unworthy of a party or a statue remains lost to history. Stay asleep.
Interstellar | Christopher Nolan, 2014
Arguably the peak of Nolan's obsession with time as a dramatic device. And it is an obsession. A film about time past and passing, ghosts and echoes, crops and wrinkles. Everything is reduced (or elevated) to seconds, minutes, decades. The dust rolling in over the hills, the waves cresting on the horizon. Getting closer. For Nolan, there is no greater commodity than time and so it hurts like hell to lose it. Recorded messages from children left behind and a flooded engine on a distant planet are one and the same. Painful reminders of all the seconds, minutes and decades that aren't ever coming back.
Labyrinth of Dreams | Gakuryu Ishii, 1997
Routines repeated again and again and so the mind wanders. Images keep coming back: a ticket punch, the passing of clouds, driving rain and steam; and letters of warning based on feelings and vibes linger on the mind, pondered in silence as something to do on a boring day at work. A longing for adventure, for excitement, for the possibility of danger just to break the tedium. Rumours create reality and the truth is decided, not proven. "If only he was a normal person". And maybe he is. A film about the folly of building a house on sand, without ever denying the possibility that all of it may actually be true.
The Last Duel | Ridley Scott, 2021
Blood, metal, sweat and mud, as expected, but far more interestingly a Rashomon-aping structure that allows subtle differences in remembered details (a falling slipper, a kiss, a saved life) to gradually reveal these men to be narcissistic, monstrous and, frankly, deranged. This being Ridley Scott, it's a film about power structures, and each man's account is an attempt to position himself as somehow more worthy of power and adoration than the other. One man assaults the other's wife and it's he who has been wronged. His wife doesn't come into it. It's only in Comer's account of events that we even see her as a person, someone who thinks and feels and exists on her own, and not as an object for a man to valiantly die for or kill for. That this film ends on her perspective and ends as it does is quite damning, I think, of both the systems that serve to provide men the opportunity to act as heroes in the name of justice, but equally that the only justice at all for the survivors of such crimes exists within these same systems. "The truth does not matter. There is only the power of men".
The Life of Jesus | Bruno Dumont, 1997
Bike helmets and roaring engines, the contrast between safety and menace. One minute, a gang of local white boys are thoughtfully counselling a grief-stricken friend or trying to teach a bird to sing, and the next they’re muttering racial slurs in the direction of a family speaking Arabic in a café. In this village, compassion for the community and hatred towards anyone outside of it is totally normal, and there are no consequences for the casual acts of violence that keep perceived outsiders in the margins. Dumont loads the film with accidents waiting to happen (health scares, reckless driving) that never actually come to anything, and these charmed lives give a horrible air of inevitability to how this ultimately comes to an end.
Red Eye | Wes Craven, 2005
There's a moment early on in which a young girl travelling alone for the first time flippantly (and awkwardly) tells her coddling mother: "I'm eleven, not nine", and the ghosts of 9/11 really linger all over the film. Craven builds a palpable fear of air-travel even before Murphy starts making threats: bad weather, rude passengers, delays, turbulence; even the mechanical process of shutting the doors and the screeching roar of take-off feel designed to emphasise just how much faith we put into engineering and skilled labour when we step onto a plane. But then this is really all about a lack of control, or specifically how to take back control of a situation in which the deck is stacked against you. For Craven, the scars of the past give resilience in the present, and the persistence of an increasingly resourceful McAdams, in her unshakeable desire to push back against the transparent demands and cat-and-mouse games of an increasingly frantic Murphy, ultimately serves to remove him of all of his charm and menace and control, and transform him into a squeaky-voiced, prat-falling idiot, outwitted, outmatched, and completely out of his depth, laying on the floor as sirens blare in the distance, looking up at her as she stands defiantly over him.
Red Line 7000 | Howard Hawks, 1965
At the track, Hawks shows the commentators, the pit-crew, the drivers, their loved ones, but never the crowd. This isn't racing as spectacle but racing as vocation, as profession; racing as obsession, where the risks are known, winning is the only goal, and other people have to hope they come home. Crash after crash after crash. The odds are against them, and yet they keep racing. A perfunctory funeral, well-trodden and numbed to sentiment. The risks are known. It happens too often. Crash after crash. Women watch through their fingers in the stands, and the men just go home, back to a facade of a normal life at the Holiday Inn, waiting for the next race to start. Neither love nor danger are enough to stop them. And so they keep racing.
Targets | Peter Bogdanovich, 1968
The work of a young man with an old heart. A real death of America movie, in which an aging actor reckons with his status as a relic of a bygone era and plans to leave it all behind, while a young suburban family man suddenly snaps and embarks upon a killing spree. Bogdanovich's suburbs are pristine and empty, all pastel-painted homes, beige chinos and white plimsolls, well-maintained lawns, a facade of peaceful living where everyone has access to guns and ammunition and the birds just keep on singing. As long as the surface is calm the rest can be ignored, left to simmer until it’s too late. And it is too late. The young man, politely and superficially ignored by his family, amasses an arsenal and takes to the streets. Meanwhile, Karloff, an effortlessly charming and melancholic man, reminisces about the good old days with a young director, played by Bogdanovich, and laments what Los Angeles has turned into. He’s a man without a future, too, but at least he has an audience of people willing to listen to him talk about it. Maybe a little too academic for my taste but certainly an effective piece of work, and there are some wonderful moments when Bogdanovich loosens the shackles — particularly Karloff’s magnetic recitation of an old ghost story in defiance of a shock-jock’s inane line of questioning, and the extraordinary sequence at the drive-in, with attendees trying to warn each other about an active shooter without drawing attention to themselves by opening their car doors.
Terrorizers | Edward Yang, 1986
A film about gravity, of sorts, in which the weight of a city pulls everything down into the ground and leaves its inhabitants to fight for their place in the clouds. Pot plants and fish tanks, barriers and veils, lies and tricks. Everything held at a distance to make the inevitable more palatable. Only those at the bottom seem to feel the pain of the crush, and so their climbs of course become more desperate. Blood signifies death, vomit life. Nobody feels anything in the end. A brutal scramble for fluids.