Letterboxd Reviews #3

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.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man | John Carpenter, 1992

Memoirs of an Invisible Man | John Carpenter, 1992

A Collection of (Short) Reviews

Some short impressions / reviews / whatever, written between June 2015 and last week, all taken from my Letterboxd, and all revised to be a little less fragmented. I like them, and I'd rather they were all in one place — so here they are.

Autumn Tale | Eric Rohmer, 1998

The way Rohmer shoots conversations between two people in this is fascinating. Characters talk objectively about their love lives together in a two-shot, before, usually as one of them says something the other doesn't agree with or want to talk about, one of them leaves the frame. The camera stays as it is, leaving one character alone in a shot made for two, while Rohmer cuts to the other in a shot of their own. The conversations continue as if nothing has happened, cutting back and forth between the two shots, and the characters generally reunite within one frame after talking a little more, but the distance between them in these brief moments, however small, feels enormous, suggesting a divide between them that bubbles under the surface of every word they're saying.

An Autumn Afternoon | Yasujiro Ozu, 1962

Calendars and clocks, usually placed right next to each other, seem to take up space on the walls of every building. One of the clocks, in the eldest son's small, modern apartment, needs to be wound to stop it from stopping, and the calendar in the hyper-Americanised bar shows two months on a single page. Ozu isn't just making us aware of time and its passing, but also how indefinite and imprecise time can be. That clock could have stopped hours, days, even weeks earlier, and the date could be represented by any of the numbers on the calendar. The present becomes harder and harder to grasp — an uncertain period between the past and the future, tradition and modernity, men and women, East and West, the old and the young.

The Color of Money | Martin Scorsese, 1986

A retired pool hustler turned whiskey salesman drinks a can of Coca Cola in a practice room after working on his game, as if to embrace the new-school, sugar-rush attitudes that have made him obsolete. His maniacally arrogant new protégé values the short term thrill of a victory over the long term reward of making people believe you're a loser and taking their money when you show them that you're not. There's no time to wait for craft anymore. It's about the rush. Quick money for a quick game. Coca Cola sells by the can while his whiskey fills boxes in storerooms. It doesn't sell anymore.

Homework | Abbas Kiarostami, 1989

A series of very simple 1-on-1 interviews in which Kiarostami (wearing sunglasses indoors, sat behind a desk) asks several schoolchildren about their homework that, collectively, paints a picture of a generation of children failed by education, both in school and at home. As the interviews mount up, patterns begin to emerge: stories of violent schoolteachers, illiterate and impatient family members, the importance of cartoons; and the accumulation of these similarities creates a sense of universality, that education in Iran is failing not just at this school, but across the entire country. Away from the interviews Kiarostami observes life in the school: in particular, a school-wide religious ceremony of remembrance that quickly descends into chaos. The students are asked to repeat the words of a religious song the headteacher is singing, but their attention drifts. They talk among themselves and play with their friends, not because they're disrespectful, but because they have no comprehension of why this ceremony should be respected. Dictation and repetition does not create understanding. Kiarostami emphasises this by silencing their singing ("out of respect for the ritual", an adult perspective), instead focusing on the indifferent, unknowingly offensive behaviour of the students, while the teachers simply continue, seemingly oblivious to the problem in front of their eyes.

In The Mouth of Madness | John Carpenter, 1994

Carpenter's tight framing and slow panning offers a world of potential horrors offscreen, forever out of sight: an unfathomable danger that may not exist, emanating from a place that's impossible to accurately comprehend. A town, not on any map, and only found following a bizarre transportive nightmare, is the source of a demonic plague affecting the readers of a smash-hit horror novel, and viewers of the smash-hit movie adaptation (a lot of people across America (at least)). But is it really happening, or is it a fiction? Nothing is concrete. It's an illogical movie, or one that at least has its own logic: roads impossibly loop back on themselves, people disappear in one place and reappear somewhere totally different. Something is making people do crazy, monstrous things, whether it's real or not. Cultural hysteria or supernatural force: what's the difference?

Lady in the Water | M. Night Shyamalan, 2006

Shyamalan loves closed-off, self-sustaining communities (the farm in Signs, the village in The Village, etc), in which some kind of unfathomable alien threat is closing in from outside. Here, the threat is so strange: a fantasy in real life, but taken seriously to the point that nobody questions it. A water nymph appears in the pool of an apartment complex, and the concern of the characters isn't "who are you really?", but rather "why are you here?" and "how can I help you?" The entire community runs with it, and everyone in the complex has a role that they take without question. Total, unwavering faith. Hearing is believing. Action is never in doubt.

Loft | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2005

The stagnation of an award-winning author out of ideas, commissioned to churn out a generic, marketable romance novel and embroiled in a ghost story that may or may not be a fiction. "The eternal corpse," used here to describe a 1000 year old "mummy" preserved virtually intact by the mud of a swamp (mud that the author inexplicably coughs up, as if to reject the idea that preservation of past glories will be any part of her future), could be equally used to summarise a genre that, by 2005, had perhaps run its course for Kurosawa (his only other classifiable horror movie since then, Retribution, was released the following year as part of a J-horror series in the pipeline since 2004). A funeral of sorts, then, and what a send off it is — flitting gleefully between classic Kurosawa accretion of tension and an exaggerated, Twixt-like visual flare (swirling fog on a lake, cartoonish green corpses, incongruous whip pans and fade outs), this bizarrely constructed narrative, complete with flashbacks and dream sequences contained within blurred layers of fiction and reality, is significantly less concrete than its face value suggests. And then there's the devilish ending, only muddying the waters further. A bewildering line in the sand.

Masques | Claude Chabrol, 1987

Perhaps the quintessential Chabrol movie. Makes literal his interest in masks by presenting each character as a false version of themselves, generally used to hide their real, somewhat surreptitious motivations. The match-making for the elderly TV show, with its assertive "applaud!" signs and love-heart number cards being an interesting parallel to this idea of an ever-present falsehood clouding reality — although perhaps a more interesting one would be the game of tennis that the show's host and his biographer briefly play, if only because of tennis's unusual status as a sport in which a player can score more points and win more games than an opponent and still lose the match.

Private Fears in Public Places | Alain Resnais, 2006

Connections based on (literal) divisions: walls, windows, curtains, bars; relationships based on untruths: false names, sexuality, miscommunication, the difference between hearing and listening. If nobody is what they appear to be then nobody really knows anybody, and we're all doomed to be disappointed and alone, with or without another person.

PTU | Johnnie To, 2003

To equates respecting the police to respecting a violent gangster who could kill you for not bringing him a beer quickly enough in a restaurant — and why not, when the cops spend so much of their time covering up their own mistakes and incompetence by planting drugs on the innocent, stealing evidence from crime scenes, and torturing people for information, instead of what they should be doing: solving crimes, catching bad guys; all under a misguided code of brotherhood. The fact that the absurd conclusion is a triumph for some and an embarrassing failure for others is particularly damning — people who slip on banana skins are invariably clowns.

Ready Player One | Steven Spielberg, 2018

The gamification of culture is the death of culture. No new ideas in 30 years, just commodified nostalgia, malleable avatars and usernames; cross-brand fantasies played out ad infinitum. The Oasis is a desert, a cultural wasteland, a "place" that Spielberg seems to simultaneously be wary of and have deep reverence for. Specially designed game suits translate digital sensations to physical ones, but they don't cover mouths and tongues — nobody can tell what's real anymore. A race for extraordinary IRL power quickly becomes a URL war for freedom, fought by regular people wearing VR headsets in the streets of a city but lost in a fake world, going through the motions of punching and kicking and shooting each other without physically connecting with anything.

The Unknown Girl | Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2016

Indigestion and vomiting, the benefit of release. Haenel's doctor encourages confession: her patients speak and their illnesses disappear, her ex-intern speaks and becomes a doctor again; but she processes her own guilt in silence, embarking upon a frustrating investigation that she's not equipped to handle while the world around her gets smaller and smaller: a promising career and a dead-end job, a spacious flat and a duvet on an office floor, and a literal hole in the ground that she can't climb out of without someone passing her a ladder.

Vampires | John Carpenter, 1998

There are no safe spaces in John Carpenter's Vampires, only safe times. In the daytime, vampires shield themselves from fatal sunlight, hiding underground or in boarded-up shacks. Skilled hunters know what to look for, and, despite their physical disadvantage, their prey are easy to defeat. At night, however, the tables turn, and the hunters are no match for their unencumbered prey. Time is more important than anything. Hunter Jack Crow frantically says "we've got less than eleven hours until the sun goes down," while vampires stalk their prey from darkened buildings, waiting for their chance to strike. Carpenter's camera turns to the sky as often as the hunters do, tracking the ever-setting sun, but if the vampires find what they're searching for, a way to walk in the daytime, all of this time-keeping becomes futile. Vampires is a film about preserving a way of life. The vampires want to extend their power beyond the limitations of night, removing their only weakness, while the hunters, of course, cannot allow themselves to be placed at a disadvantage. They're winning, but for how long? Carpenter sees a sky filled with clouds. As much as they move and change in time, there will always be clouds in the sky. Time keeps things alive, keeps things moving. Time is hope. But you can't see clouds at night.

Prince of Darkness | John Carpenter, 1987

"Common sense breaks down at subatomic level" says a theoretical physics professor early on in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, and so it does, as a group of students and scientists gather in the basement of an abandoned church to study an impenetrable container covered in satanic inscriptions, filled with a bizarre green liquid. They run numerous tests, and the results are unexplainable: the acidity can't be that high; a life form can't grow in pre-biotic fluid; how can it be seven million years old? As baffling as it seems, these scientists, who value their fields of study more than their names, still reject the idea that this is real, even as the mounting evidence becomes harder and harder to dismiss.

Carpenter, as with much of his work, thrives in tight spaces, drawing horror from pitch-black rooms, long narrow corridors, and the imposing presence of scientific apparatus and religious iconography cluttering the already cramped church; while his use of nauseating practical effects catalyses his characters' acceptance of the situation - after all, who can deny the occult when a person collapses into a pile of cockroaches? It's at this point that Carpenter shifts gears. The mystery of the green liquid suddenly reveals itself, and the earlier scepticism is replaced by a panic-stricken fight for survival: one of the students tries in vain to reason with his possessed captors by telling (terrible) jokes, while another, seeing the hordes of zombified people blocking the alley beneath the first floor window, jumps down anyway to look for an escape route, before frantically climbing back up as the crowd closes in. 

Perhaps the most important reaction, though, is between physics students Brian and Catherine, the two "leads", or at least the two characters Carpenter spends the most time with. Early in the film, they're involved in a string of non-committal sexual encounters on campus, yet when faced with the devil incarnate, they profess their love for each other, as if the irrational situation they're in has made them more prepared to accept the unbelievable. It's fitting, then, that this film about scientific investigation ends with an act of romantic optimism - which Carpenter preserves with a gorgeous cut to black.