Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012, UK)
AFTER (F) Painfully ill-conceived hey-where’d-everyone-go drama, suffocating in a fog of misplaced, morose sentimentality
AMERICAN MARY (B-/C+) Titular protagonist well sketched, but narrative slips out of focus, body mod plot never as subversive as promises
BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (A-) Warm, affectionate meta-cinematic glow dissolves into Polanskian purgatory between reality & art. Mesmerizing.
CHAINED (C+) Remorseless grimness lifted by committed performances, but thematic concerns only partly served by storyline twists
COCKNEYS VS ZOMBIES (C-) Handful of decent gags keeps things just the right side of amiable, though in too many depts more than a bit ‘pony’
DEAD SUSHI (B-/C+) Perfect throwaway midnight fodder; predictably nutso, and never runs out of suitably barmy fish/rice based ideas
EUROCRIME! (B-) Thorough, entertaining passegiata thru poliziotteschi sub-genre; great talking heads from Franco Nero, Henry Silva & Chris Mitchum
GRABBERS (B-) Hugely endearing Irish small town creature feature, delicately genre savvy & a great paean to the joys of getting pissed
HIDDEN IN THE WOODS (F) Frenetic, morally confused feral tale of two sisters; telenovela-like hysteria (& aesthetic) generates unsolicited LOLs
MANIAC (C+/B-) Undeniably brutal, but is it a formally innovative approach to themes of voyeurism & spectatorial identification, or merely retrograde & intellectually vapid?
OUTPOST: BLACK SUN (D-) Technically adept, if chronically under-lit, but story’s a bore; flavourless characters had me rooting for the Nazis
PAURA 3D (D-) Devoid of anything approaching atmosphere/suspense; botches scares, though descent into gratuitous sadism mercifully brief
THE POSSESSION (C+) Polished studio product, no more or less. Ditches early character work for derivative, predictable hokum
[REC]³ GENESIS (B-) No idea what, if anything, defines the franchise any more, but this was great, ribald taffeta-clad fun
THE SEASONING HOUSE (C+) Uneven; best when hermetic, puce-hued fairytale-nightmare, though edges softened by Balkansploitation silliness
SINISTER (B-/C+) Throws its net wide, pecking corn like the metaphorical blind hen, though with surprising frequency. Effective sound, Hawke classy
SLEEP TIGHT (B+/A-) Taut, suspenseful but above all deliciously blackly comic, propelled by darkly twisted Almodovarian obsession
STITCHES (B-/C+) More than a little rough around the edges technically, but on the whole an inventive, funny & gleefully gory delight
THE THOMPSONS (D-) Nice rural setting, but standalone blood-sucking mythology is wispy & forgettable, + some terrible secondary performances
TOWER BLOCK (C+) Frantic LIFEBOAT-meets-Broken-Britain setup, better before moralizing & explanations. Cutaways to gunman a mis-step?
UNDER THE BED (C-) Resolutely ludicrous. Nice central fraternal axis, but needed *something* extra (ambiguity? verisimilitude? Joe Dante at the helm?)
V/H/S (C+) Gripes about ‘VHS’ aspect aside, a portmanteau of efficient – if strikingly bland – found footage stories; Skype-ological 4th chapter pick of the bunch
While blowing off the dust of this here blog, i’ve decided to collate some of my Tweet reviews of films released last year, for my benefit, if no-one else’s:
UK 2011 releases
ATTACK THE BLOCK (C-) Blockploitation? Too shy of laughs or scares to satisfy on either count, though a ragged charm lurks in the shadows
ATTENBERG (B-/C+) Not so much Son of Dogtooth as its morbid, mischievous niece. Troubling and amusing in equal measure, if undercooked.
THE AWAKENING (C+) Fastidiously tape-measured Gothic goings-on; ornate, but stuck in too high a gear too early on, cramping emotional breathing space.
THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975 (B-) Searing slice of History From Below necessarily lacks breadth but powerful time capsule footage jolts
BRIDESMAIDS (C+) Overlong, meandering & visually flat, though comedy hits as much as it misses & Wiig delivers an affecting sense of pathos.
CONTAGION (C+) No little skill in the flow of ensemble narrative, but focus on the intimate feels somehow cold & depletes meta-urgency
COWBOYS & ALIENS (C-) Admirably straight-faced in the face of po-mo smuggery, but ought to put a ‘Wanted’ poster up for conspicuously absent laughs. Ensemble cast as wasted as that title.
THE FUTURE (A?/B?/D?) July’s world (bravely/cloyingly, to taste) entirely composed of affectation, with BIG THINGS to say to very few people
THE DEEP BLUE SEA (B-) Faithful to the stillness & tumult of the Rattigan, if encumbered by its limitations. Weisz its tempestuous heartbeat.
THE GUARD (B-) Visual wit, zinger-laden dialogue & a delightful Gleeson amply cover minor shortcomings. If only Hot Fuzz had been 92mins…
THE HOUSEMAID (2010, C-) Stylish, steamy psycho-soap, tho visual sumptuousness a distraction & satire effete. Last reel surrealism v odd
HORRIBLE BOSSES (D+) Well, I laughed a handful of times (mostly Farrell), and it’s not *that* misogynistic. Is that enough these days? Bosses ought to have been more horrible.
HUGO (C-) Like its stony-faced automaton, it’s striking, but clunky & in need of a heart. Less a love letter to cinema than a glossy brochure for the World Cinema Foundation.
MARGARET (B+) No wonder we had to wait so long! Capricious tonal short-shifting scene-to-scene makes this surely a editing job worthy of Sisyphus
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (D+) Idea for asequel: set in 2091, struggling director travels back to 2011, comes across Allen, Bruni & Wilson, finds no inspiration.
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (B-) Solid, well paced unpretentious B-movie-ish fluff, though simian cast excel better than a rather lost looking Franco & Pinto
SEEKING JUSTICE (D-) Formulaic, forgettable Nic Cage hokum, not so much phoned in as rung thru to a bland, generic answerphone message
THE SKIN I LIVE IN (C-) Customary Almodóvarian flourishes, but weighed down by overstuffed, cumbersome narrative which undermines the chills
SNOWTOWN (A-) Doesn’t so much get under the skin than perform an all-over body excoriation. Horrifying, clincally precise & utterly draining.
SUPER 8 (C+) I Love The 1970s over-cramming aside it’s perfectly serviceable, though it’s a shame Abrams didn’t set his aim higher than fairly straight Spielberg Xeroxing
X MEN: FIRST CLASS (C+) Second-class origins tale cf Abrams’ Star Trek; too much X-Club Juniors, at expense of intriguing Fassy/McAvoy axis
The opening shot of Martin Bargiel’s Augenblicke, seen through the eyes of its main character as he stares vacantly back at his reflection in the distorting mirrored wall of an empty elevator car, may seem a mere matter of cinematic trompe l’oeil, yet it serves as an elegant motif for the film in its entirety, which plays like a dizzying waltz through a carnival’s hall of mirrors in which the disoriented viewer is scarcely able to orientate themselves amidst their new surroundings before being whisked away into another, more sinister sphere of consciousness.
The consciousness in question is that of Schenker who, upon leaving his apartment block one evening, stumbles upon the dead body of a fellow resident who has apparently fallen from one of its high windows. From this seemingly straightforward beginning, the film progresses into a maze of shifting perspectives and time-frames as the increasingly baffled Schenker tries to piece together the preceding events; or have they, in fact, happened at all? Rather than a Rashomon-like meditation on the perspectival nature of memory, the film’s elaborate construction seems to call into question the very plasticity of reality itself as Schenker is plunged ever further into a many-circled Dantean inferno.
What is remarkable is that, in spite of its complexity, the film is propelled by narrative coherence rather than hampered by it, and the seemingly breathless pace of its meta-narrative is in direct contrast to the slow near-mundanity of many of its individual scenes. This latter stillness, coupled with the woozy, jaundiced visual aesthetic reminiscent of Roy Andersson, only serves to make this surreal Borgesian labyrinth all the more unnervingly nightmarish.
Serene Velocity 