BOOTLEG REVIEW: ArtScience (The Robert Glasper Experiment, 2016)

[This review was originally published in 2016]

Jazz maestro Robert Glasper is someone I’ve been meaning to get into for the last couple of years. I’ve caught individual tracks from his Black Radio albums, but I’ve never had a chance to get through an entire album. 

Earlier this year, Glasper released a posthumous collaboration with Miles Davis, Everything’s Beautiful, and has followed that up with his latest solo offering, ArtScience.

A series of extended jams, Art Science is my kind of joint. At times it sounds like Davis’s In A Silent Way mixed with the latest in dubstep and rap. 

The opening song, ‘This Is Not Fear’, lays out the thesis of the album, with Miles Davis’s famous quote about the influence of African American music upon on popular music. This acts as a licence for Glasper to use each track to blend genres, mixing traditional Jazz-style improvisations with soul vocals and dance beats.

‘Day To Day’ has the beat of an old-school funk song, with disco-like strings, while ‘No One Like You’ is a 9 minute epic. Bracketed by vocal choruses, it is a terrific band jam, with Glasper’s excellent blending of electronica filing out the edges. ‘You And Me’ and ‘Tell Me A Bedtime Story’ are slow jams. The latter is especially noteworthy for its use of vocoder which adds a dreamy, otherworldly dimension to the song.

The rest of the track list is built on similarly nebulous territory. All of the tracks display Glasper’s attention to detail and an ability to weigh analog and synthetic elements in a way that feels totally organic. None of the songs are what you could call traditional jazz, yet they also fall outside traditional categories of pop and soul. It is the genre-bending which ultimately makes ArtScience a worthy investment for your eardrums.

A strong recommend.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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BOOTLEG REVIEW: No Jacket Required (Phil Collins, 1984)

[This review was originally published in 2016]

The latest in the re-releases of Phil Collins’s back catalogue continues with this deluxe edition of his biggest hit, 1985’s No Jacket Required.

If you are familiar with more than one Collins joint, most of them probably came from this record. ‘Sussudio’, ‘One More Night’ and  ‘Take Me Home’ are all present and correct. 

The remastered sound certainly adds an extra sheen to the songs — the horn section on ‘Sussudio ‘(provided by Collins mates in Earth, Wind and Fire) in particular, is rather notable — rising above the rather dated synths and drum beats to add a real energy to what could have been a rather cold, computerised dance number. 

Lesser known songs stick out more — ‘Only You Know and I Know’ might be even better than ‘Sussudio’, with a faster pace and Collins delivering a more fiery performance than usual. However, the album’s chief flaw remains largely unaffected — the omnipresence of synthesised keyboards and drums gets a little wearing about midway through the album, and songs begin to blur together.

If you hate Phil Collins, this is another nail in the coffin. If you’re a fan, there is not much added value here. You get a solid selection of live cuts, but only three demos. With an album like this you would expect a little more in the way of behind-the scenes material (where’s the demo for ‘Sussudio’?). 

The demos are the most interesting aspect of this release. They represent pop at its most embryonic, with basic melody and percussion in place. There is an unintended comic aspect to these tracks -- Collins had clearly not worked out lyrics yet, and so apart from a few choruses, you get to listen to a man sing literal gibberish to fill in the dead space. More early drafts like this, and a few interviews (ala Michael Jackson's re-releases), would have made this edition feel more 'deluxe'.

Overall, it’s a decent package, worth checking out for the remastered sound. No Jacket Required is not as good as Face Value, or fellow Genesis alum Peter Gabriel’s So, but it remains a solid example of mid-eighties pop.

Related

Face Value

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BOOTLEG REVIEW: Gameshow (Two Door Cinema Club, 2016)

[This review was originally published in 2016]

Two Door Cinema Club’s third album is a disco-flavoured dish. From the opening track, with its chanting, child-like chorus, and the Nile Rogers-style guitar, the influence is evident,but never overpowering.

The Chic-style guitar continues through ‘Bad Decisions’, a blend of post-grunge anthem and seventies dance track which is hard to resist. The lyrics are more tempered than the up-tempo music, as singer Alex Trimble tries to console himself by going through the advantages of being young and surrounded by all the technological advantages of 2016 — even though he sounds less than convinced by his own argument.

The rest of the album continues this delicate balance between vintage textures and more modern alt-pop foundations.‘Ordinary’ exudes more more of an 80s New Wave flavour, while ‘Fever’ begins with plaintive guitar against a synth backdrop that feels like vintage AOR, before segueing into a more modern electronic ditty.

Other standout tracks include ‘Invincible’ which boasts some fantastic Brian May-style guitar wailing, and ‘Good Morning’, which builds a strong groove on a lyric about a person whose attempts at renewal keep leading him back to the same headspace.

Overall, Gameshow is an immensely entertaining record which pulls off the difficult trick of mixing elements of homage with solid song-craft — unlike some recent albums which attempt to hearken back to past trends, the style here is matched by substance, and musical callbacks augment the songs. This is no hollow tribute exercise, and neither is it an ungodly mess. Definitely worth a look.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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BOOTLEG REVIEW: The Fantastic Films of Ray Harryhausen

[This review was originally published in 2015]

Featuring four of Ray Harryhausen’s best known films, this box set is a solid introduction to his work. 

Boasting a great score by Bernard Herrmann and some striking colour photography, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Nathan Juran, 1958) is a lot of fun. Harryhausen’s work here is the main draw, but there is a lot to recommend here. Usually Harryhausen’s creatures are the most lifelike characters in his films, but 7th Voyage actually boasts some acting to write home about. Lead Kerwin Matthews boasts an old school charisma that works for Sinbad, and is a fine foil to the fantastical creatures he has to overcome. The other cast members are fine, but, as the other films in this set show, the lack of a strong human protagonist detracts from the enjoyment. Onto the real reason we are all here: the monsters.The Cyclops, two-headed Roc and the dancing snake woman are terrific. The dragon which guards the villain’s castle is not as interesting (he’s just chained to a wall), but he does get to briefly throw down with the Cyclops. The stand out set piece is Sinbad’s sword fight with a skeleton — staged in depth, with both combatants moving through the environment with few bad composites, it is the best part of the film. While the special effects are a little crude in comparison with Jason & the Argonauts, the film overall feels a bit more atmospheric and exotic than Jason (especially in the striking location photography). The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is definitely the most underrated film in this collection, and well worth a look.

Jason & the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963) is one of the classics of the Harryhausen canon and it is easily the standout of this set. A follow-up to his first Sinbad adventure, it is basically everything you liked about The 7th Voyage of Sinbad but bigger and better. As the titular lead, Todd Armstrong looks like a Greek statue, but with half the charisma. Of the cast, Nigel Green stands out as Hercules, a man whose great strength is outweighed by his ego. The script is a major help here, with a strong sense of humour offsetting the portentous exposition one usually gets in fantasy films of this kind. The monsters are all terrific, and together are probably the best showreel for Harryhausen’s work. While the fight with the skeletons is rightly celebrated, it is the sequence with the giant statue Talos which is the standout. Particularly noteworthy is the moment when the statue’s head turns to face his foes. The film’s other creatures are not nearly as memorable. The hydra is well-animated, but the showdown with Jason is unimaginative — Armstrong just runs around and swings his sword a bit — and then stabs it in the heart. The finale with multiple skeletons is still jaw-dropping. The only real flaw is that the ending feels like the set-up for a sequel that was never made.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Gordon Hessler, 1973) is chiefly memorable for a scene-stealing performance from Tom Baker as the villainous Prince Koura (in the role which got him the audition for Doctor Who). Once again, Harryhausen’s creature work is terrific, but the rest of the film lacks a certain energy. It features the Keanu Reeves of 70s genre cinema, John Philip Law, as Sinbad. He’s not terrible, but he’s not as charismatic as Kerwin Matthews from 7th Voyage. The film is not nearly as well directed as the previous two — once again, as with Law’s performance, Gordon Hessler’s work is not bad, but it never rises above the merely workmanlike.

Sinbad & the Eye of the Tiger (1977) is the final title in the Sinbad series, and is a rather sorry end to the series. On the acting front, Patrick Wayne steps into Sinbad’s sandals and makes you wish for the magnetism of John Philip Law. Directed by blacklisted actor Sam Wanamaker, this movie is the very definition of diminishing returns. As usual, Harryhausen’s work is the main attraction, but it is hard to maintain interest when everything else is so dull.

The special features, including interviews with Harryhausen and documentaries detailing there production of his most famous films (including his work outside of this box set), make up for the mixed quality of the films.

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BITE-SIZED REVIEW: Black Moon Rising (Harley Cokeliss, 1986)

Professional thief Quint (Tommy Lee Jones) is hired by the government to steal files from a corrupt corporation. When he is tracked down post-robbery, Quint is forced to hide the tape in the only place he can find - the boot of a super car, the 'Black Moon'.

When the car is itself stolen, Quint finds himself drawn in the crosshairs of a powerful crime syndicate. He tracks the car to the syndicate's HQ, a hi-tech skyscraper with near-impregnable security.

Quint will need all his skills to break into the building and get the car out before he runs out of time.

Based on a script originated by John Carpenter (the credits list two other scribes), Black Moon Rising is a high-concept action film that might be more well-known than I give it credit for.

The chief reason for watching this movie is Tommy Lee Jones. Prior to his breakout role in The Fugitive, Jones was a respected character actor who occasionally starred in genre fare. An interesting bit of trivia is that Tommy Lee Jones also starred in the Carpenter-based thriller Eyes of Laura Mars.

From the opening scene, in which he coolly talks a would-be robber at a gas station, Jones owns every scene he is in as the veteran thief. While he cracks wise and has a cat-like facility for getting out of trouble, Jones brings a grizzled pathos to Quint that gives the character a sense of weight and weakness.

Apparently John Carpenter wrote Black Moon Rising around the same time as Escape from New York, and the two films share some DNA. They are both centred around anti-heroes who are enlisted by government forces to do their dirty work. Watching this movie, it is a real shame that Jones and Carpenter never worked together - as Quint, he fits as one of Carpenter's no-nonsense professionals.

And while the movie does not look like a Carpenter movie, the story-telling does feel rather reminiscent of his early work. We start with a short scroll of electronic text - a communique between unseen members of the Justice Department - that lays out the basic set-up.

Carpenter's stories are pretty good at establishing character through action, and Quint's introduction, talking down a nervy gunman while buying a cup of coffee, is a little gem. In under a minute we know everything we need to about Quint - he has already scoped out the location's security, he knows the police's response time, and he is perceptive enough to recognise that the gunman is green and probably recognises something of himself int he young man's predicament ("I'm just trying to help you, son").

While the concept of the scene feels Carpenter, it also fits Jones to a T. He is the smartest person in the room, he is funny without being sarcastic and he shows just a beat of gravitas as the button to the scene.

While the Carpenter connection is the main selling point for genre fans, Jones makes the viewing experience worthwhile. Sure, the script feels very Carpenter but the movie lacks his visual touch or sense of atmosphere. With Jones in the lead, the movie gains a bit of spice.

His portrayal of Quint feels more multifaceted than the character on the page - all the history we need in that hawk-like face, the cackling laugh, and his long stare. Quint feels like a man who has been through a lot, and his sense of humour acts as both a coping mechanism and a weapon to keep his opponents off-balance.

The rest of the cast - including Linda Hamilton and Robert Vaughn - are good, but they do not get a lot to do. Hamilton plays a car thief under the thumb of Vaughn's creepily possessive gang boss, who becomes Jones' love interest. While all the characters have interesting wrinkles (Hamilton is a former runaway), none of them really pop like the supporting casts of Assault on Precinct 13 or Escape from New York.

While the conceit of getting a car out of a skyscraper is interesting, the script piles on a bunch of contrivances to get us to that premise. The final heist is also a bit too easy - sequences which could be extended for tension (Quint's vertiginous crossing between two skyscrapers) feel shortchanged.

Watching the climax might give some viewers a sense of deja vu. I have a sneaking suspicion James Wan is a fan of this movie, because the ending to this movie feels VERY similar to a certain set piece from Furious 7, even down to some of the shots and edit choices.

Overall, Black Moon Rising is a decent B-movie anchored by a terrific lead performance. The Carpenter connection makes it interesting, but as a movie in its own right, it is just fine.

Related

Eyes of Laura Mars

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You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

IN THEATRES: Colo(u)r out of Space

A family living in the middle of the woods find their lives turned upside down after an asteroid lands in their front yard. While this event is destabilising enough, events take a turn for the worse...

HP Lovecraft. Nicholas Cage. Richard Stanley.

Add all those names up = colour me intrigued.

I will admit that I never really got in to Lovecraft. His influence has permeated popular culture so I know the familiar things every other nerd does (here's looking at you Water!). I think the only story of his I finished was The Dunwich Horror. I bought At the Mountains of Madness but did not get far.

Watching this movie so soon after Village of the Damned, I was stuck by how this movie accomplishes so much more as a horror thriller and as an interpretation of its literary source's sense of tone. This movie feels unsafe - we watch a family break down, and this is played out in unflinching detail.

This is taking place in a couple of ways, some in terms of performance/character choices, some stylistic and some in terms of imagery/taboo-breaking. The breakdown of social order, the breakdown of the body, the breakdown of the rules of the world (space, time, technology).

The most terrifying aspect of Lovecraft to me is that the human characters are often incidental to the action - they are witnesses, bystanders and collateral damage to forces whose appearance and motive are beyond our comprehension. This movie’s audio-visual approach is all about this, especially in terms of extending the characters' confusion to the viewer.

One element in this is Nic Cage’s performance - oscillating rapidly between performative gestures and understated family man, it is difficult to tell whether he is acting out growing panic, or he is being overtaken by the effects of the 'color'.

The filmmakers do a great job of racking up the tension - gradually adding layers of sound design, off-kilter lighting, and increasingly fast editing until the diegesis we have been used to has been completely transformed. In light of COD-19, I am not sure if I will be able to go to a theatre for a while, but I am so glad I watched this in a theatre. This is a fully audio-visual experience - every element is designed to disorient and disturb you. 

Speaking of disturbing, the body horror imagery is well-done. Even though I think its thunder has been stolen by John Carpenter’s The Thing and Brian Yuzna’s Society it still works because the filmmakers do not just understand Lovecraft approach to horror, but because they understand that it is scarier if the viewer is not able to grasp exactly what they are seeing. We see flashes of explicit and abject horrors, but it is largely kept in shadow or offscreen, augmented by sound design. It is deliberately disconcerting, which makes the flashes of horror all the more effective.

I do not want to go into more detail. Once this movie is available to stream, turn the lights off, close the blinds and throw your phone down a well: Color out of Space is a legitimately terrific horror movie.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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IN THEATRES: Bloodshot

After soldier Ray Garrison (Vin Diesel) and his wife are killed by his enemies, Garrison's body has been given to the corporation RTS which has developed a new technology that brings him back to life.

When his memory returns, Garrison escapes to seek vengeance on the man who killed his wife. Little does he know that his entire motivation has been engineered by RTS to silence anyone who knows what they are really up to.

Will Garrison find out what is going on?

I have really come around on Vin Diesel. And it is all thanks to the Rock and Jason Statham. Hobbs & Shaw was such a long, lifeless self-satisfied PoS that it made me re-appreciate old Dom. Throw out the knowing self-parody - give me earnest machisimo.

Griffin Newman on the High & Mighty podcast hit it on the head - he said the key to Vin is how aggressively, unabashedly, EMBARRASSINGLY earnest he is onscreen.

With Fast 9 pushed to next year, we will have to wait to see if the Fast crew can survive sans Rock. Even if Han was not back, I have a hunch it would still be better than Messers Hobbs & Shaw.

In the meantime, Diesel has a new solo vehicle out now, one where he is the star and minus an familial ensemble.

I have never read the comic book on which this picture is based. I did not even know it existed before it was announced, and I caught the trailer in front of some other movie. It looked silly, cartoonish and absolutely juiced with that patent Diesel gravitas.

But what about the movie itself?

The first thought I had about the movie was how it tied into this chapter of Diesel's career. Whereas his career pre-2009 was pretty eclectic, after a series of bombs and his return to the Fast and Furious, Diesel has become far more conservative in his choice of projects - he has largely avoided star vehicles and has begun a process of converting his other franchise properties into vague approximations of the F&F 'family' dynamic.

Aside from The Last Witch Hunter, Diesel’s most popular releases have been ensemble pictures. xXx 3: Return of Xander Cage converted the concept from one daredevil-turned secret agent to a team, and 2013's Riddick positioned the title character as one of an ensemble of badasses (we shall put aside Guardians of the Galaxy since Diesel does not creatively oversee that property, but even there he is a member of a family unit).

It could be the case that Diesel has recognised that his most popular films - Fast and Furious, Pitch Black and Guardians of the Galaxy - are ensemble-based, and he pops harder when juxtaposed with other characters. 

Whatever the reasons, Bloodshot fits comfortably as the latest chapter in Diesel’s thematic franchise of family-centric action pictures. 

While the movie is based around Ray Garrison, the movie is ultimately about a group of outsiders coming together to help Garrison escape. Whereas the villain uses his technology to keep people as indentured slaves, Garrison is able to inspire a mini-revolt and the film ends with Garrison and the survivors forming a unit and riding off into the sunset in a literal camper van. It cannot get more 'family' than that.

This star stuff aside, the best part of the movie is Diesel. He has a feel for melodrama and with a character like Garrison, he is home free. I am not even saying that he is hammy - he plays the stakes of the initial set-up, and then when he learns that he has been manipulated, he plays that sense of betrayal well.

There is a short scene where Diesel meets his wife, the person he has believed dead for so long, and he really sells the sense of confusion and pain that the character is feeling. He has gone from the tragedy of believing his wife was dead, to learning that she has had an entire life that he has missed - he cannot even remember that they broke up. 

And now to the rest of the movie.

In terms of direction Bloodshot is a mess. The editing is chaotic; shot compositions are noticeably poor (there are multiple shots where characters are crammed into the corner of the frame or characters’ heads are awkwardly scraping the top of the frame); basic geography within scenes is frustrated by shots and editing that do not build in the way that the script intends.

The most interesting set-piece is Diesel’s assault on a target in a tunnel. Lit only by red flares, with flour covering everything like snow, it is a fun environment that looks like garbage because the shot choices and editing totally short-change it. It does not say much when the movie trailer showcases this sequence better than the movie.

As far as the other cast go, they are mostly fine - it is just a bummer that the script gives them nothing to work with. Eiza Gonzalez is solid as the one member of RTS who comes around to Garrison's side - one thing I really liked was that the movie does not pitch their relationship toward romance. Their dynamic is closer to combat buddies. 

One surprising miss is Lamorne Morris, as the tech guy who helps Garrison. Morris has been great in other things, but here he is saddled to a stock character and a couple of character choices which feel wedged in. While the movie could use some levity, the character feels inappropriately comedic in a way that does not really fit with the tenor of the scenes he is in.

While the story has promise, Bloodshot is a frustratingly sloppy movie that is purely of interest as a piece of the Diesel filmography. I have totally come around on Diesel, and I look forward to whatever he does next, but that does not take away from the sad fact that Bloodshot is not good.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960)

Something strange is going on in the little village of Midwich. First, everyone within the village fell into a deep sleep. After they woke up, all the women discovered they were pregnant. When the children were born, they were all strikingly similar blonde moppets.

As they children grow, the adults become more suspicious of their offspring...

When I was growing up, I read a bunch of John Wyndham's books: Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids and Midwich Cuckoos.

I loved the way Wyndham juxtaposed the banalities of mid-Twentieth Century England with science fiction scenarios. There is an irony and atmosphere to Wyndham's work that I have not found with any other author.

While I am a fan of his books, I have never seen any of the movies adapted from his work. One of the best known examples is Village of the Damned, based on Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos and directed by Wolf Rilla in 1960. My local arthouse hosted a screening of Village of the Damned to celebrate Friday the 13th, so I decided to check it out.


Before diving in, it is worth admitting that the movie’s power is considerably lessened after the Simpson’s’ parody ‘The Bloodening’. It skewers Village of the Damned so accurately, it definitely affected my viewing experience.

That aside, while it never quite achieves all it sets out to, Village of the Damned is a fun watch, with some points of interest that make it worth a look. The black-and-white photography is very sharp, it moves well and it is a blessed 77 minutes long.

My big thought about the movie is that it is far less unsettling once the children are around. Partially, that has to do with the ‘The Bloodening’, but the film suffers slightly from being unable to really tackle the taboos underlying its premise.

First, the good.

I really enjoyed the first 15 minutes of this movie. I liked it as a whole, but the whole set up is fantastically eerie. The early sequences do a good job of approximating Wyndham’s evocation of English mundanity. Played with little score, the filmmakers use a moving camera and diegetic sound to convey the disquiet of the sleeping town, tracking through houses and streets.

As the army surrounds the town, and run a series of tests against the invisible barrier around it,  the movie feels like a docu-drama, the camera a silent observer as people bustle around with equipment. There is an understated menace to these sequences, aided by the lack of familiar sci-fi signifiers (the film echoes the novel in that we never see the source of the children, either as a ship or aliens).

In The Midwich Cuckoos, Wyndham’s matter-of-fact approach strips the story of any potential melodrama, and increases the tension. There is something uncanny about these sequences that is completely dispelled once we have a group of blonde moppets marching around the village in their little Gestapo outfits.

The big issue I have is that the movie feels like it was made too early. The inherent terror of the novel, the sense of sexual and personal violation, is almost completely absent. This is almost certainly down to the censorship of the time - the film spends little time on this aspect of the story, and the female perspective is almost entirely absent.

Had this film been made later in the decade, with a similar aesthetic it might have been something special. As is, it is a slightly chilly thriller.

The movie gains a certain camp value once the children appear, but the filmmakers do not push the sense of menace. In the novel, there is a sense of claustrophobia as the children gain in power.

The film carries over the novel's description of what happened to the other cuckoo colonies around the world (including the disquieting revelation that the Soviets had to nuke a town without alerting the populace), yet there is no corresponding sense of escalation - it has been awhile since I read it, but I distinctly remember that the destruction of other Children around the world leads the Midwich branch to become more ruthless towards their 'parents'. 

There is no heightening here. 

There is plenty to unpack subtextually: the movie feels like an unsubtle Red Scare allegory (having the children in matching black trench coats also evokes WW2 fears of Nazi occupation). There are also probably some great post-colonial readings out there - however you could probably get more just by analysing the novel.

The adult cast, led by George Saunders and Barbara Shelley, are solid. The script does not give the much to dig into. Geoffrey Faithfull's photography is crisp and chilly, although once the Children appear, the more gothic touches (chiaroscuro and dutch angles) feel a bit over-the-top when the menace is a tyke in a blonde wig.

Ron Godwin’s score has some good ideas (there is a childlike quality to the main theme) but like the film’s visual style, it goes overboard and becomes histrionic as the film goes on. 

I think the thing I am bumping up against with this movie is that it is just too respectable to be scary and too hushed to be ridiculous. This movie is dealing with the moral quandary involving children - it should feel outside the norm and disturbing. But it never does.

There is potential in the quiet chill of the early sequences, but as a whole Village of the Damned is just fine. 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

IN THEATRES: The Lighthouse

In the late 19th Century, two lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) arrive on a small island for a month-long shift keeping the lighthouse going.

Wake (Dafoe) is a veteran of this job; Winslow (Pattinson) is a newbie who steps into the job after Wake's previous assistant died.

As time goes on, Winslow suspects that all is not well on the island...

If the Coen Brothers had made a Val Lewton movie it might graze the same deadpan dread and gonzo gothic vibe of The Lighthouse. 

This movie features two elements key to getting me into a movie: mermaids and whatever Ursula was in The Little Mermaid. It's three elements if you include the smorgasbord of character choices Dafoe is making.

The first thing that sticks out is the aspect ratio - 1.19:1 reduces the frame to a near-square so we are as boxed in as our protagonists. It felt like an inversion of the use of space in The Invisible Man - whereas that film made use of empty space in the frame to create suspense, The Lighthouse's limited perspective creates a level of discombobulation and claustrophobia that grows increasingly oppressive as our heroes become more disconnected from relief (and reality). 

While the film is technically a two-hander, the film is bolted to the POV of Pattinson's Winslow. 

At first, Winslow seems like an every-man in a bizzaro world - beleaguered by the elements, both real (seagulls) and possibly imagined (mermaids!).

Pattinson delivers a world-weary performance as Winslow. As the island begins to effect him, he grows more manic. It is a vulnerable, ugly performance that is utterly engrossing as Winslow's true nature comes into focus.

While his performance is more internal than Dafoe, he brings a feverish level of self-centredness to the role that becomes more apparent as the pair are forced to extend their stay on the island.

On the hairy face of it, Dafoe initially looks like a caricature here, with his accent and affected limp. Since we are in Winslow's (Pattinson) corner at the outset, Dafoe initially presents as an antagonist, a harsh taskmaster putting Winslow through hell with a never-ending series of tasks.

While the casting feels uninspired, the movie knows exactly what his purpose is in the movie, and maximises his Dafoeness. Once it becomes clear that Winslow is an unreliable narrator, Wake's various idiosyncrasies feel far less otherworldly by comparison.

I have not seen The Witch (yet), and I recall some complaints about the length. I enjoy slow burns, and I really enjoyed how deliberate The Lighthouse is - it is only in the closing third that the proverbial hits the fan. 

The movie is deeply unsettling - there is something very tactile about the movie's aesthetic, a fleshiness and sense of physical and psychological vulnerability which gives the movie a visceral punch - without being particularly gory. 

As the line between reality and nightmare weakens, the movie's anxieties extend beyond the disintegrating rules of the world to the mental health of our leads, and even our understanding of their respective identities.

If this sounds like a downer, the Lighthouse is not simply some dreary mood piece. The movie has a mordant sense of humour that becomes more evident as the movie enters its gonzo final minutes. There is also a subtext of sexual frustration to the movie that I personally found very funny.  While Winslow's fixation on mermaids, and his suspicions about Wake, carry a certain amount of dread, I came away from the movie feeling they were a black joke on our 'hero' - manifestations of his preoccupations than anything specific to the island.  

The film's action appears to be precipitated by a trio of deaths - one offscreen, one on and another metaphoric. Death is a chaotic event in this universe - rather like Macbeth, the death of a key figure precipitates a breakdown in the natural order of things. Since the film is  also focused on two men, and the only woman we see is - probably - imaginary, I started imagining the movie as a revenge movie with Gaia wrecking holy hell as Winslow for his various offences.

Once the storm begins and our heroes are barricaded inside their shelter, I really began to enjoy the movie. While it is disturbing, I enjoyed the atmosphere of these sequences  (the long shots of the sea buffeting the island are fantastic). The movie began to feel like one of those low-budget gothics from the forties and fifties - while Lewton is an easy pull as an influence, the move also reminded me of potboilers like The Trollenberg Terror - the aesthetic is similar, but the affect is completely its own.

I am not ready to dig deeper without another viewing, but The Lighthouse is definitely worth checking out. 

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IN THEATRES: The Invisible Man

After fleeing an abusive relationship with tech billionaire Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), Cecelia (Elisabeth Moss) tries to start a new life with the help of her sister (Harriet Dyer) and best friend (Aldis Hodge).

Complications arise when Griffin dies of an apparent suicide, and his will names Cecelia as his chief beneficiary - under certain conditions which include avoiding criminal charges.

Very soon, Cecelia begins to suspect that she is not alone. Something is in her house. Something is watching is her. Something is intent on ruining her life and her sanity.

Something she can't see...

I caught Leigh Whannell's last movie Upgrade when it came out. I recall thinking it was fine - nothing great, a bit cheap, but fine.

I was not expecting this.

Following the collapse of the Dark Universe, Universal made the objectively (at least in economic terms) decision to hand the future of its Monster movie reboots to Blumhouse productions.

Over the last couple years, I have become a big fan of Blumhouse. I have not seen all of their heavy hitters (Paranormal Activity) but I enjoy plenty of their movies. Alongside the movies, I have always been a fan of their business model. Keep your budgets low, enlist stars with backend deals and invest in high concept genre movies.

It is an old model, dating back to the early days of exploitation and Roger Corman, but in an age when Hollywood studios seem hellbent on only producing movies with price tags around $150-200 million, it is proving to be as successful as ever. Based on its past track record and this movie, one hopes that other majors will follow Universal's lead and focus on their lower-budget features. 

After Upgrade, I would not have expected Whannell’s next opus to be a movie about gaslighting - and a really great one, at that. I try to avoid trailers but I caught this one a couple times in front of other movies. I was definitely hooked, but the trailer makes it look like far cheesier than it is.

I was impressed by how straightforward it is, and how it finds multiple ways to show how the title character has invaded and controlled Cecelia’s life. 

Blumhouse movies sometimes feel a bit safe - The Invisible Man is not like that. 

There were two sequences in this movie that really got me - the first involves a sudden burst of violence during  a down moment. We barely see what happens, and it is really only signalled by sound design highlighting impact on bone. It is sickening without being graphic. The randomness and speed with which this moment happens that is very frightening.

The other moment is a conversation between Cecelia and one of her husband’s associates, in which she is offered a way out that will basically turn her into his property (in a more invasive way than before).

Those two sequences in particular stood out, because they felt random and pushing at taboos. Not in a cheap or exploitive way, but in a way that showed that this film recognises the threat that this antagonist represents, and the greater evil he exemplifies.

This is one of those movies where subtext is unnecessary - this movie is about a woman battling the man who abuses her. At the outset of the movie, he has cut her off from her family and friends, and makes everyone think that it is all her fault. 

While you can make the argument that this is a reaction to the current moment, The Invisible Man can also be seen as a hi-octane grandchild of Gaslight, Midnight Lace and Wait Until Dark, movies in which women are driven to madness by their duplicitous husbands (or people they think are their duplicitous husbands).

We are presented with a nightmare scenario, in which an abuser is granted near-absolute power over his victim. The filmmakers pile on the peril and push Cecelia to the lowest point imaginable, and then, in an incredibly satisfying third act, turn the tables.

Compared with Upgrade, every element of this movie is top-notch. The direction is clean, with Whannell milking a lot from wide long shots, drawing out suspense by making the viewer constantly aware of the empty space within the frame. He also makes use of a prowling objective camera - it suggests an invasive presence, but I cannot remember any scene where it was used as the Invisible Man’s POV. 

While we eventually get the green screen suit and physical effects, the film takes its time to show him in action. Whannell keeps the title character offscreen for as long as possible, drawing the maximum amount of tension from the idea he could be anywhere. 

In the lead role, Moss is fantastic as the beleaguered heroine who is determined to break free. The fragility she brings grounds the movie - Cecelia has been scarred by her experiences. Even as Cecelia makes moves to counter her enemy, Moss does not lose track of where this character has come from. This is not a final girl or an acton heroine, this is a woman who has been through hell, and Moss never loses sight of that foundation. 

Cecelia is smart, but she is also absolutely terrified - it is an easy thing to point out, but it is rare to see in many movies.

I want to go deeper into it, but this is a case where you really need to see it first without spoilers. The Invisible Man is a legitimately great horror movie.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.