Film Commentary (c) Alex Rieneck 2018

“Normandy Nude” is a particularly interesting film in several ways, all of which deserve attention almost more than the film itself deserves a simple review. The film itself is a very successful comedy (of the blistering satire variety) for anyone who can speak French or is capable of reading subtitles. But more than being simply a comedy it is a *French* comedy, and even while you are watching it, you can’t help noticing that the French sense of humour is somehow different to the humour of other countries and languages. This is not the correct place to consider the reason for the difference – it is simply enough to note that *after* you’ve watched “Normandy Nude” (which you most definitely should if this article strikes any sort of a chord within you) you could consider how it probably would have been different had it been made in Britain or the USA. For a start I would argue, neither country would have had the nasty “twist in the tail” ending. 

Without spoiling “Normandy” it is worth mentioning another film “Ridicule”(1996) which takes the subject head on. The tale of a provincial nobleman suddenly knee-deep in the creepy bastardy of the royal court at Versailles makes the case that the French sense of humour is to be as mean and as cutting in one’s wit as possible, French wit, it says must always have a target, must alway belittle or ridicule; the nastier the better. You laugh when you are watching the film, but the laughter is always mixed with horror and a fair amount of shame that you are laughing at all. “Normandy Nude” is not like that at all; it is not a film about the toxic inbred rather sociopathic culture of the court of Versailles, rather it can be seen as a film about a similar culture that has staunchly rebuffed change in a sodden rural setting for the best part of a thousand years. The village at the centre of the film is as insular as the palace once was and with, to some extent, similar effects on its inhabitants. They resist change until it is impossible to avoid it then they deal with it en masse in a typically shambolic manner that can only be seen as a pyrrhic victory of truly gargantuan proportions. The film’s punchline had me screaming with laughter and ruminating over its implications for the last week. 

“Normandy Nude” is a very special film and a remarkably good one. If you love The Coen Brothers, Woody Allen (especially the early funny ones) and “Three Billboards” you’ll probably love it. Failing that there’s probably a new a new “Marvel” film today- you could see that.

“Bohemian Rhapsody”

Queen are a band who’ve been around for donkey’s years and you probably think you know them. At one extreme you might know the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” word-for word and sing it in the shower, or in an annoying falsetto at members of your family when you want to annoy them. At the other end of the spectrum, you might be dismissive of them as a band saying, (as someone did to me this morning) that they were poor musicians, on the basis of a generalised ignorance of the band’s volume of output. The film “Bohemian Rhapsody” addresses these two extremes of viewpoint head-on. It pleases the true fan while educating the ignorant and dismissive to a truly remarkable degree. This film *creates* fans out of unbelievers and fans alike.

All in all, I found “Bohemian Rhapsody” to be an experience very like seeing “blondie” live on stage. I’ve been a fan most of my life, know all their stuff, adore some of it and have gotten used to hearing it playing softly in department stores and lifts, where it never fails to put me in a good mood; which is of course, why they play it. I saw them in the State Theatre Sydney. Debbie Harry was the size of my thumb.

Far from being the muzak that plays in a department store or a lift, Blondie were an utterly tight, almost perfect pure rock band that had the entire theatre on its feet. Bohemian Rhapsody is like that. Its not just a film about Queen’s music its a transfiguration of the band. The film embraces the band’s history and shows Freddie Mercury’s lightening quick evolution from “not Pakistani” baggage handler at Heathrow to officially deified rock god at Live Aid. In doing this in the space of two hours, the film picks up believer and non believer alike and whisks them along creating fans and worshippers in its wake.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a remarkable film, perhaps the best rock music movie I have ever seen. 

**Warning Spoilers**

By any measurement “Halloween”1978 – (God, its been 40 years), is a classic. Directed by John Carpenter at an early peak in his truly amazing form, it was the true Hollywood success story, made on a bus ticket budget, it made Gazillions at box offices worldwide before spawning an equally profitable “franchise” of forgettable sequels which in turn bred in the marketplace into a slew of copycat productions that became known as the “slasher genre”.

Over the last 40 years classifying a film as  a “Slasher flick” has become an insult, simply because so many of the films following in “Halloween’s” wake were, not to put too fine a point on it, shit. The shiny-suit money grubbers behind the titles had developed the idea that all that was required was a few tit shots, some limp soft core porn and some jump cuts of blood on tits as belaboured imagery of retribution for pre-marital sex and, of course, a number in the title so the prospective punter knew what he was getting. 

The original “Halloween” was a very good film indeed made by a truly gifted but hopelessly undervalued John Carpenter. It uses a bare minimum of cheap tricks to generate its impact. The “shock cut and sudden loud noise”technique” is barely used at all and the film instead scares the sh*t out of the audience by the skilful blending of imagery, great acting and brilliant music. Of course there is *some* blood and, because the film was breaking new ground, everyone noticed it and copied it, mistakenly thinking that the blood was “why” the film was frightening. Until the whole genre haemorrhaged itself to death. 

Well, actually not just like the killers in good franchises, the franchises themselves keep popping back up, just when you least expect them to. So, the same week I received an invitation to my fortieth anniversary high school reunion “Halloween 2018” was released. And by golly the film was released on a different world and onto a different me. No longer was I a pimply gangly bluffing my way into “R” rated movies with a doctored bus pass. Now I’m forty years older, fatter, far more self-confident and less gorgeous, confined to a wheelchair as a hemiplegic and have a white skunk-strip bleached into my greying hair (Pepe le Peu is my spirit animal)

… And along comes Halloween 2018. Its a different world, “blood on tits is as unfashionable as films about white cops shooting back men – even as unfashionable as Mickey Rooney’s “hilarious” performance as a Japanese in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, so “Halloween 2018” takes a very different tack, while essentially having exactly the same plot. It’s a difficult trick to pull but the script and direction actually managed to fool me until some hour or so after I left the theatre. Michael Myers escapes the loonie bin (again) but with more detail this time, and makes a bee-line for Haddonfield and the nearest fornicating babysitter (again) to dole out another lesson in sexual guilt forty years after the original bloody mess. Forty years later Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is no longer the babysitter, she has become a (still gorgeous) grandmother suffering through a hell of post traumatic stress disorder the way  decent American does, shitload of guns, grain alcohol and general weirdness. She is a woman who  does not need a man to protect her – instead with the addition of a three foot iron penis, she protects herself in abandoning the role of damsel in distress, she becomes yet another spruiker for the NRA showing us all, that a state of heavily-armed anti-social paranoia is the only rational response to modern life. And the film lumbers along. We meet Michael Myers in the loonie bin. He is crazier than Hannibal Lecter. He escapes, in a rather similar manner. He immediately embarks on a random killing spree and finds his way to Laurie Strode’s house. She’s had decades to prepare for his inevitable escape so her house is a heavily armoured maze of traps but Michael has the unquantifiable “luck” that assists him and protects him to the point where he is more a force of nature than a simple psycho with a knife. 

In the first film Laurie Strode was forced by the unstoppable into becoming a force of nature herself, in the end vanquishing Michael Myers with the only tool available to hand, she straightens out a wire coat hanger and in one of cinema’s most heart stopping moments, stabs Myers through the eye with it. Loomis appears like the cavalry and shoots Myers. Forgive me, but I find a lone woman trapped with only a straightened coat-hanger for protection, to be more unsettling than the same lone woman in a house full of traps, more guns than a platoon of infantry and a spot of backup bluntly, one was terrifying, the other is pretty much a forgone conclusion, like a dentist with bloodlust hunting endangered bandicoots in a toilet cubicle with a rocket launcher.

Not to put too fine a point on it “Halloween 2018” is the umpty-nineth chapter of the franchise, not an amazing rediscovery of it. If giving the female hero lots of guns and thereby lessening the challenge before her is “empowering” I am a monkey’s uncle. Its not a film anyone should be ashamed of but the director (David Gordon Green) should study the  techniques of the masters, Carpenter & Cronenberg and not insult his audience with “booga -wooga” drek – after the second shock cut, I learn the score and expect the next one. Boredom quickly sets in and I’m left admiring Jamie Lee Curtis and wondering how she makes being a screen queen and film star seem so damn effortless. Final verdict weigh up carefully whether you see this one. 

 

The trailer for “Ladies in Black was remarkably successful -at least around the people I know who saw it. It seemed that everyone, and I mean everyone who’d seen the trailer also wanted to see the film. Of course all were reasonably educated anda Admittedly  all lived in Sydney Australia and were (almost ) able to remember the ttime the film was set; Sydney in the 1950’s) Thrreby fitting a fairly accurately targeted demographic.

““was lucky enough to see the film at a preview screening. I paid for my own ticket. unfortunately that day I was severly sleep deprived since the night before I hadfallen out of bed and had to be lifted off the floor by Paramedics at 3am. While I suffered no physical damage worse than bruising “Ladies in Black” was such a mellow film with pleasant musical score that I found I could not stop myself dozing during the first half. I admit this in the interest of transparency. The second half is louder and maintainedits holdon my attention more effectively The conflicts between the characters are resolved neatly and with a maximum of socio-political  fashionability and normal respectable romance blooms All in all “ladies in black leaves very little taste in the mouth, either good or bad, since it must be said, it is as bland as1950’s Sydney actually was. Almost exclusively white English- speaking proletarians deluding themselves that they were middle class, eating fried steak as often as possible and washing it down with beer, in a city with only one coffeeshop (re-created in the film) and no culture big enough to see with a magnifying glass. In other words,a place so remote almost rural, so set in it’s ways as to be almost a living death. I didn’t live through this period in Sydney, being born just after it ended, but my parents did, and being cultured Europeans, woulften tell me of European coffeehouses- bread that wasn’t white sliced paste and the wonders of the continent 14,000 miles to the North. “Ladies in Black brings this period to life, with what looks to me to be great accuracy; The coffe cups at Repins are printed with the name of the establishment undoubtedly accrately; I’m sure that if I’d ever been there the blast of nostalgia would have been almost too strong to cope with The entire culture of Sydney at the time is recreated

And, without too much effort it is possible to see how that culture morphed into this one and (of course) how the present day is preferable to “olden times I say “of course” because without doubt “Ladies in Black” is a “feel good” genre piece and serves as a rather loud object lesson in how life has improved over the last five-or six decades -for certain segments of society.since the late 1960’s the societal position of women and blacks has markedly improved; largely at the expenser of white males. In all cynicism it is hard to see how a film with the political backbone could fail to be at least respectably successful in today’s political climate; And qualitatively speaking , it is

At first and perhaps even second and third, glance “Crazy Rich Asians” is a delightfully, tantalisingly *new* taste sensation for  cinema-goers bilious with a gluttonous over-supply of American Comedy-Thrillers and Indian dance-offs. The story of a young Chinese American ( or American Chinese) encountering the giga- rich Sinaporean family of her new fiance is a kind of fairy tale of materialism- the perfect story of a young woman effectively proving that access to her vagina is worth the price she is “asking” for it. Mother-in-law to be thinks that it isn’t her betrothed  thinks that it is. Opinions are divided and everyone seems to have an opinion, and the belief that they have a vote. The brass ring isn’t brass and the heroine of the story isn’t in it for the money anyway-and its upto her to convince some exceptionally cynical people of that.

The thing is, “Crazy Rich Asians” isn’t really new at all. It can easily be seen as “Brideshead Revisited” updated and re-set in Singapore; since it is essentially the same story with “brideshead” being more understandable to Western audience but rather less communicable the the Asin market. As far as I was concerned this was probably the weakness of “Crazy Rich Asians” Bluntly, being a round-eye I found some difficulty telling the characters apart- especially during the set up beginning hours of the film before the script seemed to find its feet and the cast gained sufficient flesh to take hold of my interest. The film starts slow, becomes complicated and pulls itself together in its last half hour. Halfway through “CRA” I was convinced I was having trouble understanding it because I wasn’t asian. By the end I’d decided I had far more in common with them than the reverse.Except, and perhaps quite importantly, that I don’t like that kind of dumpling.

 

• I’ll say onthing for the”happy time Murders”it has a great traile “Happy TimeMurders” trailerrhttps://youtu.be/CqRanVHR6sU  and I was sold on seeing the film from the first viewing
• . Better yet, weeks later I discovered that it was a rare comedy indeed in that *all* the funny moments were not in the trailer- in fact the film( an “LA Noir” private detective film where all of the characters are muppets) was almost top heavy in funny bits to the point where I was laughing out loud right the way through; Iit was *that* funny, in fact, I felt quite odd, I seemed to be the only person laughing!was there something wrong with me(aside from the obvious of course) When the film ended, it became apparent that I had been mistaken about people sitting behind me-in fact, the theatre was empty! In a way this was a relief, then what did I expect at the first session in the morning, on a weekday, anyway? In any event I’ve been giving it great word-of-mouth ever since and its as silly as the president so I guess it’ll pick up support as it goes on- though it will deserve it. Sorry.I should try to keep my film reviews, at least free of barbs at that particular loathsome glove-puppet..
• “The Happy time Murders is a very slick and professional fil, and very funny indeed, all the way through.I recommend it with only one proviso; After we’d seen it, my carer and I were both short-tempered with eachother an had a fiery little spat about nothing. This was totally unlike us and quite unexpected. On reflection, I was inclined to point the finger at the film we’d just seen.Like Joan Rivers, the humours tone is somewhat mean-spirited, and I felt the tone had taken root in us over the course of a 78 minute bombardment of  the the kind of jokes you’d never find in the “Muppet Show”- Which is something of a co-incidence. Since the “Henson” name is plastered all over the end credits.Jim and I presume his daughter, seem to be throwing off the suffocating load of “cute” brought about by a lifetime of “Kermy” Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear and of course the whole diabetic regugitation of “Sesame Street” this show is “street” too but its all hard street and I say, the better for it. The foulness of “The HappyTime Murders” came to me like a breath of fresh air blowing away the stench of the Industrial rose air freshener that had been used to cover the reek of horse shit.

‘Tea with the Dames” is a concept film and the concept is as brilliant as it is simple. From my very first encounter with the pre-publicity I was at a loss as to why someone hadn’t thought it up years ago.
Simply get a few of Britain’s leading dramatic figures, in this case ladies who have been made Dames for their services to the dramatic Arts, plonk them around a table somewhere, get them talking and film the result. After all, this lot are the very best in their craft and have been around for decades. For once lets have a “fly on the wall” documentary where the participants aren’t retards and actually have something to say that is worth listening to. It’s a revolutionary idea and as far as I was concerned, well overdue. From the first trailer I was interested, since anyone who knows the theatre knows that actors are the most gifted speakers of all, as well as being the best tellers of stories. Just from the trailer I was almost forcibly returned to the foyer of the theatre, where post rehearsal or performance, the cast would gather for a wind down that became increasingly convivial as the cask of Chateau Cardboard red became progressively lighter, and eventually the floor became the inescapableplace to sit. They were crazy days and heady nights and though I had no stories of my own to share being too young, I was welcomed as a worthy listener and in retrospect learnt far more than I ever realised at the time.

If you followed all that you should know that “Tea With The Dames” is very like it – these remarkable ladies, veterans all, are all are long-time friends, very good natured, witty and consummate story-tellers. If you’re anything like me, you pretty quickly forget that you’re sitting in a film-theatre watching a film and not sitting in a very pleasant English country garden with some some of the most delightful people you’ll probably never meet in person. My mouth hung open, partly in wonder at the space I was in and partly in the pathetic hope that I would be taken pity on meand feed one of the little cakes from the table. I laughed a lot, overjoyed by the (frequently very earthy) humour of these great ladies.

The tea party is sometimes interrupted by historical footage of the subject of conversation at the time. But these insets are always apt, sometimes funny and never jarring or overly long, instead they add to the words fleshing out the memories of the person speaking and drawing you into the action in a quite delightful way.

Now I will admit that my odd personal history makes me either a very knowledgable reviewer of this film, or perhaps an overly partial one; anyone who has read this far will be aware that I liked this film a very great deal indeed. Anyone who is unable to separate my views from my perceived partiality should be aware that the lady I went to the film with has Greek as a first language and although she didn’t have flashbacks caused by the film and didn’t laugh (nearly) as much as I did, did laugh and did testify afterwards that she liked it a lot, too, even if that *is* hearsay evidence.

Verdict:

Remarkable stuff and a priceless historical resource, I wish it had been longer

Copyright 2018 Alex Rieneck..