Annette (2021)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

Annette (2021) – L. Carax

I really enjoyed Leos Carax’s last film, Holy Motors (2012), which was strenuously weird and full of amazing images. So, I was excited to see his latest, which opened the Cannes Film Festival this year with music/libretto by Sparks and starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, as, respectively, a bad boy performance artist/comedian and an opera singer, who fall in love. It starts well – and weird – with the cast and crew singing the actors/main characters into the story which then diverges to show the separate worlds of Henry McHenry (Driver) and Ann Defrasnoux (Cotillard). We see their acts on stage and their lives offstage. Soon, they are married and have a daughter, Annette, who is played by a wooden marionette. Weird, yes, but the exhilaration of the film starts to dissipate as things take a darker turn when the script engages with #MeToo and domestic violence themes. This is topical and important but rather jarring as we lose the ability to identify with the characters onscreen. To be honest, things started to drag (I looked at my watch and decided that 140 minutes was too long) and I did not feel that the visuals or songs or weirdness compensated for the pacing problems. That said, Driver in particular gives everything he can to the film and the failure overall is not for want of trying.

Synchronic (2019)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Synchronic (2019) – J. Benson & A. Moorhead

It must be challenging to think up good material, if you’ve decided to cultivate a certain kind of psychedelic WTF cinema (with or without twists in the plot). So, I must give credit to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (directors of The Endless, 2017): they’ve come up with a fairly novel spin on an otherwise tired plot device (time travel).  And as with the best science fiction, fantasy, or horror films, these filmmakers take an outlandish premise and have their characters treat it as real, using logic and intelligence to deal with irrational events. However, there is a lot of half-baked philosophising here too and the film takes a long time to get to the good bits. Anthony Mackie (“Steve”) and Jamie Dornan (“Dennis”) play paramedics who encounter some grisly emergencies and begin to realise that they are all connected to a new designer drug, Synchronic. When Dennis’s 18-year-old daughter goes missing after taking the drug, Steve does some investigating of his own, including buying a smoke shop’s remaining supply and going on a few trips from/to their home base of New Orleans, in an effort to rescue her.  Ultimately, the central conceit works, although the emotional pay-off is muted at best – we don’t care enough about these guys to feel it – but they are our ticket to WTF-ness and it is worth the price of admission (this time).

 

The Italian Job (1969)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

The Italian Job (1969) – P. Collinson

Yes, this is the famous heist movie where the gang escapes with the gold bars in three Mini Coopers and the chase scenes where the hapless Italian police chase the Brits in Minis is the reason to see this film.  Before and after the chase, the film is decidedly odd – we watched because it was rated G (in America) but there are some things that are hard to explain to a 9-year-old. Michael Caine takes over the planning for the heist (robbing an armored truck in a crowded city square in Turin, by orchestrating a major traffic jam) after the original plotter is killed by the Mafia – but he needs British gangster Noel Coward’s assistance. My problems began when I had to explain why Coward seemed to run everything even though he is in prison and why the guards let him have special favours (uh, corruption?).  We sort of ignored Caine’s womanising (and Benny Hill’s professor who likes big butts!) but there was no way to explain the film’s bizarre ending (“Is that it?”) other than to say that criminals are not allowed to win in movies of this sort because what sort of message would that send? There was grudging acceptance of this but it didn’t win the movie points overall, some feeble attempts at slapstick comedy notwithstanding.   

 

The Dry (2020)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

The Dry (2020) – R. Connolly

I don’t think it’s cultural cringe to say that even though it is great to see Australia and its issues up there on the screen, there’s something that still feels amateurish about some of our output, including The Dry. Eric Bana is the brooding Federal cop who returns home to regional Victoria from Melbourne when an old childhood friend dies in a murder-suicide. Soon, he can’t help himself from investigating the crime (to discover whether his friend really was the killer) and we learn through fleeting flashbacks and the angry reactions of long-time residents that Bana’s character was also a suspect in a possible murder years earlier. The interweaving of the past and present is expertly managed by director Robert Connolly but the plot soon descends into a standard whodunit with an array of suspects and red herrings from which to choose. I didn’t guess correctly myself, expecting that the synergies between past and present would play out as predicted, but the film takes a turn into much darker territory instead. A better film might have interrogated that darkness more but it’s good that The Dry is willing to broach the subject and a few additional problem areas as well. We need more films to do this.

 

Red Rock West (1993)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Red Rock West (1993) – J. Dahl

Nicolas Cage is particularly subdued as a drifter with integrity who finds himself mistaken for a hitman (“Lyle from Dallas”) when he pulls into the small Wyoming town of Red Rock. His integrity doesn’t stop him from taking the 5 Gs from Wayne (J. T. Walsh) but instead of killing his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle), he warns her. His integrity also doesn’t stop him from taking another 5 grand from her to kill Wayne, but he leaves town instead. Of course, he doesn’t get far and this dryly humorous neo-noir proceeds to subject him to a number of unexpected twists in the plot from which he can’t seem to extricate himself because he is such a nice guy. Naturally, Lyle from Dallas soon appears in the guise of Dennis Hopper in full-on Blue Velvet mode and he makes short shrift of everything. As directed by John Dahl, there are echoes here of the Coens’ Blood Simple (not David Lynch, despite the cast) and a twangy instrumental score that tilts things toward the Western. It’s solid genre film-making and worth the price of admission.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) – L. Milestone

More melodrama than film noir (although the shock ending does tilt things in the direction of the bleaker genre). After a long preamble with child actors that sets up the three central characters and the basic plot dynamics, we join Sam Masterson (Van Heflin) as he re-enters Iverstown for the first time in 17 or 18 years. He meets cute with Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott) and decides to use his old childhood connections to help her out of a legal jam. So, he asks D. A. Walter O’Neil (Kirk Douglas in his debut film) to pull some strings to help Toni out; however, O’Neil is worried that Masterson is actually prepared to blackmail him and his now wife, heiress Martha Ivers (Barbara Stanwyck), over a past event that he may or may not have actually witnessed.  The melodrama comes in because Martha still loves Sam and feels she was manipulated into marrying Walter, just as Walter feels trapped in their marriage and bullied into doing what Martha requires him to do. Sam can only look on in pity and plot his escape with Toni.  It’s funny because none of the four principals plays a wholesome character – they’ve all got checkered pasts – but certainly Heflin seems the most level headed and clear thinking of the lot. But, my, there is a lot of drinking as a coping strategy in this film – it doesn’t seem to work.

 

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) – T. Fisher

Although Peter Cushing makes a fine Holmes and Andre Morell is solid as Watson, it is impossible not to compare this version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella to the 1939 version starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Intriguingly, the 50s version has some different aspects to the plot (most obviously, Stapleton has a daughter who attracts Sir Henry’s romantic interest rather than a sister) – a quick look at my Complete Sherlock Holmes suggests it is the 30s version that is more faithful. The story is simple: Sir Henry’s father, Sir Charles, has died, potentially killed by a “hound from hell” in line with a curse that was placed on his family due to a very evil ancestor, Sir Hugo (his evil acts shown in detail and colour in this Hammer Studios version). Of course, Holmes will have none of this line of deduction and sets out to solve the mystery on the Moors and to save Sir Henry from suffering the same fate. Cue some red herrings. Too bad Hammer did not pursue further Holmes films but this one is certainly solid enough, if not exactly horror nor as fun as the more famous film.