paulduane Reviews

Thrilla in Manila (2008 TV Movie)

One of the best boxing documentaries I've ever seen.

[9/10 · 18 July 2010]

The story of how Joe Frazier did everything he could to help a blacklisted Ali, lending him money, campaigning for his reinstatement to the boxing world when he had been shut out for refusing to serve in the US Army... and how Ali, it seems, never forgave him for it, and attempted to destroy Frazier as a fighter and as a man.

For those who, like me, grew up thinking of Ali as a flawless hero, a cross between Jesus and Elvis, this is quite a shocking story, but those comments above which complain that this film is biased towards Frazier are clearly not watching it attentively. There are no winners here - Ali's moral cowardice, his inability to ever apologise to Frazier for the racial taunting that effectively ruined the man's life, is more than matched by the cold, ugly bitterness that Frazier displays towards his nemesis. The story is as dark and comfortless as any Greek tragedy - these two men's lives were destroyed by their rivalry. One is rich, world-famous and locked into a crippled body; the other is poor, forgotten and healthy, but lives every day trapped in the past and in his unchanging enmity.

A stunning, mesmerising piece of work.

Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Bat Mitzvah (2007) Season 6, Episode 10

Possibly the greatest ever season ending in the history of CYE?

[10/10 · 14 November 2007]

SPOILERS throughout! This season of Curb has at times been the best since the first two seasons - it's like Larry David and co have rediscovered a fresh enjoyment in the show, given the shake-ups caused by its having to replicate the real-life break-up of LD's marriage. God knows how that feels in real life, but TV Larry deals with it brilliantly. His dating exploits are wonderful, but he's not a dating kind of guy, and the end of this episode and this series, where Larry is happily ensconced in the bosom of his new black family (and married to Vivica Fox - lucky, lucky Larry) had us rolling around in breathless happy guffaws. It seems that at least part of the awkwardness LD's felt all along has been because of uptight Goyish spouse Cheryl, and he now feels free from the need to even pretend to be PC. It's a fantastic ending, but it worries me - it feels like the perfect full stop at the end of this superb show, and I don't want them to pull the plug yet!

Tideland (2005)

Gilliam's return to form

[8/10 · 1 August 2006]

I was very intrigued by the range of opinions about this film, and I'm kind of agnostic about Gilliam at the best of times so could have gone either way. In the event, it seems to me like a very personal, smallscale and risky film - the kind of thing major directors don't do often enough.

Gilliam introduced the screening I attended by saying that plenty of the (invited) audience would hate the film. He also said that its subject is the resilience of children, in a world where we're encouraged to treat them as helpless victims most of the time.

I was pretty much enthralled from the opening scene. Jeff Bridges plays a character who's like the dark side of the Dude. A semicoherent junkie who's trained his daughter to cook up his heroin shots for him, he'd be the world's worst parent figure if it wasn't for the mother, a grotesque Courtney caricature who seems to me to be the only person in the film Gilliam's unable to summon up any liking for.

Events lead us into the wheatfields of the midwest and the story takes off into completely unforeseeable territory. There are countless reference points touched on over the next hour or so, in a very playful way - everything from Dorothy's farmhouse and her encounters with witches and brainless tin men, to the dinner table scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, to Psycho, to Jan Svankmeyer and The Bride of Frankenstein, and in what's either a major theft or a loving homage, one of the plot points of The Butcher Boy becomes a central event here.

The storyline takes detours into whimsy and the massively grotesque - there are two scenes here that will stay with me for weeks, one featuring a sex act in a taxidermist's workshop, the other best left undescribed - but there seems to me to be a central interest in the way that kids keep themselves sane through the most extreme circumstances, through imagination and play, and through projecting their fears onto made-up characters, that really shows an understanding of the way children's minds work.

The main character, the kid, is tremendously convincing, funny and - in the end - heartbreaking. I think this film might just stand with classics like Voice of the Beehive and Bernard Rose's totally underrated Paperhouse as one of the great films about solitary children and their imaginations, and their ability to rise above their fears.

The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

Could this be the greatest ever Depression-era backstage musical starring an amputee?

[10/10 · 28 October 2003]

As anybody can see from the comments, you either 'get' Maddin or you don't. Ever since seeing 'Archangel' at the Toronto Film Festival in 1990, I've known that I am forever condemned to be one of his helpless, slavering acolytes. The way that he uses 'old film' tropes (jumps, scratches, bad post-sync, fuzzy sound, deteriorating film stock, deteriorating actors, deteriorating genres) is unlike any other director I've ever heard of. To some people it's a pointless exercise because who even watches REAL old movies, let alone perverse half-assed reconstructions of some old-movie half-remembered through a fog of delirium tremens. But the pointlessness IS the point, and so is the fact that he keeps obsessively returning to his obscure hometown of Winnipeg. This film is an apotheosis of all things Winnipegian, placing it at the heart of the world at least for 99 minutes. I love the local radio station that broadcasts to the whole world, and the montage sequences - Scotsmen, Africans, Mongolians all dropping everything and packing their instruments to flood into Canada for the titular song contest. I love the acting, which is pitch-perfect and never tilts over into smirking campery. I love the music and I love the full-blooded ending, which is as savage and as moving as the best of '30s melodrama. I love this movie, and I love the fact that Guy Maddin has now allied himself with Isabella Rossellini (they are apparently planning a biopic of her father Roberto) and from now on it will be much more difficult to sideline him as some backwoods dilettante with a silent cinema fixation. Tomorrow, the world!

Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)

So you think you have seen a few strange films in your time, eh?

[10/10 · 28 October 2003]

Well, this is quite probably one of the most uncategorisable films I've seen - you couldn't possibly call it a comedy, with its beauty salons that moonlight as abortion clinics/brothels, and its disturbingly self-lacerating portrait of the director as a cowardly lecher and cold-blooded murderer. But parts of it are hilarious. Go figure. In brief, the plot concerns Guy Maddin, hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons, who takes his pregnant girlfriend to the above-mentioned clinic for a termination and then leaves her (literally in the middle of the procedure) for the brothel-keeper's beautiful daughter, played with incandescent and slightly scary intensity by Melissa Dionisio (that surely cant be her real name, can it?) only to discover that she can't allow herself to be touched by a man's hands (an uncharacteristically direct quote from Lon Chaney's 'The Unknown') until her father's murder has been avenged. And then she produced the jar in which she keeps, preserved, her father's hands... After that we get a twist on that old chestnut 'The Hands of Orlac', combined with a surprisingly explicit dose of sexual excess and weird psychology, as young Guy ends up in deep trouble of every sort imaginable, through his own inability to control his lusts. Told in ten chapters of six minutes apiece, this was intended as a gallery installation but it works just fine as a movie. As long as you don't mind a regular dose of jawdropping strangeness and a large splash of shocking, unfathomable directorial masochism.

Mississippi Blues (1983)

A wasted opportunity

[4 March 2003]

Tavernier and Parrish wander around Mississippi, seemingly without any plan or idea, film more or less everything they find - good, bad or indifferent - and release it without any kind of unifying idea. All of this I could have endured if it wasn't for the fact that they don't bother to credit ANY of the Mississippi gospel and blues musicians that they filmed. I actually logged on here looking for more information on these performers, some of whom are electrifying, but as on the tape, the only names are those of the crew, who also merit lots of dull cutaways of themselves playing football, eating and variously enjoying themselves. I'm glad they did, very few others watching this film will.

Dead or Alive: Final (2002)

More reflective than usual for Takashi

[13 November 2002]

This was a surprise - I was expecting something along the lines of the original DOA, not having seen any of the sequels. What you actually get is a slowish, rather beautiful, enigmatic science fiction film, rather like a Philip K Dick novel in that its central themes are love and the problem of how to be human in a mechanical world.

The film borrows the notion of 'replicants' from Blade Runner (I can't remember if they were called that in PKD's source novel) but takes the idea further than that highly over-rated film, bringing us characters who don't realise that they're replicants battling replicants who are becoming human, ending with a strange metal-morphosis straight out of 'Tetsuo'. The story moves along smoothly but never really kicks into high gear. We're in 2346, in Yokohama, where the gay Mayor Wu has made the consumption of a birth control drug that destroys love a compulsory act. Babies born due to defiance of the law are destoyed, Herod-style. Riki Takeuchi (who is getting a bit porky these days!) is Wu's enforcer.

Puzzlingly, he has a small son. He goes into action against some revolutionaries and has all of his most cherished illusions destroyed...

Visually, the film is quite lovely, even though it seems to have been made (as per usual with Takashi) very speedily. It also seems to have been shot on some kind of video process, which doesn't hold up well on the big screen but won't bother anybody watching it at home.

The ending is unfathomable even by Takashi's standards, and rather abrupt. Still, there's nobody else like him...

Coolockland (2000)

Best Irish noir tranny-murder thriller comedy ever

[25 July 2002]

I had been hearing people rave about this film for ages and finally got a chance to check it out myself a few weeks ago. Since then, I've watched it several more times, usually in a state of artificially induced euphoria. It is fantastically original, visually unique (shot on reversal stock), referential to an extraordinary degree (Brendan Behan, James Joyce, Jesus and Bobby Sands all turn up at various points), uses Tom Waits lyrics for dialogue and in the film's funniest line, uses Dr. Dre to slag off Southside Dublin... Try and see it, however you manage to do that. It's essential.

Play for Today: Beloved Enemy (1981) Season 11, Episode 16

Ahead of its time

[7/10 · 28 March 2002]

Alan Clarke had just made a documentary called 'Vodka-Cola',

about the creeping influence that the big corporations were

gaining over world politics,and I suppose he felt that people

wouldn't really get what the whole thing was about unless he

dramatised it - so we got this remarkable movie. Graham Crowden runs a multinational that wants to expand into

the USSR (still, of course, officially the enemy in 1981). Tony Doyle

is his smoothly thuglike right-hand-man. Steven Berkoff is Doyle's

opposite number in the Russian delegation. We see some

beautifully observed scenes evoking the mind-numbing boredom

of high-level business dealings, contrasted with the foul-mouthed

energy of the behind-the-scenes action. The story really kicks off,

though, when it turns out that the Russians will play along, but only

if the company gives them access to their state-of-the-art laser

technology... which can, of course, be used as weaponry... The film portrays politicians as being alternately bullied and bribed

by big business, ultimately colluding in the destruction of their own

native industries in order to save money for the 'greater good' -

globalisation. All this twenty years before Naomi Klein's 'No Logo'. But I shouldn't make it sound like a dry dissertation of a movie - the

performances, as always with Clarke, are superb, and it's great to

see the late Tony Doyle's powerhouse performance. could British TV ever make something as intellectually challenging

today....?

Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985)

Truly unique

[9/10 · 28 March 2002]

I've been wanting to see this movie for years, and just caught a very rare screening at the National Film Theatre. There were maybe twenty people there, and if there was any justice the place would have been standing-room only. Whatever about that, those of us who made it had a good time. This is one of the strangest and most entertaining British films, certainly of the Eighties, and probably of the entire twentieth century. You may be reminded of other movies (I thought of Ken Russell's wild set designs, and also Eraserhead) but there really is nothing to compare it to... The performances are broad, cartoonish even, but well-judged. They never topple over into self-parody. Phil Daniels is as good as ever, but I was especially impressed by Bruce Payne (a new name to me) who does a great job with the least defined role in the movie, 'T.O.', Billy's manager, the weak link in the chain, the craven gambling addict whose need puts Billy in danger of losing his career (but whose eye for the main chance is the reason he has a career at all...) The songs are kind of a mixed bag, bit when they're good (as they are through all of the outlandishly gripping final snooker game) they're much better than 'Tommy', for instance, and Phil Daniel's final stream-of-consciousness number, foreseeing his bright but banal future, wouldn't sound out of place on a Blur CD.... It looks unlikely that this is ever going to come out on video let alone DVD, but if any freakish chance allows you the opportunity to see it, then do. You won't be bored. Bewildered maybe, confused perhaps, laughing like a drain hopefully. But definitely not bored.

Ichi the Killer (2001)

Is the wildest director working in the 21st century...TOO wild?

[14 November 2001]

Miike (pronounced Mickey) Takashi is something special. I think you need to see quite a few of his movies to get an idea of what he's about. If you just see Fudoh and this film, you think he's a splatter-crazed manga freak. If you just see Audition, you think he's from another planet. But his movies as a whole are like some kind of overblown fantasy about Japanese society, families who can't communicate, sexuality gone into overdrive, violence behind every facade. Ichi is truly the most over-the-top movie I have ever seen. It reminds me a bit of first discovering John Woo. Except that while Woo was inspired by Peckinpah and Jean-Pierre Melville, this guy's influences seem to be gore comics, metal videos and his own unflinching take on modern life. Specifically, we're talking about EXTREME s&m, rooms full of entrails, sadist twin cops wearing haute couture, an insane Yakuza with slits in his face, a man stuffed into a TV set and executed with skewers, a hero who is probably mentally ill and cries all the time, a man sliced in half, and a LOT of very disturbing rape fixations. That's only the stuff that jumps to mind immediately. Pretty much every scene will surprise, shock, disturb or (depending on how hardened you are) amuse you. I left this film wondering who the intended audience could be. Japanese people, certainly. Committed seekers-out of the bizarre like myself, yes. But even the film festival audience I was with reeled out, punchdrunk and silent. It's kind of like industrial music, it makes sense while you're experiencing it, afterwards it's all just a ringing in your ears and a disoriented worldview.