The Boys

1998, Australia, directed by Rowan Woods

An exceptional piece of work that stands up well after twenty years, and numerous gritty Aussie crime pics/TV series in the interim, clearly owing a considerable debt to this picture. The Boys seemed like a start of great promise for Rowan Woods, so his subsequent career trajectory has to be rated a relative disappointment by that standard (it's hard to see what's specifically distinctive in his episodes of  the TV series Rake, for instance); perhaps, in the end, the distinctive aspects were mostly there in the original play, even if the visuals certainly seem to add a considerable depth to the portrait of this particular, unpleasant milieu. 

L'Eau froide

1994, France, directed by Olivier Assayas

A formative film for me, one I saw originally on the big screen in November 1994, and it was as impressive as I recalled, the large screen really enhancing the immersive experience, particularly in the lengthy, and quite extraordinary, party sequence. It's interesting, though, how the memory plays tricks -- that sequence looms so large in my mind that I had forgotten just how much of the film precedes it, and how much additional detail we get on the lives of the protagonists. I had forgotten entire sections, too, such as the extended scene in the police station where Virginie Ledoyen speaks with Jean-Pierre Darroussin (indeed, I had no recollection that the actor was in the film). The film is incredibly rich in detail, feeling very much of that post-1968 moment in which it is set -- the challenge to parental and social authorities (schools, doctors), the integration of various immigrant populations, the hints at the desirability of a return to the land, the apparent hopelessness of youth in the Pompidou years, etc. There are details of performance and filming structure, too, that make a big impression -- the repetition of the motif of handing something from one hand to another (records, money, a hash pipe), the way that Jackie Berroyer fretfully holds his hands together, even the contrast between how young and old dress and interact, as well as the bone-deep chill of the weather (people putting on coats even inside, never mind in the frigid final sequences). 

The Lion King

1994, US, directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff

Toy Story

1995, US, directed by John Lasseter

I hadn't seen this since its release, but it turned out to be a perfect Friday-night outing with the boys -- as charming and energetic as I remembered, and with the scary bits judged just right for the younger set. It's also brief -- I note that the running time creeps up with each of the subsequent installments.

A Brighter Summer Day

1991, Taiwan, directed by Edward Yang

An extraordinarily ambitious film that aims to paint a picture of an entire generation of (urban) Taiwanese still adjusting to live after migration from the Chinese mainland, drawing liberally from Edward Yang's own youth in Taiwan -- the Chinese title for the film makes reference to a tragedy that is woven into the latter stages of the film, and which transfixed Yang and his peers at the time. A degree of historical knowledge, such as that provided by the booklet accompanying the Criterion edition of the film, greatly helps with understanding of Yang's goals, in particular the unusual, loose-limbed first hour or so during which the film gradually coalesces around one protagonist while nonetheless retaining a sense of the broader fresco.* Indeed, the film is novelistic in the best sense, weaving a variety of destinies together to exceptional effect.

The English language title emphasizes the fascination that overseas, and particularly American, culture held for young Taiwanese of the 1950s and 1960s, just as postwar Germans delved into the depths of American popular culture, as in the films of Wim Wenders (like Wenders, Yang suggests a deep degree of alienation in the postward populace, an absence of emotional engagement that underpins the film's bursts of violence). Yang is looking back at his own youth, but there's little trace of nostalgia -- even when the film is lit with a wonderful warmth, there's often a sharp contrast with the events or words onscreen, while Yang makes exceptional use of naturalistic lighting effects during one of the film's most bewildering and brutal sequences.

* I also found John Anderson's 2005 book Edward Yang, published by the University of Illinois Press, very informative. Yang's untimely death in 2007 means that Anderson's book stands as a comprehensive career survey.

Docteur Petiot

1990, France, directed by Christian de Chalonge

Michel Serrault is very good in the title role, his precise gestures and distinctive phrasing creating a deeply disconcerting portrait of (real-life) violence and madness that seem, in Chalonge's telling, entirely in the spirit of the times, that is, occupied Paris. Whether the locations are authentic to the story or not, they are used to excellent effect to create an atmosphere of desolation and desperation, with the sound design constantly keeping the ear off-balance.

The Rock

1996, US, directed by Michael Bay

Early period Bay: while he's already in full crank-up-the-bombast mode, the camera isn't quite as restless (reckless?), though I still recall the entire cinema trembling in the big set pieces, and that was just the music. Completely idiotic, sometimes very bloody, and admittedly rather fun.

Buud Yam

1997, Burkina Faso/France, directed by Gaston Kaboré

A sequel of sorts to Wênd Kûuni, the 1982 film that put Gaston Kaboré on the map. He returns to both the characters and the actors from that film and while there are deliberate resonances between the two pictures, including brief flashbacks that are actually footage from Wend Kuuni, this stands on its own as an exploration of pre-colonial Sahel life. It's not entirely historically accurate in terms of the depiction of a rather abundant and largely conflict-free swath of territory and yet it also succeeds in giving a strong sense of the existence of numerous loosely associated societies that often have trouble understanding one another even on the linguistic level (a phenomenon that continues today, and which contributes to the real challenges posed by borders that cut through pre-existing societies). While the storyline is straightforward, narrating the search by Wênd Kûuni for a legendary healer intercut with sequences featuring the young man's ailing sister, it's rich in its generosity of spirit, and very open about suspicions within village life but also the ways in which those suspicions can be healed. Visually some of the landscapes of southern Burkina Faso are lovely, and I also liked the way that Kaboré shot most of the film in medium/long shot so you can really see the interactions between the characters, while there are a few moments of wonderful humour, particularly a sequence in which a group of riverbank kids enjoy observing some clueless newcomers. 

Mission: Impossible

1996, US, directed by Brian De Palma

Seen again for the first time since the cinema release, as a follow-up to reading David Bordwell's excellent blog post on visual storytelling. I'm not a big De Palma fan but for the most part the film remains quite fresh nearly twenty years on, unlike many of that year's other big hits (Independence Day, Twister, Jerry Maguire, The Rock, all of which seem more and more obviously formulaic); the set-piece above is especially good, though the TGV-set finale shows its age a good deal more.

Les Marmottes

1993, France, directed by Elie Chouraqui

I'm not quite sure why this one remained on "to see" list so many years -- perhaps a friend had mentioned it back in college, or perhaps it was the rather wonderful cast list (including the object of a major 1990s crush, Virginie Ledoyen), but there's no getting around the fact that the film was a major disappointment. The characters are far too self-absorbed to make them worth caring about, and the storyline is filled with highly artificial narrative turns over the course of a Christmas family gathering (at the well-heeled end of the spectrum); very few of the actors poke through the material, either, to get at something more interesting, though there are very occasional moments that hint at an alternative outcome (the lively opening that promises rather more than it delivers, or the deeply uncomfortable scene when one character goes rather too far in divulging a fantasy). Ms. Ledoyen is, predictably, lovely, but even she couldn't revive the film; even so, co-screenwriter Danièle Thompson clearly liked her work here since she recycled elements rather shamelessly two years later in the Christmas-set family drama La Bûche.

L'Inconnu dans la maison

A contribution to David Cairns' essential annual Late Movies Blogathon at Shadowplay.

Not everyone gets to go out on a high: Georges Lautner might be better suited to an Early Movies blogathon, with his most beloved work mostly at the beginning of his career. It's no great surprise that, a few stray bits of TV work aside, he took his leave from directing after L'Inconnu dans la maison flopped, notwithstanding the presence of Jean-Paul Belmondo: box office success aside, it's too middle of the road for a man who aspired to be an unpretentious creator of popular entertainment, and largely succeeded in that vein.

Belmondo wasn't, in any case, the draw he had once been -- not least when director and actor teamed up for several major hits in the early 1980s -- and had already embarked on his own rather extended wind-down in cinematic activity. He hadn't made a film for several years when this opportunity came along, and a good deal of his subsequent work has been overly self-referential, appearing as versions of himself or in gimmicky parts, like an appearance in the 2001 TV movie L'Ainé des Ferchaux where he took on the role that Charles Vanel played opposite a much younger Belmondo in 1963.

Truth be told, it's an odd project for both men. Lautner's best work is almost always semi-comic in tone, with a good deal more zip than we see here, whereas the humour here is both rare and pretty juvenile, of the stumbling drunk variety. The tongue-in-cheek aspect of Lautner's earlier police and spy parodies is key to their appeal, with the director keen to emphasize he's in it for the laughs, and always giving full rein to the sometimes terrific dialogue he had at his disposal (particularly during his extended collaboration with Michel Audiard). Though Belmondo, who gets virtually all of the half-decent dialogue here, delivers several of his speeches with real relish, particularly an extended meditation on drinking his way through an amply stocked wine cellar, the riper lines clash with the otherwise fairly straightforward procedural tone: they are very obviously lines against an often drab backdrop.

There's a similar incongruity to the idea of casting Belmondo in the first place.  He's supposed to be playing an aging, drunken ex-lawyer, mired in sorrow and drink since the suicide of his wife ten years earlier. It's not all that hard to credit the actor with a love of the bottle, since his face, which once looked like something out of a Cubist painting, is softening and bulging out here and there, but this son of a sculptor, probably born in the kind of milieu the film depicts, rarely convinces in lawyer's robes.

After all, from almost his first screen appearance in the late 1950s, we've learned to think of Belmondo as a man of action rather than one of fancy words -- rip-roaring Bebel, not some schlub stuck on a couch with his nose halfway down a bottle of Beaujolais. Lautner seems to sense this, too, for the character is ultimately re-written into the kind of go-get-'em role that Belmondo more usually played: the lawyer turns detective to solve the film's central mystery (onscreen, that is: offscreen, the big mystery is whether there's any concept of conflict of interest in the French justice system since the case involves the lawyer's own daughter and nephew, among others). While a minor player comments that the role of detective doesn't suit the lawyer, I'd voice a hearty objection -- Belmondo seems to be on much firmer ground here, and I wouldn't have found it at all surprising if his employed his fists, Inspecteur Lavardin-style, in the course of his investigation.

The whole thing is a reworking of a Simenon novel first filmed by Henri Decoin from a Clouzot script in 1942. I haven't seen the earlier film, which stars Raimu, in its entirety but those sequences I have found suggest a much more rancid tone, with Clouzot homing in on the story's possibilities to create another acid portrait of wartime small-town life (edit: I subsequently caught up with the original). Lautner's version reworks the focus so that the dissolute lawyer mostly obscures any portrait of local mores -- even the title, dropping an "s" from the original Les Inconnus dans la maison, makes the mystery within the house of considerably less psychological interest. While Lautner does pay lip service to current trends, with French gangster rap and drug culture making their appearances, the Clouzot-ish small town portrait is not his major interest as a filmmaker in any case: Chabrol might have been a better bet to take a contemporary look at the same material.

Black Beauty

1994, US/UK, directed by Caroline Thompson

My wife takes my son to the library every week, and he's in the habit of picking up a DVD on most visits. He generally picks the boxes at random and rarely asks to actually watch the DVD once he gets home so we often return them unopened. I'm not sure if the thought process here was any more considered, though the striking cover image of a rearing horse may have caught his eye, but we did end up watching the film on this occasion. He seemed to enjoy it quite a good deal, even if he had some questions about the progression of the story: it's not that easy to explain to a nearly-three-year-old that the horse is speaking in voiceover, even with the imaginative capacity of the young child. He was alarmed, however, by a scene of fire, and very uncharacteristically jumped into my arms, and has commented on the scene a number of times since then.

Somewhere online, I came across a review that suggested this is a rather Dickensian telling of the tale -- true enough for the scenes in the city, but the opening segment is rather more in the benevolent gentry mode, with horses and grooms alike grateful to their master, even if the film does subsequently point out that this was by no means the only experience one might have in the employ of a large country house. The scenes focused exclusively on the horses at play are quite beautiful, all other critique aside: they are indeed gorgeous animals.

Clueless

1995, US, directed by Amy Heckerling

One of the great teen films, along with Heckerling's own Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Heckerling manages to retain our sympathy for her characters despite their uniformly privileged status. It certainly didn't hurt that the 1995 audience was fresh from a decade of Beverly Hills, 90210 melodrama, and indeed several of the gags make reference to that show. The film feels considerably less episodic than Fast Times: there's never a free moment here to indulge in a scene for its own sake, partly because the focus never strays from Cher (Alicia Silverstone).

Indeed, I can't recall many Hollywood films that have no scenes whatsoever that don't involve the protagonist, even if on a few occasions her presence is over the telephone. Cher comes across as a very canny young woman, eagerly manipulating her ditzy image but absolutely in control of her actions: in her own way, she's a surprising avatar for girl power, with no one, save a street punk with a gun, likely to put one over on her.

The Hunt for Red October

1990, US, directed by John McTiernan

There's an awful lot going here -- tense developments aboard three different submarines and on board a handful of ships, as well as asides in the corridors of power in both Washington and Moscow -- but John McTiernan makes it work, carefully pacing his material and saving the biggest action thrills to near the end, while extracting remarkable tension from submarine manoeuvres that are mostly in the imagination.

Still, there are some awkward touches -- the filmmakers never quite resolve the issue of whether or not to have their Russian characters speak Russian, and while there's an elegant conceit early on to allow the Russians to begin speaking English onscreen, late on the trick comes back to cause confusion (Sean Connery sounds more Scottish than ever, though, especially when speaking Russian). And at times McTiernan appears not to trust his own instincts: Basil Poledouris's score is overblown, drowning out the dialogue at times, including in sequences where that dialogue would appear to be the main event.

Nouvelle vague

1990, France/Switzerland, directed by Jean-Luc Godard

I'm not at all familiar with post-1970 Godard, but Nouvelle vague was featured on the first issue of Les Cahiers du cinéma I ever purchased, when I was sixteen, and the images from that issue have remained with me since -- I wouldn't quite say that I'd constructed my own mental version of the film, but I certainly formed a clear sense of what I thought it would be like, and it was nothing like this.

I'd forgotten almost completely how beautiful, even painterly, Godard's films can be -- images composed with exquisite care, but also finding much of their beauty in movement, such as in the wonderful shot, near the end, of a couple emerging from the woods and wandering across a lawn, the camera fluidly tracking their progress over fifteen or twenty seconds. In the opening segment, though, the soundscape is often even more striking, with clinking glasses, a car, or even a snippet of music often used to distinctly unsettling effect.

As expected, there's the usual abundance of references -- within cinema alone contributing everything from Pagnol to echoes of Alain Delon's own filmography (Plein soleil, most obviously, and perhaps Notre histoire among others), but also music and books, whether they appear within the shot or are quoted in voiceover. At one point, Delon -- who has perfected, over several decades, the trick of looking utterly exhausted -- fixes the camera and asks, in response to (yet) another apparent non sequitur, "What's he talking about?" It's hard not to assume that Godard is winking in our direction, aware of his own obtuse and pretentious reputation and able, just a little, to bring himself down to size.

Das Leben ist eine Baustelle

1997, Germany, directed by Wolfgang Becker

I lived in Berlin for two years, from 1999 to 2001, and no film better captures the feel of the city as I experienced it, as a place where anything could happen, at any time -- there's a magical realist feel to certain scenes in the film that nonetheless seems entirely grounded in the city of the time. The first weekend I was there, some new acquaintances invited me to an art show in a former butcher's shop. For some reason, someone had filled shallow trenches on the floor with flour, and by the end of the evening everyone's clothes were white up to the knees: little clouds trailed behind us as we walked out into the chilly November night, and yet it was all entirely normal.

One major difference between the film and the city as I experienced it, though, and not a minor one: while I could never quite figure out how some of my friends stitched together a living, they still seemed pretty comfortable, whereas the characters here are visibly more hand to mouth, and much of the film centers around the jobs that they take and the schemes they concoct. For all that, though, there's a verve and a chance-taking about their lives, and a warmth in their fumbling efforts to create a new sense of family. That's not an uncommon cinematic theme, but it's handled convincingly here -- in halting, sometimes ham-fisted steps rather than in any simple progression, such that we learn of the characters' frailties along with them, as it were. In the end, though, it's hard to maintain any critical distance from the film -- the people and the streets feel like part of my own life in some odd way, and I'm overcome with a confused sense of nostalgia and heartache as I watch the characters work through their stories.

Crimson Tide

1995, US, directed by Tony Scott

This was our small tribute to the late Tony Scott, one of the contemporary Hollywood directors whose work I most enjoyed -- without a trace of guilt. Visually, at least, Crimson Tide isn't representative of Scott's more recent work -- it's much more classical in its framing and construction, and the Scott's experimentation with the image is for the most part, confined to lens filters or cascading showers of sparks and water. The camera, though, is a good deal more mobile, even in the tight confines of a submarine, where the vast majority of the film takes place, and as such it's quite different to the more static style of films like Top Gun -- in motion in their overall action, but less so within the individual shot. Here, though, Scott's camera tracks up through the submarine and along the individual floors, sometimes moving back and forth to underline the central confrontation between sub captain Gene Hackman, playing a kind of distillation of the gruff Gene Hackman type, and younger buck Denzel Washington. In comparison with many of Scott's later films, the opening is relatively languid -- it takes some time, and a good deal of scene setting, to get us on board the sub, whereas later films often begin with us already within the action, or get us there awfully quickly. In this case, though, the set up works well, giving us reasons to invest in Washington's character in particular, which is critical to Scott's creation of tension later -- the people need to matter for us to buy into their confrontation, just as, a few years later, the back story is essential to our being caught up by Will Smith's sudden flight in Enemy of the State.

Scream 2

1997, US, directed by Wes Craven

Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson do their best to have their cake and eat it, rushing a sequel into production to capitalize on the success of their first installment while decrying the vapidity of most sequels. While the self-referential tone works well in the early going, particularly in the amusing re-creation of Scream's tightly-wound opening, before long a grim air of repetition sets in, occasionally enlivened by an amusing cameo or a clever set-piece, such as that involving a soundproof glass booth from which a character can only watch helplessly as the killer methodically sets to work.

Scream

1996, US, directed by Wes Craven

Fifteen years later, after sequels, imitations and parodies, as well as the rise of an entirely new horror genre, it's hard to recall just what it was like to encounter Scream for the first time: like Halloween, it's as if the film is simultaneously unpicking both the teen horror film and its own deconstruction of that genre as it unspools. Although the tone is mostly light-hearted, playing with our knowledge of cinema convention by luring our attention to the corner of the screen or setting up what seem to be obvious boo moments before going in other directions, the filmmakers are still focused on delivering scares, though not necessarily with what's onscreen. After all, they even undercut the visual power of the bloody imagery by mentioning that movie gore is just red corn syrup, and so keep us off balance instead with constant changes in sound volume: I was particularly conscious of this with a young child sleeping elsewhere in the house as the volume suddenly jumped to deliver a thrill; the effect must have been much greater in a packed cinema in 1996.

Groundhog Day

1993, US, directed by Harold Ramis

I don't have a whole lot to add to the extensive dissections of Groundhog Day - by everyone from film critics to philosophy professors - not least because I watched the movie in that hazy week after our first child was born. After taking in Ghostbusters 2 the evening before I was struck, though, by the way in which Bill Murray and Harold Ramis, who directed Murray in Caddyshack, play with Murray's well-established curmudgeonly screen persona (I'm just waiting for Murray's turn in a Walter Matthau biopic) as the film evolves. Indeed, that persona seems critical to the film's exploration of just what it means to be stuck in an apparently endless present. Where a standard Hollywood film would give a character like this an unlikely redemption, and an even more unlikely psychological transformation, within a few days or weeks, here Murray has to ultimately confront and make peace the possibility that he'll never escape this alternative dimension. His character's acceptance of that reality is what gives the film its power, for that requires a genuine shift in his way of seeing the world, a shift that's possible only when he stares into the abyss, as it were. And somehow Ramis manages to combine that profound reflection with a genuinely sweet, convincing conclusion - quite a trick.