Films Catch Up 5

Yeah I watched a lot of films this year. Here's some more write ups.

1. The Crucible

In Salem, Massachusetts, in the 17^th century, a group of girls go into the woods to make love spells with the slave Tituba. Abigail Williams bites a chicken to try and kill Elizabeth Proctor, wife of John Proctor, who she loves, and was turned away from their house because of Elizabeth’s jealousy. Discovered in the woods, most of them flee, but one passes out and can’t be awakened.

Abigail blames Tituba, claiming that she was consorting with the devil. The girls all confirm the stories and in some very creepy scenes act as one in their testimony, seeing spirits and magic and stuff. Lots of the accused are found guilty. They then confess to avoid being hanged and offer witness against other members of the community.

Eventually this reaches John Proctor and his wife. They’re tougher nuts, with a reverend with knowledge of the law on his side. But we know this is a tragedy.

Adapted by Arthur Miller from his play of the same name, based on the historical Salem witch trials, the performances are hellishly convincing and gives some insight into how people believed in unseen powers.

Watch This: Gripping historical drama
Don’t Watch This: Grim and terrible madness of crowds

2. Blood And Wine

Alex Gates (Jack Nicholson) is a wine merchant with a lot of debts, cheating on his alcoholic wife Susan (Judy Davis) (who owns a majority of the wine business) and indifferently employing his step son Jason (Stephen Dorff). Jason would rather spend his time shark fishing, and is saving money to buy a boat. They’re in Miami, Florida.

Alex is having an affair with Gabriela (Jennifer Lopez) who is the nanny for a wealthy family about to go on a Caribbean cruise on their yacht. Together with Victor (Michael Caine), a British safecracker very ill with some sort of lung disease, they plan to steal a necklace from the safe when they’re away and Gabriela is house-sitting.

Things start to go wrong when Gabriela is fired rather than pay her, and Jason tracks her down to try and help and/or hit on her. Alex and Victor manage to get the necklace, and Alex hides it in his suitcase, planning to go to New York with Gabriela to fence it. Susan discovers the tickets, accuses Alex of cheating on him. They get into a fight and Susan knocks Alex out with a poker. She packs up her stuff (including the suitcase, which is hers) and she and Jason leave, not knowing they have the necklace.

The rest devolves into neo-noir deception, death and betrayal. Nicholson is very languid, even when violent and the rest of them do their best but it’s a bit lacklustre.

Watch This: Gritty crime in 90s Miami that’s not drug related!
Don’t Watch This: The heist is tense but the film loses momentum after that

3. Carry On Sergeant

Charlie Sage is at his wedding reception when one of the telegrams is read out, telling him to report that day for National Service. He has to leave his wife Mary, the wedding unconsummated, and join a group of other misfits. Mary joins the NAAFI for the duration, to be near her husband; along with Nora at the NAAFI who falls for one of Charlie’s platoon mates, and the depot medical officer this completes the complement of female characters.

Sergeant Grimshaw is retiring from the army and this is the last platoon he will take through basic training; he makes a bet that they will be the champion platoon. Then he meets them. His corporal suggest using psychology; not just shouting but kindness and encouragement. However with a set of mis-matched buffoons played by a variety of comic actors, it seems doomed to fail.

The first in the long-running Carry On series, it was not made with the intention of a sequel. Still, the bones of the future ones are there. A satirical look at an institution, a bit of smut, some slapstick and setpieces and slightly ineffectual authority figures trying to get the weirdos to work together. It was wildly successful, and as a period comedy stands up pretty well. “Carry On Sergeant,” which gave the title of the film and the series, is the order given by an officer when they have finished inspecting or addressing the troops, leaving it to the sergeant to, well, carry on.

Watch This: A classic comedy that created an iconic series
Don’t Watch This: Sitcoms about bumbling soldiers are excruciating

4. Picnic At Hanging Rock

On Valentine’s day, 1900, a girls school makes an outing to Hanging Rock* in Victoria, Australia. Mysteriously the clocks of the teachers and the coachman stop at noon, though it is now afternoon. Four pupils go to investigate the rock (they will need to write an essay). Everyone falls asleep in the heat. Then three of the pupils vanish, along with a teacher who had been awake, reading a geometry book, but vanished even more mysteriously.

There’s a lot of fall out. The police search the rock and find nothing. Several parents withdraw their pupils. One girl, who didn’t go to the rock, was in love with Miranda, one of the vanished girls. Her guardian is no longer paying. But then a boy from a family who was also at the rock that day finds some lace, and later one of the girls, somehow alive though it is days later. She has no memory, is also missing her corset.

A languid period piece with an unresolved mystery at the centre. A mystery that hurts all the characters, leaving them broken and untethered.

Watch This: An intriguing look at a small society in early twentieth century Australia, lifted by the unexplained heart
Don’t Watch This: You want answers and not just to “what happens to the survivors when an inexplicable tragedy occurs?”

* A real place though a fictional story. I’ve visited Hanging Rock, an extraordinary tree-shrouded remnant of magma erupting, rising from the farmland around. There’s a lot about both the book and films, the geology, natural history and aboriginal knowledge, also every now and then people shouting “Miranda,” like in this film. Perhaps because I’ve been there I can feel the heat and the rocks underfoot, but the film does a good job of putting you there even if you haven’t.

5. Battle Royale II: Requiem

Three years after the events of the film Battle Royale, the survivors of the Battle Royale games have declared war on adults. As adults insist on youths fighting for their entertainment*, they have become terrorists, bombing Japan. The survivors, the Wild Seven, are on an abandoned island offshore.

The Japanese government reject their demands, instead sending a class of teenagers to attack the island and kill the leader of the Wild Seven. They have bomb collars, which are linked in pairs between boys and girls, they have no training and are given a wild briefing by their teacher, which includes a list of every country bombed by the US for the last sixty years.

There are a few bits from Battle Royale brought back; their ammunition is airdropped in, and one of them opens it up and its toilet paper. The attack by the kids makes Wild Seven use their electromagnetic pulse early to deactivate the bomb collars; things get complex and political and they send in the regular troops rather than allow America to bomb the island.

The film wants to expand on the message of the first one, but in part because of the language and cultural barriers, and also it being made in 2003 and not wanting to commit to the message it circles, that maybe terrorism has a point, it's rather confused. Also brutal, and unpleasant.

Watch This: Brutal commentary on how children are co-opted into adult conflicts
Don’t Watch This: Unpleasant look at the arbitrariness of violence

 * The hatred of the old for the young is the reasoning behind the Battle Royale games, and also to try and keep delinquent youth in line. As might be expected it doesn’t work.

6. And Then There Were None

A 1974 adaption of the Agatha Christie mystery*, also known as Ten Little Indians. Ten people are summoned to a remote hotel, in this case Persepolis in Iran**, where they arrive by helicopter. There are no vehicles on site, and it is apparently 200 miles of desert and mountain from civilisation***.

They are guests or employees of the mysterious U N Owen. All of them have dark secrets that have caused deaths. The recorded voice of U N Owen accuses them all after dinner on the first night, following which one of the guests dies.

Within the hotel are many copies of a rhyme called “Ten Little Indians,” in which the ten little Indians each die a gruesome death until “And Then There Were None.” On the dinner table are the statues of ten Indians, and after anyone dies, one is smashed.

As the visit continues, the inhabitants of the hotel try to learn more about each other, and who U N Owen might be. They have to work together, but they can’t trust each other. After all, they are all killers, and more and more of them are dying.

A stylish version of the classic mystery, with an interesting setting that, it turns out, was soon to become definitively a period piece****.

Watch This: A cool murder mystery with a fun 1970s cast
Don’t Watch This: It’s all very mannered and stylised, out of date even for the 1930s let alone the 70s or 21^st century

* SPOILERS This is an adaption of the play rather than the novel; indeed it is mostly based on the 1965 film version, using the names from that script. If you know the difference between the play and the novel then you now understand the ending.

** Filmed, in fact, in a hotel in Isfahan, though the ruins adjacent to the fictional hotel are the real ones at Persepolis. This being pre-revolutionary Iran it’s an interesting view of the country at the time, offering a luxury hotel to westerners (and, notably, no Iranian characters).

*** Although we must accept this for the sake of the film, inevitably this is not accurate geography.

**** The novel itself, published in 1939, would become swiftly, if not so absolutely, outdated by WW2

7. The Man Who Cheated Himself

Lois Frazer, planning to divorce her husband, discovers he’s bought a gun. She calls her new lover, Lt Ed Cullen of the San Francisco Police. While he’s trying to calm her down her husband comes home, breaks in through the door he jimmied and discovers the gun out of place. When he moves towards Lois she panics and shoots him dead. Ed decides to try and conceal the crime, using the alibi the husband has set up for himself, taking him to the airport where he dumps the body, and throwing the gun off the bridge.

The call comes in and Andy Cullen, Ed’s brother and new to the homicide unit, gets the case. Ed joins him, it being his first one. There are various twists and turns as Ed tries to stop Andy pursuing the unanswered questions, especially after the gun unexpectedly turns up after being used in a robbery. Andy is getting married, in an inversion of Ed and Lois’s relationship, and Ed hopes to bury the case during his honeymoon.

A high concept noir thriller that uses several interesting San Francisco area locations, and juxtaposes different types of love. After interviewing Lois, Andy correctly notes that she’s Ed’s type, but also comments that she would be bad for him.

Watch This: A silly but occasionally tense film about trying to hide a crime, and somehow failing despite everything being on your side
Don’t Watch This: There’s a tremendous amount of silly coincidence, barely covered by the two investigators being brothers how know each other, which is in itself a very silly coincidence

8. Jail Bait

Don Gregor is bailed out of the police station by his sister Marilyn for carrying an unlicensed handgun. He immediately steals another gun from inside a book at his father's home and goes out to meet his gangster friend Vic Brady. He argues with his father Dr Gregor, a famous plastic surgeon.

The titular “Jail Bait” is the gun, I am sure you will be relieved to learn.

Don and Vic decide to rob the Monterey theatre, where the payroll for the entire chain of theatres is kept overnight. We’re treated to a blacked up comedian with an outrageous accent making some jokes and singing a song. After everyone’s left they strike, but it goes wrong. Disturbed by the bookkeeper, they shoot the nightwatchman and also the fleeing bookkeeper, leaving her for dead. It turns out the nightwatchman is a retired policeman, so the cops take it personally when he dies.

Don and Vic hide out with Vic’s girlfriend Loretta who he treats terribly, slapping and insisting she shut up. Dr Gregor tries to convince Don to turn himself in. But Vic has a different plan; get Dr Gregor to perform plastic surgery on him so he can’t be identified.

It’s all silly, but also quite tight with it, using the limited amount of talent and budget efficiently. An interesting noir thriller from notorious director Ed Wood Jr.

Watch This: A fun bit of crime with some farcical moments
Don’t Watch This: The twist can be seen coming from a mile off

9. Simulant

There’s a guy who hunts rogue and stolen robots, an updated “blade runner” if you will. He tracks down one that has been offline for three years, and also attacked him to try and escape, which should be impossible. The robot company seem oddly unconcerned by this but let him keep on the case.

There’s a guy who it turns out is the robot double of a man who died and was then activated by his wife. He figures out what’s wrong, so the wife calls in a technician. It turns out that this is the guy who jailbroke the other robot, and he has a plan.

It’s a strong cast and has a few good setpieces. But as a robot rebellion there’s nothing very new here.

Watch This: Slick and stylish robot thriller
Don’t Watch This: Watch another film - Blade Runner and BladeRunner 2049 come to mind.

10. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

In Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery they got a lot of mileage by taking super-spy and free-love advocate Austin Powers out of his natural time, the 60s, and bringing him into the modern day (the 90s). So obviously in this one they put him back in the 60s.

Dr Evil (Mike Myers) has some business trying to reconcile with his son Scott Evil, but is distracted by a clone, one-eighth his size, who he dubs Mini-Me. Together they go back in time to 1969 when Austin Powers (Mike Myers) is cryogenically frozen. They suborn one of the guards, known as Fat Bastard, a third character played by Mike Myers, who drills into Austins cryochamber and extracts his “mojo” (sexual potency). Fat Bastard is fat, Scottish, ate a baby (?) and is generally disgusting.

Austin is sent back in time where he meets up with CIA agent Felicity Shagwell. Together they try and uncover Dr Evil’s plan. Felicity has sex with Fat Bastard, planting a tracker in his bum. Later they discover that he has excreted it and the stool sample indicated the Caribbean island that Dr Evil has his volcano base on. Getting there he escapes to his moon base.

Dr Evil, awkward, playing favourites, is more interesting than Austin Powers. Back in his own time period Austin struggles with impotence, both sexual and in the story, such as it is. Fat Bastard is a ridiculous character, initially redeemed by his total self-confidence, and later that is undermined making the whole thing a lot of nonsense. Mini-Me is treated like a dog, a baby, Dr Evil’s Id perhaps, it’s all a bit weird. Some good jokes, and several over-explained jokes which is annoying for those of us who like to pick up on these things.

Watch This: Some very funny scenes, still making deserved fun of James Bond
Don’t Watch This: Already reaching diminishing returns, even (especially?) with the introduction of interesting new characters