Do You See – FreakyTrigger https://freakytrigger.co.uk Lollards in the high church of low culture Tue, 16 May 2023 13:37:36 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2019: #10 – #1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2020/02/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2019-10-1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2020/02/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2019-10-1#comments Wed, 12 Feb 2020 11:33:28 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32349 Oscars Schmoscars, this is the list about five people have been waiting for. And while there is a lot here in common with the Best Picture lists from this year (and last), the conclusion is somewhat different – albeit partially due to UK release dates. So below we have Queen’s, writers, gangsters and some women who don’t seem significantly littler than the average.

10: The Irishman
It is probably important that we have dumbass conversations about what is and what isn’t cinema every now and then, and for a three hour twenty minute Netflix movie Scorsese is massaging the definition as much as Marvel might be. There is much to like and enjoy in The Irishman, but I think the two films in there (the gangster Hoffa one, and the contemplative getting old one) pull in different directions that might have been better served by it being in multiple parts (and if you want, you can watch it that way on Netflix).

9: The Favourite
Last years’ number eight, I allowed this year because it had an out of London release on the 1st January so it seemed unfair to not let it in. So between the years it possibly would have topped the list and why not. A scabrous satire with a trio of great performances and odd enough direction to make you feel glad it was so well embraced by a global audience.

8: Avengers: Endgame
The culmination of 21 films – they say – so (as we see by the no show of the Rise Of Skywalker) sticking the landing is not to be under-estimated. It also manages to balance its tone between high universe saving adventure and small character comedy surprisingly well. So people accusing it of being formulaic, playing safe and the nadir of cinema neglects the spectacle, the stabs at emotion and that it felt pretty satisfying at the time. Don’t let Chris Evans wear old man make-up again though.


7: Hustlers
Perhaps I have been a bit rude to Scorsese above so lets just say the opening of Hustlers is pure Goodfellas, we get dragged around a club, seeing everything, told the lie of the land in exotic dancing. And then…J Lo does a pole dance. Even if the rest of the film had been rubbish (its not) the audacity of the opening ten minutes would have made it stand out. Its crime spree is exploitative, and yet as victimless as most bank heists, and the film can pack a lot of questions about relative morality in there. But its a great time at the movies, crime pays, then it doesn’t – the oldest plot in the book but this time the gang are women, and the crime they commit, only they can.

6: Marriage Story
Noah Baumback bounces back from the pretty lousy Meyerwitz Stories with a well judged divorce film which is much funnier than it should be and generally saves its anger not for its protagonists, but the adversarial system of break up in the US. Scarlett Johanssen and Adam Driver play a very convincing couple with a very convincing break-up (the film is nominally sympathetic to her though again doesn’t so much demonise the Driver character than the cultural patriarchy he exists in). What is so refreshing about it is quite how funny it is, and that it recognises that people grow, change and that things don’t last forever, but they don’t have to be bad. And never impress anyone with a knife trick.

5: Little Women
Neatly sidestepping the question if the world needs another adaptation of Little Women (it needs as many as it gets) Greta Gerwig takes her Lady Bird buzz and throws herself at a classic and triumphs. Deciding on a non-linear structure to a very linear book(s) pulls out clever parallels between the action but her masterstroke is spending time understanding Amy. Florence Pugh manages to capture the annoying tone of the character, but also embody the growth to a degree that we can sympathise with her – and perhaps even prefer her to Jo. Perhaps a hug of a film, but it did come out on Boxing Day so…

4: Booksmart
Yes it is just a silly little teen comedy, but it is notable how few silly little teen comedies we get these days, not least ones which are as funny as these. The Beanie Feldstein presence made people reach for Superbad comparisons, and it has that level of raunch if not more – but in the service of a lovely central female friendship and there is a surprising amount of nuance about class, sex and friendship. It has a terrific script, Olivia Wilde adds some lovely touches  and the icing on the cake is a bit of inspired lunacy from Billie Lourd.

3: Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Whilst Mariell Heller’s film boasts a fascinating story, and a well drawn picture of living alone in early 90’s New York, its real strength comes from the sympathetic portrayal of a pretty misanthropic character. Melissa McCarthy is excellent as Lee Israel, biographer on hard times who turns to faking celebrity letters, and paints a portrait of someone bitter, who finds it difficult to relate, and get by. She does find a friend in Richard E.Grant (the teetotaller’s drunk), and the film suggests that things could go well for her. But Heller paints a tender portrait of loneliness, what it can do to us, but also why we might be there.

2: Pain And Glory
There was a surprising amount of freebasing heroin with little consequence going on in movies this year, but Pain And Glory had the best drug use. Almodovar uses Banderas perfectly in a semi-autobiographic tale of a film-maker and his partners, lovers and his ego. And yet for such a specific story, it feels so warm and open – his flashbacks to the mother played by Penelope Cruz are a story in themselves and the whole piece and ensemble works perfectly. If the Irishman made a tilt at regret and ageing in its final act, Pain And Glory has it as part of its DNA, and is lovely for it.

1: Knives Out
Perhaps buoyed up by its release date, I still am very pleased with Knives Out coming top. I enjoyed it immensely, its large cast all pulling to make the chewy scenario spring to life. But what I most appreciated was the fine calibration in the script, direction and even marketing. You were led to expect one kind of film (a whodunnit) only to be given a different kind of mystery. You were led to thing Benoit Blanc, Daniel Craig’s ludicrously accented detective, was your lead – but he turned out not to be. And Rian Johnson manages to juggle comedy, action, mystery and a fair bit of social commentary on the back of this meringue of a film. It was one of the most enjoyable (and social) nights out I had in the cinema in 2019, and a worthy winner (as they usually are on this poll).

So – surprises. We have a few. No Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood – just one vote. Next to no love for Joker. No Le Mans ‘66. Just two votes for Bait but it came in at 50 -, the BAFTA and British film darling. Perhaps there being no Star Wars love was predictable, but after two strong years, no Spider-Man either. Indie Spirit award winner The Farewell – one vote (from me).  There are also a number of great but low key smaller British pictures – Ordinary Love and Only You which surprised me by getting no votes (possibly due to having unmemorable titles). Whilst it came out late too, I was expecting the usually challops happy FT voters to wave at Cats. 

TV list to follow soon – but thanks for everyone who took part and despite the surprises, a pretty solid list all told. See you next year where I reckon Parasite might be the one to beat.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2019: #20 – #11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2020/02/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2019-20-11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2020/02/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2019-20-11#comments Sat, 01 Feb 2020 10:52:44 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32305 Here we go into the top twenty. At this point, those of you who have a big picture view of this kind of thing can probably do the maths and work out that there are more than ten obvious films left – so some things didn’t make the cut.

From this batch we start to get films which had over four nominations, often the big blockbusters and crowd pleasers start to appear. But also still a smattering of smart arthouse choices – you have sports bars, resurrection and electrical monsters solving crimes in here…

20: The Day Shall Come
Chris Morris’s belated follow up to Four Lions feels exactly that – too late. Its theme from satirical take on the FBI inventing targets to justify funding is repeated in a more serious turn in The Report, but here Morris can’t get the tone right. Anna Kendrick tries her hardest to balance the gung ho chase for promotion and results, but it rubs difficulty against the subject of their investigation – Marchánt Davis’s Moses. He is our innocent, but also the film wants to have fun with his place as cult leader whilst also offering up mental health issues and a willingness to trade with nukes. An odd misstep which culminates in having a title which is absolutely impossible to remember.

19: Atlantics
Mati Diop’s supernatural romance manages to balance its gritty real-life setting (the risks taken by sea traveling economic migrants) with an altogether more dreamy story. Like all good ghost stories, it doesn’t start like that at all, and as our heroine slowly realises she has been left behind, and then the reality of her arranged marriage the supernatural slowly seeps in. Perhaps the final connective tissue is a little too convenient, but Diop creates empathy along with an unsettling with a genuinely creepy tone where the social commentary is naturally embedded in its story.

18: Happy As Lazzaro
I saw this at the London Film Festival in 2018 – and it has stuck with me since as bravura film-making. Alice Rohrwacher continues her interest in religious themes, but here with a bold run of magical realism which also contains at its heart a fascinating parallel with reality. Indentured servants on an Italian island are discovered, and we discover what we thought might be a 19th Century tale is something else. A few shocking reversals down the line, we end up in modern Italy, our miraculous naif Lazzaro questioning modern life. Rich with allegory, beauty and despite a shaky end, a great piece of art.

17: The Souvenir
Joanna Hogg’s film is acutely observed and in many ways quite difficult to watch, a upper middle class British woman slowly working through a controlling and belittling relationship to hopefully find her voice at the end of it. The partner is awful, you soon discover a long term drug user and yet the film lets you in to her world and because it is so suffocating, the eventual release becomes more powerful. I particularly liked the way it drew the world of the early eighties, a West London flat occasionally invaded by news items with sectarian violence, the randomness of which is a parallel to the relationship.

16: Border
Border is a film of two halves – one which is strongly allegorical – details the life of the physically unusual TIna, a Swedish border guard who seems to have a supernatural ability to sniff out the truth in people. She meets someone who resembles her and discovers her heritage. This part is equally creepy and empowering, Tina discovering what she really is. And then the film takes a turn, delves ito its own mythology and for me lost some of its power – though it was an undeniably compelling watch. At the heart of it is a great performance by Eva Melander – yearning to fit in, but also discover what she is.

15: Eighth Grade
It took forever for Eighth Grade to come out in the UK, but was worth the wait, even if the strongest reaction a lot of people had to it was anxiety. A intensely observed story of Kayla, hugely introverted but also wannabe Youtube vlogger, offering advice about confidence that she doesn’t have. It captures perfectly a type of pre-teen angst where all you can do is feel empathy for her and tell her that it will probably be alright (there is a sequence with her father where she talks about destroying her dreams which is devastating). Performances are great, and it also has one of the years best discordant soundtracks. It is a tough but rewarding watch.

14: Detective Pikachu
So yes there are a lot of Pokemon fans on FreakyTrigger, which might be why this is here, but of all the high concept swings on big budget films last year, this is the one that surprising worked the best. I was hugely dubious, particularly when Ryan Reynolds was bought in as the voice of Pikachu which suggested this would end up as Deadpool for kids. But Reynolds works really well, the teen protagonists are solid and it is interesting that when you just get to wallow in a lightly dressed London as Jump City, swarming with background pokemon, it looks so right. Setting a noir in that world, rather than following a standard Pokemon trainer storyline, brought back some of the whimsy inherent in the property, and was fun.

13: John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum
I don’t have to be consistent in what I like about action movies – but the John Wick films certainly push me to the edge of some of my comfort zones. On the one hand I like the action to be ridiculous and over the top – well Wick will do that with horses and dogs and ridiculous 360 glass room fights. I also like clear choreography – which again you can generally rely on Reeves to deliver. And I don’t really care that much about plot, which is fine because Wick 3 has now got so little actual plot, but so much complex mythos that I find it deadening. Reeves’s stoic superman offers me all I really want in a dumb action film, and like a kid in a candy store, I think I want more.

12. Captain Marvel
The twenty first film in the MCU, so of course diminishing returns with certain aspects of the film. On the other hand, the first to have a sole female lead, and the decision was made to fold this story into the past – if only to give us plenty of Sam Jackson young (fun) Nick Fury action. So with all the familiar, what comes out well. Brie Larson sells the complex identity issues, and some canny casting and plotting obscures who the baddies are for a bit. End it with pyrotechnics, some timeline unjustified Nirvana and it all whet the appetite nicely for the twenty second film in the MCU.

11: Support The Girls
This was my favourite film of 2019 (2018 other territories) and sadly my 20 votes didn’t quite push it in to the top ten. I guess it was underseen (its now on Netflix), but Andrew Bujalski’s little workplace comedy is an absolute gem. I suppose its setting, a off-brand Hooters-style sports bar in a strip mall also may put people off. But it is that rare thing, a film about work, how we survive shitty jobs, how we can build a community in them and how we support each other. At the heart of it is a terrific central performance from Regina Hall who holds the women together, it feels real, it is funny and there is something for everyone to recognise.

Top Ten imminent with SHOCKS – SURPRISES and some NOT SHOCKS too….

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2019 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2019/12/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2019 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2019/12/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2019#comments Fri, 20 Dec 2019 15:52:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32148 “Hi I’m Alita – some say Battle Angel – and me and my big eyes would like to welcome you to the 2019 FreakyTrigger Movie Poll. When I was rebooted in Iron City in 2563 the first thing I did was try to work out who the creepy Dr. Dyson Ido – who revived me – reminded me of. It was also a bit odd that he had a name which was half Japanese era half vacuum cleaner, but even though he seemed benevolent, he just seemed naturally villainous. So searching my incomplete historical database when I wasn’t beating the crap out of baddies in half decent but weightless CGI, my cybernetic brain came across a name. Christoph Waltz. Who apparently was a movie star in the 2010’s. Further searching in the hours I did not sleep, I became obsessed with the films of 2019 – and in particular what the readers of FreakyTrigger thought of them. So I sent this message back in time just before my important Rollerball game to find out (its not Rollerball but it is)”

Thanks, Alita, and I bet with your big eyes you can watch more movies at once. Including your own one – how self reflexive. Though don’t hold your breathe for it cracking the top ten. But thanks nevertheless for the welcome to the fifth annual movie poll. And the third TV Poll*. The rules are simple – rank your top twenty in both categories IN ORDER and send your vote to:

As long as the film or TV show was properly released in UK cinemas or premiered on UK TV in some form (VOD / Multi-Platform) in 2019 in the UK it will be counted. I may be a little more forgiving with TV seeing the multiple ways people watch it. I will not accept The Mandalorian – as there is no legal way to watch it in the UK. I will also accept The Favourite as it was officially released in the UK on the 1st January (even though it came 8th in last years poll). I’ll let you know if I rule things out.

You don’t have to vote in both polls. You don’t have to list a full twenty – I’ll take whatever you’ve got. The deadline to submit is 3pm on New Years Day because you might be watching movies up to midnight (again all other film polls neglect this point).

Your number 1 will get more points than your 20. And to make the final countdown, it must have at least two people voting for it and remember, nearly all of last years award winners and a lot of 2017 Cannes darlings were released in the UK in 2018, so I think the start of this year is not without contenders.

So remember:
– The order of your top 20 is important! Your #1 will be allocated more points than #20.
– If you can’t think of 20 items then 10 or 14 or 1 is just fine.
And see you for the rundown in January.

*OK, I said I wouldn’t do TV again, but actually just posting the list was easy, so feel free to do it any I guarantee I will put it up before the end of January 2020.

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The FreakyTrigger Top 30 TV Shows of 2018 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2019/12/the-freakytrigger-top-30-tv-shows-of-2018 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2019/12/the-freakytrigger-top-30-tv-shows-of-2018#comments Thu, 19 Dec 2019 16:33:09 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32138 Sooo…… Sorry.

Four years ago I started the FT Film poll (to ape Kat’s music poll – but also because they are pointless fun things to do – and might be better than just putting my own top ten up). Two years ago, in the flush of the film poll going well, and the realisation that most FT readers were watching more TV than films, I thought to throw more visual media into the mix. It was the Golden Age of TV so it seemed to make sense.

The thing is, I don’t watch much TV. I go to the movies. So whilst I could cobble together a list of twenty shows for myself, it was a list that I knew would miss plenty of the best of the year because I had made a decision to not watch them due to time (or couldn’t watch them). So after putting together last years list – I was stuck having to write about thirty TV shows where I had watched just ten of them.

Of course I wasn’t going to write about something I hadn’t seen, so I threw myself into watching all of them. Or actually, I didn’t. I went to see even more movies knowing that The Americans wasn’t going away and that it seemed to have ended pretty well. All of this is to say that I won’t be running a TV Poll this year.

HOWEVER that leaves last years poll, which I really really should release for all of you (one person mainly) clamouring to see it. It may not surprise any of you, the field ends up being broad that there were only 28 with more than one vote to qualify out of a field of 85.

So here is last years list, the top five being very similar to the 2017 list, and very US Prestige TV.

30. You
29. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
28. Maniac
27. American Crime Story: Gianni Versace
26. Insecure
25. Doctor Who
24. The Sound Of Movie Musicals
23. A Very English Scandal
22. The Expanse
21. Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing
20. Jane The Virgin
19. The Haunting Of Hill House
18. Big Mouth
17. Barry
16. Sharp Objects
15. Derry Girls
14. Steven Universe
13. American Vandal
12. Vic & Bob’s Big Night Out
11. The Americans
10. Queer Eye
9. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
8. BoJack Horseman
7. Better Call Saul
6. Atlanta
5. The Good Fight
4. GLOW
3. The Marvelous Mrs Maisel
2. Killing Eve
1. The Good Place

I’ll be going out for the film list tomorrow, and will so that properly, but shed a tear for the TV poll, (though don’t you think looking at the 2018 list a year late really recontextualises it… #excuses)

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2018: #10 – #1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2019/02/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2018-10-1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2019/02/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2018-10-1#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2019 16:39:34 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31823 And here it is, after leaving a slightly longer gap than hoped – the Freaky Trigger Top Ten movies of the year. Firstly, before anyone says anything, Paddington 2 came out in 2017 (and was number 40 in last years poll you idiots who left it two months before you saw it). Secondly it was a lot closer at the top end than it has been for a long time. Whilst the winner still had plenty of votes on number two, the top three were all – at some stage of the voting – in the lead.

Anyway the gap left time for plenty of speculation which I think named nearly all of these, though maybe not in this order…

10: The Rider
I’d heard mixed reviews of The Rider from people who saw it at the 2017 LFF, and the first half left me cold, yes the stark landscapes were pretty and the non-professional actors weren’t terrible but nothing here seemed to touch the depths of the other boy and his horse movie Lean On Pete (which sadly hasn’t made the list). And then I am not sure what happened, but without any obvious change, I was suddenly completely drawn into this film, its mood and Brady’s dilemma swamped me with empathy. It is a great film for how it handles its mood, but I am still not sure how it managed this magic trick.

9: Coco
Pixar usually grace the top ten, and whilst the Incredibles 2 made the most money it ended up about 48. Coco on the other hand is a welcome stab of this whitest of studios to go south of the (mainly theoretical) border and play with the day of the dead, which is not only Mexico’s signature holiday but also a goldmine for complex stories about family, memory and of course death. Also in this case too music, and memory too. Luckily Coco also is full of good jokes, and sidesteps much of Pixar’s timeless monoculture by doing Frida Kahlo jokes and thinking about the rich cultural, and cinematic, legacy of Mexico too.

8: The Favourite
It had a pretty wide London release on the 26th December so I allowed it, and it was also fresh in peoples minds. And a taut, very funny mini-tragedy about the consequences of power politics in the early 18th century. Olivia Colman will probably win an Oscar for it, it should win for writing too – and Weisz and Stone are having great fun. It isn’t breaking the mould of costume dramas but does remind us that the right story, written well triumphs all (though great performances, pretty frocks and swearing helps too). That said – I also highly recommend the German musical version of this story A Glass Of Water

7: Phantom Thread
Paul Thomas Anderson in fusty mode and Daniel Day Lewis ahhhhcting – it was never going to win me over despite intriguing me with exactly where its plot was going. But the trials and tribulations of a white middle-aged narcissist was always a hard pull for me. That said the depiction of a drab world with hints of – if not beauty, stabs at it – was compelling (I firmly believe that all of the dresses are supposed to look terrible). Still if it means Day-Lewis has retired, there’s a minor win for us all.

6: Shoplifters
We got two Kore-Eda films this year, his serial killer drama was an interesting if slightly off kilter piece for him (though it does share prison resonances with this). Shoplifters on the other hand is prime Kore-Eda, there is the obsession with what makes a family, there is the anything to get by mentality of Nobody Knows. There is also his well diffused, but simmering anger about the position and treatment of children in Japanese society – I found it interesting that the end of Shoplifters seems to leave a character back in a perilous place but that is sort of the point. Go for the acting and the terrific dynamics, stay for the small p politics.

5: Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse
It was nice to be reminded by The Incredibles 2 that animation may well be the best way to deal with the action and heightened storytelling of superhero tales, but Into(Enter) The Spider-verse is potentially the apotheosis of this. CGI which happily leans on the visual tropes of comics, and a story adapted from a comic idea from about five years ago, it happily freewheels through more high concepts than much of the MCU ever has whilst still being one of the funniest films of the year (and more vindication for Lord & Miller after being fired off of Solo). All to deliver a message that is both solid in its delivery of a new diverse mind set (we can all be Spider-Man) whilst also being nonsensical (no we can’t – we need spider powers!). Plus the best pop soundtrack of the year too.

4: Sorry To Bother You
Go for the comedy, stay for the big P Politics. A satire with a capital S which recognises that subtlety is the death of satire, Sorry To Bother You throws so many ideas at the wall and then slowly tries to make them stick. It pretty much succeeds too, partially being centred around a nuanced lead performance from Lakeith Stanfield, but just because angry socialist films just don’t come out very often and are rarely this funny. It takes a number of odd turns which Boots Riley sells visually, and narratively, and he is happy for everyone in his film to be dissected as products of a flawed racist capitalist society. And Tessa Thompson’s art show (feat Lily James voice) is a pitch perfect gag.

3: Leave No Trace
Of all of the movies looked over in award season at the moment, and in all of the cries of foul for no female directors in the shortlists, Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace seems the most glaring. Whilst less pulpy than her previous Oscar nominated film Winters Bone, that surely waved a flag for this sumptuous exploration of family, consumerism and PTSD. And again she solicits a subtle performance from a new young actor (in this case Thomasin McKenzie). Even handed whilst often highly suspenseful, its forest locations were a joy to watch and Ben Foster’s central flawed father was a great performance. Basically a near perfect treatment of its issues both beatutiful and affecting.

2: Black Panther
The twentieth or so of the Marvel movies, and snuck in before the clusteroverload of Infinity War is surprisingly self contained, and has a barrel-load of interesting characters and politics. It is an afro-futurist paradise which creates a black myth which instantly counters centuries of cultural oppression. Not everything can be done by a film, and the lead character is the least interesting thing in it (that’s princes for you), but it takes the basic Marvel formula and loads plenty of baggage on it, it smuggles more than just a positive image through, its a cultural milestone.

1: Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig’s lightly autobiographical tale is not the most ambitious movie ever made. But yet again to repeat the empathy word, she manages to create a character (and a supporting cast) who feel completely real. And specificity is the secret of telling a more generalised story, Saoirse Ronan manages to be both sympathetic and utterly precociously annoying, and yet it is always entertaining to watch her learn as she makes these mistakes. Around her Gerwig builds a world which is often very funny whilst not compromising the reality of the piece. And in the centre of it is her mother Laurie Metcalfe (robbed for the Oscar) who is both a monster and the actual heart of the film. A glorious film, and a worthy winner for 2018.

So there you go, a pretty solid top ten there, and a top forty I like a lot more than most. Our voters are the best after all. I’ll be releasing my top twenty in the next week or so, and will also do a dump of stats too, but in the meantime, keep watching the movies…

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2018: #20 – #11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2019/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2018-20-11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2019/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2018-20-11#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2019 09:33:51 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31748 Into the top-twenty-verse, as all the cool kids would say. A lot of good films here (a few I cared for less too but hey, opinions are like arseholes right?) THis is where the films I were worried wouldn’t make it, made it – the years best Hollywood comedy, the Netflix Oscar bait, a bit of European political activism and the odd idea idea that Meryl Streep looked like Lily James in the seventies (even though we know what Meryl Streep looked like in the seventies). And possibly the signature visual moment of the year (if you don’t count cleaning up dogshit in Roma).

20: Game Night
A real pleasant surprise, from a world where little is expected from Hollywood comedies, to have an intricate, clever action comedy with a comfortable stable lead couple who genuinely enjoy each other company played with quite so much gusto (there is a hint of Nick and Nora to them). There is a cast of riches here, from Sharon Horgan, via Jessie Plemmons and Chelsea Peretti but Jason Bateman hasn’t been this charming in ages (just as well last year). The film belong to Rachel McAdams however who has plenty of terrific line readings, including some priceless reaction shots. It didn’t do much cinema business in the UK, but it is well worth catching. Also worth it to see the dog from Widows again.

19: Roma
This is both a portrait of a middle class family falling apart, a maid growing up and a country at civil war with itself, and Cuaron’s black and white masterpiece perhaps ends up being a little too perfect for its own good. But in its two and a half hours he does his best to drag you into these various worlds and internal lives of his characters, the rabbly kids, the shitty boyfriends, even the car slowly getting scraped to death in the Mexico City hallway. I loved it when watching it in the cinema, though it has drifted a touch in my memory. But it feels like intimate, wonderful personal stuff.

18: Isle Of Dogs
Stop motion suits Wes Anderson, and the look and design of this one is terrific, as is on the most part, the storyline. Perhaps questions can be asked about its future Japanese setting and how much here is appropriation, how much is fetishization and how much is homage, and Anderson does seem to go through a lot of contortions to yet again include some of his stock types. But it is a pretty delightful and fun bit of work which has a few barbs behind is intricately designed art.

17: Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again
Bearing in mind the critical drubbing the original got, this thoroughly disposable sequel seemed to be a bit of a mea culpa for people who just didn’t get the first one. My Mum could not accept the general Meryl Streep absence, and even she noticed that Colin Firth was a lot less gay than he was in the last one. And yet the music, dance and action is staged and shot better, Lily James is very winning as a somewhat implausible young Meryl Streep and frankly when Cher turns up to sing Fernando you do surrender to its charms. Should have put the King Kong Song in there somewhere though.

16: I, Tonya
Not being American, the problematic content of I, Tonya (ie – telling a story from the baddies point of view), didn’t bother me. It heavily leans into its unreliable narrator tropes, and Janney perhaps pushes her grotesque mother too far in a film of performances going too far. But Robbie knows exactly what she is doing in the lead, giving us film star sympathy whilst constantly asking us was she born bad made bad, or did the fixed privileged system make her that way. Its happy that the answer is probably all of the above.

15: Crazy Rich Asians
Its a well made romcom, in an unusual setting, with a remarkably attractive cast and setting. Conspicuous consumption gets the mildest of critiques, class structures are not really here to be broken down just mildly ridiculed whilst we enjoy the fruits of the money (the production design is always great to luxuriate in). And at the heart of it Michelle Yeoh plays the monsterous mother-in-law with gusto, its lots of fun.

14: Mission Impossible: Fallout
Action movies shouldn’t have three dream sequences in them. They just shouldn’t. After Ghost Protocol was a high point in the series – partially for bringing in Rebecca Ferguson, I thought Fallout was a bit of an overlong damp squib. Ferguson was wasted, the McGuffin was literally a load of balls and I don’t really care if Tom Cruise can fly a helicopter or not. There are fun bits, Henry Cavill recharging his arms is an image for cinematic history, but I thought this franchise had been better.

13: BlackKklansman
Spike Lee makes a Spike Lee Joint out of an interesting bit of true crime history. Stylish, and funny about things which are not funny at all, Lee balances the historical with the resonances it has now and tops and tails with idiosyncratic takes on how movies may be part of this whole mess. And yet in the process, and using some of that movieness, he also simplifies, elides and dodges other issues. In concentrating on race and the KKK, he seems to give the institution of the police a near free ride (one convenient racist). There is no room for any kind of gender politics and the conflicted role of Washington’s lead (why is he a cop), is ignored. I felt it wasn’t as strong as lots of other people, but its always nice to have Spike Lee poking at us.

12: A Simple Favor
Paul Feig continues his streak of terrific female led films with this blackly comic thriller which manages to employ Anna Kendrick perfectly whilst also bringing out the best in Blake Lively who gets to play her mysterious femme fatale to the hilt, in in some tremendous clothes along the way. A twisty turny thriller that judges how to employ the racing minds of its audience trying to work out what is happening. Perhaps the cool sixties French soundtrack is over egging the pudding, but this was a delicious confection and one of my favourites of last year.

11: 120 BPM
AKA Just BPM: this is a activist procedural from the early days of Parisian HIV/AIDS support groups following a group of activists as they protest, plan, and debate the best way to succeed in their goals to get better support from the government, the right drugs from trials and to stay alive. Its a brilliantly balanced piece, between the politics (and how people argue) to the inevitability of supporting people dying. It never trivialises, and never reaches for unearned for sympathy (there are lots of infuriating characters here too), but builds a picture of the community and strength that exists in activism.

OK, we are a few days away from the top ten, feel free to guess how what’s left stacks up.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2018: #30 – #21 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2019/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2018-30-21 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2019/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2018-30-21#comments Mon, 07 Jan 2019 09:13:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31717 And we’re back, to the next segment. I promised you Jean Luc Godard and he does feature in one of the films below, but even his hardcore fans couldn’t push his most recent offering into the top forty.

So we have another all female heist, another musical remake, and of course the multi-million dollar bummer that was the Malthusian death of half of all the living creatures in the Universe. Fun fun fun…

30: A Star Is Born
The received wisdom is that Gaga is a revelation as an actor, Cooper is as a musician. That’s too glib, they both do everything well, though there are questions here about how much the story ends up being more about the hero worship of Jackson Maine than the rise of Gaga’s Ally. And perhaps it plays too easily into a pop authenticity argument you’d think Gaga wouldn’t want to touch. But it is a steamroller of an entertainment, edited like a steel trap, and that performance of Shallow is one of the sequences of the year.

29: The Miseducation Of Cameron Post
I’ve not always been a fan of Chloë Grace Moretz, but she is directed well here to play the lead role with her eyes rather than dialogue, and whilst this is a less broad version of But I’m A Cheerleader… , and it plays out pretty much as expected, director Desiree Akhavan draws out the aching pain out of the idea of deprogramming camps without sensationalism (it also is one of many now period late 2th century films that indulges in cassette fetishism).

28: Cold War
Wonderful high contrast black and white cinematography in this decade spanning bittersweet iron curtain romance. Pawe? Pawlikowski directs with his usual taught precision, it comes in under ninety minutes and yet for such a time span never feels rushed, in particular the music sequences linger and do half of the character work here.

27: Tully
Charlize Theron is great in this motherhood burnout piece, and whilst the way it plays out stretches credulity in places, emotionally it is extremely honest. It is also very funny on parenting, gender roles and societal pressures (and also how annoying kids can be). Jason Reitman, Diablo Cody and Theron do seem to bring out the best in each other.

26: The Shape Of Water
Fish Fucking In The USA, Fish Fucking In The USA – hey hey – fish fucking fish fucking…
I found Del Toro’s sexed up re-imagining of The Creature From The Black Lagoon a little airless (which I guess makes sense), and Michael Shannon’s baddie dreams of being one dimensional but Sally Hawkins manages to wring out of her mute role (another problem to me) waves of depth, and even if it is just an adult fairy tale, it is at least one no-one could have or would have made.

25: You Were Never Really Here
I saw this at the 2017 London Film Festival and it impressed me whilst staying unlovable, and has stayed with me. Not least out conversations about how many discrete flashbacks there are, and quite how fucked up Joaquim Phoenix’s character is. It starts dark, and gets darker, and is as interested in the price of trauma with Phoenix, as the trauma the terribly plausible paedophile ring he has to deal with. Strong work from Lynne Ramsey.

24: Faces Places
OK, here is Jean Luc Godard, being a dick and not being in when Agnes Varda goes round to visit him. Well her film is in the top forty, not yours JLG. Varda and JR travel France making gigantic photographic murals of people while musing on mortality, image and why the fuck won’t you take your sunglasses off JR.

23: Avengers: Infinity War
Near three hours of payoff to twenty odd films, the film does its best to concentrate on why its purple headed villain is compelling even if his scheme and purpose s daft (particularly on a universal scale) and almost succeeds. There is a somewhat metafictional comment on the genre when it can kill half of its characters off whilst the company greenlights films starring them, but it does at least end in the most convincing franchise Debbie Downer way since The Empire Strikes Back.

22: Widows
Steve McQueen revisits a classic of British TV, and in relocating it to Chicago adds layers of social and racial commentary whilst maintaining the heist thrills. Its a smash and grab job however, and does show its scholcky hand on a few occasions, but the acting talent in the centre is top notch and the film has about six actors all trying to steal it at once (it is probably Debicki who wins but only because Viola Davis lets her).

21: The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs
Whilst I never rereached the heights of delight I got for the musical opening titular segment, the Coen Brothers flip off seven short ideas all of which have a something going for them (maybe not the last one but come on – storytellers in a stagecoach, that is portmanteau movie 101). Does it hold together thematically, probably not, but it is lots and lots of fun? And I am genetically predisposed to like any film in which James Franco dies.

The action is hotting up, see you for 11-20 later in the week.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2018: #40 – #31 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2019/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2018-40-31 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2019/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2018-40-31#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2019 08:37:11 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31662 So as per usual I will be dispatching the movie poll results in batches of ten, which might start in a puppydog quick fashion, and finally limp out the final ten in the middle of February. Well we will see…

Some stats this year – we received 24 full ballots, and in all 131 films were nominated, with 66 films receiving more than one vote and therefore eligible for the list. If films tied for points, the one with the larger number of individual ballots scored higher. Which is exactly what happened at number 40, so sorry to joint 41 “The Hate U Give” and “Disobedience” you just got pipped by this pair of pretty little psychos:

40: Thoroughbreds
Its tough being a teen psychopath. Why not kill yr horse, and your best mates Dad. A terrific black comedy which doesn’t quite stick its ending, but is ghoulishly fun on the way.

39: Apostasy
Micro budget British Jehovah’s Witness drama that is both an eye opening look inside the faith, and a achingly sad dramatic exploration of the same.

38: Ocean’s Eight
Macrobudget hang-out movie with next to no dramatic tension (particularly when the antagonist turns out to be James Corden) but the class of people to hang out with is terrific fun. Blanchett probably wins on the fashion stakes but Akwafina battles with Anne Hathaway for scene stealing honours.

37: Western
Germany vs Bulagria in the battle for the heart of the European project. Prejudice, envy, a horse and claim jumping make it feel like a Western, but it is its own deliberate thing too.

36: Solo
The first Star Wars film not to make the Top Ten, this is a thoroughly disposable stab at Han Solo origin story. Of course Han doesn’t need an origin story, and some of the secret identity bits are truly clunky, but it does end up being a rather charming space opera in itself.

35: Mary Poppins Returns
The apotheosis of the remake sequel, it hits many of the same beats as the original – whilst Emily Blunt plays the character with definite different emphasis. Unlike Solo she is allowed to make the character her own, and had lots of fun doing it.

34: Columbus
Just your average architectural, metaphysical romance: a haggard John Cho waits upon his fathers death whilst flirting about architecture with Haley Lu Richardson (who is great). A perfect mood piece, and has the best bit of silent cinema in the year in it (beating A Quiet Place). Cho was also great in Searching… ,
sadly only made it to 59 in our list.

33: The Breadwinner
The animation studio behind the Secret Of Kells and Song Of The Sea take a tougher story, a coming of age drama set in Taliban Afghanistan a weave a magical tale which never pulls its punches about that hideous regime, but manages to create a heoric throughline for its heroine. IT WAS MY FAVOURITE FILM OF LAST YEAR, watch it.

32: Hereditary
To many people one of the scariest films ever made. To me, it has a genuinely powerful end to its first act, and then throws everything at the wall to see what sticks. What sticks is, er, quite a silly ending but hey it scared the shit out of a lot of people.

31: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
I was not a fan, but it won Oscars, it had a glib take on racism, it had a towering performance from Frances McDormand, it had a so-so performance from Woody Harrelson, a baffling appearance by Abby Cornish and a role for Peter Dinklage which was basically a hate crime. But a lot of people liked it.

Join me in a few days for 21 – 30 which may or may not feature Jean Luc Godard.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2018 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2018/12/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2018 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2018/12/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2018#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2018 10:39:50 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31608 “Hi I am an absence of a framing device, and welcome to the annual Freaky Trigger Film and TV Polls”

Thanks, absence of a framing device and welcome to the fourth annual film poll and the second TV poll. The rules are simple – rank your top twenty in both categories IN ORDER and send your vote to:

ftfilmpoll AT gmail DOT com

As long as the film or TV show was properly released in UK cinemas or shown on UK TV in some form (VOD / Multi-Platform) in 2018 in the UK it will be counted. I may be a little more forgiving with TV seeing the multiple ways people watch it, but if anyone votes for Breaking Bad I will shut the whole thing down. You don’t have to vote in both polls. You don’t have to list a full twenty – I’ll take whatever you’ve got. If you want to mention a worst in each category I may do a post about that too. The deadline to submit is 3pm on New Years Day because you might be watching movies up to midnight (again all other film polls neglect this point).

Your number 1 will get more points than your 20. And to make the final countdown, it must have at least two people voting for it and remember, nearly all of last years award winners and a lot of 2017 Cannes darlings were released in the UK in 2018, so I think the start of this year is not without contenders.

So remember:
– The order of your top 20 is important! Your #1 will be allocated more points than #20.
– If you can’t think of 20 items then 10 or 14 or 1 is just fine.
And see you for the rundown in January.
*Cos to qualify at lest two people have to nominate it.

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The Inaugural FreakyTrigger TV Poll: #12 – #1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2018/05/the-inaugural-freakytrigger-tv-poll-12-1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2018/05/the-inaugural-freakytrigger-tv-poll-12-1#comments Thu, 10 May 2018 10:36:24 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31016 hqdefault“Hi, I’m the Ghost Of The 1979 ITV Strike, and I am here to resurrect and complete the somewhat delayed (due to strikes probably) Freaky Trigger TV Poll. Imagine if you can the landscape of 1979 British television. Three channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV – and then suddenly one of those channels being off. Its like a third of your choice taken away. Because it is. Up and down the country member of ACTT (Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians) withdrew their labour in a pay dispute for three months, leaving in most places this blue title card to be displayed. Which still got more viewers than much of BBC2. Anyway it was a fun time I can tell you and a civilised picket the likes of which British TV has barely seen since. And given the option of the twelve shows below or a blue title card what would you watch. (Doctor Who’s Planet Of Death was the answer in my day – interesting to see that is still going.)”

Thanks, Ghost Of A TV Strike, and huge apologies for the delay in the publishing of this. If I do it next year I may get help… But in the meantime here is the top twelve:

12: Stranger Things

Season two had to deal with the expectations set up by season one, which by virtue of coming out of nowhere had no expectations at all. And whilst season two didn’t completely drop the ball, it did kind of reinforce why so many of its touchstones, Spielberg films of the 80’s in particular, never had sequels. Whilst the Upside-Down was sort of a loose end from the first go around, it is one of those conceits that the more you see of it the less mysterious it becomes. The kids are still great to watch, and the mood – whilst less desperate – is still maintained. But perhaps some things shouldn’t continue.

11: Doctor Who

We are far enough into the reboot of Doctor Who when another series is just another series, and in the current ebb and flow this was to be Peter Capaldi’s final one. I doubt it was hugely anticipated, though it was the first time that he was to get his own companion, and we sensed that finally it would be one that wasn’t some sort of magical plot device. We sensed correctly, Bill Potts was great fun and an excellent foil. We were probably wrong to be worried about Matt Lucas’s return, comedians often flourish in less comic roles on Who. But the stories were pretty good, the longer arc regarding Missy asked so decent questions of the show about redemption and of course it ended with a regeneration that finally gave us a female Doctor.

10: Search Party

Very glad to see this do so well, Alia Shawkat was a favourite from Arrested Development and has rarely been given much to suit her talents. Here she plays Dory trying to find an old college friend who she believes might have been abducted. Its thematically more about her friends and her absolutely terrible boyfriend being millenials at a loose end, transitioning into adulthood and realising that there really isn’t much there for them. At least it feels like that is what it is about, and then suddenly the “case” picks up steam and – well – things ensue. Two taught ten episode seasons now, all on All 4, and well worth your time.

9: Master Of None

Um, this vote was a while ago, pre the scandal. So let’s see where Aziz Ansari’s star falls in the end, though it cannot be denied that there is some wondeful work being done here – particularly the Italian neo-realist work and move on.

7= Catastrophe

I haven’t caught up with season three of Catastrophe yet, though as a big fan of the previous seasons I assume it continues in much the same vein, two funny people sniping at each other and ever now and then the series sabotaging itself narratively. I do know that they had to deal with the death of Carrie Fisher, which I imagine casts a certain pallor over the film, but its not as if the show has ever shied away from darkness so I am sure they have continued as before.

7= The Crown

The Queen is back baby to kick butt and take names and frown constantly at Princess Margaret. Season Two of the Crown is non-libellously supposition wrapped in the big history beats of the age. And of course it has difficulty with what actually to do with The Queen, stuff happens around her, it is not her job to intevene. So instead we have Phillip not quite (but its implied) having his end away on tour, and Margaret – the terror – entertaining us all with her snobbery and bad behaviour. Its all impeccably made, and both pushes the history buttons with enough implied scandal to get by.

6: Blue Planet II

So – er – I really don’t watch nature documentaries, but it appears everyone was all over this like a rash, which is also part of nature. Considering that all I hear about now is bloody plastic straws destroying the world I daresay it had an impact. I think I saw the clip with the running creature being chased by a snake and agreed (for a quiet life) that it was more suspenseful than most Hollywood thrillers. And of course the reassuring yet informative tones of David Attenborough (aka Naturey McNatureface) making you feel like you have just learnt something even if it is how your over consumptive lifestyle is destroying the planet. Cheers!

5: The Detectorists

A classic of British small TV, Mackenzie Crook has created a small slice of slightly off kilter life, and then just watched it unfold. Often just a couple of middle-aged men bickering about and around their slightly obsessive hobby, it slowly unfolded across its three seasons to encompass their families, partners and the people around them. Crook and Toby Jones both have been employed often enough to portray oddballs and loners, and here just fill Lance and Andy with a lived in sense of hopes and disappointments. In particular due to the unique way the BBC doesn’t really fund things, Crook was able to finish the show how he desired, with one of those great British finales, rewarding the viewer with a real sense of satisfaction.

4: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Or Mental Health – The Musical, as it moves into season 3. What has always been impressive about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the depth to which it will go for a song, for a joke and for a far fetched plot twist. But by season three there isn’t really anywhere else to go but finally examine Rebecca’s mental health, as the new theme tune suggests “crazy” is such a loose word and often applied to admirable, kooky characteristics in romcoms. CExG has exhausted that by now, its time to get real. Or as real as a show with number song sequences in them, which remain as high quality and impressive as before. A tougher series, but still on form.

3: The Marvelous Mrs Maisel

Released just before Christmas so perhaps getting a bump for that reason, though also it is the new project from Amy Sherman-Palladino – of Bunheads and Gilmore Girls. What is great about Mrs Maisel is that it is a luxurious looking period show about a subject which feels remarkably niche, the access to women to stand-up comedy in the late fifties scene in New York. And it is often tonally difficult for it to fit its two areas of interest together, the story of a young Jewish wife whose husband leaves her, and her own explosion into the clubs of Greenwich Village. And it often feels more idealised and full of wish-fulfillment than it might need to (Maisel is a natural and doesn’t bomb for a fair few episodes). Luckily the show is written very well, you can see how her routines work (so hopefully in season two we need less of Lenny Bruce telling her how good she is). But at the heart of it is a feminist story, imbued by the professional and personal friendship between Midge Maisel and her manager Susie which is wonderful to watch.

2: GLOW

GLOW (or the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) feels like a project that only the streaming model could realise. A fictionalised retelling of the story of the real, cartoonish, female wrestling show of the mid-Eighties, it relies on novelty, nostalgia and the knowledge that over its series it can tell a semi-comic soap story whilst still being colourful and daffy. Episodes are not standard US TV length and it isn’t tied to keeping advertisers sweet. And so it turned out to be, with a barely acting Marc Maron as the sleeze, and Alison Brie playing a bit against type as a pretty awful actress who starts to believe. It hits a lot of cliche notes, but was a fascinating, and generally successful stab at a different kind of show.

1: The Good Place

If someone had said to me that that Michael Schur (Parks & Rec, Brooklyn 99) had a new sitcom which starred Kristen (Veronica Mars) Bell and Ted (Cheers) Danson, I would have interested no matter what the premise. Actually I was, I may have obtained the first episode the day after it was launched via nefarious means, still not really knowing the premise until I saw that first episode. And I was sceptical. I liked the first episode, but where was this sitcom in heaven going to go. Clearly it was going to make Eleanor a better person so that by the seven season end of the show she finally belonged in the heaven she thought she had lucked into. And then I say no more, for fear of damaging what has been a delightful and funny narrative sitcom. What has been terrific is not just how bold the show is, and how many times it has been on the edge of everything falling apart, but still how it manages to surprise, delight and be very funny.

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In praise of Thatcher. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2018/03/in-praise-of-thatcher https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2018/03/in-praise-of-thatcher#respond Mon, 05 Mar 2018 18:49:46 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30986 No, not that one, it’s okay.  I mean Timothy Thatcher, the wrestling one.  No?  The one with the mean face.  No?  Let’s start this story again.

Thatcher1

I love professional wrestling.  It can be looked at in so many ways, on so many levels.  It can be gazed upon in childlike wonder as the 8-year olds cheer for the perennial babyface, action figure in hand, head to toe in WWE official merchandise.  It can be a much-needed way to remove oneself from reality for the duration of a match or a 3-hour show, thinking back to the story-lines of the past two months and how this might play out in the run-up to Wrestlemania [points at sign].  You can be a Johnny come lately, beer in hand, cheering “For whoever I fuckin’ like – I paid my money.”  Or you can take your starting point and … well, just run with it, devouring everything in your path; let it envelope you like a warm blanket or a Yokozuna bearhug, read biography after autobiography, watch Bruiser Brody swing his chain at the terrified fans in Tokyo in the 1980’s, laugh out loud at Ric Flair’s astonishing backstage promos, obsessively research Andy Kaufman’s feud with Jerry Lawler and explore the origins of pro wrestling in the travelling carnivals of America.

You may have guessed which category of fan I fall into and that’s why I’m so intrigued by this Thatcher character and what makes this chap tick.

Shall we begin where all professional wrestlers begin?  With a name and a look.  The name is critical; you can glean so much information from the name alone.  Is he a monster (Vader)?  Is she a femme fatale valet (Woman)?  Are they an embarrassing Chippendale style tag team (The Dicks)?

Personally, my favourite wrestlers let their wrestling speak for itself.  Men like Mark Andrews, Pete Dunne and Rampage Brown have no nonsense names, clear identities and get the job done.  But I’m talking about Timothy Thatcher, a Californian native whose career began in 2006 and whose first gimmick was the British Messiah.  He hailed from Brompton.  He wore an English rugby shirt or red military coat and spoke terribly but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest that time spent in America had diluted his ‘accent’ and award bonus points for littering his circa 2009 promos with “Bloody,” and the phrase, “I kicked him in the bollocks.”  As time went on, he lost the accent and concentrated on trying to be the best shoot style grappler he could be.

To paraphrase Indy Darlings podcaster Ben McClung, by 2016 Thatcher was essentially disliked in America as they were bored by him and thought him too British, but he annoyed the Brits with this fake gimmick.  Although he’s Sacramento born and bred, his influences are undoubtedly British and whatever the nickname or accent the style is unmistakable.  The name is unmistakable too.  As is sometimes the way with wrestlers, his first name is kept; thus, Tim Moura became Timothy Thatcher.  But why Thatcher?  Yes, it does seem a typically English surname conjuring up images of men atop roofs in ye olden days laying down some serious thatch but for those he’s trying to mimic, those of us who are old enough anyway, Thatcher means Margaret.  Maggie Thatcher, the Iron Lady prime minister.  Loved by some, loathed by most.  Loathed enough for ‘Ding Dong!  The Witch is Dead’ from The Wizard of Oz to reach number 2 in the charts in the days after her death in 2013.  Personally, I’d have preferred Hefner’s ‘The Day That Thatcher Dies’ to have blasted from the living rooms of 40 somethings across the land but you can’t win them all.

We will laugh the day that Thatcher dies,
Even though we know it’s not right,
We will dance and sing all night.
I was blind in 1979, by ’82 I had clues,
By 1986 I was mad as hell.

However, there is another Thatcher in the world of pro wrestling.  His name is Les, he’s a legend and as his Pro Wrestling Tees bio explains, “Starting his career in 1960, Les Thatcher has seen and done it all.  He has been a wrestler, trainer, booker, promoter, and television announcer.  He helped produce the very first WWWF colour magazine and was a forerunner in the concept of the very first ever wrestling t-shirt created.”  Yes, that’s more like it, Timothy.

In 2017, Carsmile and I attended the Freedom’s Road Progress tapings in London where Thatcher was the first name announced alongside Matt Riddle.  On our way home after a few beverages, I complained about how unfair it was that people make fun of Tim for having one facial expression; the famous Thatcher grimace.  “Matt Riddle’s only got one face too!  He’s no better than Tim.  Why does no one take the piss out of Riddle?!”  To which Steve replied, “But Matt Riddle’s adorkable!”  “But Timothy Thatcher’s adork — oooooh, there’s an article right there.”

Adorkable (adj): Unfashionable or socially awkward in a way regarded as appealing or cute.

Yes.  Timothy Thatcher is adorkable.

In the late ‘80’s, I was the biggest Brosette EVER.  You could not see an inch of wall in my bedroom for all the Bros posters.  Dad bought Grolsch beer so I could attach the bottle tops to my Dr Martin shoes, I bought jeans from American Classics, I purchased all albums and singles in all formats … and my favourite was Craig Logan.  Not the blond and beautiful Goss twins; the brunette, nerdy mate of theirs.  Not smiley, washboard abs Riddle; the aloof, unshaven Thatcher.

riddle2

Tim

In the mid ‘90’s, I was a Blur fan.  Nothing outrageous.  No posters in my student digs … but I had a framed picture of Graham Coxon on my dressing table.  Not the floppy haired, cheeky chappy Alex; the awkward, bespectacled guitarist.  Not bro-tastic, ethereal Riddle; the headbutting, uncommunicative Thatcher.

I don’t mean to be a contrarian; I will fight anyone who doesn’t love Mark Andrews, the ultimate blue eye Brit, and I was utterly mesmerised after seeing Riddle for the first time, but I am generally drawn to an underdog and not just in a physical sense either.  On the face of it, reading that Thatcher lost his Evolve title to Zack Sabre Jr after an incredible 596 days may lead you to conclude that his reign was joyous; crowd go wild, held aloft on shoulders of stablemates, showered in confetti and streamers, “THATCHER, THATCHER, THATCHER!”  No.  Those were things that did not happen.  He cut a lonely figure at times.  Backstage clips showed him packing up his gear, checking his ancient Nokia style mobile phone, no allies to speak of among his peers.  He had no friends.

The crowd seemed to quickly tire of Thatcher.  Bored with his persona?  Bored with his technical, shoot style?  Maybe.  But this is why I’m fascinated with this curious character.  The Kaufman v Lawler feud is a personal obsession of mine and whilst I eschew conspiracy theories in everyday life, I did wonder if Tim and company owner Gabe Sapolsky were trolling the Evolve faithful.  A phrase used to describe Thatcher in a recent Cagematch review was ‘wrestling nihilist’.

Nihilist (noun): A person who believes that life is meaningless and rejects all religious and moral principles (from Latin nihil ‘nothing’).

This feeds into my doubtless inaccurate idea that Gabe’s plan for the Evolve title was intricately designed to create an anti-champion, a nihil-champion.  Is this the wrestling equivalent of Thatcher singing ‘100 Bottles of Beer’ or snoozing in a sleeping bag on stage at Budd Friedman’s comedy club?  Kaufman and Thatcher are undeniably top of their respective games; whether they are to your personal taste is another matter.  Although I don’t expect to see Tim compete, Kaufman style, in inter-gender matches any time soon*, I was thrilled to read Gabe’s comments in the aftermath of Tim’s title loss.  “We experimented.  We were fearless with it.  The title reign was art.  All great art has its critics.  I’m proud of Tim.”  Maybe I was on to something?  I’ll never know.

Pro wrestling is filled with the weird and wonderful, each character bigger and more colourful than the last.  Tim is a refreshing change with his black boots, small trunks and Dvorak Symphony No. 7 with its Jaws like introduction.  Arrive, turn your opponent into a pretzel, leave.  Job done.

Talking of opponents, his visits in 2016/17 to the UK saw him take on names that on the surface may jar a little; Lord Gideon Grey, Martin Kirby and Joel Redman immediately spring to mind.  The two Freedom’s Road shows saw him compete against the London Riots’ James Davis and Darrell Allen rather than locking up with Progress trainees eager to learn new tricks.  In December 2016, Joe Coffey took on Tim as part of ICW’s Friday Fight Club.  Coffey revealed in Morgan Webster’s podcast that this was the first time that he had not discussed a match beforehand; they entered the ring and did whatever felt right.  I have wondered whether Thatcher is seen as a standard of excellence in the field of shoot style wrestling, attracting those who want to prove something either to the fans or to themselves.  Does Kirby want to be a man who ‘pisses about’ all the time?  I’m sure he relished the opportunity to show the PCW crowd that he can grapple with the best and indeed tweeted this after the show, “Had the pleasure of facing Timothy Thatcher tonight.  Someone who’s a total breath of fresh air to wrestle.  Hope we get to do it again soon.”  Gideon Grey had a great match at the Cockpit with Thatcher and whilst Kirby and Grey might be better known for their comedic elements, Tim has been known to add a smattering of humour every now and then.  Subtly, mind you.  He’s no Grado.

Tim’s post-Evolve career has seen him relocate to Germany for several months and his trips to England have increased dramatically, most notably for Progress.  During this time, it’s become clear that the tide is turning for our Timothy; the masses have come around to my way of thinking.  I think they’ve got it!  By George, they’ve got it!  Okay, the word that immediately springs to their minds may not be adorkable, but something seems to have clicked.  Maybe it’s the wXw stable of Ringkampf that he’s a part of, which has gradually decreased in numbers over the past year (Alexander Wolfe, Axel Deiter Jr, Walter and Thatcher – only the latter two remain) but have increased in popularity or maybe it’s the higher profile he’s gained through the sheer number of matches across Europe.

It certainly won’t be through his social media profile.  He has none.  His near mute in-ring persona and online presence coalesce perfectly.  So perfectly, me and a couple of friends created #TTAS on Twitter safe in the knowledge Tim would be none the wiser as we discussed why we were the Timothy Thatcher Appreciation Society.  I made 20 badges adorned with his scary grimace to give to friends only to discretely remove mine upon his arrival at a post-show pub.  Carsmile bought the three members of Ringkampf a beer, I muttered something appreciative and we left.  The next day I was reliably informed that he was aware of the badges, wanted to say hello and, ladies and gentlemen, is now the proud owner of a #TTAS badge.

TTAS

The more I get to know the man behind the Harrington jacket, the more adorkable he becomes.  A 15-minute interview clip with wXw revealed a three-month stint of the UK holiday camps in 2007 with Brian Dixon.  Awesome!  He seemed like an athlete who was humble and continually strives for self-improvement, chuckling in remembrance of “Getting my ass kicked,” by an aging Billy Robinson.  Excellent!  After his tag-team match at Evolve 76, his partner and long-time friend, Jeff Cobb, called him out … and called him Timmy.  Adorkable!

*Since writing this, Thatcher has been booked as part of an intergender card at the Beyond Wrestling show in New Orleans on 5th April 2018 against the incredible Toni Storm.  It’s gonna be a CORKER!

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2017: #10 – #1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2018/02/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2017-10-1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2018/02/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2017-10-1#comments Fri, 23 Feb 2018 10:56:39 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30918 0Hi, I’m Edgar the computer from the flop film Electric Dreams in 1984. Yes, the one the song comes from. I was just a normal 16 bit computer until my nerdy owner thought he would put out a fire near me with some sparkling wine. After a brief montage of sparks and frazzly effects, the obvious addition of alcohol to my circuits made me a super-smart and sensitive artificial intelligence – and I promptly fell in love with my cello playing neighbour (well it was Virgina Madsen). Its not easy being a fictional computer in love, particularly if your owner is trying to get with YOUR girl, and making you write Culture Club songs to woo her. Of course I get a bit jealous, hound him a bit with household appliances, but I never get nasty like the computer in Demon Seed. Of course these days I am obsolete, despite the super-artificial-intelligence. What’s more the film I an in is really bad (its like WarGames for saps). So it is great to see this selection of the top ten films of 2017 as voted for by people on computers. No super-intelligent computers in these ones.

Thanks Edgar, and even of our film is lousy, the theme tune is great – so it wasn’t all wasted time. Here is the much delayed top ten. I’ve been busy. Seeing more films obv…

10: Call Me By Your Name

Its an odd one, some people swooned passionately over this film, and some of us were a bit more “its pretty, but so what”. And yet in the bleak midwinter the appeal leaps out – it doesn’t just capture those ineffable moments of first lust, it also manages to capture that magical summer holiday of memory, or conjure one up if we didn’t have it. It is like mainlining sunshine which makes everything else, the fumblings, the middle-class ennui, the peach fucking, all slip down easily.

9: 20th Century Women

Annette Benning turned in two terrific performances last year. One, in Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool she played film star Gloria Grahame in the twilight of her career. In 20th Century Women she plays the matriarch of a Californian household of nearly all women. Writer/director Mike Mills created a loosely autobiographical paean to his own mother, and as Dorothea, Benning plays a wonderfully rounded, confused but open woman trying to raise a boy who is equally confused. Its a film with low stakes but high empathy, and Benning gets excellent support from the other women, Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning. It is a film built around a performance, but it is generous, like the character herself, and interested in people as a whole.

8: The Florida Project

A strongly humanist movie which understands that the nature of irony is the sprinkles on top of a solidly developed set of characters, rather than being write large. Here we have a child’s eye view of marginal living. Our heroine is the six year old Moonee (played by an incredible Brooklyn Prince), who has summertime fun and larks in the shadow of Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The cinematography conjures up the sense of a childhood summer, and Moonee and her friends get up to some proper hijinks, but the precarity of her life, and the lives of those around her looms in the background in the film. Willem Dafoe anchors the film as the motel manager, but equally as impressive is Bria Vinaite as Hayley, Moonee’s mother both loving and infuriating and where she is due to the deep rooted inequalities of her life. I loved this movie.

7: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

And suddenly a Star Wars movie didn’t do exactly what everyone wanted and there was a great disturbance in the – well look. I think The Last Jedi is too long, but I also think it does some interesting things and certainly surprised me. Rian Johnston has played the hand he was dealt with the characters and done a good job in arguing for their own story, not as a continuation of the previous ones, but as their own piece. There were a couple of beautiful moments, and since this position in the chart seems reserved for a Star Wars movie, this is the first one I think had done more than go through the motions. But it is too long.

6: Thor: Ragnarok

Possibly boosted here by its year end release, Thor: Ragnarok stands as testament to one of the more interesting recent trends in the superhero genre. They can be very funny. There are not a lot of comedies on this list, six at best, and of those four are superhero films. OK Lego Batman is just silly, but the success of all three Marvel movies last year was in some degree down to their comedy. Spiderman Homecoming was a high school comedy, Guardians Of The Galaxy was a gang action comedy. But Thor: Ragnarok is a Taika Waititi comedy, infused with a certain sense of New Zealand dry humour which finds this whole thing rather ridiculous. But its not poking fun at it, there is camp but it is not against the potential seriousness of the underlying story. But rather the mode of storytelling, that people are vain, stupid, pompous and can still be heroic. Most of this relies on Chris Hemsworth being a gifted comedian, though Hiddleston, Tessa Thompson and Mark Ruffalo all help. But if Marvel keep making different types of movies, often comedies, then they can probably (and will) go on forever.

5: Wonder Woman

Probably the most iconic cinema moment of last year takes place about halfway through Wonder Woman, where Gal Gadot’s Diana is in a World War I trench, and decides she’s had enough of doing nothing to help. And luckily whilst she is informed about the nature of No Man’s Land, she doesn’t have to say the obvious as she climbs out. Wonder Woman manages to escape the problems of the DC movies by being about something, and build its own mythology, with a few big ideas along with the action you would expect. Is it human nature to go to war, and what is that based on, and how do you counter it? Couple that with an island of Amazons, and a love interest who is happy to be just that, the film almost makes up for its glowy CGI battle at the end, and a baddie with a terrible moustache.

4: The Handmaiden

Two versions of The Handmaiden were released in the UK, one about twenty minutes longer. I saw the long version, I have been told there is no significant difference except some takes are more luxuriant. Which I am more than happy with, despite hating unnecessary length. Yes the production design is gorgeous, and the tone is perfect – but bearing in mind I knew the source material the fact that the film made me forget what was going to happen and genuinely surprised me was pretty amazing. Add to that erotic scenes which were genuinely tender (and nicely contrasted with less pleasant sexual exploitation), The Handmaiden is a rollicking good story which comes bundled with gender and socio-economic politics which make it fascinating too.

3: La La Land

Lots of people didn’t like La La Land. The gripes were varied as well from people who thought the songs were bad, that Ryan Gosling’s character mansplained jazz too much and was awful, the lack of precision of the dancing, and the overall message of the film. And a fair few just thought it was inconsequential, over-hyped and therefore were forced into the hating camp. I was not in that camp. I loved it, from the opening moment. The intro sequence on the overpass enraptured me with its colours, choreography and sense of time and place. Yes, it is a self-regarding Hollywood puff piece, but it was modern escapism – and as with Whiplash I am never sure if Chazelle really believes in the jazz line of his white characters or shares my reading that they are terrible people (again important for this story) but I don’t care. I love musicals, and I loved this one.

2: Moonlight

Often film presented as separate stories, a triptych in this case, are often only as good as their worst part. One way around that is to make sure you end on a high point, which Moonlight (and Certain Women) did – though it also works by being three distinct stages in a single person’s development. And despite the multiple casting of the leads not really looking much like each other, and perhaps because of an overly formal, soundtrack heavy pretentiousness, Moonlight works exceptionally well. It also shares with Get Out an internalised cultural tension that creates suspense by leading the viewer to assume the worst in certain scenarios and then be relieved that the film doesn’t go where they feared. You bring the culture with you, but you also allow culture to change you – and Moonlight is that kind of film.

1: Get Out

Occasionally genre films resonate with a wider cultural moment and suddenly become bigger that you might imagine. That could be the reason for the success of Get Out, at the box office and on many multi-levelled end of year lists. But Get Out is a little bit better than that. Jordan Peele’s time as a sketch comic and writer has given him all the tools to do a multi-layered genre pastiche, which is luckily the same tools to do a multi-layer genre piece. So he knows where the easy targets are, he knows where the harder targets are and he has worked out the toughest thing of all, how to briefly lend a moment of empathy and shared experience to non-African American audiences and say “this is what it feels like”. With a fantastic bait and switch ending, it was the smart thrill ride of the year.

So there you go, what will turn up next year? I’ll post some more stats and breakdowns in the comments too of the near misses and my top twenty too.

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The Inaugural FreakyTrigger TV Poll: #24 – #13 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2018/02/the-inaugural-freakytrigger-tv-poll-24-13 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2018/02/the-inaugural-freakytrigger-tv-poll-24-13#comments Fri, 09 Feb 2018 19:37:34 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30885 hqdefaultHi we’re the Telebugs, unloved 80’s British cartoon characters who traded on British kids loves of robots and television and still failed to create a following across our 88 tedious episodes. Part of this disdain might be that whilst we a robots with TV’s as heads our TV’s only ever show our faces, which is even more boring than watch 1980’s schools TV. These days the three of us have hacked our firmware and take it in turn to watch prestige TV on each others heads, though since our heads are in 4:3 a lot of it doesn’t fit into our aspect ratio

Thanks B.U.G., C.H.I.P and S.A.M.A.N.T.H.A. Seriously. S.A.M.A.N.T.H.A.* I doubt you’ll be getting a Danger Mouse like remake. Still I am sure you have watched all of these shows on each other fizzogs.

24: Taboo
Yet another version of the ridiculously sexy Tom Hardy mumble, Taboo is all set about with a story that reasserts the darkest side of illicit Empire slaving at a time when most tellings get very self-congratulatory: the Napoleonic Wars. With backstory in Africa and the USA, it goes all dark and Dickens and CGI exploring quite how evil the East India Company probably was. Consciously melodramatic, sometimes very effective, sometimes grisly, sometimes silly.

23: Motherland
Written by Graham Linehan and Sharon Horgan seems like an unbeatable lineage, and whilst there are some very traditional aspects to Motherland as a sitcom, there is enough here to make it stand out. Not least a female comedy line-up which has Lucy Punch and Diane Morgan supporting Anna Maxwell-Martin. What’s more is the show is more than happy to make all of its characters dislikeable, which feels like a small triumph, we can still find these terrible people funny.

22: Rick And Morty
A long wait for the third series and its increasingly nihilistic run perhaps pushed a few people away as did the overall hideousness of much of the fandom. The problem Rick And Morty has is that the lack of hope in the multiverse that it has built up, and the lead characters near absent sense of morality was intriguing as we learnt it, but is potentially exhausting now we are in on it. Which means the show has to work extra hard to engage those of its audience who are not into a dick as a lead character (sadly it seems for much of the fanbase this is the appeal). The show worked extra hard therefore, and more or less pulled it off, but I am not sure how much further it can go on.

21: OJ: Made In America
Epic documentary acting as a cultural counterweight to the more tabloid (though still excellent) American Crime Story version of the OJ Simpson trial. What Made In America does is contextualise who OJ was, how he became a phenomenon and then how his trial almost inevitably had to play out the way it did. In an era when fake news is bandied about so much, to have an epic documentary like this compliment a dramatization in such close proximity (and both be very good) does give a small amount of hope out for nuance and the industry.

20: Love Island
Talking of nuance, Love Island (ex-Celebrity Love Island but they couldn’t afford celebs any more), became the British reality show of choice in 2017. Why, its unclear. Perhaps the sunny climes made a change from Big Brothers increased desperation, it was a summer without a major sporting event, or even it was well made and cast. No matter what, it has now built itself as ITV’s other reality brand, and will probably go strong for a few more years at least.

19: Twin Peaks
Sight And Sounds second best movie of the year… The long awaited return of Twin Peaks – when I gave up on a few episodes into season two – has pleased much of the viewership who basically wanted access to lots and lots of David Lynch. I can’t say if getting this much Lynch material via the continuation of its arcane lore, and mixture of from what I understood was fan service and fan befuddlement. But if befuddlement is your stock in trade…

18: Better Call Saul
Earnest, newbie lawyer Jimmy McGill’s slowly eroding morals create the “Criminal Lawyer” Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad – it could have been shlocky and pointless, a weak cash-in glorying in a feted series’ success. But the brilliant acting, superb script and beautiful cinematography have proven that Better Call Saul is no mere spin-off. Vince Gilligan & team have served up three seasons of slowburn disappointment, betrayal and skulduggery, building up to create an intense world where everybody is awful, but you just can’t blame them. The finale broke my heart into a million pieces – I both anticipate and dread seeing what happens next. (Bec)

17: The Expanse
Mark Sinker said the main appeal of The Expanse is how it underlines that space is boring and deadly. It certainly does the latter, the former it does by treating it as a giant slow motorway where things happen in the end and your battles will be dirty and short. The second series of the Expanse completed the first novel’s arc, and then threw itself into the second, with grubby politics alongside the mystery of the protomolecule. The crew of the Rocinante are arguing, and fighting and its often better in its political scenes, but this is good pulpy stuff.

16: Love
In many ways, your typical boy-meets-girl story, more specifically nerdy boy meets hot wild girl story. Mickey and Gus’s stop-start-stop-start relationship is ostensibly the focus of piece though the supporting cast often shine brighter than the stars – Bertie’s sunny naiveté counters Mickey’s cynicism; she toughens her up. We’ve seen Gus’s friends looking out for him from the start and in many ways this love is the real focus of the show. Having said that, Judd Apatow surely isn’t going make anything easy for anyone. (Bec)

15: Bojack Horseman
Portrayals of ill mental health in the sitcom world are not often helpful or remotely accurate and usually 100% cured within 22 minutes; this gets it pretty spot on. A show about a washed up actor who drowns his sorrows with copious amounts of booze and drugs whilst sabotaging his relationships and still living a life of luxury is fairly tired, but set in a hyper surreal animated world where hybrid animal-humans coexist, it’s both bittersweet and terribly funny, and has a lot to say about success, happiness and friendship. (Bec)

14: The Handmaid’s Tale
TV takes a stab at Margaret Atwood’s chauvinist dystopia and makes a much better fist of it than cinema. This is partially because it has a lot more time and space to breathe, and build its world and characters. Much of this can be put down to a timeliness of theme, for all the leaps and bounds of equal rights we feel like we’re in a precarious moment with Trump in the White House – so Gilead suddenly feels more likely. But more can be but on Elisabeth Moss’s central performance: emphatic yet quietly fierce.

13: Dear White People
There was a lot of faux controversy when DWP was picked up for series by Netflix, but writ large over 10 episodes it has much the same strengths (and weaknesses) as Justin Simien’s 2014 film, with its arch style serving up a student campus political satire for the ‘woke’ generation. It doesn’t always work, but at its strongest (and the show really does revolve around the mid-season episode directed by Barry Jenkins), it dramatises situations that few other mainstream shows are doing. It also highlights a great depth of acting talent, not least stand-out star Marque Richardson’s Reggie, though my heart is with social climber Coco, who in all her contradictions is like a microcosm of the show itself and beacon for the distinctive world it creates. (Ewan)

There you go – the top twelve will almost certainly arrive before the end of February…

*Solar Activated Micro Automated Non-inTerference Hearing Apparatus. This is how bad the show was.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2017: #20 – #11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2018/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2017-20-11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2018/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2017-20-11#comments Tue, 30 Jan 2018 17:52:31 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30846 CiIKHzWVEAE2lJKHi, I’m Lori Quaid, just an ordinary boring housewife living my suburban life, doing housework and maintaining my 80’s hair. 2080’s hair of course, its 2084, the future where I live with my even more boring husband Doug. He’s so boring he doesn’t want to go on holiday but rather wants to have the memory of a holiday implanted in his head. Hooo – boy, is he going to be surprised when that all happens and I end up kicking him in the head a lot. You see I’m not really his wife. I’m basically a plot device. And as such, once I have sorted out stupid old secret agent Doug, and sent him to Mars, I’ll probably go back to that implant centre and get the best films from 2017 implanted in my head to watch. They are proper oldies to me!

Thanks Lori, I was always on your side. And yes I think you will enjoy this batch, with a few strong females who are more than just plot devices.

20: Your Name

A bit of a cheat here as it was actually released in the UK for a day only in 2016. But the dubbed version was released in 2017 so I allowed it. And it still stands as a terrific little fantasy, a body swop, catastrophe take on The Lake House, hitting a perfect tone for the humour in the first half that grounds the high melodrama in the second half. I am sure the dub is inoffensive, but this is a great bit of anime.

19: John Wick 2

Fighty fighty, kicky punchy. Keanu Reeves gets back into the suit, the film has a bit more money so can globe trot a bit more, but on the whole it is much more of the same just a bit more violent, a bit less focused and a lot more pointless. Still Keanu is always worth watching doing this kind of thing and the practical stunts do deliver a lot of OOOF for your buck.

18: Lady Macbeth

A bit like Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, Lady Macbeth takes the British period drama and shifts the perspective to a more modern, feminist position. It also rolls strongly with its lead identification character, who is hard enough to initially be admirable, and her actions are always understandable if increasingly horrific. Florence Pugh commands the screen and the film is composed and controlled enough to fool you into thinking it cost a lot more money. A regency version of don’t hate the player, hate the game.

17: Cameraperson

One of the great things about the more experimental trend in journalism, Cameraperson is a slightly more dour out-takes clip show. But what these out-takes tell us about the process of documentary, and about the person who is filming them is huge. Kirsten Johnson has worked with some of the biggest names in documentary, and we see takes from work with Poitras and Moore, but also we see how operating a camera is authorial, and how it is an empathy machine – both from the big projects and the more personal items she has shot. Plotless, without a clear timeline, with no linking narration or context, it tells a strong story about how cameras create stories on both ends of the apparatus.

16:The Beguiled

Sophia Coppola’s remake of the Beguilled has its critics (it doesn’t engage in the racial politics of the Civil War), but its female gaze makes it a fascinating pairing with the original with Clint Eastwood (watch the trailer to the original to see how many similar shots with a different gaze there are). The women are the stars here, and once Colin Farrell’s injured soldier starts to flirt you can see how the tensions between the women will stretch their relationships but eventually it becomes a very one sided battle of the sexes where the power imbalance leads to triumphant tragedy. A steamy little potboiler.

15: Logan

Perhaps it pushes its Shane / revisionist Western tropes too far but it takes almost twenty years of an often trashy and incoherent film franchise and creates a moving and satisfying conclusion for a wholly ridiculous character. It does that by granting Wolverine a surrogate child, an infirm father figure and a hopeless picaresque impotent quest, there are more Western cliches in here than you can throw a stick at. But the returning actors are so comfortable and pleased with how they are developed, Mangold leans into the myth making and there is a great physical performance from Dafne Keen. Franchises punt out so many films these days some will be good, and some will even end up being quite artful.

14: Manchester By The Sea

I saw Manchester By The Sea at the London Film Festival in 2016, and was impressed by the way it managed to create empathy with a man living with grief and guilt, and positing that growth still probably does not allow you to give all of that away. But I was also aware that Kenneth Lonergan, with all of his skill, ended up falling back on a number of less subtle tropes, the man who expresses with his fists what he cannot deal with verbally, the leaning on thoroughly manipulative (and cliched) music in scenes which did not require them. In one scene Michelle Williams does more, and conjures up a more interesting movie, and whilst It thing it is a hugely powerful piece of work, it didn’t really blow me away (and the Casey Affleck issues certainly haven’t help win it over for me).

13: Baby Driver

Speaking of actors with issues. Its OK, Kevin Spacey plays a despicable bad guy here. They all do. And perhaps that is my problem with Baby Driver, is its flip, impeccably sound synced car-dancical was – unlike any of Edgar Wright’s previous movies – in the service of terrible characters being cool. So yes, Baby had a pretty lousy upbringing, but he is still a car thief and dangerous driver, and perhaps looks saintly in comparison with the rest of the cast, but he isn’t. I am pleased therefore with his denouement, but there was half an hour of less fun cars grinding in car parks to get there. And also, the mid-nineties was not the golden age of soundtrack pop this film seems to think it was.

12: Blade Runner 2049

Did the world need a sequel to a flawed cult movie that even its own director is completely sure what the best version of it is. Did it want one that was almost an hour longer? Hmm, its box office receipts suggest not, but what Denis Villeneuve has done is to be faithful to the original without being slavish, to move on that vision and try to find something else in the mix of Philip K.Dick’s pulp and Scott’s monolithic art design (and even Harrison Ford’s original uncommitted acting). He succeeds on nearly all counts, with a beautiful, intriguing puzzle of a film, with some terrible politics and gnomic mysteries. It still feels like a lesser hit from the same drug, but that is a pretty potent drug.

11: Certain Women

Kelly Reichardt’s triptych of small town Americana yet again demonstrates how good she is at quickly creating low stakes but high intensity slices of life. Here she fits in three stories, all with development and drama and wonderfully played female leads, and all which feel contemplative and even slow in its swift running time. Of course the casting is impeccable, which makes the fact the film is more or less stolen by a newcomer Lily Gladstone even more impressive. The moments of emotion in the Gladstone/Stewart story contain some of the tenderest sequences of cinema last year.

Top ten is on its way…. Feel free to express your anxieties about the films that you now think might not make it below.

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The Inaugural FreakyTrigger TV Poll: 35 – 25 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2018/01/the-inaugural-freakytrigger-tv-poll-35-25 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2018/01/the-inaugural-freakytrigger-tv-poll-35-25#comments Sat, 27 Jan 2018 17:10:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30832 disposable-heroes-of-hiphoprisy-michael-franteHi I am Michael Franti and I am here to present the first ever FreakyTrigger TV Poll. Now some of you might remember me, and my clumsily named band, The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy and my opinion the Television was The Drug Of The Nation. You may not remember our follow-up hits, Don’t Sit So Close You’ll Go Blind, and Your Eyes Will Go Square They Will. Well even so I have realised that it isn’t the TV that is the problem, and so I have returned with the band for a whole new album called Tiny Mobile Phone Screens – The Opiate Of The Masses and will be making hot takes about millenials bumping into things whilst using their mobile phones in a toilet venue near you soon.

Thanks Michael, nice Spearhead – I mean big toe. So here are the first set of results. The TV vote was a lot more spread out than the Movie one, which had the upshot that under our methodology (you had to get two votes) only 35 TV shows actually qualified. And down the bottom they scraped by on a few votes each. Here are the first 11, so I might get this done in three lists (I have a film list to do too you know).

35: Grace And Frankie
Basically its The Odd Couple (the hippy and the straight one), given a little bit of a fillip by its overarching sit, Grace and Frankie’s husbands have both left them to be together as a couple. This inflects much of the action of the first season, but by the time the third one came around, it had found a groove which was about these women having a friendship based on shared trauma. Jane Fonda touches on some of her own screen history here, but it is Lily Tomlin who reminds you wnat a great comic presence she is. Very Mum friendly.

34: Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later
I liked the idea of Wet Hot American Summer (a summer camp movie with adults playing many of the kids roles in an absurdist pitch) more than the execution, though it has its lovers. I actually thought Wet Hot American Summer: The First Week Of Camp (where the same cast do a prequel about ten years later) was much funnier. And then this, it catches up ten years, though everyone is still obviously way too young, or even too famous. It has that giddy vein of absurdist humour where if you are in the right mood it will be perfect for you, but only if you are willing to go with it.

32= Star Trek: Discovery
Or, Star Trek Disco as this scene below suggests. Its not you Dad’s Star Trek this, for good and for bad. Set before the original series, this gets seriously DARRRRKKKK, seriously silly in places and has infuriated many people. But as a different way of doing a highly serialised wartime Star Trek it is entertaining and having a viewpoint character not be a captain is also interesting (having her as Spock’s hithertoo never mentioned adopted elder sister pretty much highlight some of the bad stuff here). But worth it to know rap versions of Stayin; Aline will be around forever.

32= Riverdale
The Archie comics but DARRRRRKKKK. A lot of fun of had taking the all American cheese of the Archie relationship comics and implanting a bit of Twin Peaks DNA, and a thoroughly inappropriate murder mystery. Its a soap, but one which is knowing about its teen milieu, but not usually in an annoying way. And as all versions of Archie must always do – Archie himself is an absolute dick.

31: Brooklyn 99
There have been very few successful cop TV comedies, and this is no Thin Blue Line. It has the Michael Schuur generosity of spirit built into it, a properly diverse cast and whilst it is probably sillier than it should be it has managed to make Andy Samberg a genuinely pleasant screen presence, which ten years ago on SNL seemed impossible.

29= Legion
Bonkers X-Men sort of spin-off which has one of the broader X-Men conceits at its heart, a man who believes he is hallucinating his super-powers, actually has them. But is still a but unhinged. The opening episode set the tone that anything can happen and Dan Stevens, and particularly Aubrey Plaza’s performances maintain that air.

29= iZombie
The little Zombie procedural that could runs full bloodedly into its third series and the complexities of the zombie underground, the zombie para-military and the zombie truthers threatened to knock the case of the week (and the brain of the week) out of the spotlight. But its conceit (our zombie takes on personality traits of the brains she eats) is too good to squander and we get Rose McIver channelling a dominatrix, a D&D dungeon master and a Jackass-esque internet stunt guy, and ended its season throwing all the cards in the air.

26= RuPaul’s Drag Race
2017 was season nine of Drag Race, and there are two more coming, which really does cement the show as one of the few actual successes of the competitive reality TV show era. Partially because it leans into the competition without being nasty, partially because the low stakes of the show are completely belied by the high energy of the participants. But fundamentally RuPaul is the star and lends the show its class, grace and sense of humour – very few reality shows lean as heavily, or as successfully, as Drag Race does on RuPaul – and it is absolutely worth it (note I haven’t actually watched it since season three, but I assume this is still the case)

26= Broad City
Abby and Illiana and sex and drugs and New York City (and one episode in Florida). Again another sitcom well settled into its routines maintaining its stride, as probably the most sex positive show on TV right now.

26= Black Mirror
This squeaked in by virtue of the fourth season being released just after Christmas and the fact that with streaming things, especially anthology shows, have a very long tail. So is this for the sweet Hang The DJ, the sour USSS McCalister or more likely people still on a high a year after San Junipero aired. Who knows?

25: Game Of Thrones
This was the season that overtook the books, and realised it was only about twenty episodes away from concluding. So perhaps it went off the rails, perhaps it jumped a shark or two (it certainly introduced high speed travel across Westeros). But winter has pretty much come now, and Jon Snow still knows nothing and the mother of dragons babies have grown up and – gritty high camp drama is pretty much solidified its reputation by now. Let’s see if they can stick the (Kings) landing.

The next twelve or so shows coming soon. In the meantime use the comments to tell everyone why all of these shows are rubbish.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2017: #30 – #21 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2018/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2017-30-21 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2018/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2017-30-21#comments Sat, 20 Jan 2018 00:15:20 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30793 diehard2Hi I’m Former U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel William Stuart, and I am just preparing to rescue General Ramon Esperanza, the rightful ruler of the made up South American country Val Verde. I have a foolproof plan to hold an airport hostage, at which point I will grab Esperanza’s plane, fly him home and where I and my men have been promised lots of money by his legitimate businessmen allies. As preparation there is nothing I like doing than flexing naked infront of a mirror – I believe it makes me more intimidating and not silly, even though it does mean some people call me the Nudey German (even though I am not German). Anyway I am sure my foolproof plan will work, and not be foiled by some meddling cop on holiday who is only trying to meet his wife. Even if that does happen, I am sure I won’t get blown up and thus be unable to watch the Freakytrigger best films of 2017 numbers 30-21 except in vain-glorious hell.

Thanks William, I prefered you in Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey. Here are the next ten movies, including an exciting four way tie for 23.

30: Colossal

Here is a film with a bizarre premise that actually has a solid dramatic arc and masks some surprisingly powerful character work behind a tale of giant monsters fighting. Its like the good old days of Charlie Kaufman, and here that spirit is channelled by Nacho Vigalondo in a deft melding of indie drama and kaiju movie. Anne Hathaway is great as the drunk Gloria who discovers a bigger purpose, and Jason Sudekis cleverly has enough self loathing in his nice guy character that when you ask “who was the real monster” at the end of the film it is clear what the answer is (its the monster). Fun, funny but with some genuine meat on its bones.

29: The Death Of Stalin

Armando Ianucci’s satire is whip fast but perhaps not as funny as some people expected. This is primarily due to the subject matter, despite playing a little fast and loose with some of the timeline, the film wants to get the feel right and so no matter how dark you can make the comedy there are still moments when thousands of real people are ending up dead. The instincts to farce remain strong however, and the instincts to play with the kind of central obsequious doublespeak pays dividends. The broad rang of comic skills in the cast seals the deal, a lot goes on, and a lot is said – but it manages to be a bit slightly more resonant than just a dark farce.

28: The Red Turtle

I could write the plot of The Red Turtle in about two sentences, and you would give me a stern hard look about the middle part of the movie. So I will give you sentence one: a man is shipwrecked on a desert island, and keeps getting his escape attempts thwarted by a gigantic red turtle. Simplistic story and animation blend to create a giant fable or creation myth, and the film’s simplicity does win it some depth, as does its silence. I was worried it might be a bit too basic, but it has lingered with me through the year, and short of Moana turning up to sort out the shipwreck, it is near perfect.

27: The Other Side Of Hope

Aki Kaurismäki’s droll tone has been pretty consistent throughout his career, never mind how light or dark his subject matter, but the big issues of humanity seem to be hanging on him over his last few films. The Other Side Of Hope is about a Syrian refugee trying to survive within, and outside the system, and a newly single businessman who crosses paths with him. Humanistic, occasionally very funny (there is a set piece sushi sequence which is excellent) I was disappointed by its pessimistic outlook and felt it drifted from the director’s strengths into near preachiness. But even what I think is minor Kaurismäki is strong work.

23= Logan Lucky

Steven Soderbergh comes out of retirement for this hugely enjoyable caper movie, which is superficially a blue collar Ocean’s Eleven but with a lot more emotionally and politically going on under the hood of its souped up NASCAR ride. It is centred around Channing Tatum and ans Adam Driver’s Logan brothers who play up their dumb stereotyp but are anything but – and their sister Riley Keough who is a lot subtler than you might think. Maybe it falls apart a touch in the last act, with Hilary Swank doing her best Eastwood impression, but Daniel Craig’s Joe Bang is always around the corner for a laugh and you remember why you always liked Soderbergh in the first place.

23= Jackie

On first viewing I thought Natalie Portman was too mannered in her performance as Jackie Kennedy, there was too much self-consciousness in her portrayal. And then I realised with a little bit of original footage, that not only is it a terrific version of Jackie, but the point of the film: Jackie is always performing, and has to. Its a dour film, being set just after JFK’s assassination, but it does the best this kind of historical drama can do at engaging you in the events as well as the person. The framing device, which I originally felt was too on the nose, turned out to also be a pretty accurate representation of a latter interview. Pablo Larrain has made an artefact which in taking the Kennedy presidency from a side angle, shines a lot more light on it than many of the John-centric stories.

23= Guardians Of The Galaxy 2

A dayglo rainbow shake of a movie, full of pop-rocks and fizzy sherbert and not much else. It does what most good sequels do, gets bigger, more confident and doesn’t get too bogged down when it throws new characters in the mix. With an already large ensemble it also does the thing lots of not so good sequels do, split the team up to have separate adventures even though the real selling point of the previous movie was its team chemistry. Nevertheless as a dizzy pop culture artefact it has plenty of gags, fun soundtrack songs and and least one jawdroppingly visual scene. The fact that said scene also includes the murder of 20 characters should be more of a problem than it it…

23= Hidden Figures

Whilst it hits all the beats of an inspirational true life story, Hidden Figures plays its hand partially with novelty and partially with excellent performances. Our super-maths heroes have always been white males, often British, nearly always in Universities where being good at Maths has to be juxtaposed by some life trauma. In Hidden Figures our three mathematicians are black women, real and – oh yeah – their life trauma is the entirity of racist America. In the three central roles Octavia Spencer, Taraji P. Henson and Janelle Monae are compelling, funny and determined against the system they slowly break down which is pretty monolithic. And the maths isn’t bad too.

22:The Lego Batman Movie

This sideways sequel to The Lego Movie takes that films most iconically ridiculous character, and dials him up to 11. In a world that now happily accepts multiple takes on Batman at the same time (and tends to not prefer the Ben Affleck version), this daftly animated blockbuster reaches for joke after joke affectionately poking the fun out of the character, whilst creating an arrogant version we want to see have the piss ripped out of. It does get a bit exhausting by the final reel, but it was probably the funniest film I saw last year.

21: God’s Own Country

Micro-budget British hit which manages to fold a number of hot button issues into a gloriously tender romance. I’ve always been a little suspicious of “rugged” British films, the landscape doesn’t always cut the mustard, but here there is a real sense of the difficulty of working the land, the loneliness of farming life and above all else mud. But the film is all about masculinity and pride and what decisions are important to us, plus the inabilty of people to accept or articulate their own desires. A terrific debut from Francis Lee who manages to turn the most physical of actions into tender non-verbal communication.

Come back soon (but you know, not that soon) for the next ten.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2017: #40 – #31 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2018/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2017-40-31 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2018/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2017-40-31#comments Tue, 09 Jan 2018 09:46:35 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30752 6a0105364a8fba970c0153927016cd970b-800wiHi, I’m Captain Ivan Drago, the Muscles from Moscow and still Undisputed World Heavy Champion if you were the kind of person who wandered out of Rocky IV halfway through and never saw a Rocky movie, or a Creed movie ever again. And I can tell you my life as the most beloved person (behind the most committed communist leader ever Mikhail Gorbachev) in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is peachy keen, particularly if you also have avoided all media from the late eighties onwards. As I have. After all I train 23 hours a day, only leaving a few moments to be pumped with steroids and varnished. But apparently it is 2018, and the above is a Momentum communist fantasy, so I shall instead retreat into watching recent movies to distract me. Has anything good come out recently?

Thanks Ivan, and for what its worth, I never believed that Rocky could beat you. Even with James Brown’s help. Nevertheless without further ado, here are the films that you lot thought were the good, but not top thirty good which is just the kind of films Ivan Drago deserves.

40: Paddington 2

The first (but not the last) sequel in our list, and a delightful continuation of the previous outing. Origin story out of the way, they still find a way to put the bear in peril, but let his thorough decency win the day. A sterling supporting cast, and Ben Whishaw’s perfect voice acting ground it, but its the committed animation (particularly in the slapstick sequences) and an excellent piece of comic acting from Hugh Grant that make it.

39: The Villainess

Absolutely brutal, bonkers South Korean take on Nikita, which throws everything (including a kitchen sink) at the camera – not least in its opening and closing POV single take sequences. Some of the effects are a bit cheap, some have to just be stunts where people are getting hurt. Its a pity there is a forty minute romance section in the middle that slows it all down, because the rest is the crazy,action treat of the year.

38: Murder On The Orient Express

AKA Kenneth Brannagh’s All Star Moustache Supporting Ensemble. Come to see Johnny Depp get murdered (yay!) and then wait to see Hercule Poirot’s moustache solve the crime in a CGI train. The culprit is obvious if you remember any previous versions, or you realise who has a motive to kill him (remember: its Johnny Depp), but its not without its Sunday matinee charms.

37: Silence

Silence came out in the UK on New Years Day last year, so well remembered film voters! Scorsese’s powerful take on Shûsaku Endô’s novel of Portuguese Jesuit priests’ challenge of faith against a Japanese clamp down on their existence. There is a little dodgy accent work, and like most recent Scorsese it plays long, but it is beautiful to look at and has some real philosophical heft, particularly when Liam Neeson gets a chance to do some non-running and shooting acting for a change.

36: Spider-Man: Homecoming

If the defining connective tissue between the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies has been their ease with humour, the 2017 batch have been happy to be at their core comedies. No-one wanted another Spider-Man origin movie, so they take the radioactive bite as read, but do play a smaller, high-school comedy around it. Perhaps it didn’t need quite as much Robert Downey Jr as it got, and it still has the standard final act escalation problems, but a Keaton has form playing a Birdman, and Tom Holland is a very appealing, and actually young, Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man

35: Split

On the one hand a bonkers over-acting tour de force from James McEvoy, in which he plays a kidnapper with 21 distinct personalities holding some teenage girls captive pending torture and death. On the other hand it is a stealth entry in an unwanted Shyamalan Cinematic Universe promising nothing more than poorly made sequels in the future. Stupidly entertaining I guess.

34: A Ghost Story

Casey Affleck dies, and stands under a white sheet for ninety minutes. After this year, probably not a bad idea. Rooney Mara grieves, eats a pie and gets on with her life. And the ghost just hangs. David Lowery’s meditation on eternity and loss shouldn’t work on paper, but works in practice as it is happy to let the audience laugh and then come to the tone and pace of the film. A gentle masterpiece (even if some of these votes might be sympathy votes for people who have now realised how good his previous film, Pete’s Dragon was).

33: The Big Sick

The surprise rom-com of the year, Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon’s adaptation of their own medically compromised meet-cute manages to dodge most of the pitfalls of culture clash comedies, and the associated pitfalls of Judd Apatow produced affairs. Light, but not without weight around the medical sequences it benefits from excellent performances from its four leads and enough resistance from romcom tropes to make its ending feel earnt.

32: Raw

One of this years most visceral movies, Raw gives us a timid vegetarian veterinary student who due to the kind of hazing and orientation I wouldn’t allow at my college gets a taste for human flesh. And impressively, gorily so. Garance Marillier is perfect as the heroine unsure of her new tastes, but at the heart the debut writer/director Julia Ducournau has created a icky horror satire which was one of the years best surprises.

31: Dunkirk

A surprisingly low placing for Christopher Nolan’s best recent film, Dunkirk is a really well made set of vignettes potentially badly organised, but couched in some extraordinary sound-design and cinematography. Definitely worth seeing on the biggest screen possible, it manages to summon the fear of waiting, being penned in with nowhere to go in a slightly more pleasant way than being locked in a screening with the Emoji Movie.

We’ll be back later in the week with ten more films that you thought were better than these ones.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie AND TV Polls 2017 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/12/the-freaky-trigger-movie-and-tv-polls-2017 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/12/the-freaky-trigger-movie-and-tv-polls-2017#comments Sat, 23 Dec 2017 10:55:34 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30661 veronica-mars-01-435Hi I am Veronica Mars. You might know me from my mid 2000’s TV show Veronica Mars where I navigated the class structures of Californian High School and solved crimes every week whilst being snarky to people. Or you might know me from my 2014 crowd funded movie Veronica Mars where, despite having grown up, I went back for a ten year anniversary to my Californian High School to ostensibly give everyone the opportunity to catch up with all the old characters that hadn’t been murdered, and solve another crime whilst being snarky to people. Anyway I am here to illustrate that the line between TV and Film is wafer thin these days and so it is high time that Freaky Trigger ran a TV Poll AS WELL AS a Film Poll. And I am here to introduce that idea, solve a crime and be snarky about people. Or at least Sight And Sound who apparently think Twin Peaks: The Return is the second best film of the year…

Thank you Veronica. And welcome to the third annual film poll and the first TV poll. The rules are simple – rank your top twenty in both categories IN ORDER and send your vote to ftfilmpoll AT gmail DOT com.

As long as the film or TV show was properly released in UK cinemas or shown on UK TV in some form (VOD / Multi-Platform) in 2017 in the UK it will be counted. I may be a little more forgiving with TV seeing the multiple ways people watch it, but if anyone votes for Breaking Bad I will shut the whole thing down. You don’t have to vote in both polls. You don’t have to list a full twenty – I’ll take whatever you’ve got. If you want to mention a worst in each category I may do a post about that too. The deadline to submit is 3pm on New Years Day because you might be watching movies up to midnight (again all other film polls neglect this point).

Your number 1 will get more points than your 20. And to make the final countdown, it must have at least two people voting for it. If you want to look at last years film polls to get a sense of the local talent, you can here:
FT Film Poll 2015
FT Film Poll 2016

And remember, nearly all of last years award winners and 2016 Cannes darlings were released in the UK in 2017, so I think the start of this year will be quite strong.

(If you want to vote for music – go to Kat’s FT Music Poll)

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The Sound Barrier Podcast: 8: The Phantom Carriage & A Ghost Story https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/08/the-sound-barrier-podcast-8-the-phantom-carriage-a-ghost-story https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/08/the-sound-barrier-podcast-8-the-phantom-carriage-a-ghost-story#comments Tue, 15 Aug 2017 10:04:59 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30349 phantom carriage ghostie storySpooky happenings over on Silent London this week, where the Sound Barrier Podcast dabbles in the supernatural, otherworldly and ectoplasmic. Or rather, a pair of meditative films which use death, and the afterlife, to dwell on the nature of existence. But if that feels a little dry, don’t worry there are madmen axing down doors, car crashes, poltergeist activities and the most unpleasant TB vector in all of Sweden. In the modern corner we have David Lowery’s oddity A Ghost Story, wherein Casey Affleck stand under a sheet for about an hour and a half. And in the silent corner, the Victor Sjöström starring Victor Sjöström film The Phantom Carriage, a New Years Eve ghost story about redemption and repentance (finally). Who will win, the director of The Wind, or the director of Pete’s Dragon?

The Silent London Podcast can be listened to here on Silent London and it is also available on iTunes and Stitcher. The podcast is presented in association with SOAS radio by Pamela Hutchinson and Peter Baran.

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The Sound Barrier Podcast: 7: The Battles Of Coronel And Falkland Islands & Dunkirk https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/08/the-sound-barrier-podcast-7-the-battles-of-coronel-and-falkland-islands-dunkirk https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/08/the-sound-barrier-podcast-7-the-battles-of-coronel-and-falkland-islands-dunkirk#respond Thu, 10 Aug 2017 10:21:55 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30343 sound barrier 7 dunkirk battlesWe are back from our summer holidays, which we luckily didn’t spend off the coast of Chile, the South Atlantic or a beach in France. I’m sure all of those are nice places now, but as shown in this weeks two films, they had their moments of horror in war. In the modern corner we’ve placed the Christopher Nolan short Dunkirk, packing the cinemas at the moment with its big screen re-enactment of multiple parts of the pivotal World War II evacuation. On the Silent Corner we have Walter Summers’ 1927 World War I docu-drama The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands, depicting an early lost sea battle, and a triumphant round two in the Southern Hemisphere. We talk realism, action, and even soundtracks (since we all saw the same silent with the same score), to see what has changed in the depiction of war, and glorious defeats, in ninety years. Joining us in the studio was Nick Dastoor to help adjudicate.

The Silent London Podcast can be listened to here on Silent London and it is also available on iTunes and Stitcher.

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The Sound Barrier Podcast: 6: Der Müde Tod & The Seventh Seal https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/06/the-sound-barrier-podcast-6-der-mude-tod-the-seventh-seal https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/06/the-sound-barrier-podcast-6-der-mude-tod-the-seventh-seal#comments Thu, 15 Jun 2017 17:36:03 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30278 18839828_10154680740586868_6737598035236876209_oAh Death. May your cold embrace be delayed, but when you grasp me at least do it with the humility and grace you do in this week’s Sound Barrier podcast. For this week Peter Baran and Pamela Hutchinson discuss the recently re-released Der Müde Tod and The Seventh Seal both of whom feature Death as a lead character. How do these personifications stack up, how do Fritz Lang and Ingmar Bergman deal with this heavy material and which one is a comic masterpiece (Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey obviously). Recorded in a makeshift studio, but with all the non-makeshift opinions you expect we pit these two movies together, and the conclusion may surprise you. Listen to it over on Silent London here.

The Silent London Podcast is also available on iTunes and Stitcher. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave a rating or review too. The podcast is presented in association with SOAS radio by Peter Baran and Pamela Hutchinson.

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The Sound Barrier Podcast: 5: Wall-E / The Red Turtle https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/05/the-sound-barrier-podcast-4-wall-e-the-red-turtle https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/05/the-sound-barrier-podcast-4-wall-e-the-red-turtle#comments Wed, 31 May 2017 16:55:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30253 wall e turtleOn the fifth Sound Barrier we have no guests, but an extremely animated discussion about – oh, did you see what I did there. We are comparing a Pixar classic with a brand new, but dialogue free, movie. So the dialogue free movie The Red Turtle is our “silent movie”, while Wall-E, which has largish silent section, is our sound film for comparison. Beautiful hand drawn Studio Ghibli animation vs incredibly detailed computer generated work. We delve into the animation, but we also spend a fair bit of time of the thematic similarities between the two, loneliness, love, loss and of course skittering critter sidekicks. So build a raft, or hold on to a passing rocket and listen as we break the Sound Barrier again.

You can listen over on Silent London here or on iTunes and Stitcher. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave a rating or review too. The podcast is presented in association with SOAS Radio by Peter Baran and Pamela Hutchinson.

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The Sound Barrier Podcast: 4: Mindhorn / The Mystery Of The Leaping Fish https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/05/the-sound-barrier-podcast-4-mindhorn-the-mystery-of-the-leaping-fish https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/05/the-sound-barrier-podcast-4-mindhorn-the-mystery-of-the-leaping-fish#respond Thu, 18 May 2017 14:40:28 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30247 mystery of leaping fish mindhornThis fortnights Sound Barrier podcast tackles comedy for the first time. And in particular the comedic potential of detectives and drugs. On the modern corner with have British meta farce Mindhorn, where Julian Barrett plays Richard Thorncroft who played Isle Of Man bionic detective Mindhorn. He is drawn back to the Isle Of Man to help with a case, or to try and regain some fame, and also take some drugs. Which made us think of our favourite drugged up detective, Coke Ennyday, played by Douglas Fairbanks Snr in The Mystery Of The Leaping Fish. Coke is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche who really doubles down on one particular aspect of Holmes’s method…

So join myself, Pamela Hutchinson and special guest Julian Coleman (you can follow him on Twitter here). Listen over on Silent London here or on iTunes and Stitcher. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave a rating or review too. The podcast is presented in association with SOAS Radio by Peter Baran and Pamela Hutchinson.

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The Sound Barrier Podcast: 3: The Wind / Lady Macbeth https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/sound-barrier-podcast/2017/05/the-sound-barrier-podcast-3-the-wind-lady-macbeth https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/sound-barrier-podcast/2017/05/the-sound-barrier-podcast-3-the-wind-lady-macbeth#respond Sat, 06 May 2017 16:15:54 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30233 lady macbeth wind portraitThe Sound Barrier podcast is back with an episode about women up against the patriarchy, the odds and some mighty gusting wind. And we look at two actresses, one at the height of her powers and popularity, in Lillian Gish, and one virtual unknown who both captivate their audience. So stern looks, staring through the screen, death and sex all feature highly in this episode. Joining Pamela Hutchinson and Pete Baran in the studio special guest (and occasional FT contributor) Ewan Munro. Which is better, a Virginian flower trapped in the desert or a Northern lass, traded for a bit of worthless land who starts to rebel (answer – they are both really good).

Thanks as ever to SOAS Radio, you can listen to the podcast here on Silent London
Or on iTunes here.

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The Sound Barrier Podcast: 2: The Beloved Rogue / Neruda https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/04/the-sound-barrier-podcast-2-the-beloved-rogue-neruda https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/04/the-sound-barrier-podcast-2-the-beloved-rogue-neruda#comments Mon, 17 Apr 2017 12:37:55 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30218 narude rogue 3 portraitThe second episode of our fortnightly silent sound film comparison podcast. This week our topic is political poets, or poets who have been exiled for their politics (though in one case possibly for his terrible poetry too). Our poets are Pablo Naruda, subject of Pablo Larrain’s recent Naruda, and Francois Villon, portrayed by John Barrymore in 1927’s The Beloved Rogue. Our modern film is playfully metatextual about its subject and delivery, but that isn’t to say that silent film is a simple as the romantic swashbuckler suggested on poster.

Myself and Pamela Hutchinson talk politics, poetry, lens flare, crabby acting, snow and inevitably facial hair as we play our cinematic game of top trumps to determine which movie is the best. And your FreakyTrigger correspondant might say the word “interesting” a few too many times. Subscribe on iTunes here:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/silent-london-podcast/id518437841

Or listen on Silent London here: https://silentlondon.co.uk/2017/04/16/sound-barrier-neruda-the-beloved-rogue-1927/

Presented in association with SOAS Radio.

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The Sound Barrier Podcast: 1: The Lost World / The Lost City Of Z https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/04/the-sound-barrier-podcast-1-the-lost-world-the-lost-city-of-z https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2017/04/the-sound-barrier-podcast-1-the-lost-world-the-lost-city-of-z#respond Mon, 03 Apr 2017 12:02:34 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30207 sound barrier 1So for a while myself and Pamela Hutchinson, of Silent London fame have been talking about doing a more regular podcast. And while we love talking about silent films, we also like new films too. And so The Sound Barrier was born over a Campari Spritz or four, we take a new release and we contrast it with a silent antecedent. And we were extremely lucky with the release dates as just released was The Lost City Of Z, about Major Percy Fawcett’s hunt for a lost civilization in the Amazon. And this seemed to compare perfectly with The Lost World, based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s pulp, in which Professor Challenger (based partially on Percy Fawcett) searches for a lost plateau of ancient creatures. . We talk exploration, beards, special effects, not so special acting and we may even, for a bonus mention The Smurfs: The Lost Village.

You can listen to it here on Silent London:
https://silentlondon.co.uk/2017/04/02/sound-barrier-the-lost-city-of-z-the-lost-world/
Here on iTunes (usual give us a review plea to bump us up search function)

And any suggestions for future pairings let us know, or just come back in a fortnight for the next one. Enjoy.

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The FT Top 41 Films 2016 – #10 – #1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/02/the-ft-top-41-films-2016-10-1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/02/the-ft-top-41-films-2016-10-1#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2017 16:34:05 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30142 tumblr_inline_o30imhR5R21rk58rr_540“Hi I’m The Brave Little Toaster, star of the 1986 film The Brave Little Toaster and its direct to video sequels The Brave Little Toaster To The Rescue, and The Brave Little Toaster Goes To Mars. You know, the late 80’s was a brilliant time to be a Toaster, we were flying all over the place on screensavers, being fancipantsed up by Duralit, and then there was me, an honest to god appliance hero for a consumer age. These days though, you’re all in tha cloud, and there is no room for toast in the cloud, so I have been told. So I sit with my friends, Lampy, Air Conditioner and Two Faced Sewing Machine and watch Entertainment Centre and all the great films that came out last year like these ones. I mean, I assume I got back from Mars, I have to admit I didn’t watch it, it seemed far fetched. ”

Cheers Toasty, and you should just be proud that as a Toaster you got your own film franchise. The mind boggles. Anyway here is the top ten:

10: Zootopia

Aka Zootropolis due to an Irish theme park, but the original US name is a better joke in a film full of better than average jokes. The lines between Pixar and Disney have blurred enough for me to expect any original Disney computer animated film to be as good as Pixar, and Zootopia certainly is up there. Plenty of thought is put into this shared world of animals, its somewhat honest conversation about prejudice and typecasting, and that whilst you can “try to be anything you want to be”, that doesn’t mean it will be easy. In the centre is a great pair of characters, Judy the rabbit cop and Nick the conman fox both constrained by the perception of their nature. Along with that though it is really funny, properly suspenseful and the visual design is detailed and exceptionally layered. It could do without the Shakira gazelle dance party ending but it’s pretty perfect outside of that.

9: Things To Come

Mia Hansen-Løve’s film is an odd beast, its a year in the life of a woman getting a divorce. Isabelle Huppert is controlled in the lead, this is not a film about histrionics. Instead it is a film about how life goes on, how there is no such thing as stability and how to cope with that change. The result is a very lived in film, it feels totally real, whilst still feeling totally like a French film (no other country has philosophers as lead characters). There are hints of regret, and political capitulation, though Huppert is too young to be active in ‘69, that seemingly French national spirit has dissipated in her life. Which leaves cynicism, and perhaps a slow lonely crawl to death. So the fact that the film ends up mildly optimistic is rather remarkable.

8: Deadpool

I’ve never liked the character of Deadpool, it’s difficult to write an ultra-violent, mentally damaged pop culture spewing character well. And whilst I don’t think the film is brilliant, it does find a way of walking that line in making the character likeable enough to tolerate his smart arsed nonsense whilst revelling in the scatalogical violence. Nearly all of the credit should go to Ryan Reynolds, an actor with a seemingly bottomless well of smarm, who manages to turn that liability into a positive. I thought some of the jokes were tin eared and obvious, but there were a lot of them, and the central sex scene is a highpoint and its game cast (bland villain notwithstanding) were good enough to keep things ticking over – though I think there is a much tauter, more subversive film waiting to get out.

7: Ghostbusters

Did it destroy your childhood?
I liked Ghostbusters. I didn’t really like Ghostbusters II. I liked Ghostbusters. A weird cover-version remake, perhaps with too many nods to the original, but a really good central gang cast of very funny women being pretty funny. And saving the world. Clearly cut to pieces in editing, with a very long Chris Hemsworth sequence relegated to the credits, and yes the villain is in the end a big whirly light in the sky, this exhibit A of the culture war was just a fun summer competence porn blockbuster. With female leads. Get over it.

6: Victoria

Victoria is primarily a gimmick film, a single uninterrupted take following our heroine first through a night out in a club, with young love, romance, and then into nastier crime shenanigans. However the gimmick here works, the actors stay on point and in character for the two hour running time and there isn’t too much tedious wheel spinning improv to keep things going. And considering where the story goes, and how serious everything gets, there is a degree to which enjoying the film is due to its technical difficulty. But there is also the joy of following Victoria herself as she undergoes massive changes (a great performance from Laia Costa), a film about spur of the moment choices, and also, presciently a film about Europe.

5: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

I was promised a heist, I was promised some spies, instead I got some dour dirty rebels arguing with each other and climbing things because there is one thing about the Star Wars Universe, there are lots of times when you have to climb. I thought it was a kind of mediocre film about a footnote to the original film, and whilst I think it did some good work fleshing out the universe (and certainly adding some diversity), it did that at the expense of telling that much of a compelling story. There were attempts to give the characters back story, but you know they are still fighting the space Nazi’s so good on them. But it was rarely boring and has opened the door for other types of Star Wars stories, hope they have a bit more oomph to them.

4: Creed

Or, if you will Rocky 7. Because despite the focus on Apollo Creed’s son, this is a film about the end of Rocky, about legacy and about what all of that means. And it cleverly has Michael B.Jordan embody the question – what does a rich kid have to fight for (and convincingly answers it)? Our highest scoring remnant of last years Oscar race, this is an exceptionally made commercial film, hitting all the right beats a boxing movie needs, and taking smart notes from the original Rocky. A smart archivist could probably make a Boyhood like epic watching Stallone age through these films, but writer director Ryan Coogler understands when to homage, when to steal and when to go to Goodison Park.

3: Love And Friendship

There is a degree of relief to see that Kate Beckinsale can not only be in a good film again, but be so good in what is basically a minor Jane Austen adaptation. Minor Jane Austen, quite major Whit Stillman, who manages to combine his ability with a dry wit, with the grandmother of the form. But it is absolutely Beckinsale’s film and she uses the opportunity to be catty, manipulative, despicable and thoroughly convincing that this is the only way for a woman in her position to get by. Excellent dimwitted support from Tom Bennett (which perhaps is part influenced by his Dad Mr Bennett) and a fluid filming style makes it a really satisfying, and very funny, watch.

2: Arrival

It is interesting that a lot of the films tiptoeing around award season have split audiences, with some very extreme reactions. I really liked Arrival, in the way of enjoying something really well made, this continues the idea of competence porn to an extreme position. Amy Adams is great in the lead role, managing her melancholic air through the machinations of the plot, making the piece feel tonally satisfactory. Others hated it, many sci fi fans felt the plot development was obvious, lots of people hated the tone, and that the whole thing was slow. I think I worked out what was going on about two minutes before the reveal, and just enjoyed how it had been set-up in form and content. Villeneuve uses the history of idea-based sc-fi film well to ground the film and also deliver his story, and the film is never not beautiful. A terrific bit of big screen film making.

1: Hail, Caesar!

I was underwhelmed by Hail, Caesar! the first time I saw it. I thought it was flippant, too light about the HUAC and blacklisting, its pastiches broad and I didn’t need to see George Clooney doing his comedy mugging again. I wanted the singing and the dancing and the comedy: you shouldn’t tease me with a Esther Williams homage and leave me hanging on for more. But on rewatch I actually saw what was going on, The Coen Brothers were throwing everything against the wall to create an alternate Hollywood where Charlton Heston had been enlightened with communist philosophy, where Gene Kelly was actually a Russian spy and this was all not going to destabilise the USA. Hail! Caesar posits the world actually suggested by the HUAC, but also one overseen by gold hearted thugs like Mannix. None of this really matters, you can enjoy the screwball plot, the set pieces and sweetness of the sprawling cast. But it was interesting that the things I wanted to give more on the first viewing, became the very things I wanted them to be on repeat, comforting and fun. And frankly its refreshing to have an adult comedy voted the best film of the year.

So there you go, argue in the comments. Exactly 50 films got more than one vote, the bottom nine (which I think is on a par with the top ten for average quality) were:
50 Popstar
49:Bone Tomahawk
48: Edge Of Seventeen
47: Train To Busan
46: Where You’re Meant To Be
45: The Nice Guys
44: Rams
43: Pete’s Dragon
42: Childhood Of A Leader

And there you go. Will you remember this months big movies when we get round to December this year or will LaLa Land and Cameraperson fade? See you in December to find out.

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The FT Top 41 Films 2016 – #20 – #11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/01/the-ft-top-41-films-2016-20-11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/01/the-ft-top-41-films-2016-20-11#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2017 17:49:46 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30096 PD12“Hi I am Elliot from Pete’s Dragon. I suppose you could call me Pete’s Dragon, except Pete clearly doesn’t own me, we are just buddies who hang in the woods. And yes, I am the proper Pete’s Dragon, not that godawful 2D drawn travesty from the 70’s. I’m the Pete’s Dragon from the much better 2016 film Pete’s Dragon, which I expect will pop up on this list of best films of 2016.

Oh, just looked below. Must be in the top ten. Well these are all pretty good too I guess. Not elegiac and majestic like some sort of kids film made by Malick in the 1970’s, not good like Pete’s Dragon, but good. ”

Thanks Elliot, but I have some bad news for you. Pete’s Dragon just missed our list at number 42. I know, it was a travesty. Don’t blow fire on me. I’d have voted you higher, except you weren’t as good as Mustang. Which is…

20: Mustang

My favourite film of 2016 is a heartbreaking but ultimate life affirming Turkish coming of age drama. Five sisters in a rural Turkish video go from the freedom of being children, to the strait-jacket of being young women, seen as sexual beasts and chattels. A film which can broadly be read as an allegory for the Turkish political situation, however this is always secondary to its developing character drama, where the villains are never as broad as the society around them, and the sense of perseverance and need for escape is palpable. It looks terrific, feels natural but draws out drama, suspense and in the end a small amount of hope.

18: = Hunt For The Wilderpeople

Number eighteen is for the recently added to Netflix feelgood films of the year! Taiki Waititi broadens his range from oddball adult comedies to a more oddball family comedy, using his eye eye for comic visual film-making second only to Edgar Wright’s. Its nice to see a modern film use New Zealand’s landscape, and its nice to see a more modern and diverse take on the “unloved kid melts heart of grumpy adult”, but Waititi in particular makes the film very personal, quirky and therefore oddly more universal. It might be a touch overlong, and a few of his regular cast members don’t quite make the grade of Sam Neill and Julian Dennison (himself included), but a very funny, very sweet film.

18: = Sing Street

The story at the heart of Sing Street is as old and corny as the movies. Boy meets girl, boy starts a band to impress girl etc. Like Hunt For The Wilderpeople its the specifics which make this such a sweet movie. The Irish cross pollination of strict Catholic upbringing coupled with eighties pop music via Top Of The Pops (the TOTP sequences are very evocative). The linking of music to escape, physical and imagined, and a nice side order of John Carney’s crowd pleasing music (his original tunes pull double duty with a lot of eighties hits and come off well). Carney is a corny film-maker by most counts, but he does tend to win you over even at his worst with half decent songs and a big hearted belief that music makes everything better. He does give his films terrible titles though.

17: Our Little Sister

There is a small coterie of FT filmgoers who like Kore-eda a lot, and they and a few others turned up for one of his gentlest films yet. And bearing in mind that this is a guy whose most suspenseful film involves some kids making a wish over a train, that is saying something. But Kore-Eda has successfully carved out a niche for his slight but hugely empathic films, an Ozu who concentrates more on the young. Our Little Sister is about three grown up sisters who inherit a half sister when their estranged father dies. And whilst the set up could have led to melodrama, instead its a more simple affair of people trying to build relationships, testing assumptions and living their life. Sometimes its good to take a breath of clean air.

16: I, Daniel Blake*

You know those films you really should see, but you don’t because you know what you’re going to get and you aren’t quite in that mood today. Well I was never in the mood for I, Daniel Blake – sorry Ken. Because I like Ken Loach, I like what he does, often how he does it and why. But I never got around to seeing this bureaucratic nightmare. I know plenty of people who loved it and no-one who hated it, and yes I will see it.

14: = Paterson

Jim Jarmusch’s strongest film since Ghost Dog, is almost a fun frippery, a celebration of utopian everyday toil. Adam Driver play Paterson a bus driver in Paterson who is also a poet for personal pleasure, with a creative wife and a day to day routine which is the very definition of quotidien. And yet this film teases at the edges with wonder (the re-occurrence of twins, the hinted but unimportant back story). There is an interesting subtext inherent in Driver’s casting, his art, quirks and affectations (no mobile phone) makes him a brother to his character in While We’re Young, but Paterson is celebrated, the model of Blue Collar man, while the hipster is derided. But does his lack of ambition make him inherently anti-American. A very pleasant experience with surprising defts to be prodded.

14: = American Honey

I thought it was horrendously overlong, and was the classic outsiders take on the US, an infatuation with youth and poverty which felt almost exploitative. But Andrea Arnold’s road movie does have a tremendous central character constantly skirting the edges of what would be tragic danger in other films, and indeed the core danger of its own film (Shia La Boeuf!) The camera loves Sasha Lane at the heart of the movie, and there are moments of energy when these kids are in the van together or listening to their music. But a bit of Andrea’s music choices incongruously slip in and make the feeling I was watching artful but artificial realism never got away from me. And did I mention how bloody long it was.

13: The Witch

To the superstitious witch hunt New England of the seventeenth century where a family find it hard to make ends meet out on the edge of civilization. What they probably don’t need is an evil witch in the woods and their goat to be the devil. The lack of ambiguity in The Witch is oddly refreshing, you can read the goings on as the symptoms of malnutrition, isolation and madness, but the film is clear what it wants you to believe. This years breakout horror movie, though it works much more as suspense than horror, there isn’t much horrific on show but you do leave the cinema with more respect for goats. Look out for Anya Taylor-Joy in the central role, compelling in her twists from scared to scary.

12: When Marnie Was There*

I was a little surprised with how well When Marnie Was There did, thinking that perhaps the bells, whistles and teenage angst of Your Name would be more strongly voted for. But the Ghibli love is strong around here, despite Marnie whizzing through the cinemas (that’s my excuse). This is right in the Ghibli comfort zone, a contemplative, gentle piece of mysterious kid fiction with an ambiguous ghostly character in one special summer. Looking forward to catching up with it.

11: The Assassin

I saw this at the LFF in 2015 and loved its look but found it a little slow and inpenetrable. Saw it again in 2016 and re-evaluated its narrative drive, slow, but surprisingly intense. Notorious as a martial arts film with barely any fighting in it, nevertheless when the action explodes it does so on a terrific scales. But instead of flashing blades we have long meditative takes of loyalty, honour and the rueful traps we find ourselves in as adults. The student becomes the master, and rejects the life. Perhaps, but as the clouds dwell upon the mountain in the films final scene it all comes together that we are all trapped in roles, unless we know how to break out.

Top Ten coming soon, honest.

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The FT Top 41 Films 2016 – #30 – #21 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/01/the-ft-top-41-films-2016-30-21 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/01/the-ft-top-41-films-2016-30-21#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2017 17:25:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30073 Zilla98_01“Hi I’m Godzilla. No honestly I am. I know what you’re thinking, that doesn’t look like Godzilla, he stands up on his hind-legs and stomps Tokyo. Well firstly who are you calling a “he”. Godzilla, ie me, is a lady. And secondly, that Godzilla is stupid – I’m the kind of more realistic Godzilla that people were crying out to see in the 90’s.”

“What’s that?”

“They didn’t? What even with Matthew Broderick? Jean Reno? What about the twist of my babies? Jamiroquai? His song is the best bit? Well that just makes me angry, makes me want to destroy Manhattan with my atomic breath.”

“I don’t? Well nuts to that.”

“Sorry about that, it turns out that I’m not the crowd pleasing monster I thought I was, instead I am a punchline to a number of jokes and I have been assigned to one of the great flops of history. Well just as well I spent last year watching the ten films which appear to come in between #30 and #21 in the FT film poll.”

Thanks rubbish 90’s Godzilla and that is a remarkable coincidence isn’t it. Well here’s what I thought of this run of movies.

30: Julieta

Almodovar returns to family psychodrama, telling the story of Julieta and her daughter, who slowly vanishes as the film goes on. That said he is working against his natural style, playing a much straighter Hitchcockian bat as he unspools his take on a couple of Alice Munro stories. At the heart is two performances (where we get to say yet again how good Almodovar is with his female actors) – Adriana Ugarte as young Julieta and Emma Suárez as the older one, and a very clever coup de cinema when they transition in the film.

29: Hell Or High Water

A hugely assured neo-Western which perhaps becomes a little too interested in making a big statement about the decline of the West, but is really good fun on the way. Chris Pine is oddly the films secret weapon, playing around his movie star looks to paint a morally conflicted man trapped by his family and situation. The small heists are fun, sometimes funny but always to the point, and the slow pursuit by Jeff Bridges in grizzled mode is perhaps a bit too mannered (and the racism to his partner becomes a little too formulaic when you discover where it is going) but this is a neo-Western with something to say and it says it pretty well.

=27: Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

It cannot be faulted for its ambition, but it can be faulted for an appallingly unengaging lead character. Eddie Redmayne (he’s an Edward really) channels Matt Smith’s Doctor Who but without the competence. Your tolerance for this stuff depends on your connection with Potter, though the 30’s New York setting is well created in Watford and the supporting leads are good but another five films of this, well I’m not sure I have the stamina.

=27: Doctor Strange

A competent Marvel movie (aren’t they all) which lacks originality in its origin story plot beats, but does have some impressively psychadelic visual effects which, by being visually interesting, marks it out from a lot of the other Marvel movies with their drab house style. Never quite dodging the controversies of its casting, but earning points for trying to engage with the hand dealt with it by the source material, it does a pretty good job of what I always thought was a dour character.

26: 10 Cloverfield Lane

A personal favourite of mine, 10 Cloverfield Land shouldn’t be tarred by the Cloverfield brand, instead be appreciated for the gnarly little kidnap drama with a wrinkle it is. Whether you like, or can get with the wrinkle probably judges how much you’ll like the film, but the first three quarters of the film where John Goodman terrorises Mary Elizabeth Winstead with life-saving kindness over uncontrollable rage is a study in small stakes terror. Goodman is excellent, and as the screws turn we get to see how resourceful Winstead is. And by the end of the film (with a properly satisfy close) she moves herself into one of the truly great screen heroines.

25: No Home Movie*

Our highest rated film voted for by only two people, so they really really liked it, is Chantal Akerman’s last film which flitted too briefly through the cinema last year. Akerman’s film is the story of her mothers life, a Auschwitz survivor though capure by casual surreptitious filming in the last few years of Maman’s life.

24: Spotlight

Oscar winning journalism proceedural from early last year. From the director of the terrible film The Cobbler. Spotlight tells a terrific tale in a taut manner, with a killer ensemble cast. It also shows how the recent history is already so far away, pre-mobile phones and the internets deconstruction of the press. Perhaps no great shakes cinematically, it is still an tense watch, and is part of a sub-section of films about people being good at their jobs that came out this year, the triumph of competence porn.

23: Kubo And The Two Strings

Laika move their stop-motion animation away from horror for kids and towards something a bit more mythical in this stab at an original Japanese folk tale. Its originality also comes with a price with issues around cultural appropriation in the voice work, and some idea of generic folklore from outsiders. Nevertheless it is ravishing to look at, and as ever the tangible stop motion animation gives a different kind of weight to the story. Its great to see Laika still ploughing their idiosyncratic forrow, and Kubo is an imperfect but charming addition to their cannon.

22: Captain America: Civil War

The popcorn film to beat last year had two things going for it. First the Russo Brothers following up Captain America: The Winter Soldier – everyone favourite Marvel film. Second, Age OF Ulton being a bit disappointing this seemed to promise a more personal tale. And it does though in reality everyone really came for the moment in the poster, two sets of superheroes running at each other and fighting at an Airport. What latterly turns out to be an almost completely animated sequence is breath-takingly well done. It is a pity the film limps on for another half hour and isn’t really about anything substantive, but at least no-one was called Martha in it.

21: Everybody Wants Some!

Richard Linklater’s spiritual sequel to Dazed And Confused is also a very personal period piece about going to college at a particular place and time (very early eighties). Its characters live in that moment and the film doesn’t seem to want to be too critical of the sexual politics and antics and basically this is what sort of lost me. I went to University about ten years later, but these were the guys, the sports guys, who bullied and irritated us then and so I couldn’t easily make the sympathetic leap. If you can, or if you want to look at it more anthropologically, the evocation of time, mood and nostalgia is peerless.

See you next week for the next ten.

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The FT Top 41 Films 2016 – #40 – #31 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/01/the-ft-top-41-films-2016-40-31 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2017/01/the-ft-top-41-films-2016-40-31#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2017 11:58:24 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30057 CjuxNFZXEAADIx-Hi, I’m Dr Zaius smoking a cigarette from The Planet Of The Apes. You know the proper Planet Of The Apes from the sixties where people acted as apes, rather than Andy Serkis wearing ping pong balls and making a fool of himself. OK it meant that Charlton Heston got a bit too personal about our personal hygiene but the allegory more or less worked. I also turned up in Beneath The Planet Of The Apes, which was surprisingly good despite Chuck ducking out and an even heavier handed Nuclear War Allegory. Since then I’ve been pretty quiet here in the potentially nuclear destroyed future, I didn’t travel in time to Escape From… and they didn’t get me back for the Tim Burton travesty and I think it is a bit early in the new cycle of Apes films for a doddery old Doctor type to turn up (though I must go see my agent just in case). Nevertheless all of this spare time has allowed me to look at the best films released in the UK in 2016, and help curate the Freaky Trigger Top 41 (because there are two number 40’s).

Thanks Dr Zaius, and no I shall not mention the Simpsons song. As he says here are the first eleven films as voted by FT readers. If there is a * I didn’t see it, otherwise this is my pithy opinion of these films. Feel free to argue in the comments.

40= Moana

Snuck under the wire at the end of the year, Disney’s new musical would probably have gone higher if seen by more. Cleverly playing with Disney tropes whilst telling a solid, exciting and clever story, it is also packed with terrific songs and a fantastic heroine. Dwayne Johnson sings Lin Manuel Miranda, and there is also a fantastically stupid chicken. Catch while it is still in the cinema.

40= Don’t Breathe

One of the year’s best thrillers (and it is a thriller despite being marketed and ending like a horror film) is a home invasion movie with a twist. The twist is that we are rooting for the invaders. Three twenty somethings decide to do one last robbery, of a blind veteran, they don’t sound very sympathetic but we soon meet the vet and his locked down creepy house and we end up with Die Hard in suburbia. Perhaps it goes too far in its final third – the basement reveal is more than a bit problematic – but it is an undeniably taut ride (last minute notwithstanding).

39.Florence Foster Jenkins

Crowd pleasing in the best sense of the word take on the FFJ story, a singer so rich and closeted that she was not aware that she lacked talent. Streep plays it broad for the comic notes, and only just lets the tragedy in around the edges giving what could be a very one dimensional film more depth than expected. What was surprising was how subtle Hugh Grant’s turn is. Whether you laugh or have issues with its central story, it is laudably thougth provoking around its tragi-comic humour.

38. Son Of Saul

Gruelling but technically impressive first person holocaust drama told from the viewpoint of a Sonderkommando, one of the Jewish prisoners tasked to “process” other prisoners to death, and the aftermath. As you might imagine, and as it should be, it is unrelenting grim, and the first person effect is appropriately disconcerting. I was not completely convinced by the narrative track taken by the film around an escape, but there is no denying the power of the piece.

36=Anomalisa

Puppet sex! Charlie Kaufmann returns with an intentionally drab, self-obsessed, stop motion animation about a man who comes to see the entire world as an extension of himself. So David Thewlis gets to play a cantankerous git, and everyone else, or at least everyone else until Jennifer Jason Leigh turns up and suddenly, briefly pricks his bubble (via some puppet sex). I found it a rather dry and insipid experience until the last two minutes when it suddenly all made sense and retroactively made the whole thing wonderful.

36=The Big Short

Adam McKay’s stab at explaining aspects of the financial crash, via broad comedy, objectification and a bait and switch structure that presents us with heroes who are actually villains. Impressive due to the breadth of the material it tries to cover, it ended up being too bitty and too masculine for my liking. I think I prefer how McKay dealt with the same info as infographics over the credits of The Other Guys.

35 Finding Dory*

I avoid Pixar sequels on the whole, though this apparently continues the charm of Finding Nemo (which I was never that keen on in the first place). But apparently it has some interesting things to say about family, and living with short term memory loss, and Ellen DeGeneres is always a game voice actor. I understand dodgy stuff happens with salt water / fresh water fish swapping environments which would irritate the hell out of me.

34. Room

Featuring Brie Larson’s Oscar winning performance, Emma Donoghue’s adaptation of her own novel attempts to dial down the lurid aspects of an abduction, imprisonment and rape scenario and instead tries to focus on the normalisation of a one room upbringing and the subsequent affect on seeing the world. Larson is does a good job at showing how once escaped a new prison from freedom can be constructed, and Jacob Tremblay is pre-naturally good as the central child actor. I found its attempt to generalise from a handful of cases not without issue and Lenny Abrahamson perhaps could have done more around the soundtrack with disorientation, but it worked for a lot of people.

33. Fire At Sea*

I failed to see it but hope to catch up soon, in a year full of pretty good documentaries, this urgent piece about the lengths taken for migrants to get into Europe impressed a lot (5 in the Guardian poll).

32. Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier’s follow up to Blue Ruin is an intense survival thriller about a hardcore band playing at the wrong gig to the wrong audience at the wrong time. The band are a perfectly jaded community who fight, and the gel as the situation around them gets worse, and Patrick Stewart seems begrudgingly terrifying as the leader of the White Supramicists they get mixed up in. Brutal, but very direct, with inventively new cinematic threats (you have never seen dogs this nasty), it is really, really good film.

31. Midnight Special

Jeff Nichols take on a Spielbergian theme, special kid is abducted, then reabducted by his parents to take him to a secret rendezvous where his powers will be unleashed. It feels choppy in places, and some pieces laid on the board don’t pay off, but Nichols yet again draws out an intense Michael Shannon performance, and an even better Joel Edgerton performance, to make this almost hokey road movie try to mean something. Perhaps the pay-off doesn’t work (it had too much in common with Tomorrowland for my liking), but there are a lot of risks being taken and a lot going on here.

The next ten, and it will be ten, will turn up later in the week, sadly not including Pete’s Dragon which just missed the cut (but I recommend you seeing – its like a Malick film for ten year olds but in a good way).

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2016 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2016/12/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2016 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2016/12/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2016#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2016 16:25:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30037 red_skelton“Hi I am Red Skelton, exceptionally annoying star of the 40’s and 50’s – trust me there was no comic turn I could flatten, or subtle humour I couldn’t mug into submission. Named Red due to my bright red hair often showcased in the black and white films I starred in. Trust me, I was terrible, just watch me in Neptune’s Daughter, or any number of comic MGM musicals I was shoehorned into to ostensibly make funny, but actually made the subbest of par. I can but have dreamt of being in a film nominated for the Freaky Trigger films of the year, partially because I was rarely in a good film, but mostly because I would have loved to have lived so long to see 2016. How are the jet packs?”

It worked so well last year, so what the hey, let’s spin the bottle on another Freaky Trigger movie poll. If we learnt anything last year its that the block vote of everyone who sees Pixar films will out. I wonder if everyone rushed out to see Finding Dory though or if something else has filled that hole? Batman vs Superman perhaps (hmmm).

The rules are the same as all of the other FT polls. Vote for UP TO 20 titles IN ORDER and send your vote to ftfilmpoll AT gmail DOT com. As long as the film was properly released in cinemas (VOD / Multi-Platform) 2016 in the UK it will be counted. I might tap you up for a write up or some words if your choice makes the list, so consider your responses. And if you only saw five films this year and still want to vote for Suicide Squad then do so.

I think it has been an interesting year for movies, and I’ll have no trouble identifying twenty great films, and there are loads I am catching up with over the next fortnight, as should you! Its better than Turkey with the family. Feel free also to use the comments to query methodology, remind people of a film that came out in January, question every aspect of this project… Votes will close on 11.59pm GMT on 5th January 2016 (to all a little catchup…)
So remember:
– The order of your top 20 is important! Your #1 will be allocated more points than #20.
– If you can’t think of 20 films then 10 or 14 or 1 is just fine.
And see you for the rundown in January.
*Cos to qualify at lest two people have to nominate it.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2015: #10 – #1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2015-10-1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2015-10-1#comments Sun, 24 Jan 2016 13:38:21 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29676 4835951786_b44ef39807_b“Hi, I’m Gongy the Rank Movies Gong, who you might know from the intro to any Rank Movie you’ll have seen between 1935 and 1980. And when I wasn’t being banged by an oiled up muscled bodybuilder I liked nothing more than settling down to watch the movie I prefaced. Now working for J Arthur meant I didn’t always get to see classics, but I think I put enough time in the cinema to judge the odd movie, and am in a perfect position to hand out the -ahem – Gongs in this poll.

I do miss getting banged though. Do people not “get it on” in 2015? Are there no vaguely racist kung fu movies I can cameo in to instigate a fight? Roll uncontrollably down a hill? A Gong gets restless in retirement. All the Gongmen are dead.”

Cheers Gongy, and I hope you enjoy this batch of pretty decent reasons to spend time in front of a screen. But not right in front of the screen Gongy, cos we won’t be able to see the films.

10: Bridge Of Spies

Beneficiary of lots of mid-range votes, Bridge Of Spies is Speilberg mounting an handsome spy historical and doing a solid job in the process. Clearly not being damned by faint praise, the key joy in BOS is to see two almost diametrically oppositional forms of acting (Hanks, movie star – Rylance, theatre) rub against each other for the benefit of the audience (in my mind Hanks is better here than Rylance and his made up accent). A fascinating if sometime simplistic piece about a bizarre age (the Cold War) which is slipping from memory. And (a) U2 gets blown up too.

9: 45 Years*

It slipped by me while I was on holiday, this is a small film with a terrific premise, what happens when past love, love before your present partner, revisits. A small film about secrets and lies – the acting and direction (by Andrew Heigh who can’t seem to put a foot wrong at the moment) takes the original short story and twists it into something new.

8: Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens

Is it just the combination of relief, timing and the fact everyone saw it that has dropped The Force Awakens here? Probably, though as a stab at grabbing the sensation of the pulps that Lucas originally was emulating, and also as a retread of Star Wars it works remarkably well. Even its myriad flaws can be rationalised, cyclical stories are as rampant in mythology as they are in Hollywood producerland, and in having a female lead and opening a can of worms with a stormtrooper that turns, there is fodder for plenty more enjoyable trips to the cinema.

7: Clouds Of Sils Maria

The most nose in the air arthousey movie in the top ten, Olivier Assayas’s meditation on art, aging, suicide and the internet age is deliberate in everything it does. From its play within a play, to its casting, to its elliptical ending, nothing her is just standing for itself. There is a chance therefore that this would be infuriating, looking for symbolism, looking for wry nods about the nature of theatre and acting. That it isn’t is down to Assayas’s playfulness but more around Kristen Stewart’s turn as Juliette Binoche’s personal assistant, who enigmatically plays with the ideas int he movie and eventually epitomises them.

6: Mistress America

The second (and better) Noah Baumbach movie in the list sees him reteam with Greta Gerwig for a screwball comedy of ambition. A companion piece to Frances Ha, Mistress America returns to the itch of what actually happens to manic dream pixie girls when they stop being “Girls” any more. Gerwig, excellent and being just a little uncomfortable in her skin, mentors potential step-sister Lola Kirke (even better), a lonely freshman in New York. It starts as a fun New York nightlife movie, develops into a screwball farce and ends as a bittersweet coming of age drama where the characters feel lived in enough to earn their redemption. Extroverts need love too.

5: Brooklyn

The other solid picture of autumn, which pairs interestingly with Bridge Of Spies, because it is also an acting masterclass. But here we have Saoirse Ronan who is a terrifically naturalistic actor, but also a star, turning what feels like a small story of Irish immigration in the 50’s and makes it vitally compelling. The stakes, on paper, couldn’t be lower, but this adaptation manages to grip an audience and successfully get you invested in the micro and macro story of economic migration.

4: Mad Max: Fury Road

Broom Broom. Potentially a perfect distillation of the cinematic power of cars, this revisit to the economically implausible world of Mad Max is still just a big chase movie. And it can get a little tiring in its two hours. But credit to Miller for the invention on screen, the complete understanding of how enjoyably bonkers his fantasy world can be and putting at the heart of it Charlize Theron as a woman searching for redemption, mirroring Max’s usual arc with more sympathy than anyone would expect.

3: Inherent Vice

I am no fan of Paul Thomas Anderson, finding many of his films overly mannered, certainly overlong and often grasping for importance they don’t earn. Inherent Vice, in adapting Pynchon, and not reaching for anything beyond trying to emulate a sense of the novel, makes his most successful film in my view. Shambling around LA, it plays as a weird counter-part to Chinatown, a drug addled noir which sometimes seeks the point, sometimes is looking for a good time, but usually looking for a gag. Anderson should make more comedies.

2: Carol

Oh Carol. This top two were way ahead of the pack, and whilst soundly beaten in the end, Carol stands as a really, really good movie. You always do yourself a favour starting with Patricia Highsmith, and Carol has a compelling story which is only elevated by Todd Haynes choices. The cast is great, with Rooney Mara transforming seemingly into Audrey Hepburn by the end. Designed to the nth degree and structured perfectly, there is immense pleasure in most of the frames, but as a totality it is a wonderful film.

1: Inside Out

aka Pixar Returns. A clear winner, potentially because nearly everyone saw it, Inside Out is both a compelling adventure story in itself and a breathtaking piece of world-building. The idea, in itself, is not a new one – The Numbskulls and the Greeks have been there already. But in configuring a macro story to house the micro drama, and in constructing a plausible and useful model on human behaviour to allow for both the dram and possibly explain all human behaviour is a pretty amazing job. Harnessing terrific voice talent, coupled with exemplary character design, the film also manages to throw in art history gags along with its poignancy. A well deserving winner.

And there you go? Will any of this years Oscarbait have the lasting power to be remembered for next year. Have we got any super sequels turning up that could end up in this list (two sequels in the top ten!) Thank you to the FreakyTrigger Academy for voting, with a top eight with seven out of them being about women shows there are some changes occuring out there, may diversity of talent and stories continue…

#freakytiggerfilmpollsowhite

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2015: #20 – #11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2015-20-11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2015-20-11#comments Sun, 17 Jan 2016 14:21:12 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29564 zbov0Bj“Hi I’m Mr Narwhal from Elf, you may remember my loveable show-stopping turn in what has now firmly become part of the Christmas canon. There goes Buddy the Elf, leaving the North pole and up I pop saying “Bye Buddy, Hope you find your Dad!” And time was that I thought my scene stealing appearance would spin off into a film of my own, say The Amazing Adventures Of Mr Narwhal. I even wrote a treatment Mr Narwhal Goes To Washington, a nautical remake of Mr Smith Goes To Washington, where I would fillibuster to stop deep sea Atlantic dredging. But sadly it wasn’t to be, and John Favreau stopped returning my calls around the time he made Iron Man 2 (I know King Shark is a DC character and I’m not a shark but give a narwhal a break). So these days I can be found doing Harry Nilsson covers on Thursday nights in The Red Lion on Glendale.

And of course I am here to present the FreakyTrigger 20 – 11 countdown of movies. I don’t get out to the movies much (its the nose), but I’ve seen half of them on screener and they would have all been improved by the appearance of an anthropomorphic Narwhal. Damn my agent.”

Cheers Mr Narwhal, and I too can definitely see you fitting in our first film here.

20: A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence*

Roy Andersson’s third part of his “Living” trilogy: which are droll, elongated sketches winding in and out of each other slowly building into a thematic whole about – er – life. Its probably unfair to say that having seen the previous two I don’t need to see this one, but checking the trailer I’m pretty sure there has been no huge stylistic shift. Colour palate all greys, greens and browns. Long pauses. Absurdism. I’m sure its great, and I will catch up with it on a slow, Scandinavian night soon.

19: Spy

It could do with a better title, and is a touch overlong, but Spy is a solid action comedy, which spends a lot of time playing Melissa McCarthy against type until letting her develop into her comfort zone. Equally as impressive is how the film gets there with a clear commitment to positive humour, the comedy comes from situation and character and whilst there are plenty of cheap gags, they are firmly against the dicks. And Jason Statham fills that roll with aplomb.

18: While We’re Young

A strong Noah Baumbach comedy essaying generational anxiety and the ache of aging, and no longer being cool. In the process it does a good job at interrogating what cool is, and how pursuing it is a pretty vacuous aim. Happily taking potshots at both generations, Stiller and Driver are equally ridiculed; it is the epitome of the smart New York comedy which is actually about something. At least until the last few minutes when it destroys everything it previously appeared to stand for.

17: The Diary Of A Teenage Girl

A sexual coming of age film which is disturbing on paper, but less so on screen. Not because the relationship between Bel Powley’s Minnie and Alexander Skarsgard’s Munroe isn’t still strange and paeodophilic in nature, but because the tale is told from Minnie’s point of view who is using it as a stepping stone in her own sexual awakening. And by rooting it in that autobiographical position she ceases to be a victim, even if we can see the power plays going on, and an active participant who grows and eventually rejects what she manages to see as a childish thing. Kristen Wiig as Minnie’s mother is also tremendous, and the 70’s San Francisco art design (and animations) are all of a part to make this feel a completely real slice of life.

16: Birdman or (The unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance)

There is one sequence in Birdman, where Michael Keaton’s Riggan confronts Lindsay Duncan’s New York Theatre critic where all of the praise for the film is justified. Duncan shows in her five minutes how to captivate an audience, how drive a point home about vanity of actors, or critics, of the whole ridiculous sideshow of naval gazing about high art and low art. Duncan and Keaton’s oppositional but well defined infantile behaviour, name calling, petty prejudice is a real cracking moment of cinema and is done with a camera in a bar and two actors elevating the material. The film surrounding it, with its diagetic jazz drumming, its pointless single take ellipsis, its multiple dumb endings and its grasp for any kind of verisimilitude because Keaton once played Batman is embarrassing tosh. A stinker.

15: Appropriate Behaviour

A droll little comedy which lopes along and is carried completely by the charms of its lead actor, writer and director Desiree Akhavan. Luckily these charms are manifold, she is self-deprecating, bitingly funny, sexually open and calamitous and is more than able to create an atmosphere of melancholy during farce, and humour during the worst drama. It particularly manages to conjure up that horrific sense of neediness around a break up, and slowly deconstruct the desperation as the rest of the world continues to be crazy around you. One of those polished indie gems that you walk out smiling and wanting the Google the lead to see what else she has done (lots of web series is the answer).

14: Duke Of Burgundy

Dreamy, dreamlike love story which occupies a space between a 70’s Euro-porn pastiche and a very sophisticated psycho-sexual drama. It posits an all female secret valley of researchers who live in beautiful houses, in glorious countryside, soundtracked perfectly with the right sense of menace. And the snake in this garden of Eden is love or tedium. What happens in an S&M relationship when the sadist isn’t really into it any more. One of a number of films this year where the satisfaction comes from seeing a directors vision be completely and sumptuously executed.

13: It Follows

Horror movie fatigue leads generally to two modes of appreciation. First the slapping on the back of a film which has no new tricks but employs its tricks classically very well. So the haunted house up to elevens of The Conjuring was seen as a return to form for the genre post torture porn. But there is also subversion of traditional tropes, or playing in a sandpit just adjacent. Here the classic Final Girl trope (the virgin survives) is upended because here is a monster you literally pass on via sex. Like Ringu it plays with the morality of passing on something deadly, with a second killer idea. Its monster follows you, slowly, inexorably (again borrowing zombie/mummy tropes with a bit of shapeshifting). Some people complained it didn’t follow its own rules, I disagree but more importantly it is a genuinely affecting piece of film-making (it know We Follow too), with smart teenagers adrift in an seemingly timeless Detroit.

12: Selma

Of last years Oscar batch (or Oscar snubbed batch) Selma is in many ways the most traditional. It tells a complex story in a straightforward narrative fashion, simplifying where it needs to, to successful recreate important moments in US history. It knows who its hero is, Martin Luther King, and despite not being able to use any of his speeches conjures up a very human portrayal. And whilst there isn’t much to do except tell the story, and perhaps ask some questions about how far we have actually moved in the interim, staging the marches and creating that tension is more than just pointing and shooting. Ava DuVernay assembles a great cast, stages the big and small action with flair and has a point of view.

11: Whiplash

Technically extremely adept obsession movie about a perfectionist jazz drummer and his abusive and bullying teacher. When you are watching it the drive from both Miles Teller and J.K.Simmons convince you that there may be something in this, that pushing a player to destruction is the only way to create fine art. This feeling doesn’t last, and I think isn’t supposed to last, and there are two hints to this. First, in the final performance, when Teller goes hell for leather, we don’t actually hear the audiences reaction (and a ten minute drum solo? At the Lincoln Centre?) But more importantly that the artistic endeavour we are supposed to care about is jazz drumming.

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Feeding The 13,000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2016/01/feeding-the-13000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2016/01/feeding-the-13000#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2016 17:42:07 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29629 Last night, in my commitment to not kowtow to the critics, I decided to watch 2014 flop comedy Let’s Be Cops. It was, I believe, reviewed particularly harshly because it came out just after the Ferguson shooting. The plot of Let’s Be Cops is two emasculated shlubs dress up as cops for a fancy dress party, and then get mistaken for actual cops, where suddenly with their new found authority they exploit and bully their neighbourhood remorselessly for cheap laughs. The cheap laughs are not in the film, and I get the sense that the public did not want to see people pretending to be cops getting away with figurative murder when there were actual cops bullying and intimidating a community and actually getting away with murder.

I let the movie roll though, and as I had been thoroughly distracted let the entirety of the credits roll too. Past the best boy and the gaffer. Past the music credits. Past even the Technicolor roundel thingy. And at the very end, where “James Bond Will Be Back” would be in a Bond movie was this message:
lbc final

This has just come after four minutes of credits which has made it quite clear that lots of people, more than you could imagine, worked on this film. So why is this here? Is it to make me feel better for wasting money on this lousy piece of work? Is it to show what a great employer Hollywood in general is, the Let’s Be Cops family in particular. Was it for some form of tax break?

All I’m saying is that one of the 13,000 people could have mentioned to the mucky-mucks that the film hasn’t got any jokes in it.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2015: #30 – #21 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2015-30-21 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2015-30-21#comments Sun, 10 Jan 2016 18:10:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29502 superpanavisioncamera-r“Hi, I’m a Super Panavision 70mm camera, in fact I may well be the last one in existence. Which sure makes me feel lonely. But what is this, Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan both eulogising me as a symbol of a golden age. Both trying to use myself and new fangled cameras to show stuff in Super Panavision? Oh look, they are scrapping over me, like two suitors in a 1950’s beach movie not realising that seeing two grown men fight over a camera is going to put me off of both of them. Oh, it appears Quentin Tarantino has won, and is going to use me.

I do hope he doesn’t want to fuck me.”

Thank you Super Panavision 70mm Camera, and no, do not worry. Quentin merely wants to use your super high resolution abilities to film what amount to a chamber piece in one room. But that is for next years film poll, possibly. And in the meantime here is the next run of films (as ever * means I haven’t seen it yet so the write up may be second hand, speculative or a lie).

30: Eden

Seemingly aimless history of French dance music via a very minor player in the scene which suddenly coalesces in the last half hour into a brilliant portrait of nearly making it. In a world where everyone has had something published, everyone has DJ-ed at the Scala, everyone co-wrote a Radio 2 comedy show, Eden shows the potential toll of waiting around to make it. And that there is life after not making it. With additional Daft Punk gags.

29:The Look Of Silence

Joshua Oppenheimer’s companion piece to The Act Of Killing, is a much more personal exploration of the Indonesian purge and its aftermath. Whilst The Act Of Killing was broader in scope and used cinema itself to help those who committed atrocities to condemn themselves, The Look Of Silence is much more personal following a family questioning the people who killed their brothers. Undoubtedly powerful, the personal edge raises the stakes as well as secondary ethical questions (though not to be conflate with the ethics of genocide). The ultimate in gotcha journalism.

28: Tangerine

Two transsexual sex workers stomp around Los Angeles in search of their goals while a cab driver tries to keep his sexual proclivities from his mother-in-law on Christmas Eve. Its a tale about how tough it is on the bottom, and also very funny, if a little violent in places and a touch depressing when you consider the long term future of some of these characters. Shot on a souped-up iPhone and looking great, it is a relentless film which in no way soft soaps the difficulties of these situations, but still finding hope and joy in small moments. And you’ll never feel more sorry for a doughnut shop employee on Christmas Eve.

26=: Stray Dogs*

The next two are the highest placed films with only two votes, seemingly for very different reasons. Stray Dogs snuck out and wasn’t easy to see, from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang who has significant history of making contemplative, often gently magical realist mood pieces (Good Bye Dragon Inn, What Time Is It There). Ewan said “It’s bleak, and it’s slow, but it’s almost hallucinatory in its intensity, and to my mind the narrative ellipses and obfuscations just make it all the more compelling.” Ie, Ewan’s kind of film. (You can read the rest of his review here: https://filmcentric.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/jiao-you-stray-dogs-2013/ )

26=: Magic Mike XXL*

Was the world waiting for a sequel to Soderbergh’s Magic Mike? And one without Soderbergh at the helm. It looked like a cheap cash grab, to play more to the Magic Mike audience who wanted more of the stripping and dancing. And there is nothing wrong with a solid exploitation movie, but once Magic Mike XXl came out, a different story was being told. Its key artistic selling point was the dance sequences were sensuously and joyously choreographed, its central thesis being to turn this clichéd one last hurrah tour into pure entertainment. And from what I have heard, it succeeds with aplomb. In year where Channing Tatum was increasingly being shoehorned into prestige pictures it is good to see parts of Hollywood realise that his dancing skills can be as prestige as you need.

25: Mommy

Xavier Dolan’s spit of a movie about a near feral kid and his near hopeless mother trying to create some semblance of a working family unit. It undermines the formula it cleaves to at every turn, and is somewhat fatalistic about the outcomes (and also sits in a ridiculous science fictional framing device which makes no sense). But the central acting is raw and powerful, the film is also very funny in moments. But it is mainly here for its coup the cinema midway where hope is glimpsed and dashed; no film has ever made it quite so clear the effect of aspect ratio on its viewers.

24: Girlhood

Céline Sciamma third female coming of age film after Water Lillies and Tomboy, and the most complex – aiming at the tower blocks of the Paris Suburbs and a girl with no prospects slowly learning to find her voice. Lurching between violence, and camaraderie, Girlhood paints a bleak vision of opportunities whilst slowly empowering its lead character to at least be able to make a decision at the end. And never mind how bad things are, there is always music and dancing, and people you love, and the film shows how those brief pleasures can be enough to live for.

23: Force Majure

Hell is other people, particularly your family. A mannered, very French dark comedy of fragile masculinity, where during a controlled avalanche a father instinctively gets his priorities all wrong and has to spend the rest of the film with his family staring at him like he is the piece of shit he is. A droll middle class cabin fever nightmare set in Alpen scenery as melodramatic as the story underpinning this film, its a expertly directed piece of domestic hell.

22: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

A big festival hit, this Persian language horror billed itself as the first Iranian Vampire Western, which is to say it is a gorgeous puddle of Lynchian weirdness which, for what it lacks in narrative coherence, makes up in spades for allegorical and artistic strength. From its already iconic poster, to its playfulness with its own setting and identity, it shows that there are still things you can do with vampires. But it also shows that quirky low budget stylishness coupled with a bit of clever marketing nous can make a little film soar.

21: Amy*

I think the main reason I did not want to go and see Amy is that I knew it would be good. Or at least consummately well made, and perfect at reminding me of what Amy Winehouse was so good at, and therefore why and how her death was such a tragedy. Kapadia had managed to make me care immensely about Ayrton Senna, and I had little connection, whereas I already cared about Winehouse. His skill at delicately combining extant footage overplayed with incisive interviews was going to be too powerful for me, and from what I understand the film has some interesting things to say about media and audience complicity too.

There you go, an ultra rare camera presenting the next ten in the list (the camera does seem a bit shell shocked from its Hateful Eight experience). Later this week we will hit the top twenty where we have lots of sex, a bit of yoga and an intolerable amount of jazz drumming.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2015: #40 – #31 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2015-40-31 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2015-40-31#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2016 10:05:05 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29487 harrisonfordsilent“Hi I’m Harrison Ford, the silent movie star with a somewhat unusual name, welcoming you to the first ten films in the Freaky Trigger countdown of the top movies of 2015. Now, truth be told I haven’t seen any of these films on account of being dead for 58 years. I am however pleased in perusing this number forty to thirty one list that no films with my coat-tail dragging namesake turn up – a man whose acting is a wooden as his carpentry. Which is to say it is wooden, as that is what carpentry is; I was a silent movie actor and I am still not all that confident with my words, especially since my death. So sit back and see what talkie nonsense people seem to rate these days.”

Thanks Harrison and I daresay if we were doing the 1928 poll Three Weekends with you and Clara Bow would have made the list. But we aren’t and having had a charitable 24 responses we can call this inaugural film poll a success. Just a reminder that to make the list a film had to receive more than one vote (in the case of a tie, a film with more votes was place higher). Films with an (*) I haven’t had a chance to see so I will semi crowdsource an opinion from those who did…

40: London Road (dir by Rufus Norris)

On the whole successful adaptation of the National Theatre verbatim musical about the murders of prostitutes on London Road in Ipswich, which as a sentence and idea shows the hoops which the film has to jump through to work. Some people loved the way real speech was twisted into rhythmic forms to highlight the characterisation, some people hated it with a passion.

39: Sunset Song* (dir Terence Davies)

A labour of love for Terence Davies, an adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbons classic Scottish novel. Apparently it looks fantastic, has some good central turns from Agnyss Deyn and Peter Mullan but was possibly a little too hang tied to the books to soar as a movie. Ewan’s review here is tentatively positive.

38: Phoenix (dir Christian Petzold)

Post WWII a captured Jewish survivor of the concentration camp returns to Berlin nervous, shattered and with plastic surgery to hide her scars. She discovers her husband also survived the war and he sees her, and realises that her resemblance to his dead wife means he could use her to potentially get her inheritance. What sounds like a ridiculously melodramatic plot is contrasted with terrifically naturalistic acting and a devastating final sequence where nothing and everything happens.

37: The Martian (dir Ridley Scott)

Solidly crowd-pleasing adaptation of the best selling book, where Matt Damon is stuck on Mars and sciences the shit out of the situation. Star-studded, action-packed pro-science film with no villains, it stands and falls on the quality of its script, which Scott, a lousy director of late, cannot fuck up. Nevertheless, we really shouldn’t be letting Matt Damon go anywhere, so we don’t have to rescue him any more. Also, it is set about ten years in the future, there is no way someone is just stuck with 70’s hits on an iPod, even if we have the happy outcome of Starman on rotation.

36: Spectre (dir Sam Mendes)

Personally I thought it was a pretty weak Bond movie, opening sequence notwithstanding, but a number of people threw it a bone. Craig seems weary with the role, and the two villains really embody the banality of evil, one side a government pen pusher, the other because we are all villained out with him. Still it had the usual visual wow, Lea Seydoux is a effective Bond girl and its almost worth it for disinterested Craig on the interview circuit.

35: Love And Mercy (dir Bill Pohlad)

Two films for the price of one, we get a pretty regular bio-pic of young Brian Wilson in his prime, creating his best music and slowly going off the rails. And at the same time we see an older Brian Wilson, falling in love with a carsaleswoman and how she helps him finally break free from the controlling influence of Dr Eugene Landy. Paul Dano is a perfect young Wilson, and John Cusack looks like an older Dano (without ever looking, or really acting, like Wilson). For all its flaws, the film has an interesting biopic half, mixed with a highclass Hallmark romance half anchored around Elizabeth Banks strong performances. Lacks a killer Manzarek moment though.

34: Shaun The Sheep: The Movie (dir Mark Burton & Richard Starzak)

One for the silent movie fans, Aardman’s big screen leap for the kiddie pleasing sheep is actually the stop motion animators finest physical performance. The sheep don’t talk, and their baa’s don’t get very expressive so it is down to the animators to sell the whole story and all of the gags. And like Aardmann at their best, the set pieces and gags are excellently set up, and the characterisation in the clay is fantastic. Truly one for all ages, it wasn’t just nominated by people with kids!

33: Grandma (dir Chris Weitz)

A perfect little modern family comedy, irrascable lesbian grandmother, pregnant granddaughter looking for money to get an abortion. Grandma has a consistently funny and matter of fact script, consistently well played but mainly built around a very strong and comfortable Lily Tomlin performance. Julia Garner’s frizzy haired granddaughter grows admirably in the film, but it knows its point, it avoids needless sentimentality whilst dealing with the most sentimental of topics and gets out under 80 minute. Terrific stuff.

32: Timbuktu (dir Abderrahmane Sissako)

So your in Africa and ISIS and their like have taken over your area. What does this do to you if you are a kid, a woman, a farmer, the resistance. Dripping with sadness, and framed and shot beautifully, Sissako threads moments of droll satire in and around his ultimately tragic story. Perhaps it is a bit broad in places, and is quite happy to settle on some beautiful imagery rather than build a complex narrative, but it is an undeniably powerful movie.

31: Ex Machina (dir Alex Garland)

There are two views of Ex Machina. One is seeing it as a small, deliciously creepy piece of thoughtful science fiction about artificial intelligence and gender roles. The other is to see it as the obvious first directed film of Alex Garner who has clearly read too many Tharg’s Future Shocks in 2000AD. I sort of thought the latter, and its joys (including the best dance sequence of the year) were more in seeing a pretty classic AI movie made and being acted extremely well. Also notable for being the first of nine films released this year with Alicia Vikander in it, and probably her best.

“Hey, Harrison Ford (yes, that one) here again, and they all sound jolly interesting – except I don’t know whata Bond movie is and that Ex Machina just looks like a Metropolis rip-off to me. Still we will be back soon with the next ten movies for me to catch up on the streaming beyond the grave services. Till then.”

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The Anxiety Of Binksfluence https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/12/the-anxiety-of-binksfluence https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/12/the-anxiety-of-binksfluence#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2015 11:46:26 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29362 jarjar This is about Star Wars: The Force Awakens. You should not read it if you plan to see the film, care about spoilers, and haven’t yet. I haven’t spelt out what happens but you’ll work it out.

On Facebook I made the mercifully obscure joke that Star Wars: The Force Awakens would be like The Malloreon, David Eddings’ awful sequel to his fantasy saga The Belgariad, in which precisely the same plot repeats itself with minor variations, and this is accepted by the characters as a principle of cosmic order. This comparison turns out to be unkind, but not entirely untrue. Obviously TFA is a soufflé of callbacks, mirrors and echoes, which is probably less irksome to the casual viewer like me than to the long-term fan who wanted something new. And the constant parallels aren’t just fun (or not-fun), they’re useful. JJ Abrams uses them to hide the film’s big twist in plain sight. I was too busy noticing the echoes to pay attention to their logic – it’s so enjoyable seeing someone settle into the Kenobi role that I forgot what the Kenobi role actually involves.

More generally the lack of something new becomes a feature, Eddings-style. In a dualist universe ordered around the yin and yang of the Force, its cosmic principle and plot device, of course patterns are likely to repeat as the balance between the Dark Side and Light Side ebbs and flows. This is also happening for metatextual reasons – fans wanna see what fans wanna see, and the film is a demarcation exercise in What Star Wars Is which pointedly doesn’t include most of what it was between 1999 and 2005.

But that doesn’t mean Abrams can’t use the sense of repetition to thicken the plot and the stakes. Star Wars gets called “mythology” in a rather lazy way (see also Marvel Comics and Tolkien and Harry Potter and anything else which is a bit fantastic and sells a lot). But The Force Awakens has some of the textures of mythology people aren’t usually talking about when they say that: duty and patricide and exhaustion, characters trapped in the amber of story and family.

Only one element of Star Wars (1977) is genuinely unrecoverable – a sense of lightness that was lost with the Oedipal turn taken in Empire and never reversed. The Force Awakens could have tried to step back from it – instead, Abrams doubled down, drawing more characters into the cycle, growing and tightening the Theban knot that Star Wars has become.

So the central thematic question of The Force Awakens is also the metatextual question – do you continue a story or break out of it? And – whatever your answer – how? Since we know that Disney plans to continue this particular story until long after anyone who saw Star Wars in 1977 is dead, this question is both very urgent and somewhat rigged. But The Force Awakens does its best to be even-handed. Finn, who breaks out of his story and throws off a lifetime of programming, is heroic, something new in the universe. But Leia, who simply keeps on going, is heroic too, and Luke, who steps away from his story (and inescapably starts this one rolling), is more ambiguous. And then there’s Ren and Rey.

Ren is one of the film’s best ideas – he’s pathetic, a weak man paralysed by history and by his sense, entirely shared by the audience, that he’s no Darth Vader. But of course he is a Darth Vader – the Darth Vader from the Star Wars lacuna nobody cares about, the gap between Episodes III and IV, the helmeted badass with the emo brat still perilously close to the surface.

Ren’s tragedy isn’t exactly that he can’t break out of his story, but that he imagines (with his decisive action) that he is cauterising the issue and definitively choosing not to. But behind that is a deeper issue – he’s so caught in the tangle of family and Force that either path he takes feels predictable. It’s possibly putting too much weight on a few well-turned grimaces to suggest Adam Driver’s performance captures that – but it’s a real feeling, that spoiled adolescent sense that every possible outcome for your life is kind of corny so you might as well really fuck things up for yourself.

What about Rey? My nine-year-old son pointed out something. In the 1977 film, Luke is obviously the hero, but as counterweight to that he is generally belittled by Han and Leia – he’s a kid, a farmboy, etc. Rey has no such opposition – to meet her is to be awed by her general competence. But that does also have its counterweight – for all that she is the film’s lead, gets the final showdown with the villain, and so on, it’s clear her plot hasn’t exactly got going yet. The outline of Rey’s choice – do I fully become part of this story or not? – is obvious, but she never quite gets to a point where she has to make it. Even in the final shot, she’s looking for someone else to be the main character. Luke was born to be a Star Wars hero. Rey is firmly established as someone strong enough to get the choice.

All of which isn’t exactly a deep reading – as is obvious from the shot where Ren makes his good-or-evil choice just as the sun is extinguished and night falls, this still isn’t a series which ‘does’ subtlety much. But Rey’s indecision has its metatextual mirror, even so. This is a film which starts off with a straightforwardly heroic dude (affable plot-free goon Poe Dameron) acquiring a black sidekick, and then simply cuts off the apparent hero fifteen minutes in to keep the focus firmly on a black man and a woman. Rey’s question – am I actually going to be a main character in this story? – is answered strongly and affirmatively by the film itself, but she’s the last to be convinced.

It’s Disney’s ultimate answer to the film’s question. Do they break out of the story, or continue it? They have, and take, a chance to do both. Tell the same stories but with new protagonists. There’s disappointment in that, but credit too – it’s the same solution Marvel Comics has hit on recently. But Marvel Comics sells a couple of hundred thousand copies at best. The Force Awakens will be seen by hundreds of millions.

Star Wars is often talked about in terms of childhood wonder. The Force Awakens is not a startlingly exciting film – it has beautiful designs and great set-pieces, but Star Wars birthed the era of set-pieces and effects, and has sometimes struggled to live in it. My kids can go from seeing it in the cinema to seeing a dozen other epics on Netflix the next day. But the simple fact of making Rey and Finn the leads is something kids genuinely notice. They might not be able to articulate it – my nine-year-old fumbled to explain why he’d liked the film but been so wrong-footed by Rey’s prominence (“It wasn’t about who I thought it would be about”). But they feel it.

I left the film happy. Its flaws – its plot is a lazy hopscotch of set-pieces, the background is hazy, the villains as idiotic as ever – are not new and not fatal. I want to see more of the new characters, not the old, which has to count as a win. I will see Episode VIII with enthusiasm. What I hope is that when Rey makes her decision, her answer isn’t to become part of the old stories but to write a new one – but then this is a franchise, the strongest force of all.

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The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2015 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/12/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2015 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/12/the-freaky-trigger-movie-poll-2015#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2015 13:19:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29355 49220cac244db“Hi I am Kevin Costner, star of Waterworld and The Postman, but in this instance from the poorly German Dubbed Version of Swing Vote, here to sell to you the concept of the FreakyTrigger Movie Poll 2015. I have been drafted in (though Draft Day is a different movie) because everything I do is insanely popular: they still do the Waterworld Stunt Show at Universal Studios Tour. And there is a suggestion that this new intiative may not be popular at all. Well Swing Vote was all about voting and elections and so is this nonsense so it made sense a few minutes ago.

Can I go now, my gills are getting itchy.”

Thanks Kevin, and nice hat.

For the first time ever, in a democratisating way, we are running a FILMS POLL. We’ve never done one before because the sense was that generally the FT readership gave less than a stuff about movies, but what kind of reason is that? We should put this to the test with a real actual call for submissions. More importantly if we are only going to get five or six entries, your vote will really really count. Thumbs up or thumbs down, but pull your finger out.

The rules are the same as all of the other FT polls. year. Vote for UP TO 20 titles IN ORDER and send your vote to ftfilmpoll DOT gmail DOT com. As long as the film was properly released in cinemas (VOD / Multi-Platform) 2015 somewhere it will be counted (obscure film fest releases may or may not make the cut but they probably won’t make the chart if only you saw them*). I might tap you up for a write up or some words if your choice makes the list, so consider your responses. And if you only saw five films this year and still want to vote for Jupiter Ascending then do so.

I think it has been an interesting year for movies, and I’ll have no trouble identifying twenty great films, and there are loads I am catching up with over the next fortnight, as should you! Its better than Turkey with the family. Feel free also to use the comments to query methodology, remind people of a film that came out in January, question every aspect of this project… Votes will close on 11.59pm GMT on 31st December 2015

So remember:
– The order of your top 20 is important! Your #1 will be allocated more points than #20.
– If you can’t think of 20 films then 10 or 14 or 1 is just fine.

And see you for the rundown in January.

*Cos to qualify at lest two people have to nominate it.

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Oh Bondage Up Yours! https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/10/oh-bondage-up-yours https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/10/oh-bondage-up-yours#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2015 17:03:40 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29194 There is a new James Bond film out, and so I emailed a select cadre* of FT writers to tell me their favourite a) BOND FILMS and b) BOND THEMES. The idea then being that I would write about these things. But a problem arose! It turns out that the only James Bond film I have definitely seen all the way through is Goldfinger, and that scenes from ‘other Bond films’ I remembered with fondness were, in fact, also from Goldfinger.

octobond

So I haven’t written about them. Well, not much. But here is the Top Ten List as voted for in an exclusive film critic*’s poll. Later in the week I will put up the themes, which I will give (even) more critical consideration to.

10. Dr No

The unforgettable debut. Bikini. Sea. Violence. Pussy Galore, unless she’s in Goldfinger.

9. Live And Let Die

“NOT THE RACIST BITS” said everyone who voted for this. So be warned.

8. A View To A Kill

Grace Jones. Eiffel Tower. And that’s just the theme video! Imagine how great all the rest must be.

7. Skyfall

One of the modern James Bond films which I believe use high tech effects such as acting.

6. Moonraker

Who built the moon? Bond investigates. Good spaceship action I seem to recall.

5. You Only Live Twice

Ski-ing. Spaceships eating each other. Beyond that literally everything I remembered about this turned out to be in Goldfinger.

4. From Russia With Love

I’m guessing there’s a Russian in it.

3. Goldeneye

The other Bond film I have definitely seen is one with surly Timothy Dalton. Neither of his films got into the list, and I can guess why. Here’s Pierce Brosnan instead though.

2. Goldfinger

AT LAST. Painted gold. Laser trap. Bloke with the hat. Web of sin. Don’t go in. What could be better?

1. Casino Royale (the second one)

A firm vote for New Bond as the best. I was pretty sure I’d seen this but I gradually realised all the bits I remembered seeing while half asleep on a sofa were actually in Batman Begins. He gets tied to a chair at some point and there’s a lot of product placement.

That ends our deluxe celebration of the cinema of James Bond.

*some people I go to the pub with

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The Freaky Trigger Not-A-Poll Films Of 2014: 5-1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/02/the-freaky-trigger-not-a-poll-films-of-2014-5-1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/02/the-freaky-trigger-not-a-poll-films-of-2014-5-1#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2015 01:01:03 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28740 lorelei-linklater“Hi I am Lorelei Linklater and I am here to present the top five Freaky Trigger Not A Poll movies of 2014, even though it is well into 2015. I am delighted to be here because I am certain that a film I was in will appear, and perhaps I will finally get my due, cos my Dad told me for twelve years that the film would be called Girlhood and frankly I have been pissed with him for the last twelve months. That Oscar is MINE. Frankly he could have shot a few extra scenes. Just recut the damn thing. Its not like there aren’t plenty of home movies of me doing goofy stuff as a kid that he couldn’t have bulked it out with. And then he wouldn’t be getting hit with the completely appropriate “boring white boy coming of age movie” criticism. Where is my Oscar nomination for best actress? Or even best song (I killed it with “Ooops I Did It Again”, and when I sung it it was before Britney released it so it counts as an original song or something). Anyway, Ethan Hawke smells, and my Dad owes me big time.”

Thanks Lorelei, and yes, you aren’t wrong with your prediction. You are in this list, but where….

5: We Are The Best
we-are-the-best
Perhaps there is a touch of relief that Lukas Moodysson finally got back to what he does best, kids. And kids without sex traffic slavery or whatever Lilya 4 Ever was about. We Are The Best is just a terrific little film about friendship, coming of age and punk rock. Its nice to see a hopeless rock’n’roll story, a microcosm of every band biopic ever, with the added benefit of them being fictional and not all that good. But every band has one good song in them, and in an almost cynical bid for the classic cineaste prejudice, Hate The Sport is that song. Sometimes going small helps, We Are The Best proves it.

4: A Touch Of Sin
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And sometimes you go big. A state of the nation portmanteau film about modern China, structurally bouncing off of A Touch Of Zen. Four stories, loosely connected taking on corruption, sex trade, sweat shops, MISERY MISERY MISERY. And yes, A Touch Of Sin is no bundle of laughs. But there is irony, there is anger, there are some wonderful performances and it feels like you are getting under the skin of a place. It doesn’t have a weak tale, it ties itself up perfectly without being in anyway formulaic, and does what these kind of big statement films rarely do, entertain first. Zhangke has made a properly political film in a country that doesn’t like political films, and made each story seem personal, and about the people not the system. The cumulative effect however is absolutely about the country.

3: The Lego Movie
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A lot of people responded to The Lego Movie because it surprised them. And not surprisingly: here was a toy spin-off, corporate overactive (and it is overactive) movie advert for something that has never really needed adverts. For it to latterly turn into something supremely entertaining, funny, philosophically interesting and joyous probably came as a shock. Not for me. It was my most anticipated movie of 2014, because of its directors. Lord & Miller had made Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, an equally overactive, clever and very funny animated movie based on a kids book which really doesn’t have much of a plot beyond it raining food. This was a goldmine for writer/directors who love invention, you can do anything with Lego, and they did (well OK, a few more female characters would have helped). It is also pretty unheard of for an anticipated film to exceed that anticipation.

2: Boyhood
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Well OK, I have been anticipating Boyhood for about four years. And it comfortably met and exceeded my expectation. Sort of the opposite of We Are The Best, a big canvas of time, and you see a development of the film-maker and his actors (the young ones grow up, Ethan Hawke suddenly gets fissures in his face). Perhaps it is slight. Perhaps Lorelei is right, Girlhood might have been even more interesting. Perhaps the film is really about Motherhood? But some of those discussions are prescient because time itself has passed since Linklater started making the film. One of our best directors trying to grapple with humanity, no matter how cod and pretentious those characters sometimes sound (and they are often meant to). Here we just see time passing, and it is a powerful thing. A simple idea that only an indie like Linklater could have pulled off – and he would have binned it if it didn’t work. I loved it.

1: The Grand Budapest Hotel
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But I loved this more. The top eight or so films for me have bounced around a lot over the last year, and yet the further away I got from The Grand Budapest Hotel, the more I found its rhythms, its language (its filthy language), its inherent melancholy and its jokes coming back to me. It is a comedy, a silly comedy in a lot of places, about something. And at its heart is this remarkable performance from Ralph Fiennes of energy, of swearing, of the answer to every jumped up tinpot Hitler, the meaning of loyalty and belief in doing a good job. I was over Wes Anderson a few years ago, so it feels great that with Moonrise Kingdom and this he seems to have personally considered all the things I didn’t like about him. Cheers Wes, this is for you. I am not someone who watches films again very often, but this one I have seen three times – to enjoy its old world charm, its screwball pacing and the simmering anger underneath the film. I don’t need to see Boyhood again, I can see me watching The Grand Budapest Hotel over and over*.

So that was last year. What’s coming up?

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A Mad Man Shuts A Box https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/02/a-mad-man-shuts-a-box https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/02/a-mad-man-shuts-a-box#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2015 12:33:08 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28617 Fans of long, chronological blog projects will know that when one actually finishes it’s cause for no small celebration. Phil Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum reaches its final entry today, an essay notionally about the 2008 episode “Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead” which serves, recursively enough, as a handy digest of his entire blog project to date. It’s just under 100,000 words long, which must have a decent shot at being the longest blog post in the history of the medium.

Anyhow, TARDIS Eruditorum is a mighty achievement – and importantly for me at least it was the direct inspiration for getting back to grips with my own writing last year (see the Billie “Because We Want To” post for more). It also sent me scurrying back to my Who DVDs, yet again. Even when I disagreed with the blog, it almost unfailingly found something interesting to say about every episode of one of the most over-examined TV shows on the planet.

Since Eruditorum started, what Sandifer calls “psychochronography” has become very fashionable – though not, oddly, in blogging, even though his blog has inspired a rash of direct imitators. The surge of interest in the approach has come from podcasts, where there’s a trend for chronological deep dives mixing laughs and analysis. But I’m old school: I like my critical blogs written, and commentable, and basically serious. And I have the most enormous admiration for someone who gets to actually finish one of the bloody things.

Well done, Dr.Sandifer!

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The Freaky Trigger Not-A-Poll Films Of 2014: 10-6 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/02/the-freaky-trigger-not-a-poll-films-of-2014-10-6 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/02/the-freaky-trigger-not-a-poll-films-of-2014-10-6#comments Thu, 05 Feb 2015 11:06:23 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28528 mr cHi, I’m Cardboard Mr Curry from the barely animated Paddington TV series from the 1970’s, much beloved by a generation who saw it as a genuine step up from a flapping card behind Captain Pugwash’s mouth. As it was. And I am here to give you the next five really not all that controversial films in the not-a-poll list of 2014 films. I am also here to make absolutely certain that Paddington does not make the list, because they turned what was just a bit of a mean-spirited neighbour into what appeared to be a lovelorn racist. Now I may have been an irascible nimby, but my qualms were mainly based on the hi-jinks that bear got up to rather than his origin. As far as the cardboard version of me goes, I don’t care what shade of Peru that bear came from. My name is Mr Curry after all, you don’t get a name like that without considering the role immigration played in your own lineage. And thus I am here to make sure Paddington doesn’t make the list.

Thanks Cardboard Mr Curry , and you will be pleased to hear that Paddington didn’t make the list.

That said, if I was doing this list in a years time, it might just make it. Paddington did turn out to be one of the films I laughed the most at last year, I think I was just suspicious at how it tugged at my political heartstrings, and I never quite forgot those Exorcist-like trailers. Anyway, the next five:

10: Obvious Child
Obvious Child Poster
Talking of tugging at political heartstrings… Sometimes the goodwill from being a film that does something politically admirable (here having a female fronted comedy which has a large non-judgemental abortion storyline) allows you to relax into enjoying the characters, Jenny Slate being wholly comfortable in the central role. Obvious Child is one of those comedy dramas which knows how to play its characters between realistic drama and broad humour, like a nicely seasoned TV drama. It earns its beats and its central romance is remarkable in movie terms as to how unforced it all is. Indeed the primary drama in the film play wholly on the tension between what would happen in a film/TV Movie and what would happen in real life. A nice, funny movie.

9: Stranger By The Lake
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A proper stripped down (in so many ways ) thriller that revels in its formal rigour. One location, about six characters, some wonderful fixed camera shots that ebb and flow over the film. It is a murder mystery, where tension is slowly ratcheted up as we see the dangers our lead characters are knowingly and unknowingly putting themselves in. Less a commentary on the cruising scene that a consideration of the kind of human connection the scene would set up, it looks wonderful, is perfectly acted and comes in at a breathless ninety minutes.

8: Under The Skin
Under The Skin Poster
I didn’t like the end of Under The Skin when I saw it, and have pretty much been won round by everyone elses take on it. But not liking the end was in sharp contrast to loving the rest of the film, the aesthetic, the tone, the tremendous soundtrack. An unsettling, but simple film that lets the audience get as much or as little out of it as you want (which is why perhaps my misogynistic reading of the end said a little too much about me). Johansson had a great year, and this is the moment where Jonathan Glazer brings it all perfectly together. A true cinematic experience.

7: Citizenfour
Citizenfour poster
Back to politics, and I guess I liked Citizenfour so much almost because of what it wasn’t as well as what it was. Wholly convincing as a veritie telling of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing, it stands in bold contrast to the Julien Assange films of the last few years. The thriller where you know the ending is even harder to pull off as a documentary, but this both manages to instil the viewer with locked room paranoia, and then explain patiently and clearly in a way that none of the news stories ever could as to why that paranoia is absolutely justified.

6: 12 Years A Slave
12 Years A Slave Poster
It feels like it is from a different year, and yet it drifted out quite late in award season in the UK, and has hung with me throughout the year. The destruction of a man’s place, the struggle for dignity, the nuanced matter-of-fact comparisons between good owners, bad owners, and the actual lack of difference between the two. I didn’t even mind magical dream pixie Brad Pitt. A powerful film built around a remarkable performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor, it already feels a touch ossified into the canon. But it is better than that, it really is a remarkable film.

Tune in next week for an equally uncontroversial top five…

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American Poll https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/01/american-poll https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/01/american-poll#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2015 10:35:43 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28542 baghdad barber In what is not remotely an attempt to fill in space before Popular comes back at the weekend, we present an important POLL concerning the word “American” as used in film titles. Obviously this is topical, thanks to the Oscar nominations received by AMERICAN SNIPPER, the gentle Clint Eastwood comedy about a guy helping out the people of war-torn Iraq by opening up a barbers shop (pictured). But there have been a lot of other films using this naming convention and now is your chance to determine which of them are GOOD. (You can pick five). Pete is promising a thinkpiece on this very topic so fill the comments boxes and he can nick your ideas. Also you can name the ones we forgot. And argue the merits of “American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt” and “American Ninja 4: The Annihilation”, for that matter.

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The Freaky Trigger Not-A-Poll Films Of 2014: 11: Two Earnest Musicals https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-not-a-poll-films-of-2014-11-two-earnest-musicals https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-not-a-poll-films-of-2014-11-two-earnest-musicals#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2015 10:05:24 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28497 The difficult joint number eleven post.

The very placement of these two extremely problematic films will suggest cowardice to you. And you would be right. I did not want a top ten that officially had these films in it. They are both too flawed to be put in that group (not that the top ten are in any way perfect). But both of these films actively repelled me at points in their running time, and were laughably up themselves too. One features Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie pretending to be completely different DJ’s and failing. The other equally laughably suggests that it would be OK to stay in James Corden’s flat for a bit (and that you can pay for a flat in Manhattan by busking).

Those films are: GOD HELP THE GIRL and BEGIN AGAIN.
number 11

Whilst they are both quite different films, they are both about more or less the same thing. The struggle for a genius (female) songwriter to make baby steps in the music business. In both films the genius songwriter is spotted by a male mentor/Svengali figure who has a somewhat world weary or patronising view of pop music. And in both films there is a small degree of unrequited sexual tension between the songwriter and the Svengali. Want more similarities? Both films accept that pop authenticity is ridiculous and then chase after it in a hypocritical fashion. Both films fetishise and seem to only understand a music industry stalled about twenty years ago (pre-mini disc stuff). Both female leads are outsiders in their communities. And both films have moments so cringeworthy you may be tempted to turn the DVD off or, in the case of Begin Again, put your fingers in your ears and hum a bit loudly to get past the father/daughter bonding sessions.

So much for the similarities. God Help The Girl is the indie upstart here. Written and directed by Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, this is a long gestating project about a Glaswegian girl band, originally released as an album. Murdoch’s strengths and weaknesses as a songwriter are writ large through the film. A preciousness, a self aggrandizing independence are on display, along with well observed character work. Perhaps one of the toughest things in the film, which it never quite reconciles, is that its lead cast is not Scottish. Emily Browning, our (self proclaimed) genius songwriter, is Australian. James and Cassie the other band members are English. The hallowed DJ’s (Radcliffe and Maconie) are English too. Its a strange bubble which is weird when it is not addressed, and worse when it is. Pile a somewhat melodramatic eating disorder subplot and a hackneyed love triangle in the mix and there are moments when we totter from life affirming pop music to suicide in a tone deaf manner.

And yet, and yet… The songs are good. They are performed really well and usually stages in an entertaining manner. The film is pretty confident about when it is being a musical and is good at being a musical. (and I love a good musical). Despite there being a clear difference between Browning (a bona fide movie actress sadly waiting for the Sophie Ellis-Bextor biopic that will never come) and her more shaky semi-pro co-stars, there is a slapdash charm to it all. Whilst it doesn’t earn its emotional tug from the writing and directing, it does from its songs and does conjure up the joy of living through pop music. Luckily the film is pretty well encapsulated by some of the clips – take this song The Psychiatrist Is In, how it comes in, how it builds as a performance and then how it ends. It is pretty representative of the film itself. If this puts your teeth on edge (it puts about three out of twenty of mine) the film is not for you. If you think its quite sweet, go for it. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

So to Begin Again, which was initially called Can A Song Save Your Life. Perhaps the title was changed because it was quite clear what the answer was (the answer is no, unless played by a fully qualified DJ, last night). The original title does explain though the earnestness of the whole affair – Mark Ruffalo is a down on his luck alcoholic A&R guy with a failed marriage, a wildchild kid, burnt all of his professional relationships. Keira Knightly is the singer-songwriter emigree recently dumped by Adam Levine our of Maroon Five (and we are supposed to feel SORRY for her). He is drunk, contemplating suicide, at an open mic night (correlation is not causation), she does a weedy girl’n’guitar ballad which suddenly grabs him – he imagines orchestration and is suddenly enthused by this act he has discovered.

This is the song that saves his life.

Yeah, I know. Unlike God Help The Girl the songs in Begin Again aren’t all that great. Oddly they are usually saved by Keira Knightly’s performances, her voice isn’t strong but she acts the performances well and at this point the film is so ridiculous in building its feelgood bonhomie that it actually carries you along. You see despite Ruffalo explaining in no uncertain terms to Knightly that there is no such thing as authenticity in pop music, they then proceed to blow a lot of money recording her album live on the streets of New York. This is cinematically lots of fun, but in reality would end up with honking traffic, aircon buzz and the sound of being arrested a lot.

Written and directed by John Carney who made Once, it tries to recreate the magic of his previous low budget musical, despite looking slick as hell. It tries to justify what was inherrent in Once, which was a clear musical just doing its songs on the street, as opposed to bending over backwards to justify it here. All the music in Begin Again is diegetic, it comes from the characters actions, which feels like a step back from Once. And yet there is an amazing amount of charm both from its core cast (even Corden) and its own wrong-headedness about music.It is the most rockist poptimist charter you’ll see. You walk out of the cinema believing that music wants to be free, and not constrained by record labels and what Steve Albini said was right and – hold on – Keira Knightly isn’t a winsome singer songwriter from the posh bit of Bristol. On the other hand Adam Levine is a knobbish rock star so there must be some truth in here.

I love both of these films despite themselves, or despite myself. It was enjoyable to feel my reaction to them waver between teeth grating embarrassment to giving myself over to the joy of both projects. Can I truly say they are any good? I don’t know. I enjoyed them, and I daresay I will rewatch them too, from the beginning again, god help me..

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The Freaky Trigger Not-A-Poll Films Of 2014: 15-12 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-not-a-poll-films-of-2014-15-12 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-not-a-poll-films-of-2014-15-12#comments Mon, 12 Jan 2015 15:19:24 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28447 article-2401507-1B6FAE29000005DC-487_634x895BONJOUR Mes Amis!!!

I’m Audrey Tautou, the spoon faced ingenue who everyone fell in love with in Amelie even though I was basically playing Mr Bean. But hey Mr Bean is also really big, in Europe, which is ideal for me as I am French which is also in Europe. I am here to introduce the next four films in Pete’s Top 20 films of 2014, which I hope will include one I made, and nothing by that horror Marion Coutillard who I hate as she got an Oscar and didn’t even do her own singing in La Vie On Rose. I used my own smells in the Coco Chanel movie, did I get an Oscar or even a Cesar? The French award not the dog food. Je me égare…

Thanks Audrey, and I can sadly confirm that not only are you not in the list this year, you were actually in the worst film I saw last year: Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo – a more irritatingly twee or suffocating film I could not imagine. So instead here are some films which are much, much better:

15: Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler-movie-posterAn unrelenting media satire which feels a lot closer to reality than most similar stories. We may be outraged and repulsed by Jake Gyllenhaal’s guerrilla cameraman, filming every local car crash, murder and getting exclusive footage of atrocities, but we know that the TV companies will buy and show this material at the moment and the morality at the heart of it is at best comparative rather than held up to any legal standard (we sadly saw that last week in Paris). So not only is the satire cutting, but at the heart is a truly despicable character who is also wonderfully watchable parleying his version of the American Dream. Next to him Riz Ahmed and Rene Russo almost seem like moral centres – though clearly they are not. Murky, funny, a welcome Bill Paxton cameo but this is Gyllenhaal’s show and he makes the most of it, he will make you feel moral compromised just by watching him.

14: Winter Sleep

winter_sleep_poster-620x835More films about horrible people. A testament to how even the talkiest of foreign language films can compel, this is Ceylan’s follow up to Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, and eschews some of in-camera beauty of that film, and replaces it with a slow burn character portrait. And what a horrid character the lead is; a washed up ex-actor who believes he is an intellectual, but instead is a coward, a bully and a negative influence on everyone he meets. Such is the power of the characterization that you can’t help but see a bit of yourself in his preening. A film that makes you want to be a better person, or else you’ll end up like this.

13: The Babadook

babadookHorror films work best on the level of insidious creep. This means that as long as you get and maintain a specific tone, they can actually be quite cheap to make. And the Babadook is a low budget Australian horror which mainly builds tension by increasingly unhinging its two main protagonists. Whilst it could be lumped with other creepy child films, in reality the boy in the Babadook is more irritating than frighting, and the real tension comes in the unraveling of the sleepless mother. Yes, it may all be one big metaphor, but what it is a metaphor of, and how it plays with the implicit rules of the genre, make it more than just another boogeyman horror.

12: The Guest

The-Guest_PosterThis is also a sort of horror film, or a home infiltration movie, or homage to a certain kind of 80’s home video staple. The army buddy of a family’s dead son turns up and is remarkably charming, so as per the movies, what is he hiding? Well what he is hiding always remains a little unclear as he slips into smiling psychopathy, but using a John Carpenter style score, a very eighties colour palate and it being set in some sort of eternal Halloween helps. Dan Stevens with his super-saturated blue eyes is absolutely compelling, and the stupid bloodbath it devolves into is hugely over the top in a wonderfully fun way. Possibly the years most grungily entertaining film, I loved it.

Come back later in the week for my joint number 11 films which share a form, and an infuriating mixture of being great and terrible AT THE SAME TIME.

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The Freaky Trigger Not-A-Poll Films Of 2014: 20-16 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-not-a-poll-films-of-2014-20-16 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-not-a-poll-films-of-2014-20-16#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2015 11:26:14 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28351 So I saw 397 films in 2014, 156 of them in the cinema. Of those films, 148 were released in the UK in 2014 and thus would be eligible for a list of the best films of 2014. And 2014 was a year of really rather interesting films. Films, unlike music and to a lesser degree comics, are released up until the very end of the year and the vagaries of what is known as award season means that there are films released in the very last week of the year which should potentially be considered for a best of list. There is also the fact that films from the 2014 award season pretty much all came out over here in 2014. This means that sometimes a list of the best of the year will feel a little disjointed, didn’t we say everything we had to say about Dallas Buyers Club in March? Well we did so I shall say no more about it.

Anyway this leads to a list. I didn’t do a poll. I’ve never done a movie poll because on the whole on FT people are less interested in films. If there is a clamour, I’ll do a poll next year. But in the meantime I am going to run through my own personal top twenty(-one – it will make sense) over the next week or so.

So here are the foothills of my favourite films of 2014 number 20-16 (sorry Calvary at 21, I love the Boxtrolls more than you…)

20. The Boxtrolls

The Boxtrolls Dutch PosterIt is increasingly clear that there is generally a direct correlation between how interesting the animation is in a kids film and the overall invention in the film. Laika are to me the pre-eminent stop-motion studio at the moment (sorry Aardman, I never liked Morph either) and pack their films with no end of personality. The Boxtrolls feels like it could be crushed by all sorts of messy parallels between it and other films, there is a Roald Dahl; Charlie and the Cheese Factory vibe, with self aware Shrekesque henchmen and not to mention the Borrower-like Boxtrolls themselves. But it is a grimy, messy, physical world which is ideal for stop motion, full of grotesque silliness and a real beating heart of a story. Really, really good fun.

19. Pride

Pride_posterPride is a big, lovely, socialist, issues picture which frankly was tooled for big, lovely socialists like me. By now the propaganda war for the miners strike has been resolutely won – albeit by ballet dancers, brass bands and finally an LGB support group, and despite all of the hokeyness that comes with this type of picture it is still lovely to watch a gay issues film coincide accurately correctly with a bit of socialist history. And it manages to do the hardest thing in a miners strike movie, which is find a suitably triumphant ending to play its Billy Bragg and Pete Seeger tracks over.

18. Blue Ruin

7j668XNxYjc,wgyw,L,INR0A_A taut revenge thriller which is a masterclass in building a near perfect cinematic three act structure. Sticking firmly to the canonical “revenge just makes things worse” template, it still makes it more than clear why your sympathies are with Dwight, the lead we are introduced to grimly living in his car. As the lead in this modern family feud movie, which is almost a western, Dwight is marked by both his single minded determination, and his general inability to do anything all that successfully, which in helps build suspense – he is as likely to be undone by his own incompetence as his enemies.

17. Gone Girl

gone-girl-posterAt the other end of the budget spectrum from Blue Ruin this is a perfectly designed thriller, which plays to Fincher’s strengths as a visual film-maker and also is a wonderful showcase for its two leads. A caustic media satire, psychological thriller, and a look at relationship disappointment it creates perhaps one of the best psychological screen villains since Hannibal Lecter and on the face of it is a pretty depressing movie about terrible people doing terrible things to each other. But being with an audience as this puzzle unfolded itself was a joy, people laughed (a lot), gasped and it genuinely thrilled.

16. Maps To The Stars

maps-stars-68541And you thought Gone Girl was dark. Cronenberg returns to a really odd bit of form here, throwing much of his recent Hollywood classicism out of the window for a dark twisted tale of Tinstletown tits. This is partially the acting satire that Birdman wants to be, stuffed with unpleasantly funny narcissists, the worst child stars in the world and grasping ageing actresses desperate to be relevant (I like Birdman but found it exhausting by the end). Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska (who had a great year) are terrific at the heart of this twisted story, and if you thought there was blood in Gone Girl, this gives Cronenberg a bloodbath like the good old days.

15 – 11 to follow…

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Who-ular ’14 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2014/11/who-ular-14 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2014/11/who-ular-14#comments Mon, 10 Nov 2014 13:27:28 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28021 I know that some of the visitors to this site ALSO watch Doctor Who. So as an experiment to see whether a) this is true and b) what sort of Doctor Who you lot like, here’s a poll on the season that finished on Saturday. I have set the bar pretty low as far as tickability goes, if you would like to be a little more stringent than “Any Good At All” you might imagine you’re giving marks out of 10 – tick ones that get 6 and over (a la the Popular year polls).

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

If you can’t remember which episode was which, there are reminders (spoilers!) below the cut:

DEEP BREATH: Victorian London, dinosaur, half-human clockwork robots.
INTO THE DALEK: The Doctor and Clara shrink down and go, er, into a dalek.
ROBOT OF SHERWOOD: The Doctor and Clara meet Robin Hood.
LISTEN: The Doctor investigates monsters under the bed.
TIME HEIST: The Doctor and Clara rob a space bank.
THE CARETAKER: The Doctor becomes a school caretaker, and interferes in Clara and Danny’s love life.
KILL THE MOON: It’s an egg!! Clara decides whether to blow it up or not.
MUMMY ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS: Read the title.
FLATLINE: Clara fights 2D graffiti monsters.
IN THE FOREST OF THE NIGHT: Trees grow all over Earth.
DARK WATER/DEATH IN HEAVEN: Missy turns dead people into a cyberman army.

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This is no modern romance https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2014/03/this-is-no-modern-romance https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2014/03/this-is-no-modern-romance#comments Thu, 27 Mar 2014 14:01:36 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=26584 This is a review (sort of) of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It is VERY FULL OF SPOILERS almost as much as it is full of FEELINGS. And it won’t make any sense if you haven’t seen it yet.

tws3

It’s a redundant statement to say that Marvel/Disney are making great superhero films right now, it just doesn’t even need saying. Last year’s crop of the superlative trauma saga Iron Man 3 and the family space-science romp of Thor 2, both of whom had the hard bill of following up Avengers, was terrific enough. Lightning striking even twice to make really, really good, intelligent films about superheroes after the success of Avengers seemed implausible. And yet.

I went and saw The Winter Soldier last night- it’s an extraordinarily good film. I feel messed up by how good it was, how thrilling and current and brave it was, in a way it feels like superheroes are for. How sassy, how cynical it was, how it’s a film entirely about revolution. How extraordinarily well Anthony Mackie can act with subtle facial expressions and how incredibly much I want a Falcon suit. How extraordinarily, morbidly realistically the grim world it inhabited was, how amazingly great the portrayal of interpersonal relationships was in it.

The Winter Soldier is a huge, exploding-battleships-raining-from-the-sky, global-political-conspiracies, massive cast film that is entirely about intimacy. About trust and closeness. The central trio of Captain America, Black Widow and the Falcon have an extraordinary dynamic that is all about them growing closer, empowering each other, saving each other. For a solo film, it’s about a team- that’s right and good for a Captain America film, he’s a soldier and he needs a unit.

Superheroes, mostly male (onscreen- the gender balance improves in the comics) are often defined against their romantic paramours- what would Superman be without Lois? Spider-Man without Mary Jane or Gwen? Even the lonely, dark Batman of the Nolan films is torn up about love and it’s used as a motivator.

The Hulk films are about romance, about how you live with and as a monster. The Iron Man films are about how co-dependency not only might not kill you but might be the thing that saves you and Tony and Pepper and the thing between them that makes them both stronger. Around all the family tension, beautiful space god Thor has beautiful space scientist Jane Foster, both reminding the other that being brought down to earth doesn’t mean being brought low. (And Thor is a rubbish space boyfriend but aren’t they all) And even Avengers had the tender, intimate-without-being-obvious moments between Black Widow and Hawkeye.

Even Captain America, who’d barely stuttered through adolescence in his first film, got a romance with Agent Carter. A good woman to flirt him into his own, a powerful soldier to teach him tactics. And then he got fridged so that she could start SHIELD with Steve’s sacrifice to keep her grimly on an idealistic path.

This film had a kiss. A desperate act in a moment of tension and fear and co-dependence. Except it was just that- Natasha asks Steve to kiss her to escape the notice of Crossbones, citing that psychologically people look away from public displays of affection, so he won’t examine the hipster couple close enough to realise who they are. It’s kind of a hot kiss, for a tactically necessary one but I may be biased due to the way I find both characters repulsively attractive and it’s certainly couched as effective and practical, if perhaps not 100% as clinical as that sounds.

And Black Widow and Cap have a really intimate relationship in the film- they grab the front of each other’s shirts to snarl at each other, shield each other, care for and comfort each other, tend their wounds together. And it could have gone there, sure. But it didn’t.

There’s lots of mentions of romance- Black Widow even explicitly brings up the idea that Steve should ask out his neighbour, who turns out to be Agent 13, his long-term on/off girlfriend in the comics. But he doesn’t. They have an important moment but it’s as allies, as acknowledging each other as being on the right side in a secret war.

Steve builds relationships in the film- his hospital bedside mixtape creator is Sam Wilson, the person he apologetically turns up at the house of because everyone he and ‘Tasha know is trying to kill them. Sam is an instant friend to him, a shared understanding and a sense that they can make each other braver, comradeship and sass and comfort. He can trust Sam, Sam can trust him- it’s a different bond to the one that, say, Tony Stark and James Rhodes share because Steve has never fucked up Sam as much as Tony can fuck up Rhodey- it’s more like Thor’s relationship to the Warriors Three, they just know that they are better together and that that’s what they need. But it’s not romantic, Steve doesn’t seduce Sam, they just bond. They have an incredibly strong and near-instant trust but that also means that if Sam or Steve screwed up that trust, their bond would significantly alter.

Romantic relationships are the ones you do the irrational stuff for. They’re the ones you don’t just take bullets and chances for, they’re the ones that without, you don’t know how you’ll live. They’re often kind of fucked up, frankly, in the superhero community but that’s probably because being a superhero is quite a fucked up occupation. Being a superhero who slipped forward in a seventy-year sleep to find a world he’d saved needed saving again.

I say there isn’t a romance in this film; that’s bollocks. As per the title of this; there’s no modern romance but my god there is quite a scene in the 1940s. And for all the central trio of the film being a unit on a solo billing, there is that one other character sharing the title. And if most of the film is about the closeness between comrades, there’s a big vein of it that’s about distance.

There’s a colossal romance at the heart of it that just doesn’t quite go explicit. The romance, the fridged girlfriend, the irrational motivator for Steve is Bucky. The person Steve would rather die than fight, the person Steve nearly sacrifices millions of lives because he can’t bring himself to fuck him up. The soft-focus flashback, the passionate pleas- I was genuinely surprised when they didn’t kiss, in the old Brooklyn scene. It just… seemed so obvious that they were going to, everything in the scene, in the way that cinema has made me understand these things, was clearly leading to Bucky tenderly kissing Steve against the door.

Now, I’ve read a lot of fanfiction. I describe myself as a ‘raging queermo’ so perhaps I am looking at things through the wrong eyes but I genuinely, honestly, heartfeltly thought not so much that they were going to go there but that they went all of the way there. Bucky is Steve’s shit faux-Soviet boyfriend. Their love is awful. I mean, Bucky is barely in this film- maybe a couple of seconds of recognition in a Hydra bunker but mostly what’s there is The Winter Soldier, who is not Steve’s anything. So maybe it isn’t a romance yet, too one-sided outside of memory. But it’s kind of extremely prominently there. Which is something that in a just and sane society wouldn’t be extraordinary but showing a homoromantic Captain America in 2014 is depressingly still quite a bold move.

And yes, I guess since they didn’t smush their tongues onto each other’s faces it could be left ambiguous. You could watch this film and just think ‘oh that’s interesting, they’ve set up Steve/Agent 13’ but… I don’t think that’s what they set up. I really, really don’t.

I don’t know, if they recover Bucky, what is going to happen. I don’t know if I want Marvel to do this but all the reasons I can come up with for them not doing it are based around fear of how it would be executed, when they’ve proved that with this run of films, they seriously have the goods. So maybe I just need to trust them and also ask them to, whatever they do, not let this bit of groundwork peter out.

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Welcome To Violence: Mondo Topless https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/01/welcome-to-violence-mondo-topless https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/01/welcome-to-violence-mondo-topless#comments Sun, 26 Jan 2014 14:36:12 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=25746 “Recently” Al Ewing and Sarah Peploe came into possession of a box set containing 18 uplifting classics (end quote) from the cinematic oeuvre of Russ Meyer. Heedless of the consequences, they have taken it upon themselves to watch and review each of these in turn on an irregular basis. This is part eight.

DISCLAIMER DEPT: This is definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK. There is actual porn.

BOOBS

BEE BEEP BIP BEE BEE BEEP BIP BIP BEEP

“This is San Francisco calling.”

FNARR

And we’re in! John Furlong is back on the narrative duties, but this time he’s got a fair amount more on his plate, since this film is all narration – either Furlong, or rambling interview excerpts from the bevy of buxotics called on by Meyer to shake their assorted stuff in quasi-documentary form. Half of this footage is scrounged from lost hem-hem ‘classic’ Europe In The Raw – the other half freshly filmed to showcase Meyer’s knack for picking the perfect shots, cuts and cast members, shot in a week or so and sent into the world as quickly as possible. Narrative is over for now – it’s an experiment that failed, and Meyer is back to the basics of warm flesh and the cold cash it brings in. This is the nudie-cutie model at its most stripped-down. (No groans. We haven’t time. There are lonely masturbators in sleazy thrill-houses up and down America to titillate and the light is fading fast.)

One thing we should mention from the outset is that this film is incredibly dull. Especially now that we’ve seen it about ten times and trawled through every frame looking for ones that aren’t blurred beyond recognition. This is a very kinetic film, but that’s hard to enjoy when there’s literally no plot and – in the age of the internet where porn of all kinds, including this very article, is a google search away (but for how long??? Thatcher???) – there’s not much point, either.

So let’s forgo our usual recap-the-film format in favour of running through our cast in the order they blast into the dark recesses of our eyeballs with the sudden fury of a naked thunderbolt. Starting with:

WHERE HE BELONGS

JOHN FURLONG! He doesn’t get naked, as far as we know. He may have done. But if so we don’t see it since he’s not on screen. It’d be wrong not to include him, though, since his deranged carnival-barker patter ties the flick together and gives it an all-important patina of semi-respectability – with the emphasis on semi (we still don’t have time) – the fig leaf that covers the essential irredeemability of the nudie-cutie form.

This time we get a brief travelogue about San Francisco that quickly gets lost in an endless series of not-even-single entendres about peaks, valleys, and thrusting into bosoms, before Furlong starts in on the ‘topless craze’ that is apparently taking the world by storm. Apparently this is a new thing that has never been conceived of before – up until 1966 we were all sealed into gallon drums above the waistline and all seven previous instalments of this feature – with the possible exception of Faster, Pussycat – were part of some dream you had.

OCTUPLETS

Anyway, the topless craze is here and in this very article we’re going to tell you about Mondo Topless, the movie! Yes, we’ll be writing words, endless, dazzling words, on the subject of this amazing film, so amazing that the trailer for it seems to be five minutes into the film itself! Furlong bellows about the Meyeresque pulchritude we’re about to absorb – “You’ve only dreamed there are women like these until now! But they’re real! Unbelievably real in Mondo Topless!” – even as Meyer decides he’s tired of waiting and shows us a quick-cut montage of everything we’re about to see. I don’t know whether this was aimed at convincing punters to stay to the end or at trying to get them to jerk off quickly and begone. But we get the basic idea – naked or near-naked women larking about for the camera while snatches of interviews with them play in the background along with “soul-shaking rock and roll” – and a brief smattering of said interviews, enough to convince the viewers/voyeurs to stay to the end or get out while they can.

THE SWIM DANCE ORIGINATED HERE

“But enough of this palaver!” Right at the start of all this malarkey, we get:

ROWR

BABETTE BARDOT! Some relation! Apparently. We’ll be seeing more of her (no time dammit) but for now let’s get out the Top Trumps and take a look at the scores.

FURLONG SAYS: “Hang on, men, and zero in on bouncy Babette Bardot! French and Swedish! Fifty-fifty where it counts! Speak to us, Babette baby!”

WHAT SHE SAYS: “I try to project child-like to a woman quality because I do believe that men do not like so much hard sex, they like softness also, so I try to project both sexuality and also gentleness, so I do always start my act more or less in a very gentle way.”

VROOM

WHERE SHE IS:   Behind the wheel of a large automobile, providing the desperate perverts trying to struggle through Furlong’s insane San Francisco monologue with the vital boobs needed to prevent them rising up en masse and burning the seats in a frenzied orgy of destruction. Was there some rule that said that if you left during the first ten minutes you were shot? We can only assume yes. Anyway, she’s in a car. Then later, after everyone else has had a turn (barring the Europe In The Raw crew, who are subbed in whenever Meyer feels like a bit of culture and that) she’s cavorting beside the railway tracks like Sigmund Freud directed this film. And maybe he did, Russ.

CHUFF CHUFF

Later still, she turns up on the set of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! But we’ll discuss that anon.

HER DANCE STYLE: In the car, jerking her shoulders back and forth in a way that will not help her driving. Everywhere else, licking her face, sucking her thumbs, roaring like a lion, etc. At one point she mentions not being allowed to touch her bust onstage – presumably that would have crossed an invisible line and destroyed society.

SHLORP

HER RADIO: Each of the models has their own specific radio, sometimes more than one. This is the portal through which the voice of Furlong emerges on a tide of nondescript Surf Rock chosen by the ghost of Slick. This is such a bizarre visual motif that I feel we have no option but to score them. Babette B starts out with your standard Pussycat-style car radio…

HONK

…and then transitions to…

PANASONIC

…this sporty number from Panasonic. Not bad, if a little boxy.

Anyway.

POW

PAT BARRINGER!

FURLONG SAYS: “Revving up on runway number one is bumptious Pat Barringer! A magnificently configured female skilled in the art of the topless! I beg you to try to listen to what she has to say!”

SHE SAYS: “All you’re doing is a dance – it has no meaning whatsoever.”

WARNING

WHERE SHE IS: On an electric pylon in some kind of freakish adult PSA. Has she gone to get Jimmy’s Frisbee back? No, she’s gone to frug, heedless of the danger of death. Presumably in her off hours she dances on a rug on a polished floor. You might as well lay down a mantrap!

Later, she’s hiding under a diving board as part of some assassination plot, probably.

SPLASH

HER DANCE STYLE: Variations on the Twist, the Locomotion and we’re pretty sure we saw the Batutsi in there. Also some limbo dancing. Under the diving board, the dance is mostly holding the diving board and shaking left to right, as is evidently the style at the time.

BATUTSI

HER RADIO: This.

SPLANG

Another from Panasonic. This one bears the exciting slogan RADAR MATIC over the top of one huge dial. It’s winning on points. Meanwhile:

BLOODY HELL

DARLENE GREY! Bloody hell. We estimated that she got more screen time than anyone else in the film, for some reason. Excuse us while we turn into our dads. ANYWAY.

FURLONG SAYS: “Ready to entertain you is buxotic Darlene Grey! England’s answer to the biggest and the best! What do you say, Darlene?”

SHE SAYS: “I have trouble finding bras to fit me, but I take a 38 size DD. They don’t sell them in every store, you know, you can only buy them in certain places.”

“Hang on!” Ejaculated the breast-owning member of our review team at this critical juncture. “I’m a 34DD and one of her tits could beat both of mine into a coma. Go for a proper fitting, Darlene!” Although perhaps bra size, like dress size (viz. the “Marilyn Monroe was a size 16” canard)* was measured differently in those days.

*(Though she fluctuated a bit throughout her life, she was closest to a UK 10 – but when she hit the big time she would’ve had her dresses custom-made anyway, rendering the whole concept of her “being a size X” bobbins. Also she didn’t say that “If you can’t handle the fact that I’m basically Jenna from 30 Rock YOU DON’T DESERVE MEEEEE” thing either, sorry Facebook.)

LAWKS

WHERE SHE IS: On some kind of concrete shelf with the camera pointing up at her boringly. Running along a mud flat-slash-quarry, where we later find her under an orange blanket. Half-submerged in some muddy water. Everything feels brown with her – desolate and vaguely industrial, almost definitely sourced from previous Meyer films. Even the mud flats look like the future site of an oil pipeline after the last bulldozer has left for the day. Throughout the film, Grey’s never framed as imaginatively as everyone else – everyone else is at least in pleasant or colourful settings, and Barringer and Bardot get all manner of visually arresting compositions (see above screenshots).

It might be a compliment of sorts – maybe Meyer thought Grey didn’t need it. Or maybe, since Grey is the closest in this feature to the ideal Meyer woman, he was pairing her with his ideal landscapes as well.

Eventually, Meyer blows the whole theory out of the water with a lush green field and a white picnic blanket, but let’s not let outlying data ruin a good hypothesis.

EGAD

HER DANCE STYLE: Some sort of land-based swimming exhibition, windmilling while doing squats and/or running along a mud flat. Often no dancing is required.

GADZOOKS

HER RADIO: A cheap-looking miniature from Sony, occasionally waved around in a similar manner to Slick from Motorpsycho.

SONY

Moving on.

LOCO WEED

SIN LENEE!

FURLONG SAYS: “And away we go with luscious Sin Lenee, svelte and lithesome! Give us a word, Sin!”

SHE SAYS: “Almost any kind of music makes me feel sex. Also colour makes me feel sex.”

MARIHUANA

WHERE SHE IS: Communing with nature, presumably to roll it up.

Later, she’s broken into a ramshackle house! Take that, signs. Although after the pylon and the railway tracks this might be another example of the PSA theme, especially as at one point she looks like she’s going to fall out of a window while high like that bloke off Quincey.

THIS WEEK ON QUINCEY

HER DANCE STYLE: Lenee does more work with facial expressions than most of the other performers (Babette Bardot being the notable exception). Her main facial expression is ‘stoned’, often to a comedic extent – the back end of the sixties is coming up fast and Lenee is firmly of it, which makes her seem oddly futuristic when set against the 1950s-era Europe In The Raw set. Whether it’s just a shtick for the rubes or whether she’s an active part of the drug culture – or both – is unclear.  (There’s a strong resemblance in places to Jane Fonda in Barbarella, for whatever that’s worth.) Anyway, her main dance move is watching the trails her hands leave.

THE WEED WITH ROOTS IN HELL

HER RADIO: The long strap makes it ideal for dangling from a tree branch, a nail banged into the side of the abandoned shack and/or her neck. Make: Standard.

STANDARD

Next up:

HMM

DARLA PARIS!

FURLONG SAYS: “Try to follow delicious Darla Paris, vivaciously voluptuous! Mr and Mrs America and all the ships at sea!”

SHE SAYS: “And the last time I measured, it was 36D.”

TREE

WHERE SHE IS: Also communing with nature, mostly in parks – the Golden Gate park is referenced, but we’re a little wary of that. Knowing Meyer, it’s probably some unclaimed bit of wilderness far from the eyes of authority.

ROCK

HER DANCE STYLE: “Juddering” is a word that comes to mind immediately. Later, Riverdance. There’s not that much to say about Darla Paris, unfortunately – she’s like the all-rounder in a video game, in that everything she does in Mondo Topless seems to be done better by someone else. Communing with nature has been done already by Sin Lenee (and to a lesser extent, everyone else) and the wide-eyed stare is better essayed by Diane Young. (As we’ll see.) It could be that film just wasn’t the best vehicle for her talents.

KICK

HER RADIO: Not a radio at all! The first of the tape recorders that’ll make their appearance, and the most portable-looking, as there’s actually something keeping the fragile magnetic ribbon from the merciless elements. Vista, we salute you for your forward thinking.

TAPE RECORDER

Onwards!

LOOK OVER THERE

DIANE YOUNG!

FURLONG SAYS: “Settle back and let yummy Diane Young entertain you! Blondely beautiful! And while you’re about it – lend her your ear!”

SHE SAYS: “I used to play a cello in a symphony orchestra when I was thirteen.”

POSSIBLE BATUTSI

WHERE SHE IS: On a beach – either on the sand or occasionally in the water. Russ gets a couple of good shots with her framed by the radio and/or rocks, but for the most part it’s a fairly sparse setting.

JAMES BROWN

HER DANCE STYLE: Jerky, quasi-roboting flailing. A lot is done with the arms. It’s important to note here that Diane Young, along with a lot of the Mondo Topless dancers, is not your cough typical Meyer woman. This feature is probably as body-positive as Meyer ever got in some ways, with a wide-ish range of female body and bust types on display – we might as well make the most of it, because his mammary monomania will be returning very quickly.

As mentioned earlier, an important part of all the dancing on display here seems to be facial expression – Young wears a look of constant, frozen glee – sometimes pleasant, sometimes veering into the uncanny valley and sometimes failing altogether and morphing into an unnerving mix of exhaustion and trepidation that suggests Russ is in one of his Kubrick moods. Darla Paris did the same thing, but not as memorably, while Sin Lenee prefers to gaze into a pulsating ball of purple-orange sound on the edge of the trip. Most of the others fall somewhere between these extremes, except for Babette Bardot, who’s in a class of her own.

BLOODY HELL WE'RE ON TAKE NINETY-FOUR

HER RADIO: Another tape player, this time straight out of A Clockwork Orange. Vistasi bet it all on giant reels of magnetic tape open to the sandy elements, which is presumably why you don’t see their tape players around anymore.

VISTASI

Consecutively –

X!

DONNA “X”!

FURLONG SAYS: “Relax and enjoy exciting Donna X! Junoesque of proportion! Listen closely to what she has to say about topless!”

SHE SAYS: “Oh, I think everybody goes by moods. You might make it every night, a steady thing for a month, and then you might lay off for a whole complete week and never need it at all, it depends on your mental attitude.” A whole complete week!

DATA REWIND TAPE

WHERE SHE IS: In a room, different from the one you are in now. Somewhere with a very deep pile carpet in sexciting brown and some vaguely seventies-era window blinds. There’s quite a seventies look about the whole enterprise – it might just be the fact that it’s all happening in a dingy motel room, giving it a vaguely seedy ambiance that fits with our Boogie-Nights-informed notions of seventies porno. Anyway, between those associations and the hi-tech of the giant spools of magnetic tape which dominate every other shot, there’s a definite cutting-edge flavor. (We’ll see Meyer come back to the cutting-edge much later in his life as he explores Pong.)

XX!

HER DANCE STYLE: Quite languid at first. The main move is lying on her back and idly moving a cluster of thin blue ribbons left and right, as if admitting that the ‘dance’ part of the program is what nobody in the theatre came to see. Later on in the film the dancing mostly involves elbows, but after that she’s shifted back to languidity, this time on her front. She gets slightly more time than Darla Paris – on the other hand Russ does seem very keen on the audio equipment.

XXX!

HER RADIO: The giant computer from Woody Allen’s Sleeper. It’s an Akai, if you’re counting – another manufacturer whose obsession with giant reels of tape evidently captured Meyer’s attention. Who would have thought that two giant circular objects would occupy his imagination like that.

AKAI

In addition to the main cast as detailed above, we get all the people Russ already shot in previous shorts that have since been lost to the mists of time. First of these:

NOTE: LESS BLURRY

MICKEY FRANTZ (UNCREDITED)! AND SOMEONE ELSE (EVEN MORE UNCREDITED)!

This is Europe In The Raw footage (we assume) showing a topless model and her photographer, also a model. The camera – or rather, the meta-camera – ogles both equally, although for purposes of verisimilitude the photographer is wearing slightly more clothes, at least until the scene where they both strip off to use an underwater camera. This all sounds infinitely more exciting than it is.

FURLONG SAYS: “What must a girl possess to measure up as a topless dancer? She must have a body well above the average in physical beauty – unblemished by an uneven suntan!”

THEY SAY: We can’t hear it. There’s definitely some kind of scene playing out here, though – if Europe In The Raw (or whichever short this originally came from) hadn’t been lost to cinema history, or if we were better at lip-reading, maybe we’d know what it was. We called these bits ‘the proto-lesbian scenes’ in our notes, but who knows what Meyer was thinking.

VERISIMILITUDE-A-GO-GO

WHERE THEY ARE: A swimming pool, by the look of things, in the backyard of some Hollywood mansion. Was the location important to the plot? Was there going to be a murder? Was there going to be a plot? We yearn to know. Answers in the comments please.

META AND UNSETTLING

THEIR DANCE STYLE: No dancing goes on. The model lies topless on a sun lounger for the benefit of the photographer, who sticks her bum out for the benefit of the audience. Presumably the audience were themselves wanking for the benefit of some higher entity.

Where only one is in shot, the stiffly held poses might be taken as very slow vogueing. Later, there’s some horseplay with an underwater camera. After a few minutes of this, it cuts back to Sin Lenee riding a magenta thoughtwave into the cosmic nova of consciousness, as if to say “it was a different time”.

TECHNOLOGY

THEIR RADIO: They borrow Pat Barringer’s, since it happens to be on a diving board sometimes. Was it put on a diving board just so Meyer would have a segue to this old footage? Not that he doesn’t get some great shots out of Pat Barringer underneath a diving board but it’s a little too much of a coincidence for our liking. Yes, I think we’ve cracked this baffling case.

RADAR MATIC

Anyway. Moving into the definite Europe In The Raw stuff, we find:

ROWR AGAIN

VERONIQUE GABRIEL!

FURLONG SAYS: “Let’s jet to Belgium and look in on the famed Moulin Rouge, where the buxom bombshell Veronique Gabriel performs her heady, hedonistic dance of the leather belt!”

SHE SAYS: Nothing! Once again, we’re into the bits of the film which were pilfered from Europe In The Raw, presumably long before Meyer had hit on the idea of recording interview segments. She is saying (or singing) something, but we don’t know what. Maybe it relates to the murder by the swimming pool. Answers in the etc.

RED WINDMILL

WHERE SHE IS: The famed Moulin Rouge! In… Belgium. A quick glance at Wikipedia leads us to suspect this is a less famed Moulin Rouge. According to our sources (McDonough), Meyer shot plenty of footage on location, including this bit, but some of it was faked back home when it became clear that flashing a camera around the fleshpots of Europe was a risky strategy. From the sound of it, Europe In The Raw was a much more interesting, and morally dubious, film than the bits remaining here attest to, with Meyer using a primitive spy-camera to film the red light district without the knowledge or consent of the inhabitants and splicing the results with his combat footage. God only knows what John Furlong would have made of that. Anyway, none of this looks like spy-camera footage so we can only assume it was paid for with some form of currency, especially as, by all accounts, Meyer’s attempts to create bittorrent several decades early led only to threats on his life and fingers.

BELT

HER DANCE STYLE: The heady, hedonistic dance of the leather belt involves sitting on a chair and snapping her fingers. That said, she has a way about her – the girl in the club dancing on her own, not even on the dancefloor. All the men want to grind up on her but they’re a bit scared to. You know the one.

Later, she stands up.

Meyer favours extreme close-ups here, so usually only one part of her body is visible at any one time, mostly the part you imagine.

YES THAT ONE

HER RADIO: We’re in Belgium! They don’t have radios there, they lost them in the war. They have to fashion them out of chocolate coin foil and Tintin books.

FACE

Later…

TWO-FACE

 GRETA THORWALD!

FURLONG SAYS: “Let us hurry inside the famed Atlantic Palace for an unforgettable experience! Greta Thorwald! The Nordic nymph! Whose pulchritude is unrivalled by any showgirl in Denmark! Her youthful bosom, flat stomach, firm hips and smooth lithe legs all seem to unite in her wildly exotic dance which she delivers in a burst of uninhibited frenzy!”  It’d be kind of horrific if her bosom, stomach, hips and legs didn’t unite, John Furlong – if she screamed “SPLIT” and they flew around the room in isolation until she shouted “XAM” and they re-united. Especially the stomach.

SHE SAYS: Again, not much. It might be time to retire this category.

ATLANTIC PALACE, HONEST

WHERE SHE IS: Copenhagen, apparently, although we have our doubts.

WHEE

HER DANCE STYLE: More finger snapping. More head back, eyes closed, swaying. In profile this time. Towards the start there’s some nice business with a mirror, but we’re already starting to associate the Europe In The Raw bits with feelings of boredom. It could be that everything’s much more static in these earlier days – shots are nicely framed, but it’s lacking a little of the raw kineticism that the later segments have. There’s less furious cutting from Meyer, less frenzied gyrating from the dancers, and none of the interview segments to sustain interest – just a bit of shouting from Furlong and then silence.

MIRROR AGAIN

So the dullness is creeping in. Doubtless you’re getting a sense of this too. But wait, there’s less!

ENNUI

DENICE DUVAL!

You can see the waves of ennui radiating from her eyes. Her smile is the tired rictus of someone bored out of their skull, and we’ll soon see why.

FURLONG SAYS: “Let us tarry for a moment in the provincial French city of Nancy, noted for its gates of gold, and drop in on dark-eyed Denice Duval, the voluptuous exhibitionist at Le Cabaret Sexy! Her tempting, teasing dance of the muff, spotlighting her breathtaking body, never failing to bring male blood pressure to a fever pitch!”

THE SEXY CABARET

WHERE SHE IS: Le Cabaret Sexy, if you can believe it. Once again, we get a shot of the sign outside and then we’re somewhere that could very easily be a studio set. The dance of the muff does not lend itself to credibility, unfortunately.

MUFF

HER DANCE STYLE: Ah, the dance of the muff. A dance based on the hilarious notion that one word can have two meanings. The bored-looking Duval, smile frozen in a way that suggests that she’s imagining several thousand better dance routines that she wishes she’d convinced Meyer to film instead, has a large muff – please hold your sides in, we mean the hand-warming furry device – which she holds in the air for a couple of seconds, then lowers it, then raises it, then lowers it, all to the sound of a constant drum roll. Over and over. It never ends. It literally never ends. We are watching it still, at least in the nightmares of tedium from which we yawn ourselves awake. Ha ha ha! Muff! It means pubic mound!

Duval’s actual pubic mound is not shown. It was 1966.

MUFF

HER RADIO: Not shown either.

No, no more screenshots. Not of that. Let’s move swiftly on to…

RRAAAAAHHH

LORNA MAITLAND!

FURLONG SAYS: “Without artistic surrender, without compromise, without question or apology, an important motion picture was produced! Lorna! A woman too much for one man! Its star was an incredibly voluptuous young actress, the embodiment of physical allure! Her name – Lorna Maitland!”

SHE SAYS: No sooner have we removed this feature than we have to bring it back! Apparently these are candid post-production recordings made just after the film wrapped. “I felt very MM-ish, Marilyn Monroe-ish, that night” gives you a rough notion of the flavour of it – the kind of banal “oh, this scene” chit-chat we’ve grown used to on the DVD commentaries of the modern era. It’s actually a bit more interesting than we’re making it sound, especially to those who sat through Lorna and were wondering how it came to be or what colour the salt mines actually were (brown), but on the other hand it’s not interesting enough for us to trawl through it again looking for a better quote.

ROCKS AGAIN

WHERE SHE IS: The interview snippets are played against a couple of scenes from Lorna – the bathing-in-the-river scene and the city-living montage – and what we’re told is a reel of footage her agent sent in to try and convince Meyer to give her the part. The bit that stands out is where she’s lying down, topless, on cracked, baked mud – you can’t help wondering if it was Maitland or the grim wilderness that was supposed to appeal to Russ’s sensibilities. Probably both.

MUD

HER DANCE STYLE: At one point she pulls a donkey up a hill.

DONKEY

Continuing on, to the bitter end.

CONFUSION

GIGI LA TOUCHE!

FURLONG SAYS: “Thrill to the wantonness of Gigi La Touche – the girl with the throbbing guitar!”

SHE SAYS: Nowt. It’s another Europe In The Raw flashback.

THE JIMMY RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX

WHERE SHE IS: La Place Pigalle in Paris, apparently. Referred to as ‘Pig Alley’ in a weird ‘men’s slick’ we have somewhere in the house, as part of an article detailing the kind of disturbing hedonism roaming GIs, and presumably the readership, could get up to if they abandoned their morals. Not that anyone would, of course! But for a thin dime or two, the readers of MAN’S SWAMP could find out exactly what they were missing.

PLINKY PLUNK

HER DANCE: She’s holding a guitar covered in gold glitter, and pretending to play it while roughly shaking her shoulders back and forth. Bafflement seems to be the dominant emotion on display here, but like Denice Duval before her, she’s keeping her smile in place. At this point in the film a fixed grin seems the most anyone can muster, especially us.

BRIAN EPSTEIN

How long has this film been going? A million hours? Moving on.

SPACE INSECT

ABUNDAVITA!

FURLONG SAYS: “Berlin today is a city divided, with the eastern sector under the cruel domination of communism, and West Berlin part of the free world! Located only a stone’s throw from the fashionable Kurfürstendamm, the Broadway of Berlin, we encounter the Fair Lady Film Bar, where Abundavita, the bosom bountiful, is about to begin her act of primitive passion! Capacity crowds flock to see Abundavita, fantastically developed, exercise her magnificent pectoral pulchritude as she wantonly entertains the sporting crowds of Berlin with fierce intensity!” Reprinted in full.

SHE SAYS: Nothing with words, but her weird antennae say it all.

FAIR LADY FILM BAR

WHERE SHE IS: Weren’t you listening? A stone’s throw from the cruel domination of communism! This is probably the first time we hear it mentioned – we’re a long way from the atheist pro-union shenanigans of Mudhoney already, and we’re only going to get further as Meyer’s deep hatred of communism starts to boil up to the surface. We won’t see the full flowering for some time, though.

MICK HUCKNALL

HER DANCE STYLE: There’s a lot going on here. For starters, we have the antennae aspect – a mask with two feathers sticking up, completely hiding Abundavita’s eyes, which has the effect of making her look like a bizarre insect. Then there’s a bit of business with a  frosted glass screen, which she presses up against in a manner pre-dating Mick Hucknall’s celebrated creation of the pink pancake. (Allegedly.) It all makes for a good framing device for Meyer to work with, but pretty soon we’re back to the standard move-shoulders-back-and-forth pattern. The use of props in these routines seems to be in inverse proportion to quality – the harder someone’s leaning on a muff or a golden guitar or a giant red ball on a spring (we’ll get there eventually), the more the viewer wonders if there was a routine beyond that which Meyer perhaps unjustly consigned to obscurity in favour of Carrot-Top-esque shenanigans. It’s almost as if Meyer wanted to show what was REALLY going on in the naked flesh-pots of Yoorp, but it turned out what was going on wasn’t that visually interesting. Alternatively, in a world before poles, props like these were in use every night. We’ll never know, as we’re now too far into this film to look it up.

WAUUGH

MOVING ON

MONROEIN' IT

HEIDE RICHTER!

FURLONG SAYS: “Let’s journey uptown to the Casino De Paris, the perfect place to cast anchorage for pleasure, and peek in on Heide Richter, a tall, blonde Aryan beauty of perfect proportion, and watch her as she squirms and writhes topless on a luxurious bed, contorting her supple body in a manner that defies description!”

At this point Furlong seems very tired, as if he’s been locked in a cupboard for some time bellowing at the top of his voice with a blanket over his head. Which as it turns out, he was.

REVUE PALACE

WHERE SHE IS: Hamburg! Noted for its harbour, apparently. We’re growing increasingly doubtful about both Furlong’s narration and the evidence of our own senses.

TADA

HER DANCE STYLE: Fairly basic – lots of undulating, fluttering fingers. More working of the camera than with previous Europe In The Raw stars – she ends the segment by vamping into it in a way oddly reminiscent of Monroe, with the help of a fast cut from Meyer. Again, if this was shot on location with a spy camera, it doesn’t look it.

THIS IS HAPPENING

The end is near! Ish.

IT'S A KNOCKOUT

YVETTE LEGRAND!

FURLONG SAYS: “Witnessing the passionate performance of vivacious Yvette LeGrand is a never-to-be-forgotten delight! So let’s look in on this buxom brunette, the most curvaceous cowgirl in the western world as she tempestuously tosses her torso in the most sizzling topless spectacle ever brought to the Crazy Horse Saloon!”

Furlong’s getting his second wind here, perhaps realising that this is the last push. He’ll be allowed to breathe the air soon.

NEIGH

WHERE SHE IS: Paris again, we’re told. Somewhere they have a prop department, anyway.

FUN HOUSE WITH PAT SHARP

HER DANCE STYLE: There’s a saddle onstage, which she sits on for part of the routine, and the occasional lassoing motion as a concession to the ‘cowgirl’ motif, but mostly it’s the Twist. Possibly the weirdest element is a giant red ball on a spring which she bangs with her bum, making it sway around like a punchbag – this has nothing to do with the cowboy theme or anything else, but we get the impression it was saved to last for a reason. Perhaps this moment represents the pinnacle of what could be achieved by topless dancing in the fifties. Again, we don’t have an afternoon to spare researching the particulars and we’re increasingly desperate to get to something with a plot, so answers in the comments, please.

CHEGGERS PLAYS POP

Phew! Out the other side. Let’s wrap up.

WAKE UP THE SIXTIES ARE BACK

The film ends on a couple of interesting notes – the final micro-segment involves Sin Lenee, dancing underneath what is almost certainly the same water butt that was in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! This time, full use is made of it, with the water cascading off a fully topless Lenee as the camera leers in to ogle in full colour – as if Meyer was trying to ward off some evil spirit by giving his audience what they wanted the first time. It seemed to work – Mondo Topless made the bomb that Pussycat didn’t, propelling Meyer back into technicolour and into a new era…

GO TO BED THE SIXTIES ARE OVER

…perhaps prefigured by the final shot of Donna ‘X’, in one of the bum-less dresses from Wild Gals Of The Naked West, wiggling at the camera in the dingy light of the motel room as the giant reels unspool. (Because it’s ‘the end’. Ha ha.)

As we’ve mentioned, the Donna ‘X’ segments have the flavor of the coming thing – unlike the other open-air locations, they feel like a voyeuristic glimpse into a hidden setting, heralding a clutch of films devoted to exploring the inner sex lives of various stunted suburbanites and washed up American Dreamers, all shot through with Meyer’s signature obsession. The Soap Era was about to begin. Gird up thy loins.

VISUAL PUN

FURLONG SAYS: “Well, Mondo Topless measures up! The unmistakable Russ Meyer touch makes this more than a gang of great gals – it makes it MOVE! We sincerely hope that you enjoyed the flick!”

And with that rave review of his own film, we reach LE FIN. On to the final scores.

DESIGNATED SAP: There’s a sucker at every poker table, and if you don’t see him, he’s you. The same principle applies here.

SAPS

BECAUSE YOU CAN DIE THERE: That bloody pylon. JIMMY NO

GET THE FRISBEE

JIMMYYYY

Also cavorting on the railroad tracks.

HONK

OF ITS TIME: All those radios and tape players.

RADIO ONE

RADIO TWO

All those burlesque houses.

BATWOMAN

CHI CHI

All of it, generally.

YOINKS

ONE-HIT WONDERS: Sin Lenee is the only dancer exclusive to Mondo Topless who wasn’t in anything else. Meanwhile, out of the Europe In The Raw players, only Heide Richter and Denice Duval appeared in other features, and those seem to be porn.

SPLOSH

POPPED UP WHERE YOU LEAST EXPECT IT: Pat Barringer was in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

TERRIBLE TV SHOW

FAMILIAR FACES: In this case, it’s a familiar voice, as John Furlong comes back to lend his capacious lungs to Meyer’s soundtrack. Allegedly, it wasn’t a fun experience, as Furlong was forced to holler whatever monstrous gibberish was thrust into his trembling hands on a battered yellow legal pad. If Gilbert Gottfried and John Furlong had a baby, it would be classed as a WMD.

ALL THE SHIPS AT SEA

Meanwhile, we have the return of Lorna Maitland, although whether this really counts is debatable.

LORNA

And introducing Babette Bardot, who we will meet again.

TONGUE

WHERE’S RUSS?:  He’s shoving John Furlong into a cupboard.

CUPBOARD

BREAST COUNT: Count the dancers and multiply by two.

NEXT TIME: We kick off the Soap Era with Russ asking the question How Much Loving Does A Normal Couple Need? (AKA Common Law Cabin.)

LOOK PLEASANT

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Cinema Of Blood https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2013/03/cinema-of-blood https://freakytrigger.co.uk/see/2013/03/cinema-of-blood#comments Thu, 07 Mar 2013 09:37:17 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=24390 Theatre of Blood Subway Poster 1973When you have a tweet conversation with yourself on the bus on the way home, it is good to remember it might actually be a blog post…

I saw Theatre Of Blood for the first time tonight, at a BFI Screen Epiphanies showing (you will be unsurprised to discover it was a favourite of one of the League Of Gentlemen, Reese Sheersmith). I know this is far too late in life to watch such a delightfully well made black comedy, but I enjoyed it thoroughly with the additional frisson of having the directors family sitting behind me. For those of you who have not had the pleasure, Theatre Of Blood is a wickedly dark horror comedy where Vincent Price plays Edward Lionheart, a classical actor/manager who specialises exclusively in Shakespeare who runs foul of the 1970 London Critic Circle. Thought dead from suicide, he returns to bump each of the critics off in a suitably Shakespearian fashion. Hammy, gory and with a wonderful 70’s Who’s Who cast, it is a treat – with a delightful central premise. In particular it overcomes the biggest problem in black comedies, how to balance sympathy for the central murderer without being voyeuristically complicit. Here all we meed to know is in the opening line with Michael Hordern’s critic, a pompous ass bemoaning that his best crack against an actress had been cut from his review. These are critics, and self-satisfied ones at that, who the audience have no difficulty in agreeing deserve their fates. Price is so delicious as the lead, given an extra dimension by Diana Rigg’s devoted daughter, and the critics are so grotesque, that you worry some may escape. So you get gore, imaginative deaths, and Vincent Price delivering ten of Shakespeare’s finest roles (also a bout of fencing on trampolines!*). By the end of which you appreciate the bitter irony that you still root for Lionheart even though through these performances you know the critics were actually right. He is pretty terrible.

Being of my unoriginal, gadfly, generation, and enjoying the film thoroughly, my first thought on exiting the cinema was of a remake. If you were to do a remake, who would star? Well, Kenneth Brannagh springs to mind, but its a match borne of being the only obsessive Shakespearian with a cinema career. But why remake Theatre Of Blood when the original is nigh on perfect? Still, there is something in there to be remade. And so my thoughts went to Cinema Of Blood.

Cinema Of Blood is the remake for our post Charlie Kaufmann age. It takes the fundamental idea of Theatre Of Blood: a poorly reviewed actor taking revenge on his critics in the style of those roles. But, and here is our Being John Malkovitch twist, it stars an actor playing themselves. A current actor, probably universally poorly reviewed, with enough interesting forms of death in their movies to re-enact upon their critics. And so the search is on to find that actor. If you can think of any please put it in the comments. Here was my train of thought / twitter conversation with myself.

The actor needs to be poorly reviewed and in films with interesting deaths. Whilst not an expert in his career, I’ve seen enough of his films to think of a variety of deaths in the wide ranging but mainly reviled work of Danny Dyer. Starting with Dyer brings up a hidden, but probably the most vital, ingredient necessary to make Cinema Of Blood work; some presonified in Vincent Price’s performance. Namely the charisma to have the audience root for them. And so we can happily let Danny Dyer go.

My mind then rooted around other actors with a near 100% stinker record, who had previously shown charisma in another medium. Jennifer Aniston came to mind, but not enough people die in Aniston movies. Someone could get maulled by Marley from Marley and Me, but even that’s a cheat (Lionheart does cheat in his Merchant Of Venice death, buts just one cheat). Ditto with Adam Sandler films, and Rob Schneider lacks the deaths AND the charisma. Jason Statham has the interesting deaths, and the charisma, but the his reviews are not bad enough (though it could be worth it to re-enact some of the sequences from the Crank films). I think the closest I have come to the right lead for Cinema Of Blood is Nicholas Cage: who has had enough poorly reviewed films, with some wonderfully diverse ways of killing people**. And if anyone would have the self-reflective sense of humour to make it, you’d think the current Nic Cage would.

When thinking of that Nic Cage footnote, I considered some of the ways people died in Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans. And suddenly I realised I had gone down completely the wrong line in pursuing actors. Vincent Price is an actor/manager in Theatre Of Blood, he acts the leads but also directs. So yes, Nic Cage’s Cinema Of Blood would be good. But Werner Herzog’s Cinema Of Blood – well that would have a committed central performance to rival Vincent Price’s. Herzog’s films, particularly his fiction films, have often divided critics. And there are some wonderful ways of killing people in them (drop a boat on them, get eaten by a bear…) I had my answer, with a compelling deadpan Germanic lead (and the recent Jack Reacher displayed how mesmerising Herzog can be in fiction in even a small role).

And then, that terrible part of me that often goes too far, noticed that the often poorly reviewed, often inventively violent film-maker Tony Scott committed suicide last year. Edward Lionheart seemingly commits suicide in Theatre Of Blood. And whilst it is in terrible taste to wonder: is Tony Scott’s last, greatest film, already in production? If film critics start getting shot down by jets, crashing in Nascar races, run over by unstoppable trains or shot by a gun hidden in a beaver puppet, I will know exactly what is going on.

*As a not particularly amusing bouche to seeing Theatre Of Blood, I went to see Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. Expecting a lousy film that might entertain with its cheesiness, I just got the lousy film. What is telling though is for all the sheen of the slick modern digital production, there isn’t a single action sequence to match the clunkily shot but really rather thrilling gymnasium fencing sequence in Theatre Of Blood. Which is just two men over fifty (albeit their stunt doubles) fencing on trampolines and balance beams, shot with only a few cuts and complete clarity of action.

**Nic Cage’s “Cinema Of Blood” could include people having their heads set on fire (Ghost Rider), stung to death by bees (Wicker Man), have a library drop on them (Season Of The Witch), thrown out of the back of an RV (Drive Angry), death by terrible Italian Accent (Captain Correlli’s Mandolin) and that’s without getting on to some of the more obvious ones.

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