by Oscar O’Sullivan

Monday – Love Lies Bleeding

Would you rather watch a sincere outcast love story, a surreal body horror or a traumatic gang thriller? With Love Lies Bleeding, you get all three at once – which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Each component is well-done and full of memorable moments, but it never quite gels as a whole – the increasing prominence of the crime thriller plot in the back half sees the love story sadly sidelined, while the body horror element remains detached and inscrutable. Despite having two great lead performances from Katy O’Brian and Kristen Stewart and a suitably menacing villain in Ed Harris, the story ultimately doesn’t amount to much. At least it always looks interesting, even when the story is meandering. 7/10.

Tuesday – Only Lovers Left Alive and Inherent Vice

A tale of two vampires adrift in the modern world, Only Lovers Left Alive uses the philosophies of immortality as a metaphor for our own human struggles. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) face a struggle for survival as human blood has become dangerously polluted by pharmaceuticals and microplastics, forcing them to conserve the good clean stuff. They also witness societal and cultural changes in the human world that we can only consider in abstract, touring Detroit and commenting on how the city has been run into the ground (but will likely thrive when global warming decimates areas with less water). And of course, much fun is had with gags about famous faces the pair have met over the centuries, most prominently fellow vampire Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), who they tease for details on how he actually wrote the works of Shakespeare. This historical tomfoolery might be a little too on-the-nose for a film that is otherwise cool, calm and collected, drifting from scene to scene with all the unhurried nonchalance of its immortal leads. Even when troublemaking sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) comes to visit, the promised big blow-up plays as little more than an inconvenience before the film fades away into the final act. Perhaps a little more bite, if even just for the climax, would have served this film well, but it remains stylish and thoughtful enough to get away with a certain amount of pretension. 8/10.

I didn’t understand Inherent Vice the first time I watched it. I found it funny and thought it looked nice, but I could not follow the plot or find an emotional through-line. I have since watched it six more times and can now see that it’s one of the top ten greatest films ever made. The secret to the mystery is that there is no secret – everything is explained in blindingly obvious detail as it happens, with protagonist Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) being handed clues and connections on a silver platter at every single turn. The reason it’s so difficult to follow is that Doc finds it difficult to follow – he spends the entire runtime stoned out of his mind, misunderstanding straightforward tip-offs and taking nonsensical notes as he single-handedly spins an open-and-shut missing persons case into an arcane governmental drug conspiracy, complete with Neo-Nazis, Chinese cartels and resurrected Ska musicians. It’s a film that will only make sense if you watch it more than once, very much by design, as you realise with delight how effortlessly you were pranked by the first viewing. Only when you accept the inherent simplicity of the complex mystery will you be able to fully appreciate how deftly it’s all balanced, and begin to dig into the real complexity of the myriad colourful characters, all of whom reveals new facets on each viewing. A criminally underseen film. 10/10.

Wednesday – Gone With the Wind

I was expecting a certain level of values dissonance, but my God is this thing aggressively pro-Confederate. Not explicitly pro-slavery mind you, but implicitly longing for that era through its romanticisation of Southern culture as the last bastion of noble values in the modern world. It’s not offensive enough to kill the film, but it can be alarming when it accidentally brushes up against race in some eyebrow-raising ways. All that aside, this is a rousing epic in the first half and a somewhat sloppy relationship drama in the second, gorgeously shot and dramatically acted. Even within the limitations of Old Hollywood theatricality, Vivien Leigh is able to achieve some astounding moments of subtlety as Scarlett O’Hara, a fundamentally unlikeable character who really gets put through the ringer to an almost cruel degree. Clark Gable, effortlessly charismatic, plays a character of equal if not greater unpleasantness, yet the film seems more forgiving of these faults in a man, and the world offers him more avenues of redemption. The gender commentary is so overt that it has to be intentional, using reductive ideas of morality and traditional roles to add layers to the characters and their mercurial dynamic. Rather bleak for a sweeping romance, I liked it a lot, but might have loved it if it committed to the downer ending rather than tacking on a ridiculous scene of hopeful exultation right after. 7/10.

Thursday – Kagemusha

Kurosawa in colour – magnificent. A story of deceit, legacy and blind obedience, Kagemusha stars Tatsuya Nakadai in dual roles – as a legendary warlord well on his way to conquering Japan, and as a petty thief who happens to be identical. When the warlord is shot by a sniper during a careless excursion, the thief is drafted to act as his double so the enemy doesn’t supect his injury. But when the lord dies from his wound, things become more complicated – the thief is told he will have to become the lord full-time, projecting an illusion of stability for the clan until they are ready to regroup and go to war again. This absurd ruse is carried out on the orders of the late lord, whose final decree is either divinely sound advice or delusional feverish ramblings. The film fundamentally asks us how much loyalty a single man deserves, in life or in death. His samurai go to absurd lengths to protect his legacy, and even the thief becomes caught up in this patriotic fervour. It’s clear that the lord was a great man to inspire such loyalty, but can his ideals live without him there to enforce them? The covering up of his death and use of a double is an admission that the man was more important than the idea – even the illusion of his presence is preferable to passing the torch, much to the frustration of his impatient son. The film is calm and meditative, even the battle sequences passing with a dreamlike inevitability. Scores of soldier race offscreen and die out of our sight, combat reduced to a wall of sound, the reactions of onlookers and the bloody aftermath (the extended shots of the corpse-strewn battlefield call to mind the frozen chaos of Picasso’s Guernica). While the film is too broad in its scope to truly serve as an acting showcase, Nakadai nevertheless throws himself into the two roles, especially the escalating fear and anxiety of the double. The more he comes to believe in the charade, the more he fears slipping up and undoing the life’s work of the man he now represents. No man can ever be anything except himself – he can impersonate, imitate, perform, but he cannot become him in any true sense. Any attempt to be more than a shadow can only end in madness. 9/10.

Friday – Citizen Kane

Marvellously structured, an incisive biopic of a man who never existed told through a series of subjective snippets. Kane’s entire life story is given to us immediately in the charmingly novel form of a newsreel, immediately establishing an authentic reality to contain this larger-than-life figure. Then, through the interviews conducted by an intrepid journalist, we examine the man at different points in his life and from different perspectives. His mentor shows us a smarmy and irresponsible boy, his longtime assistant recalls him as a dedicated businessman and wonderful friend, his former best friend as a hard-hearted hypocrite whose ambition eclipsed his humanity and his ex-wife as a stony-faced tyrant wasting away in an absurd palace. Each of these perspectives is as true as the other, and somehow each and every one is played perfectly by Orson Welles, almost unrecognisable as the same person by the end of the film. Despite the focus on realism and truth, the film is visually fantastical, with an obvious Gothic influence and a superb eye for scale. Shadow is used to especially magnificent effect and there are several stunning uses of mirrors that will leave you wondering how they possibly pulled it off. Now, is this the greatest film of all time? No. Don’t be ridiculous. What it is is brilliant, monumental, a must-watch for anyone with an interest in movies, and probably deserving of the decades of hype surrounding it. When a film has been at the top for as long as this one has, anything less than perfection will probably be seen as a failure to the first-time viewer. I would say to leave your notions at the door, but of course that’s impossible. It lived up to my expectations, just not quite surpassing them. 9/10.

Saturday – The Wizard of Oz

Speaking of surpassing expectations, holy shit. I used to wonder why The Wizard of Oz remained so pervasive in pop culture even after all these decades, but now I get it. This is an absolutely magical film, a beautiful and joyous experience unlike any other. Dorothy stepping through that door into the Technicolor world of Oz is a cinematic moment that will never lose an ounce of the power it possesses, and hits even harder when watched in context. For a film that has been parodied to death, I wasn’t expecting it to be so funny in its own right, a delightful blend of classic slapstick, playful absurdism and excellent comic performances all around. Even though it has relatively few songs for a musical, the numbers it does serve up are a delight. This is also a masterclass in how to create moving stakes and tension without becoming overtly frightening, almost certainly a blueprint for Walt Disney’s animated formula. And how can you argue with a film that looks like this? The sets, the costumes, the make-up, the special effects, fantasy on the screen was perfected right here and quite possibly never equalled since. I used to roll my eyes when I saw this included in “Greatest Ever Films” discussions because I assumed it was a dozy kids movie kept in the conversation by cultural relevance – boy was I wrong! Genuine masterpiece. 10/10.

Sunday – Cat People

Ah, the classic low budget horror trick where not seeing the monster is meant to be scarier than seeing it. As hokey a move as it is, Cat People is actually successful in pulling it off, at least briefly. The film’s two standout sequences involve a woman being stalked by an unseen big cat. The first, when she’s walking in Central Park at night, uses a magnificent camera trick to immediately unnerve the audience, creating a rhythm of movement that it unexpectedly breaks to put us on edge as our heroine strides through an eerie black void. The second attack, in a darkened swimming pool, uses unnatural sound design and abstract shadows to completely sell an atmosphere of evil. Visual trickery and atmosphere are the film’s two strongest points, followed closely by it’s dense themes – the story of a woman who transforms into a monster when she becomes physically intimate is rife with psychosexual readings, both intended and otherwise. What’s not as strong is the story and characters, both intentionally abstracted to the point of being flat. Though the film is aiming to be odd and off-kilter, the story itself is too straightforward to be really surprising, while the characters are unfortunately too dull to really feel for. There’s plenty here to admire, perhaps enough for a second watch down the line, but for now, I wouldn’t be singing this film’s praises from the rooftops. 7/10.