A Middle Aged Movie Blog. Being the periodic journal of a film loving middle aged independent science fiction writing father of two and his ongoing adventures in cinema and home video

16/06/2018:
After a week of watching sports, attending conferences and licking my various wounds (broke my toes, injured my knee, and had a tooth removed after months of pointless fillings!) finished Legends of Tomorrow Season 1 with The Lampshade Maker. The show rattled along at a jaunty pace with its filched Dr. Who premise and motley array of heroes and villains. Filler episodes notwithstanding, Legends is a well organised colour blast of kinetic energy, with enough action and good humour to casually pass the time.

Sat and watched Kong: Skull Island (2017) with the boy, which was a goodly load of Apocalypse Now (1978) influenced creature feature silliness with some impressive monster effects, an excellent colour palate and some fun death scenes and movie monster throw-downs. As Kong pictures go it was rollicking good fun and I would highly recommend it as a weekend popcorn muncher. Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Starring John C. Reilly, Tom Hiddleston and Katherine Waterston.

Over the weekend, attended a Manchester Classic Cinema Screening of Flash Gordon (1980) with The Lampshade Maker and decided to scribble some notes when I got home a while later.

Mike Hodges’s garishly costumed serial adaptation remains the most audaciously mounted mess to come out of early eighties cinema. Pitched as a knowing slice of affectionate cartoon silliness, and following in the footsteps of European films such as 60’s kitsch classics Barbarella (1968) and Mario Bava’s impressively mounted and insanely realised Danger: Diabolik (1969), the film has developed a cult audience in the intervening decades primarily due to the campy Queen soundtrack it fostered and Brian Blessed’s shouty performance as idiotically attired beard warrior HawkMan.

There are some fun turns from Padme Amidala forerunner Max Von Sydow as Ming The Merciless and ex jock Sam Jones as the titular would-be saviour of the human race Flash Gordon. Overall, the film remains a brightly coloured, under appreciated pantomime that cocks a snook at the Star Wars copycats that surrounded it on its release, whilst all the while displaying a wilful disregard for anything approaching coherency.

17/06/2018
Attended a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) which was gloriously, jaw droppingly life affirming. Everything else pales into insignificance when frolicking in the shadow of HAL. Stanley Kubrick remains my favourite filmmaker ever, with the exception of (perhaps) Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and the magnificence that is Martin Scorcese.

24/06/2018
This week’s viewing on my annual leave, between fleeting glimpses of world cup games and lunch time excursions to canal side restaurants, has been patchy. Watched The Killing Of A Sacred Deer (2017) alone since when I explained the premise, The Lampshade Maker ran away from me laughing. She was probably right to do so. It was about as depressing and challenging a movie as I have seen in some time.

I’m not sure I enjoyed it per se. I felt woozy for long periods and a tad over-manipulated. That said, I certainly admired the way in which director Yorgas Lanthimos skewed the story into horror territory mid way through without my really noticing until it was too late, dancing all over narrative conventionality into the bargain and leaving me with my head in my hands as the credits rolled and I tried to make sense of whatever the hell it was I had just witnessed.

The picture certainly features some wonderfully unsettling photography from DP Thimios Bakatakis and excellent turns from star players Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell as an ex alcoholic surgeon with a penchant for sexual deviancy. However it is Irish wunderkind Barry Keoghan’s astonishingly disconcerting performance as Martin, that gets under the skin most. Emotionally peculiar and visually unsettling, Martin is by turns disquieting and terrifying as he inserts himself into the family life of Farrell and Kidman in an extremely well orchestrated attempt at extracting a terrible penance from the man he deems responsible for his father’s death.

Killing of A Sacred Dear is not an easy viewing experience and it will take a strong stomach and a certain amount of willpower to see it through to the final frame. However it marks Dogtooth (2010) and The Lobster (2015) director Lanthimos as a genuine talent with a unique eye for the absurd. It will be interesting to see how he follows this up moving forward.

Also this week took some time out from writing to watch Ralph Bakshi’s final full length feature Fire and Ice, a 1983 rotoscoped sword and sorcery offering penned by Red Sonja scribe Roy Thomas. Enjoyably silly though not nearly as good as The Lord of the Rings (1978) or earlier cult classic Wizards (1977). For fans of Bakshi’s brand of animated oddness though, Fire And Ice is essential cult viewing, hobbled somewhat by an over reliance on bland fantasy cliche’s that were rife in the 1980’s.

Watched Annihilation (2018), based on Jeff VanderMeer’s best-selling Southern Reach Trilogy, which was brilliant. Sort of a weird cross pollination of JG Ballard at his most disturbingly alien and Cronenberg inflected body horror. As bizarre, slow burn cerebral science fiction goes it was a genuinely unsettling and thoughtful film full of complexity and vividly rendered, intoxicating visuals.

Alex Garland, whose debut directorial effort Ex Machina (2015) was easily one of my favourite science fiction flicks of recent years somehow manages in Annihilation to follow it up with a sophomore effort every bit as brilliant and alternative as his first. Natalie Portman manages to not act with her eyebrows for long periods (A sign in my humble opinion that she was well directed in this instance) whilst DP Rob Hardy presents the viewer with a landscape in which the flora and fauna is every bit as menacing as whatever alien life form is at the centre of the anomalous otherworldly ‘shimmer’. My only gripe is that I wished I’d managed to see it in a cinema rather than on my widescreen 10 year old Toshiba on the couch.

Also watched Soylent Green (1973), which holds up pretty well under scrutiny, despite being a tawdry and dated depiction of a dystopian futureworld not a million miles away from the ‘present day’ of 1970s era America.

Richard Fleischer, whose body of work included a slew of early noir movies such as The Narrow Margin (1952) and Innerspace (1987) forerunner Fantastic Voyage (1966) as well as violent historical epic The Vikings (1958) and Disney classic 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954), makes a good fist of it for the most part, crafting a socially conscious dystopian parable out of what is essentially a one note B movie melodrama.

The director would go on to direct 1980’s fantasy duffers Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Red Sonja (1985). However, before descending into the journeyman waters of mid eighties cinematic dross, he was responsible for some interesting work and his back catalogue is worthy of a retrospective investigation for those unfamiliar with it.

Wrote a review of Near Dark for VHS Revival, which you can find here if you’re remotely interested.
Tradition Evolved: Near Dark and The Vampire Revolution

Flash Gordon, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Annihilation
Tagged on:                         

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *