www.list.co.uk/film
DRAMA
El. BANO DEL PAPA
(cert tbc) 94min (Soda Pictures DVD retail) .0.
Eii'aao iciLAl’A
There is an awful lot wrong with this tale of a family struggling to survive as the husband tries to make a living smuggling goods over the border into Uruguay. But its strength is that it generates a plot out of real life and real concerns. Taking as its premise a visit Pope John Paul II made to the Uruguyan town of Melo. the film explores how the locals hope the visit will work a minor economic miracle. Expecting many thousands of visitors to pour in from nearby Brazil. Beto (Cesar Troncoso) and his neighbours all borrow heavily against the possibility of making a fast buck out of the visit. Beto and his family build a toilet that can be used by the hordes they're expecting, but will all go according to plan?
Directors Enrique Fernandez and Cesar Charlone have made a film that is heavy on pathos and offers too many reaction shots to Cesar‘s wise daughter looking at her parents‘ messy lives. but this is cinema with a purpose. (Tony McKibbin)
HORROR
THE GRAVEYARD (18) 83min
(Revolver DVD retail/rental) 0
Michael Hurst's horror film by numbers harks back very ineffectiver to the three-decade-old genre conventions of Friday the 73th and Halloween. A prologue depicts a group of college friends playing an unpleasant prank upon one of their number, who dies as a result. Bobby (Patrick Scott Lewis) is held by
the authorities to be responsible. After a five- year manslaughter sentence. Bobby reassembles his friends in the inevitable summer camp where the action began. and completely unsurprisingly, they start coming to nasty ends. A predictable plot and a disguised villain that T Dan Quayle would spot early on quash any hope of success. Bury this one face down. (Steve Cramer)
HORROR COMEDY BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH
(15) 88min
(Nucleus DVD retail) 0”
Out of print for over 20 years. Kenny Everett's one and only feature film has been unearthed. This horror spoof features a group of monks bumping off anyone who dares enter Headstone Manor, and stars a host of familiar Brit TV faces (Pamela Stephenson. Gareth Hunt. John Fortune).
plus a wonderful Vincent
Price as the appropriately named “Sinister Man‘.
The film is surprisingly gory. with a dash of Carry On-esque cheeky black humour. But perhaps even more shockingly, it‘s pretty damn watchable. certainly far better than the recent Scary Movie series. It‘s a real (admittedly very cheap) film, rather than just an extended sketch sharing many of the aesthetics of alternative comedy stalwarts. The Comic
Strip. and Everett. while anarchic, is fairly restrained compared to his various TV shows and rapidfire goofy gags. A bizarre slice of 80s pop culture.
(Henry Northmore)
THRILLER
THE CELLAR DOOR
(18) 86min (Revolver DVD retail/rental) COO
This is an interestingly shot. tense and to the point thriller. which belies its opening sequence in which a girl is sadistically tortured in the familiar tradition of Hostel or Saw to become a dark psychological study. with the odd outburst of gore.
Matt Zettell‘s thriller depicts a serial killer who. having disposed of his latest victim. begin the process of stalking a young woman. He captures her and locks her in a home-made cage in his basement. where she begins a psychological game with him to preserve her life. There's some interesting use of camera angles and close up. all adding to the claustrophobia. while the psychological ailments of its sick central character are deftly exposed without being overplayed. There are some moments that might be edited to shorten the film. but good lead performances from James DuMont and Michelle Tomlinson make it worth the watch. Little in the way of extras.
(Steve Cramer)
DRAMA
LA LEON (15) 78min (Soda DVD retail) .0.
There‘s a formal rigour to so many of the films coming out of Argentina that it's a pity many of them — Lucretia. Martel and Lisandro, Alonso
FILM BOOKS ROUNDUP
In terms of wealth of research and weightiness of tome Richard Brody’s biography of Jean-Luc
the Working Ute Cs?
Godard;\ '
Godard. Everything is Cinema (Faber) 0000 . should be a
masterpiece. Yet for all 3
its detail Godard remains an enigma, and this seems neither for want of research (there are well over fifteen hundred notes) nor due to Godard‘s famously obscure way of thinking, but rather because Brody's fine book nevertheless can‘t quite get the measure of this most paradoxical of men. It may be that it takes a good novelist to do justice to the Dostoyevskian
perversities at the heart
and soul of this great filmmaker.
\‘lLt V .~i~ \tiLr
Compared to Godard, Mike Leigh in Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh (edited by Amy Raphael) Faber
excepted — haven't worked through the subtle storytelling elements that they still feel obliged to utilise. Like other recent works Born and Bred and XX Y. La Ledn really knows how to bring a sense of meditative enquiry to the image. The shot isn't there simply to further plot. it has a time and place all its own. Unfortunately, at a
I
00” comes across as a meat-and-two— veg kind of guy. Though he says that Godard. ‘opened my eyes to the notion of film as film'. he also admits that he wasn’t always enamoured by the modernist masterpieces of the sixties: Last Year at Marienbad ‘bored me to death', and 'Blow- Up was total, unmitigated shite’. As he explains how he puts together his own work, based on famous improvisations with his cast before a script comes into existence, Leigh is a clear and engaging commentator on his films.
Cities in Transition (Wallflower) on is a collection of essays on the cinematic city edited by Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson. With essays by Thomas Elsaesser, Patrick Keiller and Chris Petit. amongst others. this is a very efficient look at how time and space are utilised in relation to the city. The best, most impressionistic article come from Petit, with loads of good observations on the limitations of British cinema, but Francois Penz’s article on Rohmer's The Aviator's Wife and Rivette's Pont
certain point here the strength of the image
LALEON if?“ g:
Ingmar
BERG.“th unflr‘rd' 2:21"??? ‘ "m
du Nord is worth a look also.
Then there is Ingmar Bergman Revisited
, (Wallflower) COO ,
an essay collection on the recently deceased master. Amongst the
essays worth reading here are John Orr's on
Bergman's
3 connections with
Nietzsche and also Hollywood and Janet Staiger's analysis of how Bergman presents himself in interviews.
A word also for Martine Beugnet's Cinema and Sensation (Edinburgh University Press) one . a very
E useful, formally specific E look at how recent
French cinema has become fascinated by “the deeply sensual. synaesthetic effect of the film image and
3 sound-track’. Finally
the 44th International Film Guide (Wallflower) 0000 is as always well worth buying for anyone interested in
global filmmaking. ' (Tony McKibbin)
gives way to weakness of plot: here the gay central character working in the jungles in a remote region of Argentina gets harassed by the dastardly owner of the boat of the title. melodramatic elements that seem to counter the pace of the film. Yet, this is another fine work from a national cinema of immense interest. (Tony McKibbin)
17—31 Jul 20081115 LIST 57