What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Brighton Rock (1947)

Just seen this for the very first time. I know i do love British film but i was surprised at how good this actually was.

Surely it's one of the most sinister and violent (especially for the forties) crime films ever made in this country. Richard Attenborough's Pinkie Brown is the main reason. Thanks to an outstanding performance both from him and from Carol Marsh as the naive waitress who witnesses a murder and falls under Brown's almost hypnotic spell in the hope that he actually really does love her back. The scene as she practically begs Pinkie to make a voice recording for her so she can listen to it when he's away is genuinely shocking.

Even now after just the single viewing i can tell why it's one of the great crime films.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Venom (1981)

Growing up in the early 80's was different to how it is now. One of the main reasons being just three, then four television channels. However those channels used to show what i consider to be almost mythical films and programmes. The kind you got a sneaky watch of that would then stay with you for the rest of your life. Piers Haggard's Venom was one of those films.

My main memory was of a dangerous Black Mamba snake slithering around inside a large London townhouse populated by crooks, then appearing occasionally to bite and poison some unfortunate soul to their death.

In truth i found out that was the basic premise to Venom as well, having just watched it last night courtesy of Blue Underground's dvd for the first time since those heady days of the eighties. The film is fairly basic in plot set up with the whole thing being a siege with kidnappers inside and police outside, plus of course, one deadly snake.

The film has a great cast from the time including Sterling Hayden, Oliver Reed, Klaus Kinski, Susan George, Sarah Miles and Nicol Williamson, plus the supporting cast are mainly all well known which proves a treat for those who like to star spot. However the film kind of lets this terrific ensemble down a little. Whilst it has suspense it's perhaps a little light on thrills as snake attacks aside not an awful lot happens following the first half hour ,with the middle third playing out as a shouting match between Reed and Kinski with the excitement of the siege not coming into play until the final third. When they come the snake attacks are still savage and indeed gruesome and i realize why they ingrained their selves on my mind as an impressionable kid.

Venom is a solid British thriller, competent, interesting and intermittently exciting rather than brilliant, but well worth having in any collection of British cinema.

[Frankie Teardrop]

LINK – Thanks again to Dem for this one, a film I was kind of aware of but had always avoided due to my mistaken idea that it was a sort of fantasy comedy starring a cute chimp. I'm really glad I checked it out, because 'Link' is quite a unique movie. Whilst certainly nowhere near the blown up PG Tips ad I had in mind, 'Link' is pretty difficult to pin down, on all kinds of levels. Terence Stamp is an anthropologist who lives on a remote and secluded estate out in some coastal wilderness, where he experiments with his buddies, a trio of semi domesticated chimpanzees. His new assistant, Elizabeth Shue, can't figure out what's going on – is Stamp conducting an investigation into the developmental psychology of primates, or is something more sinister going on? Needless to say, given the appearance of Tosh Lines, I'd go for the latter. 'Link' could be described as a horror film, and it is, but the whole 'animals attack' thing isn't the real thrust here (although animals do attack). There's a really odd quality to it. I always bang on about those hazy, slightly trippy grindhouse films from the seventies which often have a dreamlike feeling about them. 'Link' isn't remotely like those in stylistic essence, but it does seem to obey the logic of a dream somehow. You walk away from it feeling that that much more was going on than met the eye, as if a surface drama about a young woman being terrorised by an ape concealed all kinds of strange allusions which never quite crystallised out. There's a moment in 'Link' which feels like it might be quite telling – Elizabeth Shue comes across a photograph of Stamp and a woman and a girl, a family by the looks of things, but in the film Stamp is aloof, alone and not very nice. And that's it. The family, if that's what it was, is never again referred to. What happened with all that stuff? The fact that in the latter part of the film, Shue is a lone woman trying to protect a young chimp from a rampaging male fires all kinds of speculation – is some kind of metaphorical playing out of a horrid man's familicidal guilt going on? Or what? (don't freak out by the way, 'Suicide' fans – Frankie Teardrop has no significant others). Other aspects place it in a kind of dreamland. The dogs in the distance, the unhurried, slightly playful tone – it's all vaguely unreal, and slightly intoxicating. On another level, it's at least as distasteful and dodgy as those PG Tips ads, and goes a step further or two – witness sleazy Locke as he eyes up a nude Shue. Mid eighties Brit-grot at its woeful finest, all the more so for masquerading as, and actually being, something much more thoughtful and elusive (not to mention its technical accomplishments, there are a few passages worthy of Argento in the roving camera stakes). 'Link' left me feeling quite... haunted, strangely, and it's a film that's been stuck in my mind since I saw it (twice in row, don't often do that) a few days ago. Recommended.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

LINK – Recommended.

It certainly has qualities all of it's own making. The scene you mentioned where Shue bathes is definitely Britgrot at it's finest. That ape definitely has urges, you can see it in it's eyes.

Glad you enjoyed it Frankie. Did you pick up the Network disc in the last sale?

[Frankie Teardrop]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

It certainly has qualities all of it's own making. The scene you mentioned where Shue bathes is definitely Britgrot at it's finest. That ape definitely has urges, you can see it in it's eyes.

Glad you enjoyed it Frankie. Did you pick up the Network disc in the last sale?

Yeah, I watched the Network disc. "That ape definitely has urges, you can see it in its eyes" - again, the flipside of those cosy PGTips mid eighties UK idiot ads. Never trust the animal kingdom ,they're too much like us. I guess that was the point of the movie. I do think the psychological aspect was interesting.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Thanks for the review, Frankie. Firstly, it was a great read, and secondly, I now feel as if I have to watch the film so will buy the BD in the next Network sale.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

The Impossible (2012)

Harrowing but life affirming true story account of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated Thailand.

Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts are both brilliant, especially Watts, as a regular couple on holiday for Christmas with their three children when the tsunami strikes. Some magnificent special effects pull you in during the first half hour and then it's human drama all the way as the five try and find each other amidst all the devastation.

A film i'd heard about, a disaster movie with a proper emotional edge, i'd kind of avoided watching this for some reason but i'm now glad i did as it was more horrifying than most horror films doing the rounds.

Recommended. (Definitely better than The Babadook)

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

The Impossible (2012)

A very fine film which I'm glad I saw at the cinema – it was New Year's Day when it had just been released – and a very emotional experience. I see the commercial reasons for changing the central family from Spanish to British (implied, but not stated) but it would have been more authentic if it had been with characters speaking the same language as Enrique Alvarez, Maria Belón, and their children.

On the topic of J. A. Bayona, I'm very much looking forward to seeing the upcoming A Monster Calls; I have seen the trailer several times and think it could be superb.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Arrival (2016)

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, the man behind the thought-provoking thriller Prisoners (2013) and the tense drug action/thriller Sicario (2015), Arrival stars Amy Adams as Dr Louise Banks, a world-renowned linguist who goes to deliver her first lecture of the day passing people in front of TV screens. Although a little bemused that only a handful of people are in the lecture hall, she begins to tell them about the origins of Portuguese before the frequency of texts and phone calls the students receive leads one of them to ask her to put on the TV and turn to a news station – any of them. The reason for the unusual day is that 12 large alien rocks have descended to the earth's surface, hovering without any obvious propulsion systems. It's a bit like that line in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about the Vogon ships hanging motionless over every nation on earth, "huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature", hanging in the sky "in much the same way that bricks don't".

Of course, this isn't The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it's an altogether more serious affair, but the principle of the objects remained the same. To get a long story, Louise is recruited by the US military to coordinate the communication effort with the aliens, and is assisted by theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). I don't want to give too much away, but the two of them develop a basic communication system which develops and the 'visitors' impart their own messages which are non-linear and can be misinterpreted depending on your cultural background and understanding of a given word. This causes schisms in the world community and collaboration gives way to suspicion, with the Russians joining the Chinese and everyone deciding secrecy is the best course of action.

While this is going on, Louise is using memories of her daughter, who died of cancer in her teens, to think of communication techniques and the basics of language. Her unconventional approach isn't entirely appreciated by the spook from the CIA, nor the no-nonsense Colonel (Forest Whitaker) who initially approached her.

When I saw the trailer for this, I thought it would hopefully be one of those rare pieces of intelligent science fiction that stays with you for hours or days afterwards and demands repeated viewings. The last few years have done this with films such as Interstellar, Under the Skin, and Ex Machina, which aren't afraid to leave questions unanswered and introduce concepts such as time travel, artificial intelligence, the nature of humanity, and the dangers of overreliance on technology, which lead to discussions and debate afterwards. Fortunately, Arrival is another of thes page up page up e with a surprisingly well written and crafted screenplay by Eric Heisserer (A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Final Destination 5, The Thing (2011)) from the short story 'Story of Your Life' by Ted Chiang.

This is one of the best films I have seen this year and I'm still thinking about it 24 hours later, which is always a sign that the film's subtext or concepts were more than I can digest in two hours in a cinema. I'll either go back and watch it again next week or buy it as soon as it is available, though both are distinct probability. Any science-fiction film that introduces Fermat's theorem of least time, non-linear linguistics and the nature of free well is ambitious, and I'm very pleased to say that Arrival managed to be challenging and enjoyable. It is also an achievement for a film to have echoes Contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Interstellar without ever feeling derivative. It is also proof that Amy Adams is one of the best actors around – she was also superb in Nocturnal Animals (2016) – and the entire cast, from Jeremy Renner to Forest Whitaker, Tzi Ma to Michael Stuhlbarg are perfect. In some ways, it reminded me (in a good way) of Gareth Edwards' Monsters, in that the aliens, the heptapods, so-named because they have seven legs, are in the background and the main interactions are with other humans and the characters' own memories.

I didn't hesitate in giving this 10/10 and highly recommend it to anyone who likes challenging, intelligent films, regardless of genre.

[Justin101]

Originally Posted by Nosferatu@Cult Labs

Arrival (2016)

I've been saying it for 2 weeks that I'm going to go and see it, but tonight is the night - it really is. I'm not full of cold any more and I can sit through a 2 hour film without coughing and sneezing.