OSSESSIONE

1943; directed by Luchino Visconti; adapted by Mario Alicata, Giuseppe De Santis, Alberto Moravia, Alberto Pietrangeli, Gianni Puccini and Luchino Visconti; 140 mins

Down and out, Gino (Massimo Girotti), gets dragged off the back of a lorry and finds himself at a rural inn belonging to the boorish, abusive Giuseppe Bragana (Juan de Landa) and his much younger wife, Giovanna (Clara Calamai). Gino and Giovanna immediately fall for each other and as soon as Giuseppe is away for an afternoon, they are in bed together and plotting how to get him out of the picture. After an aborted escape together, Giovanna refuses to go because her husband is still around and she seems to love the inn itself. Temporarily, they split and Gino heads off to find work in a nearby port town.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES

2013; written and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn; 86 mins

There seems to be no way to write a positive review about this film without it becoming a defence but here we go:

After 2011’s, Drive*, it looked like Nic Winding Refn was going to remake Logan’s Run with star Ryan Gosling and a budget of over $200,000,000. That didn’t happen so, with his biggest hit to date (US$76 mil worldwide) behind him, he fucked off to see Wild Bunch in France and got himself five million to make this. Ex-pat American brothers Billy (Tom Burke) and Julian (Ryan Gosling) run a Muay Thai boxing club as a front for a drug running business.

OUR LITTLE SISTER

2015; adapted and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda; 128 mins

For a film that is book-ended by funerals, this is that rarest of things – a  genuinely happy story for mature grown-ups. Kore-eda is constantly compared to Yasujirō Ozu which is not, by any means, a comparsion to be sniffed at but the likeness does seem lazy; ‘well, they’re Japanese and they make dramas about folk’. He himself, in a recent interview, said that he thought his works much closer to the working class dramas of Mikio Naruse* and Ken Loach. There seemed, also, to be a lot of Mike Leigh in this tale of women bonding, bickering and getting by over a year of home truths thrown up by the vagaries of family.

LOUIE BLUIE

1985; directed by Terry Zwigoff; 60 mins

“You’d suck the sweat off a grape!”

“If I had one biscuit and you hadn’t’ve eaten in a month, I’d break it in half an’ eat both pieces!”

“Preacher’s a reg’lar legalised pimp! … A lotta people didn’t care too much about Jesus cos he was too humble an’ meek! Who in the fuck cares about somebody nodding his damn head when a guy’s gettin’ ready to kick his ass?”

These quotes and many others are what make Terry Zwigoff‘s feature debut (a portrait of musician, artist and raconteur Howard ‘Louie Bluie’ Armstrong) such a treat.

WHERE TO INVADE NEXT

2015; directed by Michael Moore; 120 mins

In 2007’s SiCKO, Michael Moore presented the world with a portrait of Britain’s NHS that was something akin to the Garden of Eden. Now, I’m very glad that we have the NHS and I certainly don’t want it to go away but it is a fuck up and a shambles and has been for some time! It is interesting that – almost a decade later – the UK doesn’t feature in Moore’s latest work. This is maybe less to do with him being called out on his fanciful propaganda as it is to do with the fact that Britain has no ideas that the US could or would nick to better themselves. That said, it does flag up the fact that it is quite hard to watch a Michael Moore film and believe it nowadays.

THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS

1978; directed by Enzo G. Castellari; written by Sandro Continenza, Sergio Grieco, Franco Marotta, Romano Migliorini, Alberto Piferi and Laura Toscano; 99 mins

[SPOILERS! Sorry]

The more I watched Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the more the cracks showed. First time, it was great, fifth or sixth time… not so. Firstly, the long stretches of tedious discourse on movies (symptomatic of the many issues with his worst film, Death Proof) and the variable performances (I like Brad Pitt but Aldo Raine is pretty ropey and Eli Roth is fucking shit in it). Secondly – and possibly more importantly – this seemed to be at the nadir of his appropriation of other people’s work. He has always been a pastiche-y director and loves to reference other directors’ work and that’s fine.

TOKYO-GA

1985; directed by Wim Wenders; 92 mins

Here’s an interesting viewing experience: being only intermittently interested in a film but welling up by the last twenty minutes! Wim Wenders‘ documentary about the late director Yasujirō Ozu and his beloved Tokyo is fitfully interesting but not quite the analysis/appraisal that I wanted it to be.