The future isn't what it used to be

During the last fortyeight hours i have watched two popular movies from the Eighties that both fall under the soiled umbrella of noir. Angel Heart is probably the only Alan parker movie i genuinely like. On what looks like a modestish budget he creates a visually plausible Fifties America and a graphically clean hell. Mickey Rourke was once a fairly cute actor. Robert DeNiro was once able to play comedy in lower case. Charlotte Rampling excites as always in a small but integral role. CAUTION SPOILERS AHEAD. iF YOU CARE ABOUT SURPRISE DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER. Angel Heart is a demonic variant on the basic concept of Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock and Derek Marlowe's A Dandy in Aspic with the difference that Rourke's hapless PI doesn't know that Mr. Cyphere ( DeNiro)has sent him in search of himself. Amgel Heart wears very well. I'd not have thought Parker capable of a film as modest and well realized as this.

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, on the other hand, is a Big Deal, almost a white elephant, rereleased and rereleased innumerable times. ( The version I watched was sans voiceover. I didn't even notice its absence.)I don't usually care about the plausibility or consistency of scifi science but there's a basic error about the Replicants that must be addressed. They are not androids or robots. They are genetically engineered short action flesh and blood work machines,in other words, slaves. I think audiences were so dazzled by BR's justly celebrated rainy nighttown dystopic design of the future that they didn't listen to Fancher's script very closely.
I can't help wondering if BR would be a textbook movie if it had been shot on the early Eighties equivalent of an old Twilight Zone episode's budget so ehat we paid more attention to the words and less to the imagery. Ridley Scott is not a scifi or horror director, although he's helmed one classic in each genre. He's a hack of distinction who loses interest in a film somewhere between the last shot and the editing process. Alien, that derivative funhouse of a movie, holds together as a tale of the old dark starship and the nastiest monster yet imagined because of its superior acting ensemble and daring design. BR looks a bit rushed and hokey in comparison. Scott gets good work from his actors. Harrison Ford, that block of wood, is actually exciting in a way he would never be again. Sean Young, Darryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer as the angry trio of replicants are among the finest gang of misfits in movies.
So why doesn't it work any better?
In 1982 moviegoers were still turning up stoned out of their minds. Easily dazzled by the cheesiest eye candy, they were swept off their feet by Scott's superior set design and dank seamless vision of a sinus torturing future. Blade Runner will endure but it's an elaborate facade with a lot of insufficiently explored philosophical themes behind it. Give me Alien any day. Scary as hell with no axe to grind.

RBFF Last Day

God help me. I should stay away from the flea market section of the Festival tent.
I don't buy T shirts or that sort of bric a brac. No. I buy Hollywood - From Vietnam to Watergate by Robin Wood.
I saw two more films, the popular French thriller Tell No One which actually deserves the adjective Hitchcockian. To tell more would be spoiling it for you, dear reader(s).

The Lebanese Under The Bombs was more involving. Filmed ten days after the ceasefire ( Israeli bombing attacks continued)of the Thirty-three Days War. A frantic woman hires a reluctant cabbie to drive her to south Lebanon in search of her children. They meet repeated obstacles especially bombed out bridges. It's grim to think how much of this film's script was dictated by the ravaged landscape. The ending is bittersweet but totally bleak. I had just finished complaining that the selection had become too timid and almost PBS-ish on one of those surveys. Guess I spoke too soon.

Rehoboth Beach Film Festival

It always rains on Thursday, my usual day for festivities. This year I bought two film books ( an Andre Bazin collection, an issue of Screen) and saw two films. Newcastle is the locale and title of an Australian surfing picture starring a group of blond lookalike actors. The sole brunette plays a character called Faggot Boy. Jesse and his twin brother Fergus are stepsiblings to Victor, a married steelworker who used to be a surfing champion.
Separated from his wife and children, Victor's moved back home.
Jesse enters a competition and comes in third. Unfortunately he's not even recognised because there were only two prizes. Disgruntled, he agrees to going on a camping trip with Ferus and three of his surfing friends. Everything that happens on that trip is integral to the movie's outcome. I'll not spoil it for you. Although Newcastle's storyline is on par with S.E. Hinton or some other YA novelist, the acting, comedy and truly stoamach-churning underwater camera work makes you forget easily. In a Way Newcastle is the Australian Paranoid Park, with adults, without the alienation.

Let The Right One In has already won several prizes at genre and nongenre festivals. A lonely bullied twelve year old boy's new neighbor is first seen standing on a frozen jungle gym. She's a vampire. The town's recent spate of murders and disappearances are the work of Vampire Girl's seedy middlescent renfield. One of the film.s more memorable scenes is renfield's acid facial, administered to avoid identification. LTROI is not a fastpaced thriller. it's slow and moody but wonderfully paced. Every gotcha shock is totally logical and, as far as this grizzled horror fan's concerned, totally chilling.

The festival ends tonight.

Big Changes

A quote from Laurie Anderson adapted from Walter Benjamin:

He said History is an angel
being blown backward against the future
History is a pile of debris
the angel wants to go back
and fix things, to repair
the things that have been broken.

But there is a storm
blowing from paradise and
the storm keeps blowing
the angel backward into the future.
And this storm, this storm
is called Progress.