Reviews

Neil Jordan’s new film THE BRAVE ONE plays like a feminist parody of both DEATH WISH (the survivor of a brutal crime turns vigilante) and TAXI DRIVER (New York’s omnipresent violence and corruption - at least, that’s how the films present it - turns the protagonist deranged). Even the music often recalls Herrmann's score for Scorsese’s film. I mean parody in the best sense; the echoes of the earlier films call both of those (mainly Winner’s) into question. Jodie Foster plays the vigilante, and her intensely affecting performance is the core of the film, in which her doubts about her right to gun down criminals lead her to externalise her vigilante personality, even referring to it in the third person on her live radio show. Some scenes, it has to be said, are outrageously contrived - for instance, the one in which the detective (Terrence Howard) in charge of investigating the vigilante killings takes the broadcaster along with him while he interviews a witness. That said, the scene plays so well in its own understated terms that I went along with it. Does the ending endorse the behaviour that the film has previously questioned? Perhaps it has some of the force of the ending of DIRTY HARRY, but less of the heartfelt despair. I admit that whereas in my youth I would have been outraged by its illiberality, in terms of some operations of the law I’ve become less of a liberal.

John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN is the most restrained of all slasher films, with even less blood onscreen than in Hitchcock’s PSYCHO. It achieves its effects largely by suggestion and in particular by using the periphery of the Scope screen. It is also remarkably pure as a fright film – a mechanism devoted simply to scaring the audience. In particular psychopathic Michael Myers is a cipher, and the sequels added nothing by developing the character and his relationships. Of course the simplicity of the film also led to FRIDAY THE 13TH and its sequels and innumerable imitations, all of which lost the Lewtonesque reticence of Carpenter’s film. Now Rob Zombie has remade it, and the effect is horrible in all the wrong ways. Although the film is more than twenty minutes longer than the original, it’s also hollower. Almost half an hour at the beginning, for instance, is given over to reiterating how morally empty Michael Myers’ childhood self is, a point Carpenter made in one scene and a few lines of dialogue. Where it copies the original it’s inept; for instance, the great moment in which we aren’t sure whether we hear a single breath from inside a dilapidated house is ruined by showing us in advance that Myers is inside. The film also borrows from the sequels, and makes utter nonsense of the idea that the heroine is Myers’ sister: how can he know? If the ending and other moments are meant to elicit some sympathy for him, they fails as badly as similar attempts on behalf of the psychopaths in Zombie’s previous film THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. Much more gore and lingering sadism, much less terror than Carpenter gave us. His film was in an honourable tradition – this isn’t. Watch the original instead.

Like all his films, Michael Moore’s SICKO has points to make – in this case, about the failure of the American health care system and specifically of health insurance. When it interviews victims, it often hits home, and I don’t doubt its heart is in the right place. The trouble is that Moore doesn’t just make points, he scores them, and it’s unfortunately clear that he doesn’t care too much how he does so. It’s ironic that he uses the British National Health at some length to demonstrate what the American system ought to be. Some British viewers may well think this is a sick joke, if presumably an inadvertent one, and that the issues his film deplores are already well on the way to overtaking the British system too, in Britain’s inevitable imitation of the States at their worst. The film has become notorious for his final stunt, in which he takes several of his interviewees failed by the American system to Guantanamo Bay and tries to get them treated in the superior facility there once he’s had fun on the soundtrack with the notion that the inmates should be treated well. This isn’t merely silly, it’s rabble-rousing, and it seems hypocritical to me. Is this a case of saying whatever suits the moment and hoping people won’t remember what he’s said or agreed with elsewhere? I may agree with his politics and Ken Loach’s, but their tendency to present their cases as the only view provokes me to espouse the opposite position. I really feel Moore needs to respect his audience more, and his material too.

On DVD, Universal have a box of seven science fiction films, ranging from the good (CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE) and upwards through TARANTULA and THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN to the truly classic (the original versions of THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS). I’ve been able to see only THIS ISLAND EARTH, which has the odd absurdity – the pilotless plane that nevertheless sports manual controls – but also a real sense of wonder. The scientist hero (Rex Reason) receives mysterious instructions to construct a machine that’s both an alien intelligence test and an invitation to join a crew of scientists (including Faith Domergue) to be transported to another planet. Perhaps the scenes there are a little perfunctory in terms of the total length of the film, but they’re very striking, and so is the use of Technicolor, there and elsewhere in the film (the eerie green of a tractor beam from a spaceship wouldn’t be used as effectively until it enveloped Kim Novak in a famous scene in VERTIGO). Indeed, back in 1955 this was the first film to impress this nine-year-old critic with the use of colour. This Universal release improves on that aspect of the deleted Region 1 disc from Image, but also crops the fullscreen image to 1.85. Take your choice. As part of this inexpensive set, though, it looks like a qualified bargain.

As in several films of the period and earlier – think of Dennis Potter and Harold Pinter as well – Pasolini’s TEOREMA (THEOREM) from 1968 centres on a household invaded by a stranger, in this case a bourgeois Milanese family into which Terence Stamp’s ambiguous stranger settles. Having seduced everyone, including the maid, he departs, leaving them to turn to art or politics or sex or inwards to fill the lack. In some ways, starting with the title, it’s one of the director’s most starkly theoretical films, but it’s redeemed by the casual – almost careless – beauty of much of the imagery. Like PIGSTY and of course Pasolini’s life of Christ, it’s haunted by images of the wilderness, and open to religious readings as well as political. I recall seeing it in a spotty 16mm print, which was the only way it reached most of the British provinces, but now the bfi have brought out a fine uncut anamorphic widescreen restoration on DVD. It also includes an informative interview with Stamp, and the booklet offers further insights from Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Philip Strick.