Scaramouche - Let Us Do the Fandango

The mob from the Ingram Scaramouche.

FILMS OF 2016

I can tell that it’s that time again because the drunks throwing up outside in the streets of Surry Hills are wearing Santa Hats. I list out the films which I saw for the first time and impressed me during the year to get my own recollections in order as much as for any benefit that may accrue world wide. I discover that IMDB stared as a similar exercise.

That’s (in some kind of order of preference) Rex Ingram’s 1922 SCARAMOUCHE with Ramon Novarro finally, a demonstration that major work started earlier in the twenties than I’d thought. The GOOD DINOSAUR Peter Sohn wonder of an animation,  STEVE JOBS from Danny Boyle, FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS Stephen Frears back on form, YOUTH the same true of Paulo Sorrentino, Tom Ford’s NOCTURNAL ANIMALS, extraordinary for a second film, Tom McCarthy’s scathing SPOTLIGHT, William Wellman’s 1932 SO BIG with the first great Barbara Stanwyck performance, Salvador del Solar’s MAGALLANES appearing from nowhere, Anne Fontaine’s 2011 MON PIRE
CAUCHEMAR (My Worst Nightmare) with Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Poelvoorde, WO BU SHI PAN JINLIAN  (I Am Not Madame Bovary) a piece of extraordinary complexity from Xiaogang Feng who also headed up the cast of the Hu Guan & Runnian Dong  Lao pao er / Mr. Six , Vladimir Strizhevsky’s 1929 Der ADJUDANT DES ZAREN (L’aioutante dello zar/ Zarens Adjudant /The Adjudant of the Tsar) with Ivan Mozjoukine (figuring again), Jacques Audiard’s DHEEPAN, Shane Black’s The NICE GUYS, SAINT AMOUR from Benoît Delépine & Gustave Kervern, also regular offenders here.

Nocturnal Creatures - Amy Adams

 

 

 Also considered were Ken Cameron’s 2012 Dangerous Remedy,  Stéphane Brizé’s La loi du marché / The Measure of a Man with Vincent Lindon, Avril et le monde truqué / April and the Extraordinary World/  April and the Twisted World steam punk toon from Christian Desmares & Franck Ekinci, Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, Gillo Pontecorvo’s Ogro  / Operación Ogro of 1979 with Gian Maria Volonte, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, Lee Tamahori’s Mahana / The Patriarch,  Bertrand Tavernier’s Voyage à travers le cinéma français/  Journey Through French Cinema, Samuel Benchetrit’s Asphalte/  Macadam Stories, David Mamet’s 2013 Phil Spector,  Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang, Álex de la Iglesia’s Mi gran noche/ My Big Night, Martin Zandvliet’s Under sandet / Land of Mine, Mario Monicelli’s Risate di gioia / The Passionate Thief, Larmes de joie / Tears of Joy, Roar Uthaug’s Bølgen, Vittorio Cottafavi’s 1943 winning I nostri sogni / Our Dreams with De Sica, Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake - indignation as entertainment, Cesc Gay’s Truman, Jay Roach’s Trumbo,  Stephen Chow’s Mei ren yu/ Mermaid, Doris Dörrie’s Grüße aus Fukushima /Greetings from Fukushima / Fukushima Mon Amour, Sinclair Hill’s 1929 Guns of Loos,  Barbara Kopple’s Hot Type: One Hundred and Fifty Years of  The Nation, Adam McKay’s The Big Short  and for the fun of it William Wyler’s 1935 The Gay Deception.

 
  There is minimal connection with the lists put out overseas.

Andrew Garfield - Hacksaw Ridge

I Daniel Blake seems to appeal and Hacksaw Ridge, and Nocturnal Creatures get mentions. This can be put down to my taste (or lack of it) late delivery of product here and also the fact that, now that there is a bigger pool to draw from, a lot of  films just never come up for consideration. Unless they crack it for the festival circuit and usually not then, Indian, Chinese or Arab (but not Israeli) film are considered either too inferior or alien for critics to admire or even watch. I feel the same way about the franchise spectaculars myself .

There has also been a shift. The replacement of 16 mm. by video should have meant a wider range of specialist material. However the electronic media has failed to produce significant long form work - most notably in porn and activist product.

Works of high seriousness like Piero Messina’s ponderous  L'attesa / The Wait or the output of celebrity directors like Pedro Almodovar or Jim Jarmusch have the inside track and popular entertainment - think Two Guns or We’re the Millers or indeed Mon pire cauchemar and Risate di gioia - are considered beneath consideration.

Also you might think it’s a bit early to bemoan productions missing in the Australia scene with the catch up of festivals, a limping SBS and special events still to come, so I went back to the New York Times’ ten best lists of  2011 and of their chosen material I can’t recall the appearance here of  A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang); Cedar Rapids (Miguel Arteta) Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz) Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino), Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean), Abracadabra (Ernie Gehr) Aurora, (Cristi Puiu) The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica), My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa), Poetry (Lee Chang-dong), Seeking the Monkey King (Ken Jacobs) and Voluptuous Sleep (Betzy Bromberg) and a few more I left out to be safe. I don’t have a team of subsidised interns to verify this list, so my apologies to any diligent festival director or entrepreneur who may have got around to them but just suppose my impression is correct and down the years admired material has regularly just not hit our shores - not to mention the popular or specialised titles. Wouldn’t this have an effect on the quality of film awareness and all the things that flow on from it?

Bertrand Tavernier.- Voyage á Travers le cinema Français

SWORDMASTER KILL (3D) and the Good Old Days.

In the nineteen seventies Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studios dominated the Chinese speaking market. They had obliterated the colony’s small screen, black and white productions and the mainland’s Marxists had thrown in the towel for the Cultural Revolution.

The kung fu film was conquering world markets and a sub section of that, the wu xia pian or swordsman film modeled on the work of King Hu, was their most prestigious offering.

This cycle came to be dominated by the films simplified by Chu Yuen, the one important survivor of the pre-Shaws era, from the convoluted newspaper serials of writer Ku Lung. Master swordsmen battled killer clans in studio fields sewn with paper flowers and dominated by the red lamp sun hung above them. In the company of  his Xiu hua da dao / Pursuit of Vengeance (1978) or Chu Liu Xiang zhi You ling shan zhuang / Perils of the Sentimental Swordsman (1982) Chu Yuen’s San shao ye de jian / Death Duel (1977) was a relatively minor entry, with it’s highlights being guest shots by Shaw stars David Chiang, as a master who they have to keep in a cage, driven to madness by his kung fu studies, and Lo Lieh as one anguished to the point of smearing his face with blood after a killing. Though he was notably overshadowed by opponent Lin Yun, it did however launch the stellar career of  Chiang’s brother Derek Tung-Shing Yee, who joined the ranks of costumed heroes in these films.

Derek Yee and the gang - Shaws' Death Duel.

Forty (!) years later Yee is an established director (Shinjinku Incident) and great survivor Tsui Hark  has produced his re-make of  San shao ye de jian as Swordmaster Kill (3D) and that turns out to be an event movie.

Very little of the seventies plot survives - injured master shelters with the village family of  a brothel girl and opponents face off for the death duel to establish supremacy in the Divine and the Demonic world.

The old buzz of recognising the preposterous Ku Lung plot complications & imagery is back, this time transforming his universe into one of the most extraordinary things contemporary cinema has to offer. The Palaces, brothels and villages we remember from the Shaw’s films are now visualised with more complexity and scale and the film doubles back with flash backs to account for all those inexplicable plot developments we used to take for granted. It’s realised with an extra four decades of  digital effects technology. Elaborate studio decors played against a coloured sky are divided into planes by 3D camera work. The jug is split with a slomo sword stroke that shows us the liquid suspended in it’s two halves. We are regularly showered with digital spears and arrows.

San shao ye de jian / Swordmaster Kill.

The film is a succession of extraordinary moments. The ice shattering under the impact of the fallen warrior, the disgruntled lieutenant, who has talked white robed Princess Yiyan Jiang out of slaughtering the handmaidens to accompany the perceived faithless deceased Kenny Lin Gengxin into the nether world, impales the eager one he has been offered as a swap for his royal love object. Snake tattooed Peter Ho splits the timber memorial to his fallen adversary, the Third Master of  Supreme Sword Manor, with a single stroke. (“Losing a rival is like losing your soul mate”).

He goes off to sleep in his coffin in the flower covered mountain cemetery. The whore house handyman psyches out the hoons, who refuse to pay, by standing there while they stab him four times. There’s the great scene of Ho arriving in the background hauling his grave stone as Kenny takes down the nasties menacing the village. The Master of Supreme Sword Manor (Norman Chu, once the lead of Hark’s 1980 Di yu wu men/ We are Going to Eat You) realises the skull masked attackers are using poisoned weapons and sends in his girl fighters, as he forms an array on the castle steps, and streaked black doplegangers emerge from Ho in the battle where each combatant has too much respect for his opponent to hold back.

I’m not sure that all this is an advance on the sensuous created decors and studied ridiculousness of the Chu Yuen movies but it’s certainly a fascinating comparison and a great movie experience all on it’s own.

If you’re looking for insights into the human condition, you’re in the wrong theater but if you can deal with some of the wildest imaginations at play, right now rush to the multiplex. Small screen won’t do it justice.