Bastards (2013)

Cascading rain in close-up against a building at night as moody synth from the Tindersticks plays over the soundtrack. The opening shot to Claire Denis’ film, Bastards (2013), hooked me in and visually established its neo-noir vibe. One of my favourite shots later in the film was of a woman, Chiara Mastroianni – seen from a distance – in a raincoat walking up the street late at night to buy cigarettes, neon lights reflecting in the pavement from afar, which has that woozy noir romanticism. This is the point of view from Vincent Lindon watching her from a balcony, smoking a cigarette without a shirt. His weary-looking mug and taciturn masculinity fills in the character of Marco, a sailor brought back to Paris, assisting his sister Sandra (Julie Bataille) in the wake of her husband’s suicide. Marco’s niece is in hospital, Justine (Lola Creton) found wandering the streets naked and bloody. What happened to her is a mystery, but the blame is squarely placed on a wealthy businessman Eduard (Michel Subor) who had loaned money to the family business, a shoe factory. Revenge is in the air as months later, Marco moves into the same building as Eduard and meets his wife, Raphelle (Mastroianni), an attraction growing between them.

While Bastards is classifiably neo-noir, the story is not beholden to archetypes and conventions. Even as the plot slowly unfolds through the characters, revealing more of the rot underneath everything, Denis allows everything to breathe and feel organic, of and in this world. I had read that Bastards was a bleak affair, and it does not provide catharsis, ending on a sickening, uncomfortable sequence that feels evil. Yet even within this nihilism, there are human moments. The tactile pleasure of sex between two characters, and the pondering over a watch as gift expressing something more within this affair. A friend providing assistance when someone shows up at their doorstep early in the morning. Small glimmers of tenderness within an encroaching darkness. With the tendency towards not expressing everything in dialogue, allowing observation and scenes to float, the fatalistic momentum doesn’t feel so forced, even if there’s ultimately no way out. Also featuring regular faces from Denis movies such Alex Descas and Gregoire Colin. Available to stream on Tubi (US). Recommended.

Special Effects (1984)

What I enjoy about Larry Cohen is how he approaches things as a writer: the story’s gotta have a hook! Released in the same year as Brian De Palma’s Body Double, Cohen’s film Special Effects (1984) is a comparable twist on a Hitchcockian thriller. The hook: What if a movie director was a murderer? (A plot idea conceived in the late 1960s, yet released one year after the Twilight Zone: The Movie tragedy). The title is a misdirect: it’s not really about special effects or using special effects to kill or to get away with killing. The special effect is “turning reality into make believe.”

“Who’s your favourite director?” “Abraham Zapruder. Honest Abe.” That’s what we hear over the opening credits in an interview with film director Chris Neville (a pre-Talk Radio Eric Bogosian). He’s back in New York after getting fired from a multi-million production in Hollywood, and recovering from a subsequent mental breakdown. When a model and actor, Andrea (a post-Ms. 45 Zoe Lund) shows up at his incredible loft apartment, wanting to become a star (she works as a nude dancer and model), he employs the casting couch (actually his bedroom with red walls and satin bedsheets). After being exposed secretly filming their tryst, and insulted for his career failures, Neville murders Andrea in a fit of rage. When Andrea’s husband Keefe (Brad Rijn) shows up – a hayseed who wants to take her back to the mid-western town they grew up in (and the baby son they have together) and away from the NYC lifestyle that has corrupted her – he is suspected of Andrea’s murder. The director character comes up with another angle worthy of a Columbo villain: he’ll make a film based on Andrea’s life, cast the husband to play himself, and eventually frame him for the murder, using the footage of her death that he has inadvertently recorded and privately fetishises.

There’s a low budget sleazy New York vibe to Special Effects, stylish at times with memorable shots like the one of Chris standing on the actress headshots covering the floor, or characters filmed in shadow against a doorway looking out at the neon NYC streetscape. It’s a scrappy B-movie that doesn’t reach the showmanship of De Palma or the arty grit of Abel Ferrara, but has a cynical, self-referential take on movie-making with Bogosian’s egotistical director character. Often, it feels like Cohen is commenting on the failure of the New Hollywood filmmakers (Cimino, Bogdanovich, etc), early successes leading to expensive flops and associated tragedies (Dorothy Stratton is even mentioned). This allure of the movies is insidious enough to make the lead detective on the case (Kevin J. O’Connor) become a consultant and producer on the movie-within-a-movie, unknowing helping the director on his secret, sinister plotting.

Alongside the New York location shooting (some of which shot without permits, one can assume from Cohen’s guerrilla tactics), the grind-house style sex and violence, and the psychological mind-games that the director-within-the-movie is playing on his cast, the film is also powered by Bogosian’s haughty intensity and Lund’s off-kilter energy. Lund provides a two-part performance, the first part clearly dubbed, yet thankfully the remainder allows her to shine with her own voice. Even if it’s not completely successful as a thriller or reaches the heights of Body Double, Special Effects is a lurid, entertaining B-movie that has reflexive ideas about power dynamics in cinema, both making them and watching them. Recommended.

The Yards (2000)

The Yards (2000) has been one of those movies that has always sat there on my “Must watch” lists, and I’ve never felt strongly compelled to watch it, thinking to myself, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get around to it.” After seeing Armageddon Time and watching Two Lovers for the first time, I was more inclined to see director James Gray’s earlier work, and I was pleasantly surprised to find how much I really liked The Yards. Like, I knew it would be good and a solid New York crime drama about corruption. An update of On The Waterfront but indebted to the 1970s approach of Francis Ford Coppola and Sidney Lumet, mumbled conversations in hallways, character actors in suits holding backroom meetings, and hard moral choices between keeping your mouth shut or taking a stand. What defines Gray’s filmmaking is the sense of place – the way in which apartment rooms feel lived in and real – and the characterisation shading in all of these archetypes into believable people, delivered by a great cast giving excellent performances.

Leo Handler (Mark Wahlberg) arrives home from a stint in prison, taking the blame for a car theft that he and his friends were involved in, and in the opening sequence, he is welcomed by his single mother Val (Ellen Burstyn), his aunt Kitty (Faye Dunaway), his cousin Erica (Charlize Theron) and her boyfriend and Leo’s friend Willie (Joaquin Phoenix). Leo is looking for work at his uncle’s company, Frank (played by James Caan), who provide engineering and maintenance to the city’s rail system; Phoenix’s character also works there in management, but fundamentally greasing the wheels and making under-the-table deals to get city contracts. It doesn’t take long for the extra money that Leo is earning to go bad, and when a mission to sabotage a competitor’s trains goes wrong, Leo is once again left holding the bag and tasked to make a hard choice to keep a wider investigation from happening.

On one hand, the movie goes where you expect it, but on the other hand, it’s the weight that Gray and his collaborators give to the scenes which makes them grounded and full of tension. Adding considerably to the neo-noir atmosphere is the cinematography by Harris Savides and the brilliant use of lighting and shadows; the use of constant black-outs in the neighbourhood is a masterstroke for how darkness and deep shadows are used in key scenes. All of this is also complemented by a stirring, strong score by composer Howard Shore. Everyone in the cast is great, and it’s wonderful to see familiar character actors in the supporting cast like Tony Mustante, Victor Argo, Tomas Millan, and Steve Lawrence. An underrated New York crime melodrama that feels of a piece with Gray’s understanding of the city, like his next film, We Own The Night also starring Wahlberg and Phoenix. I appreciate how Gray invests in a classic approach to narrative, hitting points you might expect, but finding a deeper register, taking you through the character’s struggle in the face of a difficult choice. There is tragedy to The Yards but also a feeling of inevitability and rather than wrapping things up with a cathartic gun-fight, knows that things are usually resolved in a back-room deal where money sets the agenda. Recommended.

A Better Tomorrow II (1987)

An action thriller about two brothers on opposite sides of the law, A Better Tomorrow was a smash hit in Hong Kong and helped birth the “heroic bloodshed” sub-genre. With Chow-Yun Fat’s performance as the third member of this triangle, the antagonistic but loyal gangster Mark, it was a role that cemented the actor as a star and his style – toothpick, sunglasses, trenchcoat – as a fashion icon. Director John Woo and producer Tsui Hark reunited for the sequel, A Better Tomorrow II (1987), and working tensions between them resulted in Woo and Hark editing their own versions of the film, eventually leaving it to someone else to smash them together. Yet, despite its clunky and convoluted plot, this sequel also became a success and is remembered particularly for its over-the-top climax, which set a blueprint for stylish action violence not only in Hong Kong cinema but internationally as well.

Plot-wise, there’s a lot of table setting as Ti Lung, former triad gangster who is in prison after the events of the last film, and his younger brother, Leslie Cheung, a cop, find themselves both working undercover to get close to a suspected importer (Dean Shek), an old associate of Ti Lung’s character. I was really struggling to remember if Shek’s character was a supporting player in the first A Better Tomorrow (he wasn’t), and was surprised to see him become a major focus (apparently one cause for the tensions between Woo and Hark). Due to a double-crossing frame-up by competitive gangsters, Shek’s character is exiled to New York, and this narrative strand brings to mind other crime epics like Once Upon A Time In America and Year Of The Dragon. This is where Chow Yun-Fat enters, which would be strange as his character Mark died at the end of the last movie. Well, not to worry because in a soap opera twist, Chow is playing his identical twin brother, Ken, running a restaurant in New York. And this is when things really start cooking, particularly the very memorable “eat my rice” scene where Ken doesn’t back down from a very unconvincing “Italian” white-guy mafia issuing threats over protection money.

A Better Tomorrow II even playfully references Mark’s style, as Ken makes fun of young punks trying to copy his brother’s get-up (only to eventually don it himself at the end, like a superhero putting on his cape and cowl). There’s even a background character who has created a series of illustrations and comic panels around the events of the first movie, furthering the story’s mythic approach to its themes of brotherhood. All the ensuing melodrama and cross-cutting sub-plots eventually pays off, as our heroes dress in black suits and shades, approaching a mansion swimming with henchmen, and proceed to wreak havoc in the name of revenge. The climax is blood-soaked mayhem with duelling hand-guns, shotguns, grenades, and even a samurai sword at one point, a masterful sequence encoded with the DNA for Woo’s later films like The Killer and Hard Boiled, but also future western films like Reservoir Dogs, The Matrix, John Wick etc.

The last twenty minutes cements A Better Tomorrow II as a classic, even if the road getting there was overly melodramatic and not as narratively satisfying or clear in its characterisation of the three leads as the first. Once again, Chow Yun-Fat walks away with the film with his suave charisma. Recommended.

Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990)

“Adios, bozo – this time I’m downloading you straight to hell!”

Powering through 1990s cyberpunk cinema, particularly direct-to-video terrain, and the glistening vistas of anime await. Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990) is some cyberpunk anime that I’d never heard of before, but on the title alone was compelled to check out; fundamentally three 45-minute episodes stuck together to experience in a two hour chunk. An OAV (original animated video) set in the future, the year 2808 to be exact, where three criminals have been conscripted to become “cyber police.” They must close cases or their handler, Juso Hasegawa, the police chief in charge of their special unit, has the kill-switch on the explosive collars around their neck. Our three anti-heroes are: Sengoku Shunsuke, a trash-talking punker; Goggles, a huge mohawked hacker; and Benten, an androgynous assassin who resembles a glam rocker. Each episode centres their story on a different character in the team, so there’s a feeling of variety watching it in one go, particularly since there’s also a different threat or villain including: a demonic A.I. that takes a towering automated building hostage; a military-funded cyborg killing machine out for a test run; and evidence of vampirism within the corporate elite. This is the usual cyberpunk anime type of deal, but all entertaining and evocative. There’s great cyber city backdrops and bursts of hectic action from the director of Ninja Scroll, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, though not as sicko as that particular movie, and it’s comparatively like Cowboy Bebop before Cowboy Bebop happened as well. For me, Cyber City Oedo 808 is defined by the brilliant English dub where they really lay on the coarse language with the glee of a teenager cursing a blue streak for the first time in their f-ing life; for example, Sengoku to his humourless robot assistance: “Haha. What a fucking mess! A whole city out of control, all because some shit-for-brains computer got hijacked. What’s that saying? To make a mistake is human but to really fuck things up you need a computer. Ain’t that right, shithead?” Great soundtrack too. Lots of fucking fun, dicksplash. Watched an upload on YouTube. Recommended.