films, page 31 of 31

The first 18-rated film I saw was Alien. I’d been dying to see it ever since seeing its poster on display at the old East Grinstead cinema. A glowing green egg, and the words “In space no one can hear you scream”. It seemed like the perfect recipe for an SF movie, and the fact that they didn’t show the alien on the poster just made me all the more keen to see it. (I have a real hunger for monsters.)

Unfortunately, I was only 8 years old at the time. I couldn’t believe I had 10 years to wait. At one point it came on TV. I savoured reading the article in the TV Times that said even the film’s writer had nightmares about his creation, but my Mum wouldn’t let me watch it for that very reason. Another time, I walked into a model shop in Croydon and was amazed to see they had an action figure of the alien. How could that be? Surely the appearance of the alien ought to be some closely-guarded secret? I was disappointed to find the alien had a basically human shape, but managed to convince myself they’d altered it for the action figure; the real alien in the film would be something much stranger, less human…

And then finally I got my chance to see it. My brother and I were on holiday with my Dad in Scotland. We were visiting some people Dad knew who lived in a large country house (which I for some reason insist on remembering as being a castle, but that can’t be right). Someone there had a video of Alien. My chance to see it at last.

One thing marred that first viewing. Halfway through, the VCR was commandeered by a mum whose young boy just wouldn’t go to bed without watching his favourite video. So, shortly after the alien actually got on board Nostromo, we had an intermission of The Little Donkey, which sort of broke the mood a bit. Then it was back to the film. I can’t remember if I was disappointed to finally see the alien itself, but having subsequently watched the film countless times, I can’t believe I was. What I do remember is, having watched what must be the scariest film I’ve ever seen (bar The Sixth Sense, I suppose), was that we then had to go to bed, and our beds were not in the large country house itself, but in a building a short walk away. Nothing to worry about, surely. We said our goodnights, then left the building… And found ourselves in absolute darkness. That must have been the first time I realised that out in the country, when it’s dark, it’s dark.

Lost in Translation. Bill Murray stares into space.

Broken Flowers. Bill Murray stares into space. For even longer.

But he does it so well! The criticism I heard for Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers was that it was “more of Bill Murray doing what Bill Murray does”. And there are certainly a lot of long, actionless sequences in which he does nothing but sit there, staring into space. But for some reason it’s extremely funny. (Albeit in a quietly despairing kind of way).

The plot is that Don Johnston (Bill Murray), a successful businessman with a long line of women in his life, receives an anonymous letter telling him that he has a 20-year-old son he never knew about, and that the son is coming looking for him. Don’s neighbour, Winston, a detective-story fan (excellently played by Jeffrey Wright — just the way he handles the letter speaks oodles about his character), badgers him into setting out to find which of the five exes from that time is the mother.

Watching Broken Flowers is all about adjusting to the film’s pace and paying attention to its subtle nuances of character. Much of the humour comes from the mini character-studies of the women Don visits, as it is revealed how they have changed in the two decades since he knew them. Seeing them through Don’s eyes, as we do, they seem bizarre. But the main character study, of course, is that of Don himself, who is left, each time, seeming emptier and emptier.

Something best characterised by staring blank-faced into space, I think.

First Amazon rental of the month is John Carpenter’s entry in the Masters of Horror series, Cigarette Burns. I really only included it in my rental list because I was adding Stuart Gordon’s entry, an adaptation of The Dreams in the Witch House (I can’t resist the promise of Lovecraft on film, even though the results are so often disappointments — notable exceptions being Stuart Gordon’s Dagon and the HPLHS’s silent Call of Cthulhu), and I caught a glimpse of Cigarette Burns’ plot synopsis, which was enough to get me intrigued: Years ago the first showing of an obscure European director’s film La Fin Absolue de Monde resulted in a spontaneous bloodbath in the audience. The film’s single print was supposedly destroyed, but a rich collector has information to the contrary, and he hires our hero Kirby Sweetman to find it.

I love this sort of plot, where someone embarks on a quest to track down some obscure book or film (as in Theodore Roszak’s novel Flicker, or Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions). And John Carpenter directed one of my all-time favourite films, The Thing, which is also one of the most Lovecraftian-without-actually-being-Lovecraft movies I’ve seen. (He also created some brilliantly moody-but-minimal soundtrack scores — a recent purchase was The Essential John Carpenter CD.) However, Carpenter also directed They Live!, a film whose great genre premise (an alien race enslaves mankind through the use of subliminal advertising) is totally ruined by its being turned into a crass action movie. (Not that I’ve got anything against action movies, it’s just that you want a film founded on an idea to reach some sort of idea-based solution, not one involving nothing but big guns and grenades.)

So, I was prepared to be disappointed by Cigarette Burns. Thankfully I wasn’t. The Masters of Horror series was originally made for TV. Thirteen notable horror filmmakers each directed an hour-long self-contained episode, and perhaps it’s the fact that Cigarette Burns is only an hour long that makes it work, as the need for brevity keeps the story on track.

Of course, the thing with a film like this — a film about a film — is that at some point the hero has to find the film he’s searching for and watch it. Whereupon we, the audience, will have to see it too, otherwise we’ll feel cheated. And how can any filmmaker deliver, after all the build-up about it being a work of undeniable though diabolic genius and power? Flicker and The Book of Illusions could dodge this issue because they were books about films, so their authors could describe the films without having to realise them in full. A film about a film doesn’t have that option.

The Japanese version of Ring (another favourite, though the US remake isn’t), really delivers on this promise, by making the content of its cursed videotape both short and extremely surreal. In Cigarette Burns we see glimpses of La Fin Absolue de Monde, but only after we’ve been told the reason why it has the effect it has. (As I want to try to keep this a spoiler-free zone, I won’t reveal it here.) So the mythical film retains its glamour by relegating all but those few glimpses to the viewer’s imagination, which is the right thing to do.

On the subject of books and films about (invented) films, there are of course many books about (invented) books. I read Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind earlier this year (it was recommended by Richard and Judy, for heaven’s sake!), and though it was quite readable, I really only read it to the end because I couldn’t believe such a critically acclaimed book boiled down to nothing but an awful quasi-gothic melodrama, but it did. The Invisible Library website aims to list all invented books, of which there is a surprisingly large crop.