Change Your Image
garwy
Reviews
And When Did You Last See Your Father? (2007)
eeeeuuuuwwww
as a result of going to a cinema with a number of trainee staff i ended up seeing this film as part of a double-bill with the new seann william scott squirmcom 'mr. woodcock'. i don't usually watch seann william scott films unless you nail me to the seat - but on this occasion the two films were a useful contrast.
both 'mr. woodcock' and 'and when did you last ...' are basically films about young men who obsess about a parent's sex-life. 'mr. woodcock' plays this theme as a gross-out comedy - and makes for very uncomfortable with few laughs. 'and when did you last ...' instead opts for pathos, so the film is only uncomfortable.
'and when did you last ...' will appeal to a certain type of determined viewer of British films. there are lovingly reconstructed vignettes of 1950s middle-class Britain (the eldest son's eyes light up when his family gets a new maid: 'meat!' he thinks), careless praise of English sangfroid (to take their minds off the cuban missile crisis father and son go camping), and more masturbation (tastefully presented) than you see in most of the 'american pie' movies.
but it didn't appeal to this viewer, who thought it was very nearly a paradigm - in its careless snobbery, its prurience, its feyness, and its casual misogyny - of what has been wrong with British film for most of the last twenty years, and apparently shows no hope of improving.
Unfaithful (2002)
Freedom fries on celluloid
(Maybe spoilers?) Forget the trivial sideplot which has Diane Lane getting her kit off, this is a film about American Businessman Richard Gere killing a smelly frenchy and dumping his body on a landfill site.
It has about nothing to do with Claude Chabrol's Femme Infidele (where it stole the elements of its plot). In Chabrol the murder is deliberate (but Richard Gere is such a hunk he just can't help killing wimpy French guys), and the wife's cover-up is motivated by complex but finally selfish thinking. (Diane Lane doesn't seem able to do motivation - at least not in this film).
'Unfaithful' is xenophobic, shallow, predictable, and its sex-scenes are calculatedly disgusting. It is a Richard Gere film.
Basically 'Unfaithful' is what is wrong with Hollywood.
Escort Girls (1974)
candide for the '70s
gavcrimson's summary is full enough that there is little to add to it; except to comment that there are so many films of this nature which are conscientiously dishonest that it comes as a shock to realise how easy it would have been to show these stories as they really are.
London's miserable weather is captured to perfection, so is the dirtiness of the city, how lonely it is, and how no-one ever seems to be at home there.
this is a peculiarly muted film, and i don't really know of anything else quite like it; but people who see it on the title (or for the photographs on the publicity)are going to be as disappointed as the characters in the script.
Sytten (1965)
Eh?
The film is set in the Danish provincial town of Nybro, though it opens and closes in Copenhagen. It is 1913 and the Danes smell war in the air - though they are uncertain whether it will involve them or not.
The film falls very oddly between being a not-very-interesting sex-comedy (all the women seem anxious to get laid, but we see very little except copious lingerie from any of them) and a much more intriguing montage of village life reacting to imminent war with a mixture of confusion and indifference.
One could certainly watch the film without any attention to the erotic element. Sytten contains one of the few accurate loss-of-virginity scenes before Catherine Breillat, but all the rest of the porn is so anodyne as to be tedious. The photography of Nybro is lovingly attentive to detail though, and the attempt to capture belle epoque class certainty and political confusion if genuinely thought provoking.
I thought this was a very good film, though I can see why it will disappoint almost everyone who watches it. The erotic content is either silly or annoyingly accurate (the people who watch erotic films seldom have any interest in real sex) but it certainly gets in the way of the rather unusual gentle nostalgia which should have been the film's forte.
The other films I've seen from Anneliese Meineche were all just as confused.
Der Philosoph (1989)
Thinking Heads
Hardly an erotic film, but then real sex is often something different from 'sexy' (and rather better).
The plot is that an academic and socially inept philosophy student who is working on his thesis meets an attractive woman who may or may not be imaginary.
The woman is not only attractive, she has a personality. (How often do you see that in a film like this?). The philosopher and the woman become friends and then begin to have sex. (Not the way round things happen in most erotic films). He then meets her two friends who share her apartment, and when he has grown close to them, has sex with each of them in turn (and various other permutations).
The film shows a fair amount of flesh, but it has the undriven and exploratory quality of narrative of a real drama. One would need to be extremely blunt to manage to get through any sequence of this film without thinking about what is happening on-screen.
As with very few films (and hardly any English-language ones) this is a film about sex without being in any expected sense an erotic film.
I enjoy it more every time I watch it. But it leaves you with things to think about - not things to do.
Domino (1998)
terse and intriguing
a neat and original idea this: the protagonist visits a fortune teller who has her own difficulties with the occult.
it's also a pleasant change to see a single idea turned into a short terse film instead of spun out to feature length.
i particularly liked the way that the film changes plot direction constantly while the film is going on, the main character doesn't really know what she wants from the future and dithers somewhat in the film, i found this especially convincing.
Les onze mille verges (1975)
unexpected crosslight on a great author
guillaume apollinaire is probably the greatest of the surrealists and wrote france's most popular modern love poem.
when he wasn't being a heavy intellectual and pillar of the french academy he was writing some of the best pornography since the seventeenth century.
the original novel on which this film is based is packed with totally promiscuous sex, but differs from other 'erotic' novels by having characters with real lives, real ideas, real histories and real feelings about each other.
in fact the novel is real pornography, in a way that most pornography isn't. think real ale and real ice-cream to get the idea.
the film-maker has just dumped the novel to film (its not a work of great technical beauty) so you get lots of pretty girls (and guys, which is a nice change)romping around starkers looking like they're enjoying it most of the time, but quite capable of having a bad time also (again, as i said, this is real pornography).
if you're part of the mucky mac brigade you'll probably miss the point of this film (though you'll still find plenty to enjoy in it). if you're from the moral majority, it's not for you.
if on the other hand you've ever wondered why most pornography just isn't erotic (wooden characters, no plot and silicone, that's why) this film might nudge you towards realising what blue movies ought to be like.
the one thing that makes me sad whenever i watch this movie is that i've never seen another one like it (except maybe fotografando patrizia).
anybody reading this a film-maker?
Fotografando Patrizia (1984)
too hot to dub!
i watched this in english as the 'dark side of love'.
both the dubbing and the sleeve conceal the (crucial) information that the lead female and male characters are brother and sister, referring to patrizia as a 'governess'.
while not a great film (some of the setting is lazy and a few of the scenes use nudity to cover for slack characterisation) it is a film with several near unique virtues.
the sub-incest theme is not handled pruriently, instead the reticence of the two lead characters pushes them towards a talked flirtation (patrizia's brother talks her into a series of sexual adventures, she in turn talks to him about her sexual history).
adding a clearly imaginary dimension to a straight skin-flick produces something a lot richer than either would have been on its own.
definitely a must watch, if only for the way it makes you re-evaluate your response to so many other erotic movies