The Raven (1963)

 "But you'd be kiled!"

"I do hope not..."

I haven't checked how many of Roger Corman's Poe films I've seen. It's a lot. It's possible, with this film, I've seen them all. 

They are, of course, all B movies, bless them. They all acknowledge the fun side of that. Corman has always understood the power of kitsch... except in Frankenstein Unbound. This film makes me wonder if the tongue in cheek subtletiesof his other Poe films are wittier than they come across, Because this film is full of ironic, fourth wall- threatenning humour.

Understandably, many films are based on novels or plays. Few films are based on poems, yet this film begins with a recital of Poe's masterpiece- I love the poem, unfashionable thought it is; compare it to the adolescent nature-wanking drivel of John Keats- and just has fun.

Vincent Price is a great avtor, one who deserved more than B movies. Here he shows his prowess at deadpan humour. Peter Lorre not so much, but you can't take your eyes off him Hazel Court is more of the classy straight actress, but her performance works very well indeed. Boris Karloff cannot fail to be the consummate evil sorcerer. He was born to play such a role.

Yet Jack Nicholson- yes, he was once this young- turns out to be a bloody good comic actor, moving beyond the point of treating B movie characters like Shakespeare, as he was previously known to do, and showing a real comic timing. 

This film is a joy, despite the tenuous connection to Poe, and the cast is fascinating. So is the deliciosly garish direction, exalting in the possibility of Technicolor.

I know this film is very silly, but I love it.

Easy Rider (1969)

 "I'd like to try Porky Pig."

If I'd seen this in my late teens I'd have devoured it in the same way I devoured all that old "counterculture" literature back then- Kerouac, William S. Burroughs,  Hunter S. Davies- so uncritically. Anything counterculture was cool to me back then, and I vaguely assumed to to be progressive, free thinking, an unalloyed good thing.

But I didn't. I saw the film tonight, at forty-three, much more ambivalent about a hippy movement that owed as much to right wing rugged individualism as it did to socially progressive causes. Billy and Wyatt may seem like free spirits, but their money comes from a cocaine deal, and Wyatt expresses admiration for both a poor Arizona farmer and a commune for their self-reliance in living off the land, and they end the film in a brothel before dying. Yes, the bigoted, corrupt and racist South that taunt and eventually kills them is much worse morally than they are, but these two men could easily have voted for Reagan or even for Trump if they'd lived.

Poor George (you can see why Jack Nicholson's surprisingly small but incredible performance elevated him from prominent actor to movie star overnight) is simultaneously much more intelligent (he has a clearer idea of freedom) and more naive than either of them, and probably too innocent to live.

This is a beautifuly directed film, obviously looking ahead to the Hollywood auteur films of the next decade. Surprisingly, much of it is just pocaresque rod movie stuff with as much music as dialogue. It's superbly shot, though- there's a particularly good panning shot of the peole of the commune- and the film deals with a great deal of themes- the ambivalent nature of the counterculture and the uneconsruced nature of the Deep South among them. This is a unique film, but a sublime one.  It reminds me of the literary works I mentioned above but, unlike On the Road or Fear and Loathing, it still has an appeal to this forty-three year old with long hair.

Mars Attacks! (1996)

"For dark is the suede that mows like a harvest..."

I saw this once in the ‘90s- at a festival, I think, perhaps Phoenix ‘96. But I was very drunk, and let us not discuss any herbal substances which may or may not have been imbibed. Let us also, in the same token, disregard the bottle of Aragonian wine (yes, the bottle states it’s from “Aragon”, a name from the annals of history) that I have just imbibed at the time of composing this paragraph. Let’s just say that, yes, I can see this film is no classic, but it’s fun.

Tim Burton is always brilliant at making his films feel likes stylised worlds of their own, but he generally has his own gothic style. This film, like its superb predecessor  Ed Wood, gives us a style very different from Burton’s norm- in this case that of the ‘50s flying saucer movie. Hence the many CGI saucers look exactly as we might expect from countless movies. Hence the ever-present sound of the theremin. And the Martians, in old fashioned stop motion, look awesome.

Oh, and the film is bloody hilarious. No, it’s not the funniest film ever, but it’s a fun little spoof and extraordinarily well cast- Jack Nicholson is superb, as ever, as the cynical President. Pierce Brosnan is hilarious as a character taking the piss out of all those pipe smoking, exposition-spouting professors. Also excellent are Sarah Jessica Parker and the wonderful Pam Grier, with a small role for a Michael J. Fox presumably too far into his Parkinson’s disease for a larger role.

It’s also very, very ‘90s- Richie dresses just like I used to back then, and the less Grungy fashions are... yes, well. But the film is enormous fun, with its capricious Martians putting people’s heads on dogs’ bodies and zapping US Senators. And can we please have a Martian do you Trump what is done to the President here?

Batman (1989)

"Where does he get those wonderful toys?”

In one sense, and one sense only, this film parallels 1978’s Superman; both of DC’s flagship heroes, in spite of a long and varied Hollywood past, celebrated their fiftieth anniversaries with a whopping big, and rather successful, Hollywood blockbuster. But there the similarities end, because this is a Tim Burton film. And Tim Burton is far more interesting than Hollywood blockbusters.

It’s worth stepping back, though; 1989 was a long time ago, and I was only 12 when I saw this at my local Cannon cinema. But the popular perception of Batman was at best ambiguous, and largely coloured by the magnificent but very singular Adam West TV series, at that time being constantly repeated on UK television. And, after all, the dark, ‘80s version of Batman had only existed for a small percentage of the character’s fifty year history. After an admittedly dark, but very pulp introduction in 1939, it didn’t take long for Batman to morph into decades of Dick Sprang square-jawed straight heroism, which remained in place until the late 1960s. And even the 1970s “Darknight Detective” was very different from the darker 1980s tales of Frank Miller and Alan Grant. This film was, more or less, the introduction of this darker Batman to a wider public.

Tim Burton is, therefore, an inspired choice. This isn’t the Tim Burton we thing of today, of course; all whimsy CGI, a certain style, Helena Bonham Carter and a pre-meltdown Johnny Depp. No; it’s only 1989, and he’s not even done Edward Scissorhands yet. Nevertheless, Burton has a thing for design, and for Gotham it matters. Anton Furst’s cityscape is in some ways the real star of the film, a dark Art Deco. Even the retro fashions- men wear hats with their suits, evoking old gangster films- enhance the atmosphere. Michael Keaton is a deliberate statement as casting choice. And Kack Nicholson is magnificent in exactly the way you’d expect. Kim Basinger is good enough to obscure the fact that the character of Vicki Vale is only there as a token piece of prominent oestrogen in what would otherwise be a sausage fest, and Michael Gough is a fine, grandfatherly Alfred.

Perhaps the fight choreography is a little lacking, but in a film that looks this good and is so well-conceived that’s a minor touch; I can forgive Burton for not being an action film director. And it’s interesting that this Batman relies far more on gadgets than any great physical athleticism. Far more even than usual it makes you wonder why everyone doesn’t know that Bruce Wayne is Batman; after all, he’s the only person in Gotham who can afford all that stuff.

That aside, though, this film is easily as good as I remember it and, in the way it really-presented the character, arguably the most important Batman feature film.

The Shining (1980)

"Come and play with us, Danny. For ever. And ever. And ever..."
                                                                                                    
Wow. It seems some things really are as good as their reputation. The Shining is a beautifully shot Stanley Kubrick film, and has a towering, perhaps career-defining performance from Jack Nicholson at its centre, but at its root it's a slasher film with supernatural elements. Yet here we have an auteur director like Kubrick, a serious mainstream Hollywood cast, and we find that a slasher film can be elevated from the genre ghetto to become a mainstream classic.

It is, of course, a Stephen King adaptation, and the cast is ably supplied with excellent performances from Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers, who would go on to become the voice of Jazz in the Transformers cartoon. The plotting is masterful, if not unusual for the genre; the idea of "shining" is interesting but oddly peripheral to the plot. But essentially this is a masterclass in acting from Nicholson and a timely lesson in how the normal tropes of horror- the hotel is even built on the predictable Indian burial ground- can be transmuted into gold by a genius like Kubrick. The only disappointment, I suppose- and I'm clutching at straws here- is that the concept of Tony, the boy who lives in Danny's mouth, is somewhat undeveloped, which I suspect not to be the case with the novel.

Also interesting, to me at least, is how very 1980 the hair, the clothing and everything looks; I'm 40, albeit British, and this is how I remember the world of my earliest memories. But there's no doubting that this is a fine film, possibly Kubrick's finest.

Chinatown (1974)

"Middle of a drought and the water commissioner drowns..."

SPOILERS

Best film about utilities and nonces ever. Ironic, seeing as it was directed by a man who urgently needs to get on a plane to the very city that this film is about to face the charge of being a nonce himself. But let's not get distracted by a certain heinous event in 1977 for which the perpetrator has yet to face justice...

Annoyingly, even nonces can direct films which are exquisite works of art. It's a film noir, it's a whodunit, it's an early '70s auteur film in the same vein as Scorsese and Coppola's stuff. The 1930s as a setting is glorious, the whole fictionalised history of the Los Angeles Water Wars manages to completely avoid being, ahem, dry, and Jack Nicholson is the best Philip Marlowe ever as he plays Jake Gittes. Faye Dunaway also impresses as the femme fatale who turns out not to be that at all, and John Huston(!) is suitably evil as the rich old corrupt nonce who causes so much misery.

One thing, though: why does Katherine pretend to be her mum/sis and hire Jake to expose the rather nice Hollis as an adulterer? If it's a hint at getting him to find out about the conspiracy then it's a rather odd one. But the film is a triumph, and reminds us of just how much Los Angeles is a desert city, unnaturally watered. Ironic that the Los Angeles Aqueduct was designed by William Mulholland, and that I would have watched Mulholland Drive tonight if Amazon Prime had been civilised and had subtitles...

The Terror (1963)

"Mark you, you are getting yourself into things beyond your understanding!"

Roger Corman, O Roger Corman, you have your tropes. I mean, this film isn't even based on a Poe story but it might as well be. It's all typically gothic, set in "the remains of a noble house" and full of the sinister suggestion that the sins of the past may come to find us. Oh, and we have Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson in the same film, a witch, a bloke getting his eyes pecked out by a bird, and Nicholson being delightfully excessive throughout in really trying to find motivation in the cipher of a character he's playing; he actually manages to imbue his shitty lines with some depth. Wow.

But let's not be too harsh; this is a fun film and exactly what you'd expect from Corman. It's a precious artifact from those last few years of Boris Karloff's life in which he was again fashionable, and both he and Nicholson are excellent in a competent film, if a cheap one and formulaic in the best possible way. This is pure distilled Corman, with two excellent performances from its leads, so much so that we can avoid the unfortunate continuity error about when Ilsa is supposed to have died, and the frankly implausible twist about the Baron that comes at the end. What counts is atmosphere, and Karloff, and Nicholson. Typical Corman in the best possible way.

The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

"I didn't mean it!"

Ah, I love me a good old low budget piece of retro fun. I only actually watched this as preparation for the musical remake, which is coming next, but there are much worse ways of spending late afternoon on a Friday. It may not be The Godfather, there's no real depth or subtext to it, and it looks as though it cost about $4.40, but it's bloody funny. And filming in black and white can paper over a multitude of budgetary sins, most of the time.

The film is a black comedy, with increasing amounts of farce. The customer who starts munching on carnations in the first few minutes tells us that this is going to be a very silly film indeed. It's gloriously camp; all the characters are grotesques, and all of them have delightfully silly names that the film just revels in. Seymour's hypochondriac mother and the mad, scary dentist (is this the birth of a trope?)  are both personal favourites of mine, but the best of them has to be Jack Nicholson's unforgettable cameo as Wilbur force, a man with a massive, masochistic craving for dental torture. He spends a most enjoyable afternoon, which I suppose makes Seymour some kind of dominatrix. Hmm.

Seymour's accidental murders get increasingly silly, with the last one positively revelling in its silliness; Seymour doesn't have a coin so he flips a rock. And accidentally kills the poor gorgeous lady trying to seduce him by missing the ground and throwing it clumsily at her head. it's funny because you can see it coming. And what's this about all these women throwing themselves at Seymour? I want some of his irresistible sexual magnetism, dammit.

There's a good reason why this film is thought of so fondly. As always, it's the script and the performances. If those two things are bloody good, as they are here, then any faults elsewhere don't matter so much. It's interesting to compare this with, say, Plan 9 from Outer Space. Both are cheap. Both are hilarious viewing. But one of them is actually good and the other one… isn't.

One slight oddity, mind. I know I'm British, but surely the dialogue indicates that the film is set in LA, and a lot of characters seem to have New York accents?