Review link: Island Of Lost Souls

Everyone once in a while—actually, fairly often—this job of mine allows me to write about a film that I love. The new Criterion DVD/Blu-ray of Island Of Lost Souls proviced one of those occasions. A truly horrifying adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island Of Dr. Moreau, I first saw it thanks to the Bob Squillace, a college professor of mine who knew a rich text and a creepy movie when he saw one. Here’s my review. It’s grim, unsettling, and barbed in a way that feels like everyone got involved knew they couldn’t get away with anything like this twice. If you’re looking for some Halloween viewing that will stick around in your nightmares for a while, look no further.

Some recent reviews: Mighty Macs and Boccaccio ‘70:

This week I reviewed the new-to-Blu-ray, confusingly titled 1962 omnibus film Boccaccio ‘70, featuring half-features from Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Mario Monicelli (Big Deal On Madonna Street), and Vittorio De Sica. (Short take: The Visconti’s great, the Monicelli’s memorably bittersweet, the Fellini’s self-indulgent even by Fellini’s standards (and I say that as a Fellini lover), and the De Sica could have been made by anyone with a feel for broad comedy and an eye for framing Sophia Loren’s physique).

On the new movie front, I’m seeing The Three Musketeers tomorrow but I also reviewed The Mighty Macs, an inspirational/extremely sleepy inspirational sports movie starring the forever underutilized Carla Gugino. So go see Martha Marcy May Marlene. I saw it a couple of months ago and still get the willies when I think about it.

My favorite passage in Susan Orlean’s Rin Tin Tin (so far):

“I began to understand that what drew me to Rin Tin Tin most of all was his permanence—how he had managed to linger in the minds of so many people for so long, when so much else shines for a moment only and then finally fades away. He was something you could dream about. He could leap twelve feet, and he could leap through time.”

Movie poster: Thrashin’ (1987)

“Hot, Reckless, Totally Insane” was also briefly considered as the tagline for No Country For Old Men.

Reviews I have written: Apes, doomsday cars, and sexy priests

Here are links to a handful of recent reviews: I liked Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. I found Bellflower—the story of two guys, their post-apocalyptic dream car, and their fear of women—intriguing and then distressingly distasteful. And I enjoyed Jean-Pierre Melville’s Leon Morin, Priest, a story of religious conversion and forbidden attraction set against the backdrop of occupied France.

Some recent reviews: Cowboys & Aliens and The Guard

In this week’s A.V. Club film section I write about Cowboys & Aliens, a new blockbuster about… well, look at the title. It’s pretty dull, halfhearted stuff led by a couple of dull, halfhearted performances. (Nice supporting cast, though.) Also: The Guard, a witty, eccentric, Irish-set crime film starring Brendan Gleeson as a truly irresponsible cop and Don Cheadle as the reluctant partner who never quite figures him out.

Tumblr-exclusive review: Life, Above All

The A.V. Club is, by and large, a smooth running operation but sometimes mistakes happen. For instance, a film editor who shall remain nameless assigned a review of Life, Above All to freelance contributor Alison Willmore. The problem: Said film editor forgot I’d already filed a review when I saw the film back in April. Alison did a better job than I did anyway, but in the interest of not wasting my work entirely, here’s the review. Or, to put it more enticingly: Here’s the review you were never meant to see:

Life, Above All

Director: Oliver Schmitz (PG-13, 105 min.)

Cast: Khomotso Manyaka, Keaobaka Makanyane, Harriet Manamela

In Northern Sotho, with subtitles

As Life, Above All opens the young heroine played by Khomotso Manyaka has lost her infant sister. But for those around her seeing she gets a proper burial is a secondary concern. Her stepfather (Aubrey Poolo) steals the funeral money to pay for drugs. Her mother (Lerato Mvelase) seems too frail and shell-shocked to do anything but cradle the corpse. And then there’s the matter of how the baby died. Taking Manyaka aside, her family’s aggressively proper next-door neighbor (Harriet Manamela) assures her that everyone knows her sister died of the flu, just as everyone knows her own teenage son died as the victim of a robbery. And as long as nobody says anything else, there’s no problem. Trouble is, everyone’s already saying other things. And what they’re talking about in private—and pointedly not talking about in public—is a problem that won’t go away. 

Life, Above All— a German-produced film set and shot in a small village outside Johannesburg and adapted from the much less cumbersomely titled Allan Stratton young-adult novel Chanda’s Secrets—doesn’t use the word “AIDS” or the local euphemism “the bug” until relatively late in the action. But even unspoken it hangs ominously over the film just as it hangs over its protagonist’s village. It’s the thing everyone fears and nearly everyone tries to forget and both the fear and the forgetting create an unbearable tension.

Favoring carefully composed but divided frames and handheld camerawork, director Oliver Schmitz captures that tension well. But it’s the film’s tight focus on a single family’s story and the performances, particularly Manyaka’s, that prevent Life, Above All from being just another well-meaning look at a troubled part of the world. Like Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, Manyaka plays a girl forced to navigate a treacherous, hypocritical grown-up world she’s been forced to understand before her time. Thrown into an impossible situation, she does her best to survive while staying true to herself, even when that’s not easy. Protecting, for instance, a friend who’s turned to prostitution means sharing her status as an outcast and the considerable consequences that come with it. And though the film doesn’t turn away from the grimness of Manyaka’s world—up to an ending whose optimism doesn’t quite square with what’s come before—its heroine’s wearily indefatigable spirit provides a powerful counterbalance. Everything around her begs her to surrender, either to her neighbors’ habit of back-turning or despair, but she knows sometimes being right means standing alone. —Keith Phipps Grade: B

Hunting Hitler: Man Hunt (1941)

I wrote a piece on Fritz Lang’s remarkable 1941 thriller/call-to-arms Man Hunt for my tri-weekly A.V. Club column Secret Cinema.

DVD/Blu-ray reviews: Zazie Dans Le Metro and Black Moon

Here’s my (long) A.V. Club review of two peculiar Louis Malle films recently released by Criterion. You will never look at a unicorn the same way again after seeing Black Moon.

A few words on Gidget (1959)

When I think of the golden age of California beach culture, I think of reflections. I know it mostly from surf music, Beach Boys lyrics, and movies filmed on sandy soundstages. For some reason I’d never seen the 1959 film Gidget before, much less its many sequels, an oversight I’ve been meaning to correct since Noel Murray’s guide to beach movies a while back. As usual, Noel was right. It’s a relentlessly, even a little deceptively, cheery film about surf culture told through the eyes of an outsider—in this case the 16-year-old tomboyish “girl midget” played by Sandra Dee—wanting to get in then discovering it’s not quite as expected. Or, in Noel’s words “it’s a sunny coming-of-age story that tries to be as frank as the late ’50s would allow about teen sexuality and the seductive power of surfaces.” There’s nothing stunning about Paul Wendkos’ filmmaking, but Dee’s completely winning as a girl filled with conflicting emotions about where she fits in in the world, and whether or not that’s where she wants to be. It’s a nice contrast to Cliff Robertson’s performance as “Kahuna,” the slightly older beach bum who’s been driven to make a lifestyle of drifting from wave to wave by his experiences in Korea. Like much of the film’s deeper themes—Gidget’s baby steps into sexual initiation, the less savory lifestyles of some of the surfers—his clearly horrific war experiences surface briefly and then drift down beneath the surface. But they make their pull felt beneath all those images of a California paradise.