Reg returns to remember David Bowie and ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS (1986)

If you were young, talented and had attended a school that let you go home most nights, Britain was a grim place in 1985. I'm sure most Unseenerati already know this through the films of Ken Loach, the televisual works of Alan Bleadsdale and just the unremitting grimness of every cultural artifact from the period that didn't involve Anthony Andrews and Nigel Havers wearing stripey blazers, carrying teddy bears and running along beaches to Vangelis soundtracks in training for some long ago Olympics whilst suppressing feelings that dared not speak their names.

It were grim up North and it was somewhere in the 1920s down South.

Into this mix, like a florescent purple sock under a Seville Row suit came Julien Temple's ambitious, ill-fated and much ill-féted "Absolute Beginners".

The idea was very good. Colin MacInnes' 1959 novel about London's youth culture of the time was a cult classic and its paralels with 1980s London resonated very strongly, replete as it was with a stultifyingly conservative establishment, simmering racial tensions and a voracious advertising industry just looking for ways to commercialize youth culture. All that was required was to ignite Paul Weller and retire.

Now the fact that you are reading about this film on a forum called Unseen Films should suggest to you, if you weren't already aware, that things didn't go according to plan. You may have heard of this film as the Howard the Duck of the 1980s British film industry. You may have heard of it as many things. What you are very unlikely to have done is actually seen it because after its failure at the box office, it was suppressed in a manner worthy of Kim Jong Un's last year's family Christmas video. It was released on VHS one Tuesday in March 1989 and then withdrawn the next day and to the best of my knowledge, has almost never been released on any other format.

And I don't understand why.

Because, while far from being the searing indictment through the medium of pop music of the Thatcher government that it was perhaps intended to be, it's actually quite an enjoyable film which takes on the added charm for people of a certain generation (ie: mine) of revisiting that short halcyon period of the late eighties when British sophistipop as exemplified by the Style Council and Sade ruled the airwaves.

The plot, such as there is, is a curious superimposition of the Faust story over MacInnes' simple stream of consciousness "a boy with a talent" wanders through his London in the days before the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. It is told through a mix of gorgeous period street scene set-pieces and luridly neon-lit, amphetamine-inspired hallucinatory musical numbers, so pretty much the same as a 1940s MGM Gene Kelly pic really.

No. Seriously, many of the musical numbers are utterly forgettable, as are most of the lead performances, but the two show-stopping songs, "Anything For a Quiet Life" a cameo piece by former Kinks front-man Ray Davies and the gloriously surreal "Selling Out" featuring David Bowie as half-Fred Astaire, half Mephistopheles only manage to fall on the safe side of the fine line between pastiche and plagiarism due to Temple's sheer inventive oddness.

As suggested above, most of the lead performances are utterly forgettable, but Bowie really does shine as the ostensible villain, advertising executive Vendice Partners, (and no, you can blame the original author for that rather heavy-handed bit of concrete metonymy rather than the well-meaning eighties lefties,) who really does manage to be the most likable character in the film despite the fact you know you should despise him.

If you have read Colin MacInnes novel and are looking for a cinematic adaptation laying bare the skull beneath the skin of late 1950s England, jog on. If you are looking for a searing indictment of Thatcherite Britain and its ugly undercurrents of racism and hypocrisy, you probably want something made by a Ken or an Alan.

But if you want a snapshot of joyous silliness in the face of disaster, a strange meta-nostalgia party piece, you really should track this film down and give it a chance.

Because if you don't, then Thatcher will have won.

Empty Beach (1985)

DB here. Reg returns with what he calls an Unsolicited Review. Solicited or not I'm happy to have yet another review from our correspondent from Australia.

Peter Corriss is an Australian university professor who writes Chandlerian detective novels as a side-line. This 1985 effort marks the only attempt so far to turn his books into film.

The first thing to say about this film is that the cinematography is gorgeous and Sydney has never looked better and the art director's emphasis on the colours blue and white serves the sun-drenched daylight scenes very well, and the brightness is actually a very clever idea for a film which is obviously working every film noir trope in the book.

The plot kicks off with Corriss' unashamed Phillip Marlowe analog hero, Cliff Hardy, being hired by Marion Singer, a widow all in white. Her much older, property-developer and businessman husband went out for a day's sailing two years earlier and disappeared at sea. Now she has received an anonymous note saying that the writer has seen him back in Sydney and he's in rough shape. If you know Chandler, it won't surprise you that Hardy discovers that Singer had some very dodgy business interests and a lot of people who wanted him dead, and if you know film noir, you already know who the real villain of the movie is.

And what follows is a war between the script and the art director.

Bryan Brown actually makes a good fist of the Marlowesque Hardy, but almost without exception, (John Wood manages to hold his own as the put-upon police detective-sergeant,) every other acting performance in this film is atrocious. Special mention should go to Ray Barrett who should consider himself lucky that the set-designers weren't using lead-based paint. because his scenery-chewing villainy would surely have given him a lethal dose.

And the plot quickly becomes so byzantine that having watched it about twenty times, I still don't know how the sub-plot involving Leon, the homeless guy connects in.

But it is sumptuous to watch and Brown gets to deliver one of the best introduction lines in cinematic history: "The name's Cliff, you should drop over some time.


The Empty Beach is a deeply flawed movie, but most of those flaws are due to over-ambition.

Here is the video for the theme song which tends to emphasise the noir aspects which I felt didn't work rather than the cinematography which did:

Captain America (2011)

To close out the second part of this week of Comics and Commentary (after Tin Tin and before 20th Century Boys), we find ourselves graced with some thoughts on Captain America, by Reg. To me Captain America is one of the best comic book based films I’ve run across (not to mention one of the best films of the year). Reg has been having conversations about the film ever since it’s come out with anyone who would listen (and a few penguins on holiday who wouldn’t) so I thought it would be best if he was the one to weigh in on this truly wonderful film.

In his Pulitzer Winning novel about the 1940s comic book industry in
New York city. "The Amazing Adventurers of Kavalier and Clay", (a book I cannot recommend highly enough,) Michael Chabon recreates a particular image. The cover of the first issue is a picture of the hero punching Adolf Hitler square an the jaw and there is just something very satisfying about that image, which is probably why back
in the 1940s that was the image on the cover of Captain America issue #1.

Let's face it, punching Hitler is fun and back in the forties, you could make serials where Captain America got to punch Hitler on a regular basis and the folks at home and the troops abroad would be enlivened by it. Captain America, a pure force of goodness, fighting pure evil and the anathema to all that Middle America believed in.

How wonderful it would be to return to that era of certainty, before Watergate, before we knew about the the secret files J. Edgar Hoover was keeping on the Kennedy's, before we knew what the mob had on Hoover.

The problem with Captain America is that he comes from a more innocent age so any film about him could go really, really wrong.

The reason Joe Johnson's film works is that the first thing it eschews is jingoistic patriotism. For a film called "Captain America" there is very little espousal of America. What there is a lot of is giving the little guy a chance and not letting the bully win.

I imagine that the same narrative was the key to those 1940s serials.

21st century technology allows for some brilliant sequences that could never have been dreamt of back in the 1940s and it has to be said that acting techniques have also moved on, so Hugo (Mr Giraffe-Face) Weaving can actually be a terrifyingly controlled and very Prussian omnipathic villain. Weaving's Red Skull is so cold and clinical, the comics geek in me wants to see him go head to head with Jack
Nicholson's Joker.

The point I've been hinting at here is that this film does draw strongly from the 1940s serials. It knows what it is and it knows that at some visceral level, as long as they see the hero punch Hitler, the audience will be satisfied and yet it does so much more because at some point, the director forgot he was trying to pastiche 1940s
serials and started trying to make a 1960s war film.

So the fight scenes involving the Cap, they do look authentically 1940s and frankly, I think the costume works brilliantly in that context. The wider battle-scenes are to me reminiscent of "The Dirty Dozen"or "Where Eagles Dare" And that deserves credit.

The crucial point about this film is that after all the hullabaloo, you actually like the central character and this film leaves us with possibly the most tragic victorious hero ever.

I'm not going to suggest that it is easy to direct a big fat lazy comic-book film but I will say that Joe Johnson directed something that was neither fat nor lazy and he certainly produced a film that deserves to be seen, and makes us all feel like we can punch Hitler.

King's Speech (2010)

DB here. I've been rough on the Oscar nominees for this year. Last week I took a number of them to task for not quite being up to snuff. That attitude is about to change. Tonight I'm presenting a few kind words about what I think is the best of the eight Oscar Nominees for Best Picture that I've seen. How good do I think it is, well basically I've seen it five times over the same number of days.

My good friend Reg has been waxing poetic about the film for sometime and to that end I asked him to write it up. He came across it and fell in love with it first so he got first shot at writing it up. What he's given us is a review that is both loving and wonderfully kidding. I find this a perfect mix for a film that has become the front runner for the Oscar and in the sites of those wishing to knock a damn great film.

And with out further adieu I give you the words of Unseen Film resident International Man of Danger with his thoughts on The King's Speech.

Warning: Contains Spoilers. If you do not wish to know the outcome of the 1930s in Britain, do not read any further.

So a guy walks into a speech therapist's office and says "...."
And the speech therapist says "That's alright. I'm not a doctor"
And then Neville Chjamberlain says "But we still need the eggs."
And Churchill says "Ohhh yesss!!"

I'll start out with four words about this fillum: Colin Firth=Oscar-bait.

I understand that he might be given a run for his money by James Franco in Danny Boyle's classy reinvention of the Saw franchise, (and I bet that's a phrase you never thought you'd read, Unseenerati,) but look at the stats. How many acting Oscars in recent years have been won by people playing either members of the British Royal family or struggling with a physical or mental disability? I think you'll find the answer is "Most".

But Firth's performance in this fillum deserves to be lauded. To focus on his ability to stammer would be like focussing on the bass line of a Jim Steinman song and ignoring the rest. His Bertie is a complex human being rathr than a study in mannerisms. The snobbery and arrogance he exhibits at the beginning are pitch-perfect reflections of the performance of Michael Gambon as the martinet George V later in the fillum and the warmth he exudes in the scenes with the young princesses show a man determined to be a better father to his children than his father was to him. Yes, the film is about his trying to deal with his stammer, (the hint is in the title,) but Firth never allows the character to be defined by his impediment. His Bertie is much more than just the stutter.

And so to Geoffrey Rush. Rush is a brilliant actor, but when asked to play an eccentric character he can occasionally go a little over the top. In the same way that Julian Clary can occassionally go a little bit camp. Or Brian Blessed can occasionally be a little bit LOUD. (Apologies for that Unseenerati, but the site's style guide says that any reference to Brian Blessed must include at least one word in caps.)

Thankfully, in this fillum he is magnificently restrained. His Leonard Logue is gently eccentric without ever being manic. Warmth is a word I think I'll be coming back to and Rush brings it in bucket-loads without ever threatening to become maudlin as some lesser actors might, (not mentioning any names, you know who you are Robin.) when playing an unconventional character like this.

But it belittles this fillum just to focus on the performanes of the lead actors, because I think even Paully Shore would not be completely dire in a fillum this well written.

In the lead-up to writing this review, I mentioned to the guvnor, Mr Bourroughs, English film critic Mark Kermode's observation (and if you aren't listening to Kermode and Mayo's film review on BBC radio why not?), that it takes a particular kind of brilliance to write a script where the feel-good ending is the announcement of the beginning of World War II. (I did warn you there'd be spoilers.)

One of the things I really admired about this film was the brilliant writing, in particular, the use of foreshadowing. Two examples that stood out for me were Rush's audition piece for an amateur drama production with the opening speech from Richard III, ( I won't say any more about that because I know the guvnor is going to watch this fillum again and I want him to admire the subtlety; suffice it to say it's the best use of an out of context Shakespeare quote I've ever come across.) and the early scene where Bertie is encouraged by one of his speech therapists to take up smoking "to relax the larynx". I don't want to spoil any potential sequel, but that is a big plot coupon.

And the thing that doesn't get mentioned about this fillum is that it is very funny. Serial mentalist Helena Bonham Carter, in probably her most restrained performance since A Room With A View, demonstrates a hitherto unseen talent for deadpan comedy.

I could wax on. A fillum where an appearance by Derek Jacobi, (or is it Judi Dench, well have you seen them in the same room together?) feels like they're over-egging the pudding

This is one to take home on DVD.

How can I put it? I have a friend who is one of the most gorgeous women I have ever seen. She is also incredibly talented and quite successful. She is the kind of person you just want to resent. But she is also incredibly caring and generous and she makes everyone around her feel better.

The King's Speech is the cinematic equivalent of my friend.

About the worst thing I can say about it is that after seeing it, it may take a viewing of The Green Hornet to bring you back down to earth.

Forrest Gump (1994) On Further Review

"Life is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory
gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So you're stuck with this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while there's a peanut butter cup or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast and the taste is... fleeting. So, you end up with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. And if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you got left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappers."

--The Cigarette Smoking Man From X-Files

DB here.
Our contributor from Australia, Reg, returns to the fold with his take on the Oscar winning, restaurant-spawning film Forrest Gump. As you can guess the film is really too well known to be a true Unseen Film, however it is not immune from being considered over-hyped and overdone for our On Further Review series. With that in mind I leave you with Reg as he continues his thoughts on the film responsible for birthing a restaurant where I got one of the best steak dinners I’ve ever had.

Forrest Gump, paean to the American Dream, or hymn to conservatism, anti-intellectualism, and unquestioning obedience to Those Who Know What's Best For The Country?

Well, on the surface, it could easily be dismissed as a frothy nostalgia-fest, with no larger intent than an excuse for a "Hits Of The Sixties And Seventies" soundtrack album, and the trial of some new film editing techniques. But to my eyes, there has always been something slightly darker going on. Certainly, Winston Groom's novel, upon which the fillum is based, had greater ambition than that. Groom's Forrest is a darkly satirical baby-boomer-equivalent of Voltaire's Candide, and like Candide, is subjected to more pain at the hands of society than Bruce Campbell was at the hands of Sam Raimi. His unquestioning acceptance of that pain, in the book, becomes a sad comment on the sheep-like conformity of modern society.

The film almost completely loses Groom's black humour. It perhaps only survives in the character of Lieutenant Dan, a man so bound up in a family tradition of dying for the country that that is his only goal in life. He thus despises Forrest not for his stupidity, but for saving his life, therefore preventing him from achieving his destiny. And praise is due to Gary Sinise for a performance which actually subtly shifts the character's bitterness at his destiny being thwarted to his becoming the only real note of cynicism in the film. One could almost see the character as an onscreen embodiment of Groom's reaction to the finished film.

The reason I find the film distasteful though is that Forrest doesn't ever really suffer, except at the hands of one character; the smart, liberal, and free thinking Jenny...and upon her head, all the sufferings in the world are heaped. So the unquestioning and malleable Forrest sails through life unscathed, except by Jenny's constantly seeking more than he can offer. Meanwhile Jenny is punished for seeking more; with abusive relationships, with poverty, and eventually, with a painful death resulting directly from her free-thinking lifestyle. She only achieves a kind of implied redemption when she returns to big, dumb, loveable Forrest.

As above, so below. All the social problems in America are caused by questioning, free thinking liberals, and if only they'd return to the arms of loving conformity, everything would be fine.

A good friend of mine (who is by no means a liberal, but is a music lover), once pointed to the interaction between Forrest and John Lennon as his least favorite scene in the whole film, and I do see his point. If this were a music blog rather than a film blog, I could probably write an On Further Review piece of a similar length to this one on John Lennon's Imagine and why I think it's one of the most
disingenuous songs ever written. The suggestion that it was inspired by a child-man's view of Mao-ist China is utterly egregious. Lennon was a liberal, but any suggestion that he viewed Red China through rose-coloured glasses, (which I imagine would just make it Even Redder China,) is somewhat rebutted by even a cursory listen to The Beatles' Revolution. Of course, in keeping with thematic consistency, Forrest's narration then has to go on to mention how the liberal Lennon will later suffer. I don't seem to remember the encounter with Elvis earlier in the film going on to point out how The King essentially consumed himself to death.

Forrest Gump is a very well made film. Technically, it is very clever and the acting is, for the most part, quite outstanding as well. I've long held the view that Tom Hanks is the modern day answer to Jimmy Stewart and if so, this is his Harvey, but I'm afraid I do look at it now and think "This is the film that could have inspired Glenn Beck."

The Chiltern Hundreds (1949)

Reg is back with one of the first films he promised to review for Unseen Films. Its a comedy with a decided political bend which he says is perfect for the British political season.

This is an utterly silly film, but given what is going on in Britain this week, there could not be a better time to review it.

The plot is fairly simple, young Viscount Tony (David Tomlinson) is doing his national service and all weekend leave is cancelled except for candidates in the upcoming general election. Tony recalls that his family have held the local constituency for the Conservatives for generations, so he declares himself a candidate.

Now I'll put on the brake right now because I've already gone too fast for some readers. Yes. I did say David Tomlinson and yes it is the father from Mary Poppins. He is indeed playing the Hugh Grant role in this film. At the time, he was a credible romantic lead.

But he is deservedly only third billed in this film.

To continue with the plot, Tony comes home to stay with his family. His father played by the great AE Mathtews, (If you don't know who AE Matthews is, you are sorely ill-educated about comedy films and I can see that I'll have my work cut out here,) cares nothing for politics and is more concerned about the rabbits on the lawn and how frequently he can hit the little buggers with his double-barrelled shotgun. (It has been this reviewers experience that the double-barrelled shot-gun is an extremely ineffective tool for hunting rabbits, experience backed up by watching Warner Brothers cartoons, But I digress, (Seriously though. Elmer Fudd, ,175 hollow points, Daffy Duck, you could have been the star.)

This film is about the British class system and despite its age and almost breath-taking naivete with regard to the British electoral system, it seems oddly current.

Viscount Tony loses the election to the Labour candidate, Mr Cleghorn, who is swiftly kicked upstairs to the House of Lords and suggests that public-school-educated, well-spoken Tony might do better as a Labour candidate. (No! Don't go there,because I've been there already and the T shirts are rubbish.)

But Tony runs as a Labour candidate, which so upsets the long-suffering family butler Beecham (Cecil Parker), that Beecham feels compelled to stand as the Conservative candidate and of course,he wins.

I won't spoil the ending although the title does give a huge hint if you're well versed in how the British political system used to work.

Cecil Parker is deserving of top billing in this film. He plays everything completely straight and his Beecham is surely the template that was looked to by Geilgud in Arthur and Denholm Elliot playing possibly the greatest "this is beneath me" butler of all time in Trading Places.

This film is funny, sometimes for the wrong reasons nowadays, but no matter how sophisticated I think myself, I keep coming back to it and it always makes me smile.

The film might be better known to US readers as The Amazing Mr. Beecham. The film currently appears not to be out on DVD.

Bran Nue Dae (2009)

With this review You are introduced to another contributor and a very good friend of mine Reg. I won't go into what a hell of a nice guy he is, since I'll leave you to discover that on your own. I will however talk about why I asked him to write for Unseen Films.

Reg is a hell of a writer. He writes regularly on music on his blog and he waxes poetically about music and uses it as a springboard for discussions of other subjects. Its like listening to the best disc jockey in the world talk about the music you love, or want to love or will love as soon as you find the music he's talking about. He truly kicks it into high gear when he does it as part of his trips to The Pelican Club, a feature where he does extended posts that are like being in a small club and enjoying an evening of music. (I'm trying to convince him to do a film version here at Unseen Films)

Reg has an encyclopedic knowledge of film. If you can get him talking about film he will amaze you with all that he knows. I'm still trying to figure out where he's picked it all up since he is not a typical film geek with his head buried in films and film books. The information kind of just spills out out of him. He has a great love of classic films, as well as a passion for science fiction. Since he lives in Australia he has wicked knowledge of classic films from the UK. He's pointed me toward any number of really great films that I simply never knew about because of my limitations here in the United States. Actually Reg knows a hell of a lot about just about any type of film out there. He's also a blast to go to the movies with. A few years back he and I went to see The Host at the New York Film Festival and we had a great time not only watching the movie but watching the audience.

Reg and I have been trying to get him on the blog for a while now but he's been having really wicked computer problems that have prevented him from posting directly to the blog. He's in the process of getting the problem solved, which I'm hoping will bring about a more rapid flood of pieces. Until then Reg has sent me his review of Bran Nue Dae which I've posted below. This is a film that he has been talking about from the instant I mentioned this blog to him. Its a film that he really wanted to write about but was prevented from doing so because of the computer problems. (I don't know about you but based upon what he says the mere thought of Geoffrey Rush channeling Dr Strangelove puts this on my list of must see films.)

And with out further adieu I now give you the first, of what I am hoping will be a steady stream of reviews here at Unseen Films from the ever wonderful (in a manly sort of a way) Reg.

How can you define a musical which in its' first ten minutes features an old school church spiritual and a rockabilly song about the benefits of condoms?

That sums up this film really because it is trying to be two things and it fails in at least one attempt.

The plot is simple. Willy is a young aborigine running away from his boarding school in Perth and trying to get home to the girl he loves in Broome.. Along the way he gathers together a group of fellow travellers, all of whom learn something and...Oh never mind. It doesn't really matter.

This is a film that works best when it forgets that it's a musical, even during the musical numbers. When it tries to be a musical, it is embarrassing. When it relaxes and just tries to be a road movie, it is delightful.

Overall, its flaws, Geoffry Rush's Dr Strangelovesque accent, Magda Subanski's being in the film for no good reason and a fairly muddled knowledge of religious practices, (the services Willy's mother attends are clearly Baptist and yet she has sent him off to a Catholic boarding school in hopes that he'll become a priest,) and the moments when the director remembers that this is based on a stage musical, are out-weighed by the moments of joy brought on by a brilliant cast, (Ernie Dingo and Deborah Mailman are deserving of singling out here, both playing characters who could be tragic victim stereotypes, but both playing with such gusto that the comfortable white liberal viewer is forced to question their own assumptions,) and a great sound track.

I walked away from this film smiling, which I believe was the intent of the people who made it.