Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”, Yawn, Shrug

Greil Mar­cus, famous­ly, lament­ed that no one had so ful­ly betrayed their innate tal­ent as enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly as Rod Stew­art. No doubt Stew­art will be rais­ing an eye­brow at this, as his lat­est para­mour wraps her legs around his neck in whichev­er of his coun­try estates they are cur­rent­ly reclin­ing in. But it’s hard not to view Tim Bur­ton as his cin­e­mat­ic equivalent.

Because for all their mate­r­i­al suc­cess, they must both know, at some lev­el, that it was nev­er meant to have been about the money.

Burton’s prodi­gious raw tal­ent was imme­di­ate­ly spot­ted and very quick­ly he was able to direct his first fea­ture, Pee-wee’s Big Adven­ture, in 1985 at the age of 27. And over the next ten years, he made Beetle­juice (‘88), Bat­man (’89), Edward Scis­sorhands (’90), Bat­man Returns (’92) and Ed Wood (’94). 

Which looked like he’d struck that ide­al com­bi­na­tion of doing one for the stu­dio, fol­lowed by one of his more per­son­al projects. The stu­dio pic­tures man­aged to make mon­ey while still bear­ing his very par­tic­u­lar per­son­al stamp, and allowed the stu­dio to jus­ti­fy fund­ing the more idio­syn­crat­ic fare that Bur­ton was clear­ly more inter­est­ed in. 

But in the 30 years since mak­ing Ed Wood, Bur­ton has made around a dozen oth­er films most of which are nei­ther one nor the oth­er. Some of them look like they start­ed out as per­son­al pet projects, but quick­ly grew to become bloat­ed stu­dio pic­tures. Oth­ers were clear­ly designed to fund what came in between. 

None of them are bad films. Burton’s not capa­ble of mak­ing a bad film. They’re just not ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing. And now this, the so say long await­ed sequel to Beetle­juice

If you were try­ing to be char­i­ta­ble, I sup­pose you could say, isn’t it great to see all that tal­ent up on screen? Willem Defoe, Jen­na Orte­ga, Justin Ther­oux and Mon­i­ca Bel­luc­ci join Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Cather­ine O’Hara from the orig­i­nal. But it’s hard not to con­clude, what a shame they weren’t giv­en a bit more to get their teeth stuck into.

I hope they all enjoyed the expe­ri­ence of the shoot and were suit­ably com­pen­sat­ed for their time. And the stu­dio put a huge amount of heft into their mar­ket­ing efforts, so hope­ful­ly they’ve recov­ered their invest­ment and won’t feel the need to blame any­one for the film that resulted. 

But it’s hard not to be a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed that Burton’s best film, Bat­man Returns, turns out to have been one of the stu­dio films that were sup­posed to have been fund­ing his more per­son­al projects, all those years ago. 

You can see the trail­er for Beetle­juice Beetle­juice here

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Kneecap” and “Oddity” Both Hit Their Mark

There are two films out at the moment both of which are sur­pris­ing­ly watch­able. First up is Odd­i­ty, an Irish hor­ror film.

I’m very much not a hor­ror fan and our abil­i­ty to pro­duce com­pe­tent­ly made low bud­get genre films here in Ire­land is, with­out putting too fine a point on it, uncon­vinc­ing. So I seat­ed myself on the aisle, con­fi­dent that I’d be leav­ing after about twen­ty minutes. 

What a plea­sure to be proved so thor­ough­ly wrong. As its writer direc­tor Dami­an McCarthy is the first to admit, it makes no attempt at break­ing the mould and is quite con­tent to rely on the usu­al assort­ment of well-worn tropes and types. 

What’s a girl to do?

A women is on her own in a large, sprawl­ing house in the mid­dle of nowhere, and when she goes back inside from the pitch dark­ness after retriev­ing some­thing from her car, there’s a loud knock at the door. 

It’s a man who has, he tells her, just escaped from a lunatic asy­lum, and he’s come to warn her that while she was in her car, he saw some­one enter her house. That man is in there now!! All she has to do is let this wide-eyed lunatic in, and he’ll go in, find him and save her. 

What’s she to do?

For once, the fact that there’s so lit­tle that’s orig­i­nal about the film is exact­ly what makes it so enjoy­able. Odd­i­ty hits each of the age old marks just so, so that the brief bursts of gen­uine if mild anx­i­ety are imme­di­ate­ly tem­pered by know­ing recog­ni­tion. Deliv­er­ing just the right mix of sus­pense, the super­nat­ur­al and pure hokum. 

Tight­ly script­ed, well-act­ed and with excel­lent use of sound, Odd­i­ty is one of the few films it’s worth both­er­ing going out to the cin­e­ma for this summer. 

My expec­ta­tions around Kneecap were even low­er, and I plant­ed myself in the aisle seat of the front row, expect­ing to remain there for no more than 8 or 9 min­utes. Once again, how nice to be proved wrong. 

Instead of the usu­al suc­ces­sion of unfun­ny skits per­formed by embar­rass­ing­ly wood­en pop pup­pets in a film con­spic­u­ous­ly devoid of any­thing approx­i­mat­ing an actu­al plot, Kneecap boasts impres­sive per­for­mances from one and all. And not just from Michael Fass­ben­der, whose gen­er­ous par­tic­i­pa­tion must have helped con­sid­er­ably in get­ting the project off the ground. 

Kneecap are, osten­si­bly, a hip-hop trio from Belfast on a mis­sion to spread the word on the Irish lan­guage. Impres­sive­ly, all three offer up pol­ished and at times even sub­tle per­for­mances that sug­gest their future is more like­ly to be on a sound stage than in the record­ing stu­dio. And the film is pro­pelled by pacey direc­tion in a con­fi­dent­ly plot­ted sto­ry that expert­ly fields its pol­i­tics with informed aplomb. 

It’s instant­ly dis­pos­able of course, and no one’s going to be lis­ten­ing to that kind of sub-Beast­ie Boys music in 12 months’ time, but the film deliv­ers an instant hit with incred­i­ble ener­gy and gen­uine humour. And so long as you go in with appro­pri­ate­ly low expec­ta­tions, you’ll be as pleas­ant­ly sur­prised as I was. In short, it’s a riot. 

Odd­i­ty won an audi­ence award at this year’s SXSW and Kneecap did the same thing at this year’s Sun­dance. You can see the trail­er for Odd­i­ty here:

And the trail­er for Kneecap here:

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Jeanne Dielman’ Vs ‘Citizen Kane’

Every ten years since 1952, Sight and Sound has issued its 100 Great­est Films of All Time list, which it com­piles by can­vass­ing opin­ions from a selec­tion of over 1,500 inter­na­tion­al film crit­ics. And for most of those eight decades, top of that list sat Cit­i­zen Kane.

But in 2012, Jeanne Diel­man, 23 Com­merce Quay, 1080 Brus­sels broke into the top 50, and became the first film direct­ed by a woman to do so. Ten years lat­er, in 2022, it ascend­ed to the sum­mit to dethrone Kane and was offi­cial­ly declared the great­est film ever made. 

It was always a lit­tle unfair to sad­dle Cit­i­zen Kane with the great­est­fil­mo­fall­time tag, it’s far more instruc­tive to think of it as the first ful­ly realised film of the new medium.

For the first four decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry, tech­nol­o­gy and the lan­guage of cin­e­ma adapt­ed in tan­dem, the one respond­ing to the oth­er. But by the time Orson Welles came to make Cit­i­zen Kane in 1940, faster film stock, lighter cam­era equip­ment and pur­pose-built sound stages meant that he was able to explore the exploit the lan­guage and gram­mar of film in a way that nobody pre­vi­ous­ly had been able to. 

What’s so exhil­a­rat­ing about Kane is that Welles explores every con­ceiv­able facet of the lan­guage of cin­e­ma in the one film. From dis­guised match dis­solves, whip-pans and in-cam­era trick­ery to cam­eras that ran on tracks from under­neath the sound stage, and a sound design that has only ever been matched since by the lone fig­ures of Robert Alt­man and David Lynch.

It’s not hard to see why, in this of all times, crit­ics might be drawn to a film like Jeanne Diel­man. It is essen­tial­ly the anti-Kane film, in that it’s anti-nar­ra­tive, a‑cinematic, un-French and very much a repost to the oth­er­wise dom­i­nant male gaze. It would be nei­ther unfair nor inac­cu­rate to describe it as the arche­typ­al me-too film.

The film fol­lows a bour­geois, mid­dle aged wid­ow over the course of three days as she method­i­cal­ly goes about her dai­ly chores. Prepar­ing the evening meal for her teenage son, clean­ing the house, and sex­u­al­ly ser­vic­ing the male client that arrives each after­noon, and whose mon­ey she relies on to be able to pay the rent. On the sec­ond day, she starts to unrav­el, and on the third she had a breakdown.

Almost every scene is filmed in one long take, on a sin­gle cam­era that sits at waist height, with almost no edit­ing and absolute­ly no trick­ery what­so­ev­er. And what we see her doing, in a defi­ant­ly anti-nar­ra­tive vein, are all the things that con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive cin­e­ma leaves out. 

So when, for instance, she sits down at the kitchen table and begins to peel the first of four pota­toes, you just know the cam­era is going to sit there duti­ful­ly record­ing her as she method­i­cal­ly pro­ceeds to peel all four of them, one after the oth­er. In one long and tri­umphant­ly undra­mat­ic sin­gle take.

Andy Warhol

In oth­er words, it’s cov­er­ing the same ter­rain, themes and sub­ject mat­ter as the won­der­ful Agnes War­da, but it does so by com­bin­ing the stric­tures and anti-tech­niques that Andy Warhol had pio­neered in the 60s, with the sto­ries told in Polanski’s The Ten­ant and Bunuel’s Belle De Jour.

All of which might have been okay over a crisp 90 min­utes. But it’s t h r e e  and a h a l f hours long. I know in my ear­ly twen­ties, I’d have proud­ly sat all the way through this sort of thing, before loud­ly bor­ing my friends about it over end­less pints. But at this stage of my life, I have to con­fess, I found it so mes­mer­i­cal­ly dull that it quick­ly became torturous. 

There are, hap­pi­ly, an ever-larg­er num­ber of films direct­ed by women that deserve to be loud­ly cel­e­brat­ed: Debra Granik’s Leave no Trace (2018) and Winter’s Bone (2010), Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009) and The Pow­er of the Dog (2021), Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002) and You Were Nev­er Real­ly There (2017), Kel­ly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cut­off (2010), Char­lotte Wells’ After­sun (2022) (reviewed by me here), Sami­ra Makhmalbaf’s The Apple (1998), Sal­ly Pot­ter ‘s Orlan­do (1992), Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Lina Wertmuller’s Blood Feud, (1978).

All of which rep­re­sent a won­der­ful con­tin­u­a­tion of the explo­ration and exper­i­men­ta­tion that Welles had begun with Cit­i­zen Kane, which was and is a giant of a film. Jeanne Diel­man is not.

Watch the 2 trail­ers below, and decide which of the two films you’d be most excit­ed about sit­ting through.

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Arooj Aftab’s new album, Night Reign

Arooj Aftab came on to most people’s radar with her third solo album, Vul­ture Prince, in 2021. Mar­ry­ing ele­ments of exper­i­men­tal jazz and tra­di­tion­al folk music from her native Pak­istan with the sort of urbane pop that the likes of Sade and Enya con­coct, the result was a plain­tive and evoca­tive explo­ration of her attempt to deal with the death of her younger brother. 

That album’s suc­cess and the Gram­my it won her gen­er­at­ed sig­nif­i­cant pres­sure around a fol­low-up album so Aftab took a time out to form a trio with the jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and the mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist Shahzad Ismai­ly. And in 2023 they released their Love In Exile album.

Iyer and Ismai­ly reap­pear here on her fourth solo album, Night Reign, where they’re joined by Gyan Riley, son of min­i­mal­ist pio­neer Ter­ry, the harpist Maeve Gilchrist and Elvis Costel­lo, who makes a cameo on, improb­a­bly, the Wurlitzer.

Ini­tial­ly, the album was going to focus exclu­sive­ly on set­ting the poet­ry of Mah Laqa Bai Chan­da, the first woman to pub­lish poet­ry in Urdu, to music. But in the end, just two of the album’s tracks are set to Bai’s words. And instead, she wise­ly decides to open the album up to give it a broad­er, more cos­mopoli­tan hue. 

So that, even more so than with her pre­vi­ous album, Night Reign moves with ease from Eng­lish into Urdu and back, and back and forth between the worlds of jazz, pop and tra­di­tion­al Pak­istani folk music. 

What’s so sat­is­fy­ing about the expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to the album is the sense you get of its ‘uni­ty of com­po­si­tion’, which Aftab achieves thanks to her dual roles as vocal­ist and pro­duc­er. The 20 years and more she’s spent per­fect­ing her craft in both guis­es allows her to meld those poten­tial­ly dis­parate worlds and fuse them togeth­er into an organ­ic and cap­ti­vat­ing whole. 

Night Reign exudes appar­ent­ly effort­less poise and is an album you can enjoy equal­ly in the inti­mate pri­va­cy of your head­phones, or on repeat, for hours, on in the background.

The boys from Pitch­fork gave it an 8.3 here

Watch the video for Raat Ki Rani here:

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Season 3 of the sumptuous “My Brilliant Friend”

The Rai/HBO adap­ta­tion of Ele­na Fer­rante’s revered quar­tet of Neapoli­tan nov­els returns for its third sea­son (it’s been out, truth­ful­ly, for a while now), and if any­thing it’s even more impres­sive than sea­sons one and two.

My Bril­liant Friend, which is both the title of the first nov­el and of the over­all series, fol­lows Lenu (as in Ele­na) and Lila as they move through child­hood into adult­hood and maturity. 

With one leav­ing the squalor and cor­rup­tion of the impov­er­ished neigh­bour­hood in Naples where they grow up to become a suc­cess­ful nov­el­ist. And the oth­er stay­ing behind to stand in defi­ance against every­thing that bares down on her in those unfor­giv­ing environs. 

And through all the men, and sex, and births and betray­als and suc­cess and fail­ure, the one thing that holds firm is the depth of their fierce friend­ship, forged as it was in fire of youth.

Ferrante’s tetral­o­gy occu­pies a curi­ous space. Like the nov­els of Bret Eas­t­on Ellis and Philip Roth, they’re clear­ly and unapolo­get­i­cal­ly lit­er­ary, but they’re far too suc­cess­ful to be classed as pure­ly lit­er­ary. The clos­est com­par­i­son is prob­a­bly Tom Wolfe’s Bon­fire of the Van­i­ties

Remark­ably, the tele­vi­sion series not only does jus­tice to the orig­i­nal, if any­thing it improves on it. And it’ll be inter­est­ing to see what they do to cor­rect the fact that, between our­selves, the fourth of the nov­els isn’t quite as unput­down­able as the pre­vi­ous three, and rather drifts off.

What My Bril­liant Friend does so suc­cess­ful­ly is to use the close up of its inti­mate por­traits of two female friends and set them against the back­drop of every­thing that was hap­pen­ing in Italy. As it moves from the con­ser­vatism of the 50s, to the vibran­cy of the 60s and the agi­ta­tion of the 70s. 

What the tele­vi­sion series does, even more impres­sive­ly, is to present us with an unro­man­ti­cised pic­ture of how harsh life can be for all too ordi­nary peo­ple liv­ing on the periph­ery. But to do so by mould­ing exquis­ite­ly craft­ed images with metic­u­lous­ly com­bined sounds. The result is both vis­cer­al­ly real, and at once glo­ri­ous­ly cin­e­mat­ic and defi­ant­ly romantic. 

My Bril­liant Friend proves that not every­thing that has hap­pened in the world of film and tele­vi­sion is all bad. A cen­tu­ry ago, you would have had to go to a bespoke, art house cin­e­ma to find fare such as this. Films deter­mined to zoom in on the very local but to do so in widescreen tech­ni­colour cinemascope.

Like the Sici­ly we’re pre­sent­ed with in Tornatore’s Cin­e­ma Par­adiso, or the Provence of Claude Berri’s Jean de Flo­rette and Manon des Sources, or with De Sica’s pair of rov­ing, work­ing class lovers in Sun­flower (reviewed by me ear­li­er here).

Today, it’s not only read­i­ly avail­able on a tele­vi­sion near you, there are four sea­sons of eight episodes each. And each one is com­plete­ly and com­pelling­ly believ­able and at once tri­umphant­ly and glo­ri­ous­ly escapist.

Watch the trail­er to My Bril­liant Friend here

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