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CVIII: The Serpent's Egg (Ingmar Bergman, 1977)
Or The Curate's Egg? A curious Bergman piece, filmed in English and German.
Abel Rosenberg (David Carradine) is living in 1920s Berlin amid the decadence and hyperinflation and comes home to find his brother has blown his brain out. Abel takes up with his brother's estranged wife Manuela (Liv Ullman) who is working in a dance line and as a prostitute, although he also has to help the police with their enquiries. As the city slides into chaos, Rosenberg is given a job in a medical library and discovers a nightmare world just as Hitler's putsch fails in Munich.
It's a peculiar nightmare world - almost haunted, but always within the realms of the real world and its dark side. Carradine is rather flat, Ullman hysteric, which both seem reasonable reactions to the time. The full horror comes from our hindsight of what is going to happen to Jews in Berlin a decade or so later - and then from the climaxes revelation of what was already being done (assuming it is historically accurate). But there's an abrupt, dream-like-is-this-real quality to some of the final scenes that detract from the overall feel.
CIX: Endgame (Gary Wicks, 2001)
Curious gay-themed film by a director who sounds to me like he should be a sports presenter, but has a Lily Savage stand-up video, a gay softcore compilation and a Page 3 documentary (Daily Star not Sun) on his C.V. It's a little conflicted shall we say. In a sense this is Guy Ritchie territory, with the homoerotic subtext brought to the fore - or as if David De Coteau were directing Lock, Stock.
We first see our hero, Tom (Daniel Newman), sat in his impossibly white y-fronts in the sort of loft last seen in Queer as Folk, and the film tries to have him topless as often as possible, or in the shower (full frontal), and generally served up like a slice of Tesco's Finest top side. He's a piece of rent, kept by the insanely jealous George Michael (ho hum) Norris (Mark McGann) who would kill him if he thought Tom were unfaithful but shares him among his acquaintances such as DI Dunstan (John Benfield). Tom falls in with his downstairs neighbour Max (Corey Johnson) who is a big noise in the City but originally from Boston and his seemingly unoccupied wife Nikke (Toni Barry). Despite the hideousness of the couple - the one coke-snorting alcoholic, the other dull and depressed - Tom doesn't run a mile, and turns to them when something awful happens. Just as soon as saying "Why not phone the cops?", Max is driving them to the last place on Earth Nikke wants to be, their cottage in Wales.
There are sections where this works as a thriller, and towards the end I was thinking of another Tom, Tom Ripley, setting up a house for the inevitable onslaught of the villains, which clearly won't end well for anyone caught in the cross fire. Indeed, I was wondering how much was some kind of grand set up, as Tom's second encounter with Max is when he goes into a bar to ask for change and share a bottle of beer with him when he should be off on a job for Norris. They've got to get the characters together somehow. And learning a lesson from the master of the old ultra violence, one fight scene has an ironic soundtrack (albeit jazz rather than 'Singin' in the Rain'), possibly to distract you from the inexplicableness of Tom having to be there to spark the fight. But it's not Hitchcock - save for the homophobia.
Despite having Newman's charms on display, gay sexuality is associated with criminality, violence, duplicity, hypocrisy and abuse. Tom is kept by Norris - and McGann has rarely looked seedier. Tom's sexual encounters with him seem very much against his will - and he expects Tom to stay home and tidy and not go out, like a mousy house wife. (Note that Norris has a wife and prodigy in Surrey somewhere.) A series of flashbacks telegraph what is intended to be a climactic revelation of abuse as a child - gosh, Tom as case study. Meanwhile, the one tender sex scene in the whole film is resolutely heterosexual, and Tom graduates to Sensible Sweaters. There is some late back peddling - maybe he's only after comfort, maybe he's after rent, maybe she's just after Walthamstow rough and in a life-threatening scene she is able to score his performance... I don't believe it.
Newman does a good job with poor materials, after an overly arch start, indeed the opening is fine until the actors open their mouths. Max's mate is given particularly gum stretching lines, and the writer-director can't plot for shit - at the end the tapes Tom had for insurance purposes are delivered, even though by then they can't harm the person featured on them, and they would only be sent if Tom had not triumphed. Wha?
Totals: 109 (Cinema: 43; DVD: 61; TV: 5)
Or The Curate's Egg? A curious Bergman piece, filmed in English and German.
Abel Rosenberg (David Carradine) is living in 1920s Berlin amid the decadence and hyperinflation and comes home to find his brother has blown his brain out. Abel takes up with his brother's estranged wife Manuela (Liv Ullman) who is working in a dance line and as a prostitute, although he also has to help the police with their enquiries. As the city slides into chaos, Rosenberg is given a job in a medical library and discovers a nightmare world just as Hitler's putsch fails in Munich.
It's a peculiar nightmare world - almost haunted, but always within the realms of the real world and its dark side. Carradine is rather flat, Ullman hysteric, which both seem reasonable reactions to the time. The full horror comes from our hindsight of what is going to happen to Jews in Berlin a decade or so later - and then from the climaxes revelation of what was already being done (assuming it is historically accurate). But there's an abrupt, dream-like-is-this-real quality to some of the final scenes that detract from the overall feel.
CIX: Endgame (Gary Wicks, 2001)
Curious gay-themed film by a director who sounds to me like he should be a sports presenter, but has a Lily Savage stand-up video, a gay softcore compilation and a Page 3 documentary (Daily Star not Sun) on his C.V. It's a little conflicted shall we say. In a sense this is Guy Ritchie territory, with the homoerotic subtext brought to the fore - or as if David De Coteau were directing Lock, Stock.
We first see our hero, Tom (Daniel Newman), sat in his impossibly white y-fronts in the sort of loft last seen in Queer as Folk, and the film tries to have him topless as often as possible, or in the shower (full frontal), and generally served up like a slice of Tesco's Finest top side. He's a piece of rent, kept by the insanely jealous George Michael (ho hum) Norris (Mark McGann) who would kill him if he thought Tom were unfaithful but shares him among his acquaintances such as DI Dunstan (John Benfield). Tom falls in with his downstairs neighbour Max (Corey Johnson) who is a big noise in the City but originally from Boston and his seemingly unoccupied wife Nikke (Toni Barry). Despite the hideousness of the couple - the one coke-snorting alcoholic, the other dull and depressed - Tom doesn't run a mile, and turns to them when something awful happens. Just as soon as saying "Why not phone the cops?", Max is driving them to the last place on Earth Nikke wants to be, their cottage in Wales.
There are sections where this works as a thriller, and towards the end I was thinking of another Tom, Tom Ripley, setting up a house for the inevitable onslaught of the villains, which clearly won't end well for anyone caught in the cross fire. Indeed, I was wondering how much was some kind of grand set up, as Tom's second encounter with Max is when he goes into a bar to ask for change and share a bottle of beer with him when he should be off on a job for Norris. They've got to get the characters together somehow. And learning a lesson from the master of the old ultra violence, one fight scene has an ironic soundtrack (albeit jazz rather than 'Singin' in the Rain'), possibly to distract you from the inexplicableness of Tom having to be there to spark the fight. But it's not Hitchcock - save for the homophobia.
Despite having Newman's charms on display, gay sexuality is associated with criminality, violence, duplicity, hypocrisy and abuse. Tom is kept by Norris - and McGann has rarely looked seedier. Tom's sexual encounters with him seem very much against his will - and he expects Tom to stay home and tidy and not go out, like a mousy house wife. (Note that Norris has a wife and prodigy in Surrey somewhere.) A series of flashbacks telegraph what is intended to be a climactic revelation of abuse as a child - gosh, Tom as case study. Meanwhile, the one tender sex scene in the whole film is resolutely heterosexual, and Tom graduates to Sensible Sweaters. There is some late back peddling - maybe he's only after comfort, maybe he's after rent, maybe she's just after Walthamstow rough and in a life-threatening scene she is able to score his performance... I don't believe it.
Newman does a good job with poor materials, after an overly arch start, indeed the opening is fine until the actors open their mouths. Max's mate is given particularly gum stretching lines, and the writer-director can't plot for shit - at the end the tapes Tom had for insurance purposes are delivered, even though by then they can't harm the person featured on them, and they would only be sent if Tom had not triumphed. Wha?
Totals: 109 (Cinema: 43; DVD: 61; TV: 5)
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