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II: Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008)
Eastwood directs, produces, writes the music and makes the tea on this late 1920s period thriller, in which telephone exchange supervisor Charlotte Collins (Angelina Jolie) comes home to discover her son, Walter, has been kidnapped. The police ignore her for twenty-four hours, and then draw a blank until a boy is found in and brought back from Idaho: he claims to be her son, but a mother knows better. The police, embarrassed by her outbursts in an election year, take steps to silence her.
This is a gripping mix of James Ellroy (although he's interested in the post-Second World War) territory and Chinatown, with the period lovingly reproduced in fetishised details, drawing together a mix of period objects and rotoscoping. The closing shot - a long LA street - is money on the screen, albeit a mixture of set and computer imaging. The narrative - which I am being coy about - is somewhat of a relay race, as the focus shifts from character to character rather than being truly ensemble, and as a true story doesn't quite know where to stop. If there is a fault, it's that the film hardly allows for the possibility of Collins being wrong: it is the Authorities against her, and the motives of those who come to her aid are underexplored.
III: The Man who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)
Rewatch of the remarkably faithful adaptation of Walter Tevis's novel - Roeg's cross-cutting is most evidence in the sex scenes that ion the rest of the film, and it is more sedate than I remember as a result (I recall only the scenes of Newton (David Bowie) watching tv and some of the medical tests).
Newton crashes to Earth in a lake, and makes his way into civilisation by establishing a corp[oration to sell new technology. He is raising the money to fund a space mission so he can go home - but what is less clear from the film is how this will help his people survive. The film covers a couple of decades without saying so - aside from Newton the principles age in varying degrees (Mary-Lou (Candy Clark) less successfully), and lift technology changes, as do televisions. The film is full of surveillance technology - cameras, telescopes, xrays, spying of one kind or another - and it is clear that Newton is being watched from the very start. Is everyone being watched - or could this US track incoming spaceships? I suspect another future building element is having an African American agent - of increasing seniority - with a white wife.
Bowie convinces utterly as the alien - his personae include this sort of figure anyway - and of course Roeg had co-directed a rock star in Performance already, although Chas (James Fox) was the "alien" in that film. There is, god help us, a remake in the works. And I guess I ought to watch Don't Look Now soonish.
Totals: Cinema: 1; DVD: 2; Television: 0.
Eastwood directs, produces, writes the music and makes the tea on this late 1920s period thriller, in which telephone exchange supervisor Charlotte Collins (Angelina Jolie) comes home to discover her son, Walter, has been kidnapped. The police ignore her for twenty-four hours, and then draw a blank until a boy is found in and brought back from Idaho: he claims to be her son, but a mother knows better. The police, embarrassed by her outbursts in an election year, take steps to silence her.
This is a gripping mix of James Ellroy (although he's interested in the post-Second World War) territory and Chinatown, with the period lovingly reproduced in fetishised details, drawing together a mix of period objects and rotoscoping. The closing shot - a long LA street - is money on the screen, albeit a mixture of set and computer imaging. The narrative - which I am being coy about - is somewhat of a relay race, as the focus shifts from character to character rather than being truly ensemble, and as a true story doesn't quite know where to stop. If there is a fault, it's that the film hardly allows for the possibility of Collins being wrong: it is the Authorities against her, and the motives of those who come to her aid are underexplored.
III: The Man who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)
Rewatch of the remarkably faithful adaptation of Walter Tevis's novel - Roeg's cross-cutting is most evidence in the sex scenes that ion the rest of the film, and it is more sedate than I remember as a result (I recall only the scenes of Newton (David Bowie) watching tv and some of the medical tests).
Newton crashes to Earth in a lake, and makes his way into civilisation by establishing a corp[oration to sell new technology. He is raising the money to fund a space mission so he can go home - but what is less clear from the film is how this will help his people survive. The film covers a couple of decades without saying so - aside from Newton the principles age in varying degrees (Mary-Lou (Candy Clark) less successfully), and lift technology changes, as do televisions. The film is full of surveillance technology - cameras, telescopes, xrays, spying of one kind or another - and it is clear that Newton is being watched from the very start. Is everyone being watched - or could this US track incoming spaceships? I suspect another future building element is having an African American agent - of increasing seniority - with a white wife.
Bowie convinces utterly as the alien - his personae include this sort of figure anyway - and of course Roeg had co-directed a rock star in Performance already, although Chas (James Fox) was the "alien" in that film. There is, god help us, a remake in the works. And I guess I ought to watch Don't Look Now soonish.
Totals: Cinema: 1; DVD: 2; Television: 0.
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