Cold Comfort Farm (1995)

director John Schlesinger
viewed: 01/06/2013

Cold Comfort Farm is the third film that I queued up after reading an Entertainment Weekly article listing the best films “you haven’t seen” of the last 25 years. I recalled it coming out and its buzz and popularity, but I never got around to seeing it for whatever reason, and really, it’s not the kind of film that I queue up regularly.

Directed late in the career of John Schlesinger (Billy Liar (1963), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Marathon Man (1976), to name a few), it was actually produced for British television, though was given theatrical release in the States.

Adapted from a 1932 novel by Stella Gibbons, it is a bit of a send up of the dire, hard life sagas of the small village English that became a stereotype in some of the later Victorians and beyond.  It’s the story of Flora Paste (Kate Beckinsale), a modern, urbane young thing who goes to live with her poor relations when family tragedies put her in need.  These overtly grouchy, grimy, gritty, earthy characters are played out to comic extremes, with surnames like Starkadder, Lambsbreath, and Doom.  But all it takes is a little modern attitude and some prodding from the spritely Flora to exorcise Cold Comfort Farm of its gloom and misery.  By the end of the film, everybody is matched up and happy as clams.

It makes for the cheerful, easy entertainment that one could easily watch with one’s in-laws.  It is clever and quite fun.  Some of the actors are better than others.  At the top end you have Ian McKellen and Joanna Lumley in small but very character-driven parts.  Some others are more average and a couple are a bit over the top.  Interestingly, Kate Beckinsale is quite good and charming.  I guess this is before her whole Goth Sci-Fi transformation in the Underworld (2003) series.  I didn’t even know she could smile.

I guess in a list of overlooked films of the past quarter century, maybe this would count.  Maybe not.  It’s certainly a charming enough diversion.

Kill List (2011)

director Ben Wheatley
viewed: 09/20/2012

A hitman, suffering from some psychological stress, winds up taking another job with his partner, not just one hit, but a “kill list”.  He’s got trouble at home with a volatile, beautiful Swedish wife, and given the aberrant psychology, it’s never all that clear how much his “reality” is purely his, and not the same as the one generally observed by everyone else.  And then, when they get to their victims, it’s clear that he’s got a lot of violence within himself to dole out, sometimes even more than required, knocking off anybody suspected to be affiliated with a snuff film ring, for instance.

The film is by Ben Wheatley, and was getting a lot of buzz in its native Britain.  He’s already got another film out, Sightseers, and has been building a reputation for thriller cum horror.  And based on Kill List, I’d be very open to see what else he might have up his sleeve.

The best thing about Kill List are its plot twists, its blind alleys in regards of the story.  The less you know, the better.  So, if you’re it sounds remotely interesting, you should stop reading this and just see it.  The film doesn’t necessarily achieve greatness, but it shows promise, surprise, cleverness, and good performances.  It’s worth seeing for sure.  And quite gruesome at times.

But it’s a little hard to discuss entirely without spoiling it.  So read on if you will.

The film’s final twist, something that you get some hints of throughout, but really have no idea exactly what’s going on, is that there are a bunch of Satanists at the core of things.  His final hit is upon a “hunchback” who turns out to be his wife with his young son on her cloaked back.  Who he stabs to death in a ring of hooded worshipers.  This evokes some of Britain’s best horror films, such as The Wicker Man (1973) or Witchfinder General (1968), and it’s not exactly what I expected to happen.  But it’s also a bit unsatisfying, to me, at least.

I guess one of the challenges of an unreliable narrator (perspective) type of work is that it’s so often the case that it just turns out that the subject is crazy and his world is a world of madness that that twist is kind of predictable in and of itself.  I still kind of like it as it often offers for disjunctive and unpredictable moments and events, things that come from the unconscious or beyond.  The form itself is inherently oppositional to logic.

Kill List, though, is odd in both tone and style as well as narrative.  It’s mixture of surreal and impressionist reality and depiction, with naturalistic acting and dialogue, really does create something different and unique.  I will certainly be on the lookout for Wheatley’s next films.

London Boulevard (2010)

director William Monahan
viewed: 08/12/2012

London Boulevard was recommended by a friend.  A sort of neo noir, it’s the story of man just released from prison, who comes back to the criminal underground that had made up his life before, and tries to take a path away from that former life.  As these stories almost inevitably go, it’s a hard life to get away from, especially when all your old gangster buddies want to keep you in and don’t mind blackmail and murder to get their way.

Colin Farrell stars as the ex-con who winds up picking up a legitimate job as a caretaker and protector for a reclusive young movie star, played by Keira Knightley.  I think that perhaps the way that this had come up was when I was discussing A Dangerous Method (2011) and how I had been surprised a bit by Knightley, who I’d come to truly disdain as an actress.  Her part here is quite small, really.  And she’s okay.

Farrell is a perplexing actor.  It seems like everyone seems to agree that he can really act.  He’s still a big name movie star.  But he really has never made a “great” film.  Watching him here, I was struck that he could  be good in the right hands, in the right film, with the right director.  Because he is good here in this decent, not particularly stand-out film.

Directed by William Monahan whose credits are mostly for writing, the film is mostly solidly decent.  Ray Winstone shows up as the creepily affable but brutal villain.  David Thewlis appears as a drugged out hanger-on (an interesting performance).  It’s got a fair amount of fairly fair things.  But it doesn’t add up to much.  It doesn’t stand out for me even three or four days since I watched it.