Author: Matt

Six Damn Fine Degrees #58: Redemption song

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

I used to be a massive sucker for redemption stories, in films, books, games, anything that tells a story. Darth Vader? Severus Snape? Buffy‘s Spike? Or, to choose a somewhat more seasonal example, Ebenezer Scrooge? Oh, yes, please, give me more of that! Conflicted villains that, at the last moment, find the goodness in their hearts were very much my thing.

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Criterion Corner: Original Cast Album: “Company” (#1090)

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In 2019 (remember that time, a hundred years ago?), I nursed something of a briefish obsession with “Being Alive”, one of the songs from Stephen Sondheim’s 1970s multi-award winning musical Company – and perhaps like many others, I first heard it in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019), performed by Adam Driver. It’s perhaps something of an ironic use of the song: in Company, it is sung by the show’s central character Robert, an attractive but commitment-phobic man who, in the course of the song, comes to the realisation that he yearns for all of those things that make him shy away from an actual romantic relationship. In Marriage Story, the character who sings it is just coming out of a marriage via acrimonious divorce proceedings, and he mourns everything that he is in the process of losing. In spite of the very different contexts, however, the power of Sondheim’s song clearly comes through.

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The Child is Mother of the Girl: Petite Maman (2021)

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When I was born, my mother and father were 28 and 33 respectively. In my earliest memories they are in their mid- or late 30s. By the time my personality started to become what I recognise, more or less, as the person I am now, they were approaching 60. As a child, I knew my parents as middle-aged people with middle-aged concerns. As a young adult, I saw them moving towards retirement age.

When my mother died, on this day twelve years ago, I was 34. Technically, I knew my mother when she was the age I am now, but I was a different person then. I don’t really know who she was at the time, what she felt. I know that she wasn’t particularly happy. I rarely knew her to be happy. I don’t know whether she was happy as a child.

Sometimes I feel I can barely say that I knew my mother.

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Baa humbug: Lamb (2021)

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María (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) live on their isolated farm in rural Iceland. Though they talk little, there is clearly affection between the two – but there is also a sadness lingering in the air, much like the fog that shrouds the hills around the farm. They look after the sheep, assisting in the births: work that they make look both arduous and, in their laconic way, loving.

And then, one day, something unexpected is born. Something different. Something that, possibly, isn’t quite right – though who defines what is right, when it comes to these things?

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The Compleat Ingmar #27: The Magician (1958)

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What is the perfect Bergman movie for Halloween, if that’s how you roll? Is it Hour of the Wolf, with its surreal phantasmagoria? Wild Strawberries, with its uncanny dreamscapes? Through a Glass Darkly, perhaps – think of the spider-god monologue. Or what about Bergman O.G., The Seventh Seal, with its sardonic personification of Death stalking a band of Bergman regulars, if that gets your ghoulies going… or even Scenes from a Marriage, which I expect will play like horror to anyone whose biggest fear is a failing marriage?

The film we ended up watching on Halloween was The Magician, made one year after The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries and two years before The Virgin Spring (which, come to think of it, also has a moment or two of ghoulish atmosphere). And, reader, I’d say that it was a pretty good match.

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#CredeMulieri: The Last Duel (2021)

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I wasn’t sure what to expect of The Last Duel, Ridley Scott’s medieval drama about justice and gender. The trailer looked interesting (once I accepted that some of the hairstyles in the film took some getting used to, to say the least), I liked the actors, and Scott knows how to do a good-looking movie. At the same time, the director has been rather hit and miss for me, in particular in the last ten, fifteen years or so. Obviously Alien and Blade Runner are stone cold classics, and I’ve enjoyed quite a few of his later films, but while the likes of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant looked gorgeous, they were saddled with scripts that were uneven at best and weak at worst, which in turn wasted the usually solid, at times even great acting in these films. Scott and his collaborators have often been better at the cinematic craft than at picking material deserving of the craftsmanship.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #52: I want you (to take this gun and pull the trigger)

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

When some people read “I want you”, what they think of is that Elvis Costello song. Me? The first thing that comes to my mind is that guy in the red, white and blue outfit, the one wearing a star-spangled top hat and pointing straight at you. The one who wants you to kill, or die, or both, for your country. Good times!

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Criterion Corner: High and Low (#24)

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I’ve seen seven or eight films by Akira Kurosawa, but other than Ikiru and Dreams, the latter of which I saw about twenty years ago and don’t remember particularly well, it’s all been the Jidaigeki films, i.e. period dramas set during the Edo period (more or less) and featuring samurai, ronin and the like. Even Ikiru, which isn’t clearly set in the past, feels like it is about the past to some extent, as it is the story of an old man looking back at his life.

High and Low immediately makes for a striking contrast: it is set in the present day in a big city, its protagonists are businessmen and police detectives. More than that, while the film was released in 1963, there are many elements that would easily translate into our present day, and while High and Low comments on class in specifically Japanese contexts, much of its commentary could work equally well outside Japan. All of this comes together to make High and Low feel modern, in terms of the story, characters and the filmmaking itself – even almost sixty years after its release.

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Men & Algorithms: Riders of Justice (2020)

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What is the probability of a Danish soldier joining forces with a bunch of grown-up nerds to wage war on a biker gang in order to exact revenge for the death of the soldier’s wife? And what’s the likelihood of that plot resulting in a film that manages to be both funny and poignant? Mathematically speaking, the likelihood increases if the film in question stars Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas and is written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, whose earlier film Adam’s Apples (about a pathologically optimistic priest trying to reform a bunch of Neo-Nazis and other deplorables) was an unlikely hit.

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