Overlooked Pictures

In this long edition of SHORTS we discuss and debate for nearly the duration of a full length commentary. Jules: More characters, more locations, more worms, more desert, and more engagement with themes of mass mind control and the metaphysics of destiny. DUNE may be Denis Villeneuve's dream project, but has it become his waking nightmare? David: And speaking of dreams, why does the Fremen one based on myths and faith keep coming true, while the smarter-than-thou Bene Gesserit one based on calculations, manipulations and unholy trysts keeps turning out wrong? Who’s trolling who in the Dune-iverse? Meanwhile this dream franchise grows apace, drawing a sparse narrative from its dense source text, leaving space for sensorial nuance, albeit often at the expense of logic.

Jules: Roman Polanski's least controversial film may be one of his densest when it comes to themes and messaging. Based upon a subplot of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's 1993 novel The Club Dumas, Polanski plays out a love affair with books, their physicality, and their mystery. Johnny Depp's muted Dean Corso encounters the gamut of Polanskian caricatures, from the mephistophelian Frank Langella, the vampish Lena Olin, and the angelic Emmanuelle Seigner.  David: Unlike the claustrophobic Rosemary's Baby before it, Polanski's second dance with the devil sees its protagonist cross the Atlantic to Mediterranean-adjacent lands, seeking to unravel the antics of an occult book club whose members, some unwittingly, compete for an audience with the devil. As a mysterious tome purportedly penned by the dark lord himself occupies the hero's attention, and its pages begin not only to echo but also presage unfolding events, does he himself stand to win the race or become merely hapless prey?

The inaugural episode of Overlooked SHORTS. Ironically focussing on one of the longest feature films in recent memory, Jules and David literally phone it in with a short commentary whilst not watching the movie. David recalls and Jules interrogates, surveying the technological innovations, the water, whales, wokeness and 3D wonders of Avatar: The Way of Water.

David: Each manifestation of Dune, including Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, can be viewed as a product of its time. Dune (2021) appears sanitised to accomodate the social and geopolitical tensions of the 21st Century. It’s also a different take on the huge weight of world-building detail in the novel and the choice whether to cram it into a movie or leave most of it out. Here we set out to cram some back in for you. Jules: Is the tragedy of DUNE (2021) the same as the tragedy of DUNE (1984), namely that the best film of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel was David Lean's 1962 Lawrence of Arabia?

Jules: Do we deceive ourselves when we attempt to distinguish the sacred from the carnal? A small film made in a small village in a small (for Scandinavia) country seeks answers, as do we. David: When a fortress of encrusted ascetic piety and propriety suffers an unexpected incursion of fabulous french cuisine, something more than its inhabitants' impoverished taste buds cracks open. Rather than the conflict against which the god-fearing community steels itself, Babette's state-of-the-art feast triggers a cathartic synthesis of sensory and spiritual joy, to the great elevation of all concerned. 

David: The perenniality of the vampire genre derives from its capacity for reinvention. Its form mimics its content in similar fashion to the zombie genre, transcending death. Here, the immortality of Jarmusch’s vampire couple is a perfect foil for retrophile hipsterism. They are aficionados of a lapsed cutting edge – analog technologies, first edition guitars, a dash of Tesla tech for colour and in the garage is a perfectly-poised-between-eras XJS Jaguar. They disdain contemporary ephemera and are content to await its fall. Only Lovers Left Alive takes its time. It may irritate some but bewitch others, who will return to bask in its sunless, bohemian langour. Jules: Are vampire tropes a means or an end? Is the grand tradition of vampire fiction standing for nothing other than itself? Is it a debasement of said grand tradition to use vampirism as a metaphor, for themes like drug addiction, sexual obsession, metal illness, or mere aristocratic fecklessness? Or can a vampire picture possibly be nothing more than a cosy suburban story of rekindled love between senior citizens? The beautifully titled Only Lovers Left Alive ponders and enacts these and other questions to a delightful and confounding conclusion.

Jules: Alain Resnais' and Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'année dernière à Marienbad has astonished viewers for six decades and counting. Who, or what, are ‘A - la femme brune' (Delphine Seyrig), ‘X - l’homme à l'accent italien' (Giorgio Albertazzi, and ‘M - l'autre homme au visage maigre, le mari' (Sacha Pitoëff), and is this landmark of world cinema merely a film, or an initiatory experience akin to a rite of passage? David: This film, both modern is its experimentation and postmodern in its self-reference, provides a meandering dream-like experience of unresolved narrative, unanswered questions, effects divorced from causes and a frustrating, potentially infuriating trap for the unwary viewer.

David: When a military prison devoted to regimentation, correction and the rebuilding of wayward units fails to manage its own, the hierarchy of power turns upon itself. As those who covet power scramble to avoid responsibility, repercussions twist and twist again into a Rubic’s cube of blame and counter blame. We salute the departing Sean Connery with this not-quite-obscure-but-lesser-known anti-Bond vehicle directed by Sydney Lumet. Jules: A rare pleasure for those interested in well-constructed plots and characters who are just complex enough to support the dramatic conceit. Adroit and affecting work from all, especially Connery.  

Jules: Is it possible to make a film about vampires that is not a vampire film? The genre is perennial, with familiar tropes that filmmakers endlessly adjust to achieve varied ends. Power, class struggle, sex, death, eternal life and eternal damnation; each theme intersects vividly across the genre. Neil Jordan seeks transcendence for his antiheronies, from their plight, and their genre within film, with some success. David: At the heart of many a vampire story sits the dramatic tension between desire or love and the hunger to devour, and next to that the ultimate existential question - would immortality be a prize or a curse? Neil Jordan’s third foray into romantic horror and his second vampire-duo story (after Interview With The Vampire - 1994) this time with a gender flip, wanders among some interesting themes, though perhaps with more convolution and less art than it could have done.

David: A black satire perhaps running overlong with other ideas. It presages a spate of dark, disillusioned and memorably bleak films from the following year 1969. What does this say about the realities of 1968? The swinging 60s was as dead as the Summer of Love and the young boomers came out of it a cynical lot. This telling of the famous doomed  British cavalry charge overviews the production of cannon fodder, from street  urchins to gold-buttoned mounties of imperial glory and, with one blunder from overconfident under-experienced aristocrats of bought rank, into the valley of death. A reminder that war is most famous for its disasters. A stellar 60s British cast is present, featuring what must be Trevor Howard’s greatest role. Jules: Is warfare a matter of duty, ambition, or efficient management? Tonal confusion meets tragicomedy in this anti-war epic.

Jules: Many films depict deals with the Devil at the time the deal is done. Fewer - like Fellini's contribution to this anthology - depict the Devil arriving to collect. But does Fellini's contribution satisfy? David: Fellini, usually so generous, has rarely been so impenetrable. Is Toby Dammit’s flight to Rome hijacked and diverted to Hell? Or is he really in Rome and finds the experience sufficiently overpowering that he literally loses his head? What is the nature of his tryst with the Devil? Do we watch him getting more than he bargained for, or is this all a payment? And was the prize stardom? A Ferrari? Or just release?

Part Two of the Vadim-Malle-Fellini moral ménage à trois. David: Does the shadow have its own shadow? Does a remorseless psychopath have a suppressed or intermittent conscience, or none at all? What if they were one day confronted by one? Jules: One is accustomed to thinking of oneself as having a dark side; implying that one is essentially good. But what if one discovers that one is the shadow, repeatedly assailed by the light?

Part one of a 3-in-1 Poe anthology, baton passed between directors Vadim, Malle and Fellini. Jules: Are soulmates real, even if one or more of the parties behave soullessly? What is the price to save one's soul, once it it lost? Roger Vadim and his beautiful entourage seek answers beneath the surface of things. David: A tragic ghost myth? A seminal precursor to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not? Or both plus a costume rehearsal for the immediately subsequent intramarital collaboration by Vadim and Fonda, Barbarella.

Jules: Whether or not machines can, should, or will become self-aware are perennial debates in the field of artificial intelligence. They are perfectly capable of performing any number of tasks without it, and it's unclear how one might go about installing or eliciting it in a machine. Peter Chung of Aeon Flux fame engages in these questions by way of the interaction between human agents and a killer machine that has been trapped in a virtual world. David: If a human can be shocked into awakening from the dream-seduction of the matrix, can a machine also be awoken? And if woken can it be turned? How to do that?  Via a counter-seduction? Can the machine be lured from its role of anti-insurgent into a more agreeable motivation and agency to which it can choose allegiance? Is this an awakening from autonomic slumber or just a matriculation from one dream into another?

Jules: If politics is theatre, and the public are the audience, and the affairs of the day are the script, who are the writers, and where do the actors come from? Can the actors perceive the truth they are playing a role in a work they have mistaken to be their own lives? What if they should?  David: Considered part of Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy”, along with Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976), The Parallax View is a reporter cum detective story surveying the creation of homegrown chaos agents and fall guys of obscure origin, or what we refer to today as terrorists. This birthplace seems to be is a rabbit hole so deep and tortuous that exploring it, you might find yourself turning into the perp without even realising. Can the great conspiritocracy recruit even its enemies? Are we all in some way doomed to be recruited by a machine that no one is even driving?

David: In this second part of our survey of the human condition, we move from HG Wells’ s 1930s to a voice from the 1990s with no words. Rather than an obvious narrative, Baraka paints a canvas, bringing into focus piece by piece an image that turns more and more of its facets to the light but doesn’t really progress. As if it were less a film than a mandala, a shrine or a temple, it could serve it's purpose equally well on an eternal loop with an audience free to come and go. Perhaps referencing its own form, Baraka queries the value of advancement over stillness and contemplation. But we’re not invited  to contemplate the void so much as observe ourselves within it. Do we value simply being? Or only uncertain notions of betterment? Jules: What does spirituality mean if the only reality is physical? Does it connote anything more than aesthetics; the appropriate appreciation of a natural setting, or artistic conceit? Does it mean anything more than a type of experience that is unusual in some way, perhaps due to a drug? Baraka reaches for an answer to these questions, among others; but does a spiritual reality lie behind its images and sounds? And what would, or could, that mean, at the end of the second millennium?

David: We embark on a two part examination of the human condition, beginning with the movie of H.G. Wells’s 1933 novel of imagined future history. This modernist manifesto posits that humanity is distinguished from the animals by little more than ambition and the march of progress. There seems to be no alternative for us but onward, onward to the stars. Wells begins his fable with war, disaster and rebirth, perhaps meaning to describe the arc of civilsation from a fresh beginning, but also expressing pessimism about progress as the early 20th century defined it - sandwiched as it was between two world wars. Though inspired by the promises of science, Wells is perhaps poignantly aware that a one way shark-like need for forward motion down a one way street may contain the seeds of its own doom. Jules: What distinguishes a desire to change one's local world in some aspect – access new sources of fresh water, say – and a desire to transform it entirely? Is crisis always a requirement for such transformations? If the management of crisis is an essential part of statecraft, what rules out crisis-creation as a moral method of change?   ( hgwells sciencefiction future prediction prophecy thirties existentialism blackandwhite)

Jules: Sequel, prequel, reboot, or mashup? Or just the logical conclusion of director George Miller's deconstruction of genre, gender, and guzzlene? David: We bookend our survey of 1979's Mad Max1 with our overview of the latest 2015 instalment. On Fury Road there’s lot to recognise from our own time. Much of the human degradation in it's murdered world seems to be with us now, already.

David: As Mad Max returns to cinemas after 20 years in the wasteland we look back further to Mad Max’s origins, as well as contexts like seventies oil shocks, road death tolls, bikie gang terror in the media and a director moonlighting as a doctor in an emergency ward. Jules: The most financially successful budget genre film (until 1999's Blair Witch Project) or something more? What does director George Miller deconstruct as he assembles his mythos.

David: Science fiction has been crowded from our movie screens by a plethora of comic strip adaptation. Sunshine raised the flag for serious sci-fi cinema in a very lean decade. It recalls Kubrick’s 2001 in positing space as a spiritual destination, with the sun, the source and nurturer of life, not unlike a god to its hapless progeny, who are on a precarious mission to keep its dying light alive. In the end one of Sunshine’s revealed truths is that a film cannot transcend its script. Much vision and beauty unravels as the story switches genres and loses its way in the third act. But for all that it stands tall, because it dared to dream. Jules: Saving the world is often an extremely external affair: places, (often generic) people, and objects relating in a way that either guarantees or negates an apocalypse. Here, an internal story is attempted, where beliefs, perceptions, and personalities are the focus.