Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) directed by Jim Jarmusch

 

Starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, this is a art film take on vampires. Swinton and Hiddleston are have been a couple for the last few hundred years but are currently living apart. Their characters are named Adam and Eve which I found a little annoying to be honest but there wasn’t much other religious symbolism in the film. John Hurt plays Christopher Marlowe and the script makes it clear that he wrote the Shakespeare plays and Adam was behind some of the world’s most famous poets and musicians while Eve has had her share of relations with famous historical people. This is an element that I find ridiculous in many films with vampires or any long lived characters. They always seem to know or worse, have been famous people throughout their lives. Like in stories of reincarnation, no one is ever a pig farmer, that are always Cleopatra. The unlikeliness of that just irritates me. 

This a Jarmusch film so the story is sort of light on details or structure and instead relies on how interesting you find the people in the story. I do think this works for him and it doesn’t fail him in this film either but it’s the performances of the main actors that keeps you watching. He introduced some elements that took me a while to figure out why they were important, like how the vampires wear gloves when out and about, but not all the time. Adam does seem to mopey at times but is still manages to elicit sympathy. John Hurt and Tilda Swinton are the highlight of any production in my opinion and they don’t disappoint here. 

Melancholia (2011) directed by Lars von Trier

 

A moody slow paced film with some very compelling performances, especially by Kirsten Dunst and small character roles by Slammer favourites like John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling and Udo Kier. Kiefer Sutherland also reminds us what a good actor he can be, even in a support role. 

The story revolves around two sisters, one with depression issue who is getting married at her sister's and brother-in-law's estate which goes all wrong by the end of the night. It is revealed that a rouge planet is heading towards the earth and will have a close fly by in a very short period of time. Sutherland's character who owns the estate is studying the event and tells everyone not to worry while at the same time secretly  buying water and gas. As the planet grows in the sky tension rise and fall and it finally becomes undeniable that the planet will strike the earth, destroying the planet. 

Things to love about this film are multitude. I think showing that the earth is destroyed in the opening sequence adds to the tension within the small group of characters. That small group in an isolated estate is also a brilliant move. We never see or know what is happening in the larger world. While Dunst's character is shown as a woman suffering form severe depression, she is also, especially in the end the most accepting of her and the world's fate and sets up a very touching, loving way for her, her sister and her nephew to face the inevitable. 

Technically a disaster film, I guess, but not one with large scale destruction. Instead it focusing on smaller scale destruction of relationships and emotional states while at the same time giving us some scary yet beautifully poetic images of the coming apocalypse. The effects are sparse, simple and veery well done s as not to distract from what is happening. 

It might be a little slow or even a little "artsy" for some people but I found it very involving and poetic. 

The Shout 1978 directed by Jerzy Skolimowski

It seems odd to me that this film never reached cult status considering it’s « cult » bonafides. For example it stars Alan Bates, Susannah York, John Hurt and Tim Curry! The film is certainly weird enough and interesting enough to have gained multiple viewing by motivated audiences.  maybe the recent death of John Hurt will bring it more into the public eye. 

The story is that of a drifter who arrives in a  small seaside town who is taken in by a young couple. Hurt plays a musician experimenting with all sorts of new ways to produce sounds, a profession that the lifter uses to his advantage by telling the musician that he was trained by an Aboriginal shaman to produce a sound, a shout, that will kill any living thing that hears it. 

The mysterious guest, played by Bates, slowly takes over the household including the wife (who has a really bizarre walking on all fours scene) played by York. When the time come to prove his ability… he does, accidentally killing a homeless person sleeping on the beach within range of the terrible shout. 

The film is book ended with shots from inside an asylum where the story is being told as the inmates, all of whom are are featured in the story as Bates narrates while keeping score. This story telling device keeps the viewer off guard as while most of the events are shown as a flashback, there seems to be jumps forward and other directions mixed with the dreamlike imagery of some of the shots.  

The film is not perfect and from a 2017 point of view, there are some problems with the white guy who can learn and master the powers of the aboriginals. Why would they teach him? Why not just hire an aboriginal actor? I wouldn’t accuse anyone involved with racism by any means, but I also had issues with the « Last Wave » (1977)  for similar reasons even though Richard Chamberlain’s roles was better explained than Bates’ was in « The Shout ». I suspect the casting was more a case of who was close and available for this very low budget production.

This film is somewhat hard to see now, no DVD version in North America I can find. Another site stated it was viable in full on YouTube but that seems to have been taken down. 

John Hurt (1940-2017)

I first saw John Hurt on TV, in the role of Quentin Crisp in the Naked Civil Servant, on PBS. He played Crisp again decades later in the follow-up film about the last years of Quentin's life called An Englishman in New York. It was a great introduction to an amazing actor. Having met Mr. Crisp a couple times, I can say Hurt's performance was so spot on that if the two of them were in the same room and he was in character, it would be hard to tell them apart. It was a role that could have killed his career. Playing a modern gay dandy as a sympathetic person was not exactly in vogue then, nor is it now - to be truthful.

As Kane in Alien, he gave us one of cinema's most iconic images, but after that film he made The Shout - a weird artsy pseudo-horror film that I was in preparation to write about here when the news of his death reached me. In that role as in  ALL his roles, he shined. His presence in even a terrible film elevate it into something worth seeing for his part in it.

As a genre fan, he has given me plenty to look back on. Winston in the film 1984 (which sadly is becoming the actual world we live in), the leader in V for Vendetta where is plays the opposite of Winston, he was Hell Boy's father, the war Doctor in the series Doctor Who and was the titular character in  the film version of the Elephant Man, maybe his most heart breaking role.

He was a great actor who left us with a lifetime of work to reflect, enjoy and relive as we re-watch his body of work in the coming years. I certainly will be doing just that.