Glanni Glæpur í Latabæ (aka 'Robbie Rotten in LazyTown') (1999)

Glanni is rather more frightening than Robbie

Today’s film is actually a filmed-for-DVD play, ‘Glanni Glæpur í Latabæ’ (also known as ‘Robbie Rotten in LazyTown’, although ‘Shiny Crimey in LazyTown’ would be a more literal translation). It’s an Icelandic stage-musical which served as a pilot to the hit TV show ‘LazyTown’ (2004-2008).  LazyTown, if you don’t know, is the most expensive children’s TV show in history.

The play is recognisably the same characters in the same world. Local superhero Íþróttaálfurinn (Sportacus, but his Icelandic name literally means ‘sports wizard’) teaches everyone what to eat and how to exercise, and in times of crisis he runs in to save the day. He’s handsome and athletic and he can do the splits in mid-air, which from any other hero would feel like a mating display. His costume in this play owes more to Icelandic elves and folk-heroes than modern athletics, but the basic elements are the same. Here, he lives in a hot air-balloon, not an airship - and he uses it to travel to different towns (we also hear about MayhemTown and BullyTown). He speaks very LOUD in this production, and he wears a magic hat which tells him when people are in trouble.

The Policeman, the Mayor, Glanni and Miss Busybody

All the familiar characters are present - and they’re all played by humans. On TV, most of the cast are human-sized puppets, but now the children are obviously actors in their late twenties. The main impact of this is that Stephanie (the viewpoint character on TV) is just a member of the larger crowd. There are also a few characters who didn’t make the cut: gullible policeman Officer Obtuse (who doesn’t contribute much that the Mayor couldn’t), Jives (a child who raps about how vegetables cancel out pain) and a bird puppet, who doesn’t really do anything.

The character who’s most different from their TV portrayal is Glanni Glæpur. Now, Robbie Rotten is one of my favourite fictional characters, and one I identify with strongly: lazy, self-defeating, and over-keen on dressing up. Glanni Glæpur shares these attributes (and is similarly played, with excellent flair, by Stefán Karl Stefánsson), but whereas Robbie wanted peace and quiet, and so sought to expel Sportacus from town (while usurping his position), Glanni Glæpur wants cash. Robbie carries out his plans on his own, but Glanni hires a gang (of ‘ugly, boring, smelly, thievish’ folk from MayhemTown) to steal all the vegetables so he can sell can sell canned fruit (which is, of course, a great evil). When Sportacus helps the town plant new fruits and vegetables, Glanni resorts to poison. Robbie harboured a secret desire to make friends with the townfolk. Glanni Glæpur is just an evil capitalist, and it’s far less interesting.

Glanni lacks Robbie's fascinating prosthetic chin and eyebrows

Glanni impresses Stingy with his wealth, and he kisses Miss Busybody, and he impresses everybody else with a story about how he once gave the president a foot-massage. He has a seductive philosophy: ‘Never think about the future or the past. Do you know how to add and subtract? There’s nothing else you need to learn, because you know enough to count your money.’ Of course he leads everybody astray and becomes the mayor and so on.

Then there are the songs. Normally a 20-minute episode has one song, but the far greater duration of the play (which is in some ways a hinderance) allows for a lot more singing and dancing. The best of the songs were resurrected for TV. Indeed, certain songs are note-for-note the same as they appear in the series.  Glanni Glæpur’s introductory song goes to precisely the same backing as Robbie Rotten’s ‘Master of Disguise’, and ‘Bing Bang Dingalingaling’ is obviously the same song and instrumentation as ‘Bing Bang Diggiriggidong’. Others are still works in progress. An early version of ‘Gizmo Guy’ pops up, but it lacks finesse.

Stephanie and Trixie sing of their enduring friendship after escaping jail

It’s an enjoyable enough 95 minutes, but it doesn’t hold a candle to such LazyTown classics as ‘Rottenbeard’ or ‘The Greatest Gift’. It’s easy to love Sportacus and Robbie on TV, but at this early point (and with too much stage time) they’re too authoritarian and too criminal respectively. The fact that it’s obviously a filmed stage-play, but without a live audience, leaves it feeling like there ought to be a laugh track. The TV series ups the stylisation, and shoots single-camera, but the compromise in ‘Glanni Glæpur í Latabæ’ leaves you feeling that something is missing.

You can see the musical on Youtube, and you can donate to Stefán Karl (Glanni/Robbie) here - he’s currently undergoing therapy for pancreatic cancer and there’s a movement afoot to raise money to support him and his family through the process. You can see some of his finest work in meme form here and here and here and here because this is 2016.

P.S. I almost forgot the most important thing, which is that Icelandic sounds great. It's a very similar sound to the German accents that I find so satisfying. Good work Iceland!

Kids (1995)

Despite no particular plans in this direction, my film-watching project has encapsulated a lot of films set in New York - from 'Shaft' (1971) and 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes' (1971) to 'Taxi Driver' (1976) and 'Party Monster' (2003), and 'The BQE' (2007) and 'Mary & Max' (2009), and six others besides.  It's a very interesting set of movies, but taken together they present a vision of a formidably ghastly city, full of cars and violent woe, not somewhere you'd particularly want to live or visit.

'Kids' joins this tradition, but takes a new perspective, looking at the great teen nineties of baggy clothing and public urination.  It's a rampantly heterosexual movie, opening with an abrasively long and noisy teenage snog, and going on to follow the sex and lives of a pubescent gang.  Bored, horny children, raping and mumbling and laughing.

"I have no legs," sings the man.

I didn't know anything about the film when I bought it.  I picked it up from a charity-shop because I found its spine interesting - normally DVD-spines are printed so you can read them when you tilt your head to the right, but this one was like the DVDs of continental Europe, where you have to tilt your head the other way.  The design made it look like 'world cinema', a vague, arty term that I don't often hear applied to American movies, but this is a film seemed to fit both categories.

It's thrillingly disorientating, shot largely in very close-up close-ups and highly saturated colours.  A cast of untried actors overlap their dialogue, and compete with the sounds of traffic and loud music.  It has a documentary feel, a spontaneity.  It feels oddly like real life, rather than performed drama, and it makes other films feel staid and artificial.  I'd expected 'Kids' to be bleak and hard to watch - it's a film full of HIV, romanceless underage sex and other widely-protested content, but it proved to be full of energy and vitality - a much more visceral and important piece than, for example, 'The Titfield Thunderbolt' (1953), the last film I'd looked at.  It passed quickly, and it troubled me.

2013 Dies!

Well, that was the year of The Penciltonian.  What an exciting time!  What a world of adventures!  What!  Why?

I had hoped never to watch another film again, but the bright lights and colours have drawn me back.  Since the official end of the project and the blog, I've found myself compelled to watch the following motion pictures, which I report here in order to wrap up the year:

Iron Sky (2012)

This is actually a far more appropriate end to The Penciltonian than whatever the actual end was: an exciting Finnish/German/Australian/kinda-American film, riffing on a lot of the German movies I've been watching (even 1943's 'Münchausen', which I'd thought pretty obscure) and slathered in modern-style Wagner.  An action comedy about space-Nazis, an enjoyable and necessarily broad satire, which didn't end as I expected.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

On St Christmas Eve's Day, I actually saw a movie on the BIG SCREEN, something I had failed to achieve through the body of the year.  It's an excellent telling of the story, and is pretty close to being a perfect film.  Attractive, exciting, amusing and moving, and the muppets work surprisingly well alongside human actors, without seeming unduly ridiculous.  I'm sure I had more to say about it, but Christmas.

Witchfinder General (1968)

What a jerk!  I've always liked the Puritan style, and have seen photos from the film and admired Matthew Hopkins' hat and fine array, but he was a horrid fellow.  This film sits neatly alongside 'Häxan' (1922) and 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928) as a tale of misidentified witches being beaten up by unchristian Christians - and it joins my beloved 'Winstanley' in being an inspiration for 2013's surprise hit 'A Field in England'.  This is a film of really horrible, hard-to-watch violence (which seems entirely appropriate, given the subject matter), and Pertwee-era-style crash zooms (which seem less appropriate).  Vincent Price IS the Witchfinder General.

War and Peace (1956)

I watched the first hour of this, but became immensely irritated.  It wasn't terrible, but it was slow and unexciting, and I'm no longer obliged to watch slow, unexciting films.  I have the liberty to escape such things.  I also grew aware that the film was not at all the best way to take this particular story.  As much as a massive, massive book is daunting, a film that boils a massive, massive story down to a few hours and makes it feel like any other romance, is a less appealing and less helpful prospect.

A borrowed and wearying cat on me, and upon you all.

So, what does 2014 bring?  I tried to make a list of my predictions, but the list started out frighteningly bleak and full of catastrophe (which celebrities will die, this year?), before becoming a sequence of portents of doom and stars of ill-omen, so I stopped making the list and wondered whatever was wrong with me.  2014 will be very lovely.  Amen.

Starship Troopers (1997)

Rounding out the nineties, we have this excellent sci-fi satire, an anti-war-film disguised simply as a war film.  It drifted into my mind a couple of months ago when I watched 'All Quiet on the Western Front' (1930).  The stories follow similar patterns: in each, a school-teacher inspires our hero to join the army, the better to be a patriot, and both films show a gruelling period of training under a hostile drill-sergeant, which nonetheless leaves the cadets unprepared for the real horrors of battle.  The war drags on for far longer than expected, and the hero watches all his peers perish in agony.  I can believe there are plenty of other anti-war films that follow the same pattern, but these are the two I know, and despite their similarity in plot and purpose, they use very different methods.

'Starship Troopers' is subtler, or at least, it credits its viewer with more intelligence.  It drops the occasional hint that humanity are the real aggressors, and that the 'bugs' whose planets they are invading are only defending their territory, but it makes the aliens ugly enough, and the battles exciting enough, that one could watch the film without realising the cruelty of the heroes, the sarcasm of the jingoism.  'All Quiet on the Western Front' opens and closes with clear anti-war statements, and its hero loses faith in the struggle, speaking openly against its futility - but the horrors experienced by Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) in 'Starship Troopers' leave him all the more committed to the bugs' extermination.  He's a true citizen.  'All Quiet on the Western Front' makes its point with tragedy, but 'Starship Troopers' gives us a happy ending, a triumph for the surviving characters.  Its far more bitter, and terribly unfair.

Death!

It's an attractive, fun and thrilling film.  If you can put the grim moral aside, it's highly entertaining, something you can watch a lot of times.  The film was fortunate to be made at exactly the right time, in 1997 special effects had become so good that they still impress today, with CGI 'bugs' and ships looking both real and solid.  Made a few years earlier, I suspect this would have aged poorly.  Five years later, I doubt the film could have been made at all, as the extremely negative portrayals of propaganda and American-style extreme patriotism would, post-9/11, have rankled against the public mood.

I'm told the film is extremely different to Robert A. Heinlein's novel on which it was based, and that the book, published in 1959, plays the war far straighter, with the monsters utterly evil, the heroes justified in their crusade.  It sounds considerably less interesting than the motion picture; the world needs the occasional warning about the evils of imperialism.  I always prefer sci-fi that doesn't advocate for national churlishness.

---

Unreported films

There have been a number of films I've watched during the period of the blog which for one reason or another I haven't written up for you.  They all duplicate (and in some cases triplicate) years I've covered with other films, but for reasons of completism, here's a brief run-down.

Vertigo (1958)

A third James-Stewart-starring Hitchcock movie, after my posts on 'Rope' (1948) and 'Rear Window' (1954).  Of the three, only this one isn't confined to a single room, meaning it can roam up and down the steep San Francisco hills, mainly down.  I was very taken by this film when I first watched it, as there's a point when it rather alarmingly reveals that it isn't in the genre you expected.  Rewatching, I was surprised, and not pleasantly, at what a sinister jerk the hero becomes toward the end.  And Kim Novak's eyebrows are strange and confusing throughout.

Bucket of Blood (1959)

I watched this and wrote it up for you, but then I watched it again.  It's good, it's short, and much of it is imitable.  I made a page of notes the second time, but apparently I've lost it.

The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977)

This is an absurd comedy written and directed by Marty Feldman, and it's a real pity it isn't better known.  It feels like a British Mel Brooks film, or a sillier and wider-ranging 'The Bed Sitting Room' (1969).  It's either an adaptation of a classic novel, or (as the title suggests) a remake of the 1926, 1939 and 1966 films, which ignores the original's lack of laughs and somehow comes out with a more interesting and satisfying resolution than any of those versions managed.  It stars Marty Feldman, Michael York and Peter Ustinov, and features (among many others) a memorable performance from James Earl Jones, who plays an Arab in the style of Terry Thomas.

Chariots of Fire (1981)

I picked up a copy of this film during the 2012 olympics.  I didn't watch any of the sport, but the opening ceremony had impressed me, and a rendition of the theme from Chariots of Fire stirred something within me.  It's music I've always associated with running in slow-motion, so I'd long held at least a little interest in watching the film.  Besides, it got the oscar for Best Screenplay, which tends to mean a film is worth a look in.  It's a fine thing, and well worth the attention given to it at the time, and isn't at all the film I'd expected.

Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988)

My cousin Alice recommended me this film, and I sought out a copy the following day.  I had meant to write it up for 1988, but somehow 'The Last Temptation of Christ', 'Akira' and 'A Short Film About Killing' all got in the way.  The occasion of my viewing is now eleven months ago, so I can't recall a great deal, except that the film struck me as extremely Italian, and felt much more like the stereotype I had in mind of European films than any of the German, French or Scandinavian films I'd seen.  It has a Summery, somewhat Catholic feel to it, like 'Cavalleria Rusticana'.  I meant at the time to watch the Director's Cut version, which came in the same set, that I might have a fuller idea of the film before writing it up.  Still not gotten around to that, but I imagine it'll happen eventually.

Ghostbusters II (1989)

After watching 'Ghostbusters' (1984) this was inevitable.  It's a mite less sweary than the original, but otherwise very similar in style, humour and production, and amply enjoyable.  It's a mystery to me why this sequel isn't held in the same regard as the original.

The Baby of Mâcon (1993)

Long-term readers will know I have a love of Peter Greenaway films.  Like so many of his movies, this fascinated me with its ideas and dazzled me with its beautiful cinematography by Sacha Vierny.  Its events show a play within a play - a vast audience, all dressed splendidly in what I'd count as an 18th century style, watching, and joining in with, a play about an ostensibly virgin birth and a tiny, all-powerful baby.  There's a lot of colour and blood and nudity, and it's quite astounding to behold.  The ending, though, was too unpleasant, and represented the first and only time I watched a film for The Penciltonian and resolved not to write it up for reasons of censorship.  If Peter Greenaway has ever gone too far, it was with the resolution to this film, which made for extremely uncomfortable viewing.

Hackers (1995)

1995 was an exciting year for movies, with 'Tank Girl', 'Toy Story', 'Goldeneye', 'Nixon' and 'Jumanji' (the latter of which is a film everybody saw, but nobody now speaks about) all in cinemas.  Saskia is a great advocate for the dream of nineties, so I turned to her for a recommendation, and was shown both 'Empire Records', which got a post of its own, and 'Hackers', an exciting story about the 1337 h@xX0r5, 7H05e co0l kiD$ wH0 C0UlD 7Urn c0mpu73r$ t0 tH3Ir pURp0$35, CH@Ng3 7H3Ir GR@des 0N $Ch00l coMpU73r5, $73@l m0n3y FR0m 8@nK5 (0n @ WhIM) @Nd dR355 iN 0U7l@NDI5h 0u7fI7s, HaPPy n07 70 C0nF0rM.

A Night at the Roxbury (1998)

An enjoyable, though often-scorned bromance, regarding two jiving brothers (Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan) who yearn to escape their jobs at their father's fake-flower shop and make it big in the dance club scene.  I'm not surprised it's less popular and less well-known than other Saturday Night Live movies as it lacks much of a hook to draw audiences in and keep 'em, but it seemed quite enjoyable enough, and an antidote to some of the heavier films I'd been watching.

Shaft (2000)

Having watched 'Shaft' (1971) and its two sequels, it was inevitable I'd get to this year 2000 remake, starring Samuel L Jackson.  It's a fair action movie - and is as explosive and slick as you might hope for, but it's not as incisive as the original, which seemed edgier and more dangerous.  I liked the soundtrack, which is by David Arnold who composed the music for the nineties and noughties Bond movies, and who revisits the original 'Shaft''s funky sound in his own glossy style.  I'm not so sure I can get behind the film's apparent glorification of police brutality, in which John Shaft, a cop, achieves what he needs to be beating people up and pistol-whipping unarmed suspects into respecting him.  We're meant to like the cops who turn a blind eye to these antics.  I guess it gets the job done, but not every violent police officer is so good at heart as John Shaft.  Noughties Shaft seems to have much less sex than the seventies Shaft did, too; perhaps it fell out of fashion.

Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

An inevitable watch, after 'A Night at the Roxbury' (1998).  A bizarre and pleasing picture of the newsrooms of the 1970s.  Ron Burgundy's jazz-flute recital is a fantastic thing to witness.  The film goes for the old, slightly annoying convention of making all the male characters extremely amusing, but all female characters serious straight-man types who make no attempt to amuse.  Are there any films that reverse this trope?

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

It turned out I had absolutely the wrong idea about the Fast and the Furious movies.  I'd expected tales of car-theft, homicide, drive-by shootings and gritty America.  What I find instead, in this, the third in the series, is an extremely clean film about young racers, challenging one another to drive better and faster to win women.  Saskia described the films as chav-magnets, which might be a fair stab at the core audience.  Like 'The Transporter' (), the film reads like a story-board, each shot clinically chosen, rather than looking like a record of real events caught on camera.  It's an artificial style, but very efficient, very economical.  The script is tight and well-structured (as are, I understand, the others in the series), meaning that the story is well-paced and the protagonist's story engaging and satisfying.  Alas, the core of the film is that old, uncomfortable idea that the white man can go out to a foreign country and in a few short weeks become better than any native at whatever it is the foreign culture supposedly excels in.  See also 'Avatar' (2009) and, I suspect, 'The Last Samurai' (2003).

Das Weiße Band (2009)

I have as many Toms in my entourage as Mary Queen of Scots had Marys (which is to say, about four of them), and one such Tom urged me to seek out films by director Michael Haneke.  The very next day, 'Das Weiße Band' popped up the BBC iPlayer.  It's set in Germany in the early 1910s, and so neatly plugs the gap in my knowledge of 20th Century Germany that's so well filled by 'Heimat' 1-3, Fritz Lang's Weimar Berlin crime films (1922, 1931, 1933), 'Das Boot' (1981), 'Downfall' (2004), 'Der Baader Meinhof Komplex' (2008) and 'Goodbye Lenin!' (2003).  It's a rather unpleasant crime film, subtitled 'A German Children's Story', in which the children are known by name but the adults only by occupation.  Despite being set slightly before the First World War, the film has its mind on the second war, when these children will be running the country based on the lessons learnt in infancy.  Despite a pretty poor special effect of a horse falling over, this is a good film, if rather grim.  It's in black-and-white, too, meaning I have a wholly or largely monochrome film in every decade but the nineties.

Cosmopolis (2012)

Having watched 'Metropolis' (1927) and 'Persepolis' (2008), 'Cosmopolis' had to follow.  This is a story about a businessman in a car going to get his hair cut.  It looks like a blockbuster but is actually an art film, or something of the kind.  There's a wonderful artificiality to his limo's interior, and a daunting and real dirtiness to everything that happens outside it.  I really liked the vast majority of 'Cosmopolis', but wanted it to have a blunter ending.  The final confrontation felt too much like a final confrontation, and the film seemed to lose some of its fascinating individuality.  I'm told the book is deeper and more interesting.

Ted (2012)

I'd almost forgotten that I'd seen this during the course of the project, so long ago was it.  I'd initially meant to write this up, but, in a moment of belief that The Penciltonian was wholesome family reading, I censored this and 'The Baby of Mâcon' out of having their own posts.  Anyway, 'Ted' seemed just the thing to watch while visiting Big Dave in London, where we had been to a fine crêperie/crémerie combo for good pancakes.  The film is plainly from the mind of Seth MacFarlane, creator of 'Family Guy' and its ilk, and I know their comedy is fairly divisive, but it's a style I can enjoy, and which is used well here.  The film put me in mind of one I'd made and then destroyed, 'The Death of Pencilton' about an owl puppet which is obviously a puppet but which is nonetheless treated as being alive.  This did it better.

The Hunger Games (2012)

I enjoyed this, but wondered whether I would have liked the book more - not because the film was deficient, but because I thought prose might have afforded more intimacy to the actual Game part of the story.  A book could give an insight to Katniss's thoughts that was lacking here.  Her predicament might have been more genuinely daunting from her point of view.  As it was, I knew she'd be out of danger inside two hours and back for a sequel or two.  Nonetheless, I look forward to the next film, which I understand to be in cinemas now, but I can't think when I'll get to see it.

Run Lola Run! (1998)

Since my Penciltonian project is nearing its completion, I've been looking over the list of films I've watched this year, and I realised that the 1990s was almost the only decade to be made up entirely of English-language films.  (The other decade lacking foreign-language cinema was the 2010s, but I have another 6 years to rectify that particular omission).  I knew immediately what I'd like to watch: 'Lola Rennt', or 'Run Lola Run', a sassy German film which pleased and excited me when I saw it half a decade ago, and which I'd very happily recommend to anybody who hasn't tried foreign cinema before.

As you might expect, it regards Lola, running.

Lola (Franka Potente) has exactly twenty minutes to rustle up 100,000 German marks to save the life of her jerk boyfriend Manni, played by Moritz Bleibtreu, who went on to play, with a more competent criminality, Andreas Baader in 'Der Baader Meinhof Komplex' (2008).  Lola has an excellent rage, a shock of red hair of the most enviable character, and a capacity to scream with such determination that glass and other weak things must shatter.

Lola Rennt!

The events of the film last just over twenty minutes, but the film is almost an hour and a half in length.  We see multiple attempts by Lola to find and deliver the money, and when she fails she goes back to the beginning and starts again, like a video-game character trying new ways to beat a level.  Which way she goes, and what happens to each of the characters, depends entirely upon her timing: it isn't that she makes different decisions in the same situations, but rather that the situations are different when she gets there.  It all hinges on how quickly she makes it down some (animated) steps at the start.  A difference of a single second is all it takes to change many lives.

I'll certainly keep an eye out for more films from writer/director Tom Tykwer, who works with an attractive energy and flair, and casts even the smallest parts memorably.  I don't know why I haven't watched this film more often.  It's a cool, stylish movie, and a good drama.  It's colourful, it's attractive, has good characters, a pleasing techno soundtrack, and a lot of fun.  If it was in English, you'd all have seen it by now.

---

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Lawnmower, man.

Do excuse my fortnight absence from writing up films for The Penciltonian; a blend of business and laziness left me indisposed, but I'm back with these words on 'Lawnmower Man', a serious-minded vision of a year 2000 in which VIRTUAL REALITY is credible, practical and nineties beautiful.  You can tell it's from the nineties, as the CGI sequences resemble 'ReBoot', and every important scene is lit wholly in blue.

Our hero is a scientist played by young, dark-haired Pierce Brosnan, a couple of years before he became Bond.  At this point in his career he's just Some Guy and accordingly gives a less subtle, more theatrical performance than I've become accustomed to.  In looks and manner, he's a cross between Gaius Baltar and Dr Lucian Sanchez.  He works with the most colourful screen-savers, and is making breakthroughs in either brain chemistry or software.

The future of computing.

When his chimp dies of science, he recruits Jobe (who has extreme learning difficulties, but whose performance in no way resembles any of the learning-disabled people I work with), treating him with all the sciences combined in order to increase his brain, and the prominence of his naked torso.  Poor Jobe soon abandons his lazily-worn dungarees and takes to driving, sex and catastrophic mental spasms.  'Awesome dudical!'

What follows is a cyberspace horror, as Jobe's mind becomes inseparable from the Day-Glo CGI that dwells inside all computers, and he goes on a rampage of embarrassing character.  The special effects aren't what I'd describe as good enough for Youtube, and are probably the least impressive that I've seen during my century of film-watching.  The visual effects from 'Orphée' (1950), for instance, would stand up far better today than these do, and it's a great pity that the point where this film ought to turn from sci-fi to horror, it in fact loses its credibility and becomes 'Garth Marenghi's Darkplace'

---

Two films about offices: Glenngary Glen Ross (1992) & Office Space (1999)

Shelley Levene finally gets his groove on.

'Glengarry Glen Ross' (1992)

A few years ago a person I often meet directed an excellent production of 'Glengarry Glen Ross' for The Company, a small but consistently entertaining amateur dramatics troupe.  The play was very different to their usual array of classics, swashbucklers and European tragedies, and very much swearier, so it was a strange delight to see some of their best actors, most of whom I've seen in a dozen other roles, spewing forth David Mamet's uncompromisingly aggressive dialogue.

It's a very good play, and I was advised at the time to seek out the film; since 1992 was one of my few remaining gaps in the 90s I seized the opportunity to watch it here.  For one thing, I wanted to see how a play set entirely in one room of an office could work as a motion-picture - and for another, it's a strong drama and worth the rewatching.

The result is very talky, with very sparse, if welcome, use of music.  It's set in and around the office, with dialogue scenes moved out to cars, to a cafe, to rain-battered streets.  As consolation for a relative lack of visual diversity we're given an array of excellent performances from the likes of Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin and Kevin Spacey.  These are actors who can sell incessant invective and descent into despair, and Jack Lemmon was rightly awarded for his performance as Shelley 'The Machine' Levene, crumpled and pathetic whenever he's being himself, but able to turn on that magic old charm as soon as he's talking to a customer.

It's the eighties nineties, by which I mean this is still the age of the yuppie, of eighties style and sound, greys and browns over colours.  The story regards real-estate agents selling bad properties to bad customers, each of them under threat of the sack if they fail to come out on top.  Unemployment is the worst thing that can happen.  That makes it sound like a rather trivial threat, but these are people who have nothing but the job, whose lives will fall apart if they can't bring in the money, by whatever means.

It's an extremely tense watch, with a rising anxiety and pressure, and it was a relief when it was all over.  It's well-made and well-acted, but I couldn't help wondering whether something so dialogue-led was really a good use of a visual medium.  I preferred watching it on stage, but it was a very good production.

Jennifer Aniston in 'Office Space'.  She doesn't work in an office but still isn't happy.

'Office Space' (1999)

That we might lighten the mood after the difficult watch that was 'Glengarry Glen Ross' and make a double-bill of nineties pictures about miserable workers who look to crime as a last resort, Saskia ventured that we watch 'Office Space'.  This was certainly the pudding of the two films.  The office here is just awful, but at least it's comically so, and we're given a reassuring hint that, if the worst comes to the worst, we might be happier in a non-office job.

Office Space is blessed with moderately likable characters, with Jennifer Aniston as Joanna, a waitress urged by her employer to show customers that she enjoys her work, and enjoys it in an extremely regimented fashion; and Ron Livingston as Peter, who works in the eponymous office and is hypnotised into losing his overwhelming stress, causing him to saunter through his hellish life being casual and honest in ways which ought to be sackable offences.

While 'Glengarry Glen Ross' was a work of moral complexity and anguish, wherein every character was being cruel to somebody, even if just to their potential customers, 'Office Space' has a clear and booable villain: Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole) is everything one could hope to despise in a cheery young manager, and even merits his own Wikipedia page, an honour currently reserved for only the most iconic movie characters.  The only other character who really leaps out of the film is Milton Waddams (Stephen Root), an intense and learning-disabled office-worker acted with the same extreme gusto that made Mickey Rooney's 'hilarious' Chinaman in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' (1961) quite so monstrously offensive.

It was a curious double-bill, like following 'The Elephant Man' (1980) with 'Dumbo' (1941), but it seemed to work.  I'm left extremely glad I don't work in an office.  If you do, why not quit today?

P.S. I suggested watching 'Glengarry Glen Ross' without giving any clue to its contents.  Later, asking Saskia quite what she had expected of the film, she described 'Brigadoon' (1954).

---

But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)

So Megan (Natasha Lyonne) is a cheerleader.  She's dating the captain of the football team, and so on and so forth.  She doesn't much like kissing him (and when you think about it, kissing is an absurd and alarming act, though as I recall an enjoyable one), but otherwise looks set to do the appropriate American thing, and settle down and get married.  Until, that is, her family put it to her that she's gay.  On the contrary, she protests, but they're most insistent.  The thought has never passed through her conscious mind, but in no time she's packed off to a correction camp, where stern leaders seek to convince her of her homosexuality, then 'cure' her, and others of her ilk, using a perfectly charmless five-step plan.

So starts this wonderfully cheap-looking film; its tall-screen aspect ratio (alas, cropped to 16:9 for the DVD release) and dearth of fancy make-up or lighting leave it with a pleasing humility, a look that owes more to the 50s or 70s that the slick 90s.  Several things left me expecting the film to be a broad comedy: the DVD box, the film's dazzling colours, the particular direction, and the oppressive villainousness of the main antagonist - but despite this, there's a strange absence of the overtly comic, of jokes or obviously humorous situations.  Not that there's anything really missing, as such - the film remains excellent fun, constructed with a wonderful lightness of touch - but at its core is not humour but a rising despair, a dreadfulness.

Pink for girls and blue for boys

So anyway, the Umbridge-like head of the camp berates Megan and her new friends into shameful acknowledgement of their gayness, and seeks first to gender them.  Pink and washing up for girls, blue and sports for boys - that horrid set of heteronormative stereotypes that, aside from anything else, have precious little to do with who has sex with whom.  I realise I oughtn't to be outraged by the outlandish petty villainy of fictional characters, but it never ceases to agitate me that pink (an excellent colour, if not the best) is mandated for half the population but utterly forbidden for the other half, a pair of complementary social diktats as terrible as one another, and one we're all taught from youth.  Mary Brown (Cathy Moriarty), the disciplinarian at the head of the camp believes this is the best way back to straightness, and that such rigorous, tedious normality is the only acceptable option, the only true good.

In the seventy films I've watched so far for this Penciltonian project, no villain has so easily raised my ire as Mary Brown.  Of course, it's possible that in such an extreme antagonist, the film is using a straw man - except I'm pretty sure that such camps do exist, where people are taught to despise and repress parts of themselves that cannot ever truly be changed.  This satire may heighten the performances and draw attention to the hypocrisies, but seems to represent something that does indeed exist in the world.  It's an unpleasant prospect.

My lodger, Saskia, showed me this film about a fortnight ago.  We consumed it in a double-bill with Michael Cera comedy 'Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist' (2008), a film which was an amply enjoyable indie romance, if perhaps a little too aware that it was being an indie romance.  'But I'm a Cheerleader' seemed less polished, less studio-constructed, and was all the better for it - I commended it at the time for actually being about something.  This film left something to be angry about, and had the sweeter romance, as Megan finds a complicated but engagingly peaceful relationship with Graham, a girl at the camp less naïve and less happy than her, who faces the threat of disinheritance from her family if she fails to turn straight.

Graham and Megan

I couldn't help but wonder whether this film was chosen with an ironic pointedness, since we watched this the night before I went off to run a Christian holiday-camp for 14-18 years-olds, whether perhaps the film's colour-coded borstal, with its ineffectual brain-washing and campaign of shame and condemnation is how my Scripture Union camp, 'Transformers' is imagined by some.  Needless to say, mine was not an exercise in oppression, but something far freer and more welcoming, and pushed no agenda on sexuality, being in general far more interested in God's love, and computers, and board games and such.

It seems curious to defend it against such an extreme example, but since I long ago met somebody who supposed that Christian holiday camps are concentration camps (invoking Godwin's law, indeed) I might as well say something of its content: the young people came because they thought they might like it, and returned because they did like it.  It's a computer camp, rather than a running around one, with a good half of the day given over to technical activities, those being programming, photography, 3D graphics, video and music production.  The projects, their tone and content are whatever the young people want to make, though we on the team lend a hand wherever we're asked for.  The rest is eating, worship and Bible study.  The latter are not, to my mind, indoctrination or normalisation, and not nearly rigorous or emphatic or competent enough to be the brainwashing my friend supposed in the aforementioned conversation.   They're there because we believe there is hope beyond death, and hope before it too, and that it's kind-of a big deal, and it would be churlish of us not to tell people all about it.

If you're curious about the sort of things the technical activities produce, by the way, here's 'The Face-Taker', a horror film the young people made toward the end of last week.  The same Youtube channel contains dozens more short movies we've made from the last few years.  I'd especially recommend 'Earth Pie', 'Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My', and any of them, really.  And I'm always glad to talk about the camp in person, too; I've been disappearing off to it each August for many years but rarely find the opportunity to properly enthuse about it.

I seem, now, to have sauntered so far away from 'But I'm a Cheerleader' that I feel I'd do well to wrap up.  It's an enjoyable film which places an immediately likeable main character in an alarming situation which fails to put her down, but rather brings out all her merits.  There's a message worth hearing and a beautiful romance, so I could hardly fail to recommend it to you.

---

...and here it is on DVD, not that this was what I was driving towards.

The Crow (1994)

Eric Draven (Brandon Lee †) rocks out on a rooftop, because he can.

So, some guy called Eric rises from the grave on the anniversary of his death to wreak a bloody revenge on his fiancée's murderers.  On the basis of that pitch I was wary of the film, expecting it to be distressingly horrific and charmlessly dour.  As it transpired I was quite mistaken: 'The Crow' turned out to be excellently enjoyable, with a genuine wit, warmth and lightness of touch.  The heroes are extremely likeable, enviably cool, and share a friendship that's appealing to watch.

The villains, on the other hand, are outlandishly despicable, and seem to constantly invite their own destruction.  Not in the ridiculous and pantomimesque way we saw in last week's 'Battlefield Earth' (2000), but through a habitual disdain for everyone not in their gang, almost a violent snobbery, expressed through exploitation and extreme physical abuse.  The villains are cool too but, unlike in the later 'Battlefield Earth', never threaten to eclipse the Heroes.  Indeed, if I've one criticism of 'The Crow' (which, as you may note, I'm rather taken with), it's that the gang of villains are on the back foot from the start.  The format of the film is invulnerable Eric Draven busting their asses, which means that, though the baddies present a substantial threat to society, there's really no prospect of our hero losing.  The villains are doomed.

Sarah (Rochelle Davis) and Sergeant Albrecht (Ernie Hudson)
Eric's friends and allies, down at the hot-dog stand. 

It's a visually striking film, and had as significant an effect on the fashions of the alternative and gothic scenes as did 'The Matrix' half a decade later.  The film has the flavour of Batman noir, a tone at which early-nineties cinema excelled.  Watching this, I also realised where the 'Doctor Who' TV movie two years later stole all its most memorable shots and images.

It was a particular delight watching this film so soon after the aforementioned 'Battlefield Earth', that superficially exciting plodder in which no two elements complemented one another, as it showed up this film's wonderful consistency.  Here the sound and picture, dialogue and story, mythology and character all work together to make something that's amply enjoyable to sit down and watch for a couple of hours.  I'm rather surprised it took quite so many years for this film to be set before me, and I'll be glad to see it again.

Myca (Bai Ling) enjoys gouging out eyes.  She's a villain, by the way

P.S. I'm aware that almost any film would probably delight me after 'Battlefield Earth' (2000).  Even if I'd watched 'Doctor Zhivago' (1965) straight afterwards (to pick a well-made film that I nonetheless don't enjoy at all), I'd probably have come away saying it was great fun and sparkling with wonder.  Nonetheless, I found 'The Crow' to have many merits.

---

Hey look, optical media!

Empire Records (1995)

A haircutting scene!  All is not well.

So it's the middle of the nineties.  I've heard a few people opining recently that the nineties isn't enough of an era, in as much as one can't really dress nineties in the same way one can dress sixties, seventies or eighties and clearly belong in that one decade - but I'd venture that this film does indeed look identifiably nineties.  For one thing, characters have magnificent nineties hairdos of the style I envied at the time and envy still.  For another, it's set in a music store where people actually buy music on CDs, and this is counted as cool.  That era is now closed.

This is a film about some cool young people who work in the music store - and yes, as in 'Brick' (2005) I've found myself describing the cast of a film as 'young people' and realise I no longer count myself as youthful.  They're not cool cool, as their lives are troubled and complicated and their music, fashion and lifestyle choices tend to be a couple of steps toward the idiosyncratic, but I found them to be a stylish and enviable bunch.  They love their job, whether it's good for them or not, and they enjoy one another most of the time.  It's a film about what happens to people before an after the highpoint of life we know as 'being in a band', and it looks like a fine time, though I found myself at the end worrying for their continuing prospects.  They can't all wind up owning their own music store.

The store is visited by Rex Manning, that sexy, churlish Elvis Shatner of a man

It's a well-cast film, and two of its stars, Renée Zellweger and Liv Tyler, went on to prosper as an actor and an elf respectively.  I tend to do an embarrassingly poor job of recognising actresses, as they're prone to more variety in hair and makeup than their male equivalents so often appear unrecognisable, but these two are unmistakable and show the promise of their later careers.  I was surprised not to have seen any of the rest of the film's cast in other works, and particularly enjoyed Anthony LaPaglia as the store's excellently patient manager, and Rory Cochrane who managed to come across as both socially incapable and excellent company.

I feel I've come away with remarkably little to say about this film.  It's so much easier when a film is technically innovative or very terrible, but this is certainly neither.  There's only so far one can spin out 'this was good and I liked it', but this is and I did.

---

We may be in the twilight of the age of the compact disc, but here's a DVD for format nostalgists

How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)

Since first hearing of this movie some decade ago, two questions have plagued me: how did Stella get her groove back, and what the heck happened to her groove in the first place?  I'd always imagined it something like the following year's 'The Spy Who Shagged Me', in which Austin Powers loses his mojo and has to retrieve it from a fat bastard - but even more groovy, should such a thing be possible.  My hope here was that 'a man' wouldn't be the answer to both questions.  The film, after all, has an overwhelmingly female cast (though not to the extent that most of the films I've watched have had overwhelmingly male casts), and stars Angela Bassett and Whoopi Goldberg, the latter of whom I've always found to be extremely watchable.

An aspiring suitor strips to his pants at a party,
prompting Stella to give her best Kenneth Williams look of horror.

Stella is a brilliant businesswoman, rich through hard work and discipline.  She seems content, she's confident and independent, and is a single mother to boot - but her sisters believe she ought to be dating, and her son doesn't think she takes the time to have fun.  So, Stella does something uncharacteristically crazy.  She goes on holiday to Jamaica (no, she went of her own accord) with her best friend Delilah, and accidentally falls in love with a handsome guy.  He's twenty, and is also twenty years her junior.

The guy has an excellent name, Winston Shakespeare, and is played by Taye Diggs.  He and Angela Bassett give performances which seem independently excellent, but I never quite got the chemistry between them.  This is meant to be a great and complicated romance, but they somehow never seemed truly in love.  This is a particularly ruinous to the movie, as the age-difference creates a gulf between the characters, and the film spends almost its whole duration on the question of whether they can overcome these differences or whether it's better for them both to go their separate ways.  I was rooting for the latter option, since it seemed to be a better way for Stella to keep her independence (which I'd assumed to play a role in her eponymous groove) and for Winston to get on with his own life - but I'm not sure mine was the intended response.  Had their relationship looked deeper, more than a fling of physical passion, I think the central conflict would have seemed far more credible.

Stella and Winston work through a few issues

Crucially, for a movie that wants to tell us that it's not OK to be happy being single, the film never makes romantic love look much fun.  Stella's doing fine at the start of the film, and only starts to doubt herself when her peers demand that she should conform to a traditional female role, and once she's found romance they start demanding that she acts her age, and she starts to insist that Winston acts like a man, all as per society's norms.  It seemed to me that Stella's groove was her independence, her ability to be herself and not have to act in the way our current society demands.  Once her friends and relatives made her doubt herself, and urged her towards their view of normality, I'm not sure she ever got her groove back.

---

Here it is on DVD, in case you're curious.

Scream (1996) and Cabin in the Woods (2011)

Aaaaaaaarghhhhhh!

With the arrival of a new lodger, so Netflix has entered my life.  Suddenly it's possible and convenient to watch films that neither Saskia nor I had deliberately sought out for our collections.  So it was that, when it became apparent I had seen neither 'Scream' (1996) nor 'Cabin in the Woods' (2011) we simply dialled them up and watched 'em.

They're both horror films which know they're horror films, where the characters know the conventions of the genre, and the audience are credited with some intelligence in this area too, meaning the movie can get on with something slightly more complex and interesting than a creeping tension studded with deaths.

An enjoyably quizzical stuffed wolf-head, in the cabin in the woods

We saw 'Cabin in the Woods' first.  It's written by Joss Whedon, who helmed 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and its ilk, so the characters are well-drawn, genuinely funny and memorable.  As to postmodern horror, it sets out its stall clearly and enjoyably during its opening titles, which begin by showing the credits over murky images of bloodish hell before a deliberately jarring cut to the ever-enjoyable Bradley Whitman in a government office - so suddenly that I thought for a moment the television had jumped a track and started showing us a different film.  He and a colleague banter for a while before the film's title crashes in over them and we jump to the 'normal' start of the film, the introduction of the doomed teens in all their Scooby-doo glory.

From the off it's clear that it isn't just a story of teens going on holiday and being killed by monsters and villains, as per 'The Evil Dead' (1981) or 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' (1974, 2003).  That's how it may seem to the victims, but there's a sci-fi underground base in the James Bond tradition operating their fantasy horror, pulling the strings and apparently making a real-life horror film - but to what end?  Not only do we get the traditional fight of ordinary people against zombies, we also follow the mystery of why this is happening.  What could have been a twist at the end is given quite freely from the start, and we're left with the suggestion that many or all supernatural horrors are actually being manipulated in the same way.

A tutorial on what you must never do in a horror film

'Scream' is a serial-killer film directed by Wes Craven who a decade earlier wrote and directed 'Nightmare on Elm Street' (1984).  Here, the masked villain, the anonymous Ghostface, is well aware that he's in a horror film - or rather, he knows horror films and knows what's expected of him, and knows that his victims will have seen horror films too and will know the score.  The high-school students who make up the large cast of potential victims know their horror movies, and when it becomes apparent that there's a murderer preying on their peers many of them react just as churlishly and delightedly as real people would, dressing up as the killer and watching all the more horror, and intellectualising about the killer's his likely motivations.  Like 'Madhouse' (1974) it's a horror movie about horror movies, but more credible on all fronts and considerably more intelligent.

Both films show a real understanding of horror - how and why it works.  They enquire into two very different sides of the genre - the monster horror of zombie films and the slasher subgenre made famous by 'Psycho' (1960) - and manage to exposit on the genre conventions while remaining genuinely scary (though, as 15-certificate films, not horribly so), as well as fun and enjoyable.

I suspect Saskia's presence here means more horror will be on its way to The Penciltonian's pages, though I feel we've been spoilt by these two movies and by 'Bucket of Blood' (1959), which as the first horror film to make substantial use of comedy was similarly innovative.

Says Saskia, this is the most 90s screen-cap possible - a scream mask and some Romantica.
'What's Romantica?' I hear you ask.  'Think of Viennetta / But a cake and better'

P.S. Ghostface asks his victims 'what's your favourite scary movie?'.  I've no idea what my answer would be to that.  I like 'The Wicker Man' (1973), which is a horror but isn't really scary.  Of the films I've Penciltoned at you and not already mentioned in this post, it might well be 'Jurassic Park'.  It doesn't quite fit the genre, but those dragons are terrifying!  Though it's a documentary I'll venture 'Häxan' (1922) too, as the Devil's first appearance in it is so sudden and alarming that I almost toppled from my sofa with fright.

P.P.S. I feel compelled to give another tenuous link between films: 'Scream' and 'Brick' (2005) feature a school principal and a vice-principal respectively, each played by a cool 1970s hero, The Fonz in the former, Shaft in the latter.  What further inducement could you need to watch these fine films?

---

Despite my earlier advocacy of Netflix, here's some optical media for y'all.

Dogma (1999)

Alan Rickman IS Metatron, God's messenger to humankind

YellowToast, my fellow Radio KoL DJ, suggested I watch 'Dogma' for 1999.  The year came down to either this or Gilbert & Sullivan biopic 'Topsy-Turvy' (which is very good), but I'd only seen 'Dogma' once, long ago, and was curious to revisit it.  Happy coincidence meant I found a copy in a charity shop almost immediately.

So, it goes something like this.  There are two somewhat fallen angels, one of them the erstwhile Angel of Death, who have been living on Earth for millennia, but find a loophole in Catholic doctrine which would allow them to return to Heaven, from which they were once banished.  (In short, all they have to do is walk through the archway of a certain reconsecrated church, and then die.  It sounds theologically iffy, but they're counting on an obscure and arcane piece of church dogma, and on Jesus' promise to St Peter in in Matthew 18: 18 that what is bound on Earth will be bound in Heaven, meaning that blessings, however bizarre, affirmed by the church will count in Heaven too, at least by the interpretation here).  The angels are played by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and this big-name casting initially makes them seem like they must be the main characters; indeed, their scheme sounds reasonable and their plight sympathetic, but their schemes for salvation soon begin to look destructive, even villainous.

This is what God looks like, sometimes

An unlikely saviour is found in Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), a Catholic abortionist on the cusp of losing her faith entirely.  This being a Kevin Smith film, Bethany eventually finds herself accompanied by those two excellent churls Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Smith himself), a pleasingly unlikely pairing for the crusade to New Jersey.  Along the way there's wealth of adventure, action and comedy, and a particularly starry guest cast including Chris Rock, Salma Hayek and a surprisingly good performance by Alanis Morissette.  Perhaps predictably, my favourite casting is Alan Rickman as the pallid, sarcastic and coolly British messenger of God.  God himself is in a coma in hospital, which complicates matters somewhat.

Silent Bob, Jay and Bethany regard a naked apostle.

The film opens with disclaimer that it's only a comedy, and shouldn't be taken seriously.  To my mind it sells itself short here.  For all its whimsy and crude comedy, 'Dogma' is a rare, mature discussion of faith, its purpose and its loss.  I don't necessarily agree with its findings, but I'm glad of the discussion, so it's a pity writer/director Kevin Smith felt a need to include a slide telling us not to give it much credence.  If it stopped extremists burning down cinemas, I suppose it's worthwhile, but I don't feel that the film lacks theological merit.

It's a pity there aren't more comedies about God.  There are some, I suppose, but usually not funny ones, and rarely do they cast Him in a positive light without making Him seem tedious.  The only other well known Christianity-flavoured comedy that comes to mind is 1979's 'Monty Python's Life of Brian', but that's more a satire on religion and politics, and the existence of God is never explicitly discussed.  'Dogma', though, is surely as agreeable to an atheist audience as to a Christian one, and this without refraining from crudeness and offensiveness.  Having twice enjoyed this and the two Clerks films (1994, 2006) I'm quite tempted to seek out Smith's other View Askewniverse movies - though I may wait until the end of this Penciltonian project to do so, lest I overburden you with movies of similar flavour.

---

Hey look, buyable things.

Train to Hell (maybe 1993, but let's say 1998)

...featuring Malcolm McDowell as 'STRANGER'

First things first.  This is a 98-minute film called 'Night Train to Venice', except that the version I saw was only about 70 minutes long, and was entitled 'Train to Hell', and seems to be a shortened, retitled version of the original.  Wikipedia claims it came out in 1996, or possibly 1992, and Amazon says 1993, and the laserdisc thinks it was 1994, while IMDB suggests its original German release was 1995, and its appearance at Cannes was 1996.  Given the nature of my blog's project, I'd be very glad of any pointers on this.  Anyway It's an English-language German film with an Italian director, set in Venice.

It stars Malcolm McDowell and a young, not-yet-famous Hugh Grant, and is beneath their dignity.  It also prominently features Rachel Rice, a child actress of average quality who went on to win Big Brother in 2008.  It's an attempt at gothic horror, and it sees Hugh Grant play a writer taking the Orient Express to Venice, carrying with him the manuscript of his exposé of neo-Nazism.  However, the train also harbours a number of skinheads, and a nameless slow-motion man of malignity, the frowning STRANGER.

It looks to be a doomed romance, but turns out just to be a romance.
How disappointing.

There's the germ of a good and frightening story here: a writer smuggling his book on neo-nazis on a train full of 'em, and arriving in Venice to find that they own the publishing house he's travelled to visit.  Unfortunately, the skinheads are played rather extraordinarily, and not in a good way.  The STRANGER, that malign Englishman who spends the film looking at people and causing them to hallucinate flashbacks and flash-forwards, is the film's real villain.  Or is he?  He's hardly hands-on, and while he clearly has some influence over minds, and comes across as habitually sinister, he never actually does anything.  Nothing at all.  He seems to have some influence on a crash late in the film, but since it hinders the skinheads far more than the heroes, perhaps The STRANGER is not a satanic being, but a force for good, albeit one with the manners of a pervert.

So yes, since the villains hardly bother him on the train journey (thus making the film's first half less exciting than it might have been), Hugh Grant has ample time to fall into a fairly nineties romance with Vera (Tahnee Welch).  It has all the hallmarks of a doomed romance, and a tragedy all-round, with omens erroneously portending the death of Vera's simpering daughter and a great number of allusions to 'Romeo and Juliet' (1595).  The film seems, up to this point, keen to ape 'Don't Look Now' (a credible horror film from 1973, which I've always preferred to call 'Don't Look Now, Vicar!' as if it was instead a mildly saucy farce) - but doesn't deliver on the promise of its horror.  It's rather disappointing, in fact, that the film doesn't end with the promised bloodbath, but with a long being-in-love montage of an amnesiac Grant smiling, and Vera smiling, and her daughter smiling, and everyone being generally glad, and a pigeon flying over Venice, and some sex-having, and then some more smiling.  All this for two or three minutes over a not-wholly-tuneful love-song.  It's my hope, though research has not yet backed it up, that there exists a version of this film with a more gruesome conclusion.

Will the child fall off the balcony?  I guess so.

'Train to Hell' is one of a trio of DVDs which made an unexpected appearance through my letter-box on Monday.  I'd heard it spoken of, and Andrew, who had done the speaking, realised that the best way to make me watch it (and I watched it immediately) was to get it into my house.

So, why do I suppose he thought I should watch 'Train to Hell'?  Well, we both help out on a young people's holiday-camp each August where, among other things, we help the young people shoot and edit videos.  He knows my penchant for either saving or ruining un-extraordinary scenes with alarming editing techniques: slowing down reaction shots to 10% of their proper speed, say, or cutting in fragments of footage from the wrong scene to give the audience something unexpected.  Both of these techniques, which I had never dared to expect in a professional work, are used with tremendous frequency throughout 'Train to Hell', with McDowell's ominously-looking-at-things shots, which make up the large portion of his action, routinely stretched to two or four times their original length, and intercut with shots of dogs and low-budget Nazi rallies.

The STRANGER, again.  Looking on in slow motion, again.
Ought we to boo him, do you think?

I'm especially glad that some people are willing to recommend me films which are unusual and bad, or at least not conventionally good.  Quite a lot of ordinarily imaginative people have recommended me 'Metropolis' (1927), as if it really needs any recommendations at all, and I'm sure that when I get to it I'll find it easy to watch and easy to enjoy, but almost impossible to write about in a new or interesting way, since everybody knows it's epic, beautiful and magnificent.  But the mysterious 'Train to Hell'?  There's far more meat here for The Penciltonian.  Andrew has recommended the similarly questionable-looking 'Ninja Terminator' (1985), and I'm reminded of Opai's distressing recommendation of 'Na Srebrnym Globie' (1977).  Wouldn't this blog be tedious if I only looked at the stone-cold classics?

On the subject of tedium, let's return briefly to the issue of what year I'm attaching to 'Train to Hell'?  A great deal of googling has revealed no real authority on the issue, but I have a theory, which I've backed up with another look at the closing credits.  Here's my idea: 'Night Train to Venice' was made in 1993, as any later and Hugh Grant would have been too famous.  That's presumably the 98-minute version, and was released some time between 1993 and 1996.  However, since this retitled version, 'Train to Hell', is rather shorter, I reasoned it must have been a significant re-edit (to make it shorter, better or simply different), put out a few years later.  There is indeed a small credit for 'Reedited Version by Toni Hirtreiter and Heinrich Richter', and a copyright date of 1998.  So let's go with that, shall we?  'Night Train to Venus' from 1993ish, and this snappily-titled cut-down released 5 years later, in '98.


P.S. Perhaps the closest amateur work I've seen to the tone of 'Train to Hell' is a short horror movie of dubious merit, made by my old housemate Chris Bambling, and entitled 'Retail II' (2009ish).  He gave up part-way through shooting, and eventually gave me the footage to edit, so I cut out all the punchlines to jokes, and made as much of a meal of the edit as I could.  The similarity between the two works is concerning for 'Train to Hell', but I feel 'Retail II' is somehow vindicated.  Watch its eight terrifying minutes here on Youtube, if you dare.

---

Should you have the urge to check my findings, here's the thing on DVD.  Enjoy, but beware!