www.list.co.uk/film DRAMA/BIOGRAPHY TROPIC OF CANCER (18) 87min (Olive Films) ●●●●●
Available on DVD for the first time, this is the 1970 adaptation of Henry Miller’s novel set at the end of the 1960s rather than the 1930s of the book. It nevertheless captures the irreverence of Miller’s style in its own haphazard approach, while also working well as a time capsule of Paris during the moment in which it was filmed. There is nothing formally ingratiating here, as director Joseph Strick offers a rough and ready aesthetic that gives us a strong sense of a character drifting at a time when it had become a common post-’68 life choice. It’s a strange combination of 1930s self-definition meeting late 1960s lifestyle choices, following the hand-to- mouth existence of Rip Torn’s central character, a man living for sex and writing, who eats when he can, drinks when he can afford it and lives the contingent life of an American writer in Paris. This is a US import and Region 1 encoded, so requires a multiplayer DVD. Minimal extras. (Tony McKibbin) BOX SET THE VIVA CUBA COLLECTION (12) 680min (Network) ●●●●●
Back in the 1960s there was a mighty Cuban filmmaking wave. Filmmakers Tomás Guttiérez Alea and Humberto Solás became internationally significant filmmakers whilst reflecting the social values espoused by Castro’s government. While the masterpieces of each of these filmmakers are missing from this box set (Alea’s
them up . . . while putting off redecorating the front room. The first half is full of funny bleak moments, most notably Bill’s priceless paean to the trippy old 1960s. Thereafter, things take a violent turn, following the arrival of top brass from London. Director Ben Wheatley, his co- writer Robin Hill (who also plays Karl) and Robert Hill (Robin’s dad, playing Bill) are talents to watch. Extras: short film, extra scenes, acting tests. (Miles Fielder) BOX SET/TV THE AVENGERS: THE COMPLETE SERIES 6 (12) 480min (Optimum) ●●●●●
Throughout the 1960s The Avengers bestrode the televisual world like a colossus. Twisted, kinky and confident, the flamboyant spy series echoed precisely the pop-cultural moods of that tumultuous decade. The latest volume in Optimum’s re-mastered and extras-stuffed reissue programme covers over eight discs the era of John Steed (Patrick McNee) and Tara King (Linda Thorson), when proceedings began to go a bit prog and the shirt collars could take your eye out. Even so, series six, from 1968, contained some of the show’s finest, furthest- out episodes – Fog, for example, where a reincarnation of Jack the Ripper stalks Soviet peace delegates through the streets of Whitechapel, or The Super Secret Cypher Snatch in which evil window-cleaners (no, really) brainwash operatives of the intelligence services. Like Sherlock Holmes going on the Magical Mystery Tour or The X- Files rewritten by PG Wodehouse, The Avengers was hip and
Memories of Underdevelopment; Solás’ Lucia) their works make up five of the seven films collected here. There is Death of a Bureaucrat and Twelve Chairs from Alea and Beloved, Cecilia and A Successful Man, later works from Solás. Also included are Che Guevara as You’ve Never Seen Him Before and The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin, the former putting together aspects of Che’s life, the latter a self-conscious revolutionary western. Solás’ tired film A Successful Man aside, these are all key examples of Cuban cinema at its most taxing and politically astute. Minimal extras. (Tony McKibbin) THRILLER DOWN TERRACE (15) 89min (Metrodome) ●●●●●
Not another facking Brit gangster flick?! Well, yes, but this alternately nasty and hilarious little gem is a world away from the mockney posturing of Guy Ritchie and co. Set in the suburban backstreets of Southern England’s tarnished seaside resort, Brighton, Down Terrace comes on like a comic crime drama directed by Ken Loach or Mike Leigh – kitchen sink gangsterism if you will. It concerns a pair of small-ish-time crooks, father and son Bill and Karl, just released from a modest prison sentence and intent on finding out who grassed
DVD REVIEWS Film
Film Books
We all know what the Christmas break is really about. It’s about catching up on movies and books. If you put the two together you get film books. Here’s some of the best out at the moment. Christopher Bray’s Sean Connery: The Measure of a Man (Faber
●●●●●) is a muscular and spirited attempt to evaluate the great Scot’s life and career in terms of his renowned obstinacy, awkwardness and undoubted iconography. It’s a good read: Bray has pieced the pieces of Connery life together well and attempts to answer some difficult questions about what happens to a man when sex appeal fades. Demetrios Matheou’s The New South American Cinema (Faber ●●●●●) eagerly examines the rise and rise of Latin American cinema over the past decade. It’s well structured and full of illuminating interviews with, among others, Walter Salles, Pablo Trapero and Lucrecia Martel. What Matheou omits in historical context he more than makes up for in Latin passion. Czech and Slovak Cinema (Edinburgh University Press ●●●●●) by Peter Hames is a more academic sweep through the ancient and modern cinema of these artistically influential nations. The scope and breadth with which Hames embraces his subject is very impressive. This book is a must for anyone interested in Eastern European cinema.
As ever it is impossible not to be infuriated by the new edition of David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Little, Brown ●●●●●). Any film reference book that includes essays on Andy Serkis and one of Thomson’s old friends who he used to go to the cinema with, but fails to include Italian giallo masters Dario Argento and Mario Bava, is surely a work of mischief. Still Thomson is such a beautiful, impish and thoroughly unreliable commentator on the invisible passions that compel us to be distracted by the collected idiocies of cinema, that this book is a necessary purchase.
Finally, it’s not released until January but Amy Raphael’s Danny Boyle: In His Own Words (Faber ●●●●●) is a thoroughly competent Q&A trawl through the life and work of a director (pictured) whose best work, one can’t help feeling, is still ahead of him. It would be good to invest in the updated version of this book in ten years time. (Paul Dale)
smart as a whip, set in a fevered Home Counties fantasia where thought control, killer super- computers and mind- transference were just mildly irksome facts of life. Minimal extras. (Allan Brown) THRILLER KICKS (15) 82min (Drakes Avenue) ●●●●●
The third and final film to be made under Liverpool and Northwest’s excellent micro-budget scheme, Digital Departures, director Lindy Heymann’s dark drama is very different from its predecessors, Terence Davies’ documentary Of
Time and City and Salvage, a post-7/7 horror shot on the old Brookside set. Kicks, which was originally and more straightforwardly titled Starstruck, dramatises the crisis of Britain’s celebrity culture with a story about two teenage Liverpudlian girls whose obsession with an Anfield
midfielder leads them to kidnap him when it’s announced he’s a transfer target for Real Madrid. Kerrie Hayes and Nichola Burley convince as, respectively, the introverted and underprivileged Nicole and the wealthy aspiring WAG Jasmine. Their characters are reminiscent of the not dissimilar troubled teens from My Summer of Love, and that film’s lovely visual styling is her matched by cinematographer Eduard Grau, who recently shot A Single Man for Tom Ford. Extras: Making of documentary. (Miles Fielder)
16 Dec 2010 – 6 Jan 2011 THE LIST 67