Viewings: January 2022

We finally hit the same year as Soylent Green. Prophetic in some ways with its prediction on climate change, over-population and the wearing of face masks. Still have eleven months for the green stuff to come correct, however. Not even referring to Edward G. Robinson munching on some lettuce, either.

The trifecta of Gerald Kargl's Angst, Joseph Losey's The Servant and Stephanie Rothman's Terminal Island were my fave films that I happened to discover over January. Lewis Gilbert's Cosh Boy was also a nice find and deserves a future spot in the Juvenile Hell series.

Perhaps I should have done one of these posts for last December, but this blog was already well into the month and I can barely remember what I watched last night, let alone a week or two.

Film:

Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947)

Cosh Boy (Lewis Gilbert, 1953)*

Town on Trial (John Guillermin, 1957)* 

Beat Girl (Edmond T. Gréville, 1959)

The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963)*

The Train (John Frankenheimer, 1964)

The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci, 1968)

Performance (Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

Straight on Till Morning (Peter Collinson, 1972)

Terminal Island (Stephanie Rothman, 1973)*

Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973)

Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973)

Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974)

Almost Human (Umberto Lenzi, 1974)

Summer of Fear (Wes Craven, 1978)*

Jubilee (Derek Jarman, 1978)* 

The Stud (Quentin Masters, 1978)

Porridge (Dick Clement, 1979)

Maniac (William Lustig, 1980)

The House on the Edge of the Park (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)

The Soldier (James Glickenhaus, 1982)*

Britannia Hospital (Lindsay Anderson, 1982)

The New York Ripper (Lucio Fulci, 1982) 

Breathless (Jim McBride, 1983)

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1983)

Angst (Gerald Kargl, 1983)* 

Sleepwalker (Saxon Logan, 1984)*

Creature (William Malone, 1985)*

Armour of God (Jackie Chan & Edward Tsang (uncredited), 1986)

Nekromantik (Jörg Buttgereit, 1987)

The Blob (Chuck Russell, 1988)

Steel and Lace (Ernest Farino, 1991)*

The Addiction (Abel Ferrara, 1995)

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

Excision (Richard Bates Jr, 2012)

The Beta Test (Jim Cummings & PJ McCabe, 2021)*

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Jason Reitman, 2021)*

The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson, 2021)*

The Scary of Sixty-First (Dasha Nekrasova, 2021)* 

The Last Thing Mary Saw (Edoardo Vitaletti, 2022)*

Television:

 Mastermind - Episodes 17-20 (Bill Wright, 2021/2022)*

Cobra Kai - Season 4 (Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg, 2021)*

Toast of Tinseltown - Season 1 (Matt Berry & Arthur Matthews, 2022)*

 

* First time viewings.

 

Dada Debaser Notes:

• Stephanie Rothman's Terminal Island really was ahead of its time and had quite a few things in common with John Carpenter's Escape From... movies. I also really liked the Jack Hill vibe it had going on throughout. Big surprise seeing both Tom Selleck and Roger E. Mosley many years before Magnum P.I. fame. 
• Outside of the supernatural time travel stuff, Edgar Wright really took a lot more elements from Straight on Till Morning than I originally thought for his film Last Night in Soho. Still think it's superb and one of the best films from last year, regardless.
  
• Derek Jarman's Jubilee is a shamelessly indulgent film. A young Toyah Wilcox resembling Po from the Teletubbies and a pre-new romantic Adam Ant are the only memorable things about it.
  
• Question: What does last year's Titane have in common with the Brit cult film Performance? Answer: Both feature characters who inject a drug into their arse, who just so happen to signify the film's turn for the worst upon their introduction. Don't get the love for either of these movies and find them vastly overrated.
  
• Speaking of putting things into your wazoo, Richard Gere played a far more watchable outlaw than Jean Paul Belmondo in the superior version of Breathless.
• Chuck Russell's The Blob remake is also another example of a film being better than the original, that doesn't get much love.
  
• Wes Anderson's fetishistic obsession for visual detail always seems to come at the expense of a good screenplay. His latest effort is another eye-candy laced snoozefest catering to Criterion cultists and Tumblr gifmakers.
  
• Back in the day, Abel Ferrara looked like a bizarre hybrid of Matt Dillon and Carlos Tevez.
  
• The one thing I find even more annoying than Tom Cruise, is that horribly repetitious piano composition in Kubrick's lacklustre Eye Wide Shut.
  
• Not to come off like a fashion snob, but the appropriate attire standards when appearing on Mastermind has been slippin' over the last few years. Most of these contestants are dressed like psychiatric hospital patients on a day excursion.

"The game he plays he plays for keeps
Hustlin' times and ghetto streets"