168. Only You

Song - I Want You (Elvis Costello)

Movie: Only You (Harry Wootliff, 2018)

Elvis Costello's I Want You can be heard at two crucial moments in Only You and would be a fitting song for any Laia Costa film. Few contemporary actors understand as well how much you can communicate through "the way your shoulders shake and what they are shaking for." She uses her entire body, face and limbs to evoke her state of mind and is in almost constant movement throughout the film. And she is matched beat for beat here by Josh O'Connor, who conveys so much of his emotional state here through the way he moves his hands. They are very much helped by Harry Wootliff, who tries to put the actors' full bodies in the frame and to have the two actors together in the shot. Much of the film is about seeing Jake and Elena be loving, gentle, and caring to each other and see the other person respond to that behavior in kind. It's a wonderful approach that authentically and lovingly conveys the great physical and emotional attraction between the two lovers. 

I was glad to discover that Harry Wootliff's next film will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. She is clearly a good and sensitive director who knows very well what to do with her actors. All she needs is a better marketing department. Only You was presented and written about as a romantic drama about a couple who has trouble conceiving children and the challenges such an ordeal brings. It is certainly (also) about that, but it would have made all the money in the world if it had been marketed to millenials as the unabashedly romantic portrayal of a young financially independent, emotionally mature couple with a somewhat decent house (that they own!) and somewhat decent jobs. You could even see it as an anti-Brexit film that never bothers to explain why the Spanish Elena is living in Glasgow, and never sees her as an outsider/exception in society.  

Wootliff at times does let herself get bogged down by plot mechanisms and cannot avoid a too conventional third act where the heroes break up and then triumphantly get back together again. No film anymore needs a scene in which a parent explains that love isn't perfect, but is worth fighting for (or any variation of it), especially not one in which that idea is so perfectly conveyed by the relationship between its actors. 

167. Kiss Me Deadly

Song - Twilight Zone (Golden Earring)

Movie: Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)

"You have only one real lasting love. You. You're one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing, but his clothes, his car, himself. Bet you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard."  

Christina Bailey (Clorlis Leachmann) correctly pegs Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) merely a couple minutes after he has picked her up from the side of a dark empty road. Mike is a private detective who together with his exasperated assistant/lover Velda (Maxine Cooper, somehow her only major role)  specialises in divorce cases/adultery. They are essentially double agents, seducing the partners of their clients and sending the recording as proof they've solved the case. The money is good, so is the sex. The film takes great pleasure in showing the sexual, erotic attraction between Velda and Mike and her provocatively seductive behavior. It takes even greater pleasure in showing contempt to the mores of its times. 

Velda and Mike are of course hated by the 'serious' police detectives and polite society. But the film always remains on their side. It agrees with Christina's assessment of Mike, but ultimately sees it as more of a compliment than an insult. It works, thanks to Meeker's brilliant performance, (it reminded me of Jack Nicholson's early and greatest roles) portraying his arrogance, confidence and manly self-indulgence as an expression of his anti-establishment attitude. It's that attitude which makes makes him a man of the people, who will not turn over the distressed Christina, an escapee from a psychiatric institution, over to the authorities, nearly leading to his death. And it's that attitude that makes him stick his teeth into the mysterious case that has led to the death of Christina and the disappearance of many others, despite the fact it's never clear what he'll gain from solving the case. He just can't stand the powerful getting away with it, even if he doesn't exactly know what 'it' is.

It's an attitude the film sees as necessary and moral but ultimately pointless. The establishment is corrupt and out to crush you, and it eventually will. All you can do is follow your own rules and make bonds with the other lowlifes of society. Those include a Greek car mechanic, an Italian home-mover, a failed opera singer forced to perform for an audience of one in run-down apartments, and a black boxing trainer terrified for his life. Mike's cocky attitude softens in the presence of these people. He becomes friendlier, treating them with affection and concern, even occasionally allowing himself to show fear when they are in danger. The film has a genuine love for these forgotten members of a multicultural working class and their need to bond together in solidarity against the special interests of the police, high society and the government. Those special interests are in the end a bit too much of a McGuffin for my taste. I perhaps would have wished for a little bit more background in the motivations of the film's villains, but am not sure that this would have led to a better film. It definitely wouldn't have made the final scenes as eerie and haunting as they are. 

166. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Song - (Everything I Do) I Do it For You (Bryan Adams)

Movie: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Kevin Reynolds, 1991)

I like Kevin Costner, but the world would have been a better place if he realised that Bull Durham is his greatest film. Unfortunately, the man cares too much about being perceived as noble and wholesome, which has led to some films and roles that are far less interesting than they could have been. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is one of the worst offenders with Costner never disappearing from his "oh how anguished I am for having to make such great sacrifices" mode. At the end of the film, there is a cameo by Sean Connery as King Richard, providing more joy and wit in a couple of seconds than Costner does through the entire film. He also doesn't have much chemistry with either Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater or Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (who does give the most confident and realistic performance in the film).

Unfortunately, even aside from Costner, the other actors have problems of their own. Slater never looks convincing as someone who supposedly lives in the 12th century, and the film gives up pretending at the end with an explicitly anachronistic one-liner. This is not some sort of egregious mistake and was obviously at least partly intended as a sort of clever self-referential joke. Unfortunately, it comes at the worst moment, taking you right out of the film's most exciting moments, the only sequence that takes the time to set up the action, inviting you to think along with the characters and to follow and understand their battle plan. 

I also don't much care for Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham, who too often feels like a retread of Die Hard's Hans Gruber. Rickman seems completely lost in his own world, you never get the feeling that he ever even thought about aligning himself with the tone of the film or with the other actors. Now, as someone who is a bit predisposed against joyless gloomy epics like this, I do somewhat respect Rickman's belligerent attitude towards it, and anytime you get the chance to make lazy screenwriters explain why you'd kill someone with a spoon, you have to take it. 

Finally, the film doesn't really know what to do with Morgan Freeman, but it deserves credit using him to portray the sophistication of the Arabs the crusaders fought against. The film introduces Robin Hood as a heroic fighter in these crusades, but never engages in the kind of stereotypes against Arabs that you would usually see in these kinds of films. It even goes out of his way to present Freeman's Azeem as a rational man of science and compassion.