Twenty-something and tired.
My other writing, stories and that, can be found here: steelcathedrals.wordpress.com/
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Street Without End 1934
It's taken me a few years but I've finally made my way through all of Mikio Naruse's surviving silent films (there's only five of them left, although he made twenty-four between 1930 and 1934) and I can safely say that I believe this to be a deeply underrated period of his career. Part of this may be due to how these films complicate the traditional idea of Japanese auteurism (that later Naruse, admittedly, helped to create in the West); these…
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The Bravados 1958
A fairly poor film gifted some exceptional alms (to fit with the evangelical subtext). As a compare and contrast with its influences and contemporaries (i.e. the Mann-Stewart and Boetticher revenge films), it's instructive: where those films work (as lean, condensed poetry, both rubbed-and-shined to perfection and rough as a mountain path), this doesn't, taking on too much flabby extra alongside the familiar core elements. King, an old veteran journeyman, lacks Mann and Boetticher's dynamism, sensitivity and intuitiveness- too many jobs…
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Heretic 2024
Astonishingly, astoundingly bad in every aspect. Evidence of an intellect developed solely through Reddit, perhaps a sort of premonition of what nearly all genre scripts will sound like in ten to fifteen years. Follows the usual A24 film school path of combining artless trick shots and over-complicated clever-clever flourishes with countless basic film-making errors and ugly digital photography. Grant is the sort of British ham who deploys a bag of quirks to cover for an unwillingness to actually engage with…
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A Photograph 1977
I'm not sure there's a writer whose work better displays the bitter, misanthropic heart of folk horror than that of John Bowen; here, as in Robin Redbreast and others, modern middle-class mores are obliterated, carved up in blood and fire and despair, but the alternative- the old ways to be found in the caravan- are also acts of destruction carried out by a small grouping of isolated grotesques. There's never very much worth believing in.
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