May 2019 film review

HOW I LIVE NOW (2103) D- Kevin McDonald

A rather testy adolescent girl comes over from the States to spend the summer with a middle class English family on their farm. After a shaky start she begins to settle into the routines of life which are so different from what she is used to. Then, just as it is becoming almost idyllic, everything goes wrong. There is some sort of terrorist attack in London, some distance away, but they have used a dirty bomb and the fallout is heading in their direction...

          What follows is a new take on the post-apocalyptic story, as the parents disappear and the children are forced to live hand to mouth in a nightmare world. Director McDonald handles all this with considerable skill, given his limited budget, and he is very ably assisted by an excellent Saoirse Ronan as the American girl determined to survive whatever the hazards...

EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE (2018) D- Joe Belinger

Being the story of Ted Buddy, America’s most notorious serial killer, who roamed the Pacific north-west in the 1970s, murdering one woman after another, all of them young, all of them with long dark hair usually parted in the middle. Was he trying to kill one particular woman who once let him down, and killing her again and again? We’ll never know, because Buddy always denied his crimes, until the very last moments of his life, days before his appointment with Florida’s electric chair, when he did at last hint at the possibility he might be guilty.

This story is pretty well known, the subject of numerous books and at least 3 films that I know of. 

Has this one, featuring a Zac Ephron who, if nothing else, is fashioned into an extraordinary likeness of Bundy, added anything to our body of knowledge? Not really. The film is coy about depicting the actual abductions and murders (which is a bit like making a film about Henry VIII and not mentioning his wives), concentrating instead on his court appearances, in many of which Bundy chose to represent himself. The result is ultimately unsatisfactory, even if we must praise Ephron’s skilful performance. Shame, because somewhere in here there is great movie waiting to be made...

BLACKkKLANSMAN (2018) D- Spike Lee

In Trump’s world, a world where after the Charlottesville incident he said there were good and bad people on both sides, ie between the despicable racists and the people who protested against them, Spike Lee has returned to a previous era, that of the 1970s, when a black police officer volunteers to take down a local KKK group by, improbably, pretending to be a white supremacist himself. He does this by contacting them over the phone and then sending in a white ‘avatar’ to act as him. Complicated? You betcha.

What emerges is a very clever and thoughtful movie typical of Spike Lee, who navigates his way through this labyrinth with great skill and verve. Highly watchable, but you’ll have to pay attention to every frame, or you’ll quickly get lost...

THE SOUND OF FURY (1950) D- Cy Endfield

In post war rural America, a family man is struggling to make ends meet when a friend suggests a little robbery would solve all his problems. These go off without too much trouble, but then his friend (a very good Lloyd Bridges) dreams up a plan to kidnap the scion of a wealthy local family. Something goes wrong (of course) and the young man ends up dead. They are rapidly tracked down and held in the local jail, awaiting their trial for murder. But that isn’t good enough for the the townspeople, who would prefer to drag them out of there and string ‘em up from the nearest tree.

I have long admired the work of Cy Endfield, whose work is best known to us through his directing of the iconic movie Zulu. And here, in a film he made 13 years earlier, he shows that he was already a class act. All the players are strong, and the tension builds brilliantly to its climax, still horrifying nearly 70 years on. Excellent.