Congrats to HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko on the big, swanky TaorminaFilmFestival debut of Show Me What You’ve Got, a black-and-white menage a trois love story set in Los Angeles and Italy. Directed, shot and co-written by Svetlana (along with producer David Scott Smith).
The screening happened Tuesday night (7.2, 6 pm). Congrats also to Svetlana for having just been invited to become a member of the Academy. Well deserved.
16 months ago I posted about Richard Franklin‘s Link (’86), which is hands down one of my all-time favorite monkey movies. I’m re-posting because I somehow missed the fact that the Kino Bluray came out a month and half ago. I’ve just ordered it. A “4K restoration” with audio commentary by film historian Lee Gambin and film critic Jarret Gahan, deleted workprint scenes, an audio interview with director Richard Franklin.
3.18.18: Nobody remembers Richard Franklin‘s Link (’86), but it was a witty, better-than-decent genre thriller with a nice sense of tongue-in-cheek humor, and shot with a great deal of discipline. Clever, dry, smarthouse. And nobody saw it.
Shot in Scotland in ’85, Link was basically about a watchful, intelligent and increasingly dangerous chimpanzee who develops a sexual obsession for a junior zoologist played by young Elizabeth Shue (who was 22 or 23 during filming).
A Thorn EMI production that was acquired by Cannon, Link costarred Terrence Stamp, was fairly well written by Everett De Roche, and was very carefully composed. Franklin (who died young in ’07) shot it with a kind of Alfred Hitchcockian style and language.
I wrote the Cannon press notes and in so doing interviewed Franklin. The then-39-year-old director worked very hard, he told me, to put Link together just so. Franklin made no secret of the fact that he was a lifelong Hitchcock devotee.
Boilerplate: “Jane, an American zoology student, takes a summer job at the lonely cliff-top home of a professor who is exploring the link between man and ape. Soon after her arrival he vanishes, leaving her to care for his three chimps: Voodoo, a savage female; the affectionate, child-like Imp; and Link, a circus ape trained as the perfect servant and companion.
“A disturbing role reversal takes place in the relationship between master and servant and Jane becomes a prisoner in a simian house of horror. In her attempts to escape she’s up against an adversary with several times her physical strength, and the instincts of a bloodthirsty killer.”
I helped out with Link screenings at Cannon headquarters on San Vicente Blvd., and I remember playing The Kinks “Ape Man” (a portion of which is heard in the film) as a kind of overture for invited guests.
Terrence Stamp, who starred in Link, told me during a Limey interview in ’99 that Franklin was very tough on film crews.
A little more than two years after its debut at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival, Thomas Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War (101 Studios, 10.4) is finally set to open commercially.
But don’t wait for streaming. It may sound hackneyed to say this, but Chung Chung-hoon‘s striking, ultra-widescreen compositions really need to be appreciated on a large screen. The bigger, the better.
The film was originally scheduled to be released on 12.22.17 by The Weinstein Company, and then the sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein shut the whole project down. After 18 months of hibernation and reflection, The Current War was acquired last April by 101 Studios for $3 million. Gomez-Rejon has added five additional scenes and trimmed ten minutes from the runtime. It will open later this month (7.26) in the UK but not stateside until October.
The movie is basically an AC/DC thing — the battle between direct vs. alternating currents of electricity in the late 1880s and early 1890s, or a stab at creating compelling drama out of a battle of opposing modes and strategies for providing electricity to the public.
This in itself, especially in an era of increasingly downscale if not submental approaches to mass entertainment, is highly eccentric. But the tone of inspirational strangeness doesn’t end there.
The DC team was led by genius inventor Thomas A. Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) while the AC approach was steamrolled by engineer-businessman George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) with a late-inning assist from genius Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult).
This is fine as far as histrionic line readings, personality conflicts and eccentric facial-hair appearances are concerned, but an especially striking visual style from South Korean dp Chung Hoon-Chung (It, The Handmaiden, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) compounds the fascination.
In an attempt to reflect the unusual, headstrong mentalities of Edison and Westinghouse, Gomez-Rejon and Chung have gone with a kind of early ’60s Cinerama approach to visual composition — widescreen images, wide-angle lenses and a frequent decision to avoid conventional close-ups and medium shots in favor of what has to be called striking if not bizarre avant-garde framings in which the actors are presented as smallish figures against dynamically broad images and vast painterly landscapes.
The look of The Current War, in short, closely resembles the extreme wide-angle compositions in 1962’s How The West Was Won.
When you’re rehashing an Agatha Christie whodunit that could just as well be called “Who Killed The Haughty, Flinty Patriarch During His 85th Birthday Party?”, there aren’t that many ways to go. As the various members of the rich Thrombey family are all cynical, hard-edged, “who gives a shit?” types, it can probably be assumed…naaah, let’s not. But what are we to think when the Hercule Poirot-ish detective (Daniel Craig‘s “Benoit Blanc”) announces that no one can leave the family mansion as one of them is the murderer? My first thought, naturally, was “they all did it simultaneously” but director-writer Rian Johnson wouldn’t dare. Would he?
Christopher Plummer plays the elderly dead Thrombey; the living descendants and their spouses are played by Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell. Sidenote #1: Craig is looking a bit creased and weathered. Sidenote #2: All hail Lakeith Stanfield, but not so much his moustache.
Show Me What You’ve Got director-cowriter Svetlana Cvetko with executive producer Phillip Noyce prior to Tuesday evening’s screening.
Show Me What You’ve Got director-cowriter Svetlana Cvetko (center) basks in post-screening applause with executive producer Phillip Noyce to her left.
