Pather Panchali

It takes a special kind of talent to depict grinding, relentless poverty without ever resorting to either an overwhelming sense of despondency or, swinging in the opposite direction, an unconvincing, simplistic parade of hardscrabble virtue. Writer-director Satyajit Ray has exactly that knack though, his Pather Panchali (or Song of the Little Road) is the tale of a crumbling ancestral home and the family who huddle shivering inside its draughty rubble. Adapted from a 1929 novel of the same name by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Pather Panchali may well be the first part of The Apu Trilogy but wide-eyed child actor Subir Banerjee is more of a deputy presence within this instalment. Thanks to his youth, an elevated social position within his setting - not to mention his mother's relentless toil to keep him fed - Apu gets to remain something of a cheery bystander to the harsh difficulties facing his family. 

He's the beloved son, given access to education and indulged enough to be able to wander around his rural duchy, playing with his bow and arrow. Apu is never expected to assist with the day-to-day work associated with keeping a destitute family's head above water. Similarly, Apu's father Harihar, played by Kanu Banerjee, is barely present, away from his home eking out a meagre living as, variously, a debt collector or temple priest. Even when he does deign to return, Harihar is an oblivious, even frustrating presence, who speaks with the certainty of the terminally blinkered. Instead it falls to three women to form the backbone of Pather Panchali: Chunibala Devi's extremely elderly aunt, Indir; Karuna Banerjee's Sarbajaya, the long-suffering mother; and Apu's older sister Durga, played by Runki Banerjee and Uma Dasgupta. If Apu's strengths are forthcoming, unlocked over the series' two remaining films, then Durga is life and vitality now, a child defying her diminished station through sheer force of personality. 

We meet a younger Durga 'stealing' from a neighbouring orchard that, in the fullness of this picture, we learn used to belong to her family anyway, before it was schemed away by greedy moneylenders. Although indulged by Indir, who Durga bequeaths her sweet spoils to, this child's youthful effervescence is resented by her penniless mother, a woman crushed by the unceasing responsibility to keep everybody fed while maintaining some sense of social propriety. As well as the fuss created in the nearby village by Durga's light fingers, Sarbajaya perhaps intuits a similarly bleak future for her daughter, left freezing and alone to raise ravenous offspring, but Durga doesn't seem to see her life in those terms. Like all children she is enjoying the now. She prefers to roam, instilling in the little brother who trails behind her a sense of adventure. The pair follow electrical pylons into marshland, chew on sugar canes and watch with awe as steam trains clatter by. Ray's film then as much a testament to curiosity as it is steadfast and unbreakable maternal love; the picture buoyed by the beautiful bird song compositions of Ravi Shankar. Pather Panchali, and Durga in particular, symbolise a dignity seized rather than conferred. 

Boards of Canada - Prophecy at 1420 MHz

You & The Explosion Band - Silhouette

The Horror of Godzilla by ZORNOW MUST BE DESTROYED

Father John Misty - The Payoff

The Rolling Stones - Rough and Twisted

Cure

Around fifteen minutes into writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, our perspective character, Koji Hashimoto's police detective Takabe, strolls into a brightly lit dry cleaners on his way home from work. The clerk apologises to him, indicating that he is already busy with another customer. As the clerk disappears into the back of the shop this other customer, a haggard looking salaryman, begins mumbling to himself. This strange, murmured autocommunication is a stream of pure venom. Takabe glances at him, taken aback, then stares straight ahead as this blank-faced professional loses himself in a whispered, discursive invective. Initially, and based on the subtitles present, this rambler appears to be addressing absent colleagues who've disagreed with his way of approaching work. He then changes tact, directing his hisses at an absent clerk who has, maybe, lingered too long picking out the man's laundered clothing. The salaryman snarling the kind of accusatory insults that basic propriety demands he otherwise keep to himself. 

When the clerk returns, apologising profusely, the salaryman accepts his plastic-wrapped clothing with flat thanks, then exits the shop. The scene concludes without comment from a clearly bemused Takabe. In a sense, this is the crux of Cure: the idea that, in this paint-peeled Tokyo, everybody harbours bubbling resentments that they cannot express. The city crammed with unfailing polite people who are neither seen nor catered to and, precisely because of that, this engenders in them a terrible but untapped anger. Which brings us to Masato Hagiwara's Mamiya. Seemingly an amnesic vagrant and, therefore, someone so vulnerable that they have slipped out of any implied social order. When conversations with Mamiya end he cannot recall the beginning of these queries; he responds to every question directed at him with increasingly incisive prods of his own. Despite his dishevelled and disorientated demeanour, Mamiya proves himself a powerful broadcaster, apparently able to either intuit the deeply personal prejudices of who he is addressing or, perhaps, even able to craft them for a receptive person out of thin air. 

Linked to a series of murders in which unconnected persons have each carved x-shaped gashes into their victim's throats, Mamiya, in his every action, represents a disquieting break from the hierarchical norms that underline society. Formerly a psychology student, Mamiya faded away from school as his obsession with mesmerism grew; amassing a library on the subject and even fashioning fetishes out of caged animals. To converse with Mamiya, to even attempt to dissect his motives - the crux of all police procedural - proves to be alarmingly dangerous. The resilient Takabe, seemingly used to discursive conversation and droning, domestic undertones thanks to a mentally unwell wife, doesn't react to Mamiya in quite the same way as everybody else though. He is, at least up to a point, able to resist the suggestions that this Svengali is attempting to plant. To strike back at Mamiya's interrogations, not just verbally but physically, when others would slip under his somnambulic spell. As Kurosawa's film presses on, and Mamiya's power within the piece grows, significant sequences are given over to hallucination and paranoid fantasy, blurring the line between waking life and manufactured dreams. Through clipped scene assembly and ominous, overbearing noise we are made to understand what it is to experience intrusive thoughts and even a kind of growing, murderous psychosis. A sense of menace prevails in Cure, transforming every dangling sentence - every ellipsis recorded on the subtitle track - into an implied, imminent threat. By now Kurosawa has trained us to expect catastrophe. 

Miyako Kobayashi - One Sunny Afternoon

Horse Lords - First Galactic Utopia

Farewell, Tears! by Akahana Dragon

The Womack Sisters - Chauffeur

Futureworld

Futureworld, director Richard T Heffron's inert Westworld sequel, eschews any of the onscreen pleasures associated with barging around a theme park that caters to violent, randy divorcees to spend the majority of its screentime sneaking around in dimly-lit back-of-stage locations. These pipe-packed caverns look less like the credibly advanced maintenance and service tunnels you might expect to be threaded through a futuristic retreat and more like the leaking interior of a massive aircraft carrier. Somehow able to bounce back from the lawsuits implied by the complete extermination of its customer base a few years earlier, the android manufacturing Delos Corporation have actually increased their prices and expanded the operation. As well as the criminally underutilised Medievalworld and Romanworld, the restort now offers - just in time to host Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner's snooping reporters, as well as Soviet and Japanese dignitaries - a woozy Spaworld and an antwacky attraction called Futureworld. The latter of which demands that guests be packed into padded outfits then tasked with miming some half-hearted space exploration. 

Despite utterly failing to work up a similar sense of chilly inevitability as its Michael Crichton directed predecessor, Futureworld does manage a few stray notes of interest, largely due to this viewer's overfamiliarity with The Terminator. It's difficult not to wonder if James Cameron's film (and its sequel) were working both with and against this piece. Cameron has spoken in interviews about being disappointed with the FM radio transistors powering these improbably lifelike robots; the implausibility of their blinking circuits and wiring splayed on hospital beds leading him to speculate what kind of skeletal machinery would actually be required to ambulate the muscles of an artificial human. Even the top-of-the-line T-800 designation assigned to Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg seems to have some root in the models described in this film: the primitive, unconvincing 500 series and the laser-focused 700s, who fill out the Delos rank and file and pass for human. A third act in which Fonda's Chuck Browning is followed through a factory by an emotionless duplicate foretells Leslie Hamilton's role in the climax of Terminator 2: Judgment Day while Futureworld's bizarre, revisionist use of Yul Bryner's stalking cowboy - he's the centrepiece in a televised sexual fantasy in which Danner's Tracy is protected then bedded by a reprogrammed gunslinger, who kisses with his blazing eyes open - anticipates the rehabilitation ascribed to Schwarzenegger's leather jacket wearing assassin. 

Seven Samurai by Tony Stella

Cocu* - Universal Friends

The Fantastic Four by Peach Momoko

Nia Archives - Boys in Blue

David Matthews - Main Theme from Star Wars

They Will Kill You

If Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is the Dante's Peak of action comedies based around rich elites kidnapping women for Satanic sacrifice, then this piece - director Kirill Sokolov's They Will Kill You - is the slightly later, much goopier Volcano. All of which is to say that neither film is particularly good but at least one of them (this one) is extremely interested in depicting hot, red liquids blasting out of ruptured structures. At the outset, Sokolov's film uses ornate buildings and inky, rain-lashed voids to prickle memories of Italian horror films directed by Dario Argento. When battle is joined though, Sokolov's reference points are instead the engorged violence and fitful flashbacks seen in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. 

Although Zazie Beetz maintains an impressive physical presence throughout, these stray notes of reproduction invite a level of comparison that does this film absolutely no favours. Sokolov's genre cross-fading plays photostat and Beetz is never given the opportunity to play anything like the plucky, Falconettian vulnerability that underlined Uma Thurman's signature performance. They Will Kill You is to The Whole Bloody Affair as 2 Days in the Valley is to Pulp Fiction then. As well, the crunchy invulnerability bestowed upon the hooded devil worshippers that hunt Beetz's vengeful housekeeper not only rob the audience of any satisfaction associated with a well-earned dispatch but this impermanence even undermines some cracking body detonations too. Still, Heather Graham's enucleated eyeball creeping around, while her headless trunk clatters about in an air vent is, at least, pretty funny.

Hi-Posi - あと何日

The Punisher by Frank Miller