Back to the Future

Viewed from a point in time that comfortably outpaces the gap between the past and present in writer-director Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future (co-written with Bob Gale), it seems notable how dilapidated this film's vision of the 1980s is, at least before Michael J Fox's Marty McFly has had an opportunity to meddle with the time-stream. Even more so than the ramshackle burg seen in Amblin Entertainment contemporary Gremlins, Marty's home town, Hill Valley, is a graffitied Pottersville that is packed with crumbling buildings and porno theatres. Barely remarked upon within the piece, this (then) present appears as crushed and aimless as Marty's parents: one a bitter drunk wondering where it all went wrong and the other still a passive target for Thomas F Wilson's oafish (but still enormously entertaining) Biff. This initial 1980s is balanced on a precipice then, ready to tip into the gauche dystopian version seen in Back to the Future Part II, when the bullies rebuild the town in their own image. 

Even Marty is affected by this malaise. Although commonly understood as being unyielding and scrappy, thanks almost entirely to the innate charm that Fox brings to the role, Marty suffers the same dithering lack of confidence as his father. His problems are communicative: he and his band mates don't share the unified image (or, presumably, sound) of his closest, new wave-presenting rivals; and the school board presiding over the talent show seen in the film's first act (which is never revisited) don't want to hear him play anyway. Although he enjoys some level of self-possession, largely as a frustrated reaction to his wet father figure, Marty frets about how has talents will be understood by others. In conversation with his girlfriend, played in this instalment by Claudia Wells, he worries about his creativity being crushed if he is forced to face up to a real, stinging rejection. The breakthrough with his parents - who he had previously looked upon as almost Martian in their dissimilarity to him - is when, having been blasted back in time to the 1950s, he realises that his mother, played by Lea Thompson, was a firecracker and that his browbeaten father, played by Crispin Glover, had his own creative ambitions. 

The instant Marty learns that George McFly is precious about his writing, Marty is both excited to discover this fact and reflective about what that means for his own ambitions. It's natural for Marty to be both friendly and effusive when faced with another person's precious creative endeavors, so why not extend that courtesy to himself? In a film made for and about teenagers, it's an acknowledgement that everybody - even parents - are three-dimensional human beings with their own, closely guarded frailties. In one of Back to the Future's many, superbly arranged climaxes Marty is pressed to play lead guitar for a doo-wop band. Following a rendition of Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode, Marty launches into a long, masturbatory rock solo in which he completely loses his audience. Unlike the Battle of the Bands try out seen much earlier in the film, in which an indifferent reaction prompted soul-searching in this teenager, here Marty has achieved a level of self-mastery that allows him to just shrug off the lack of adulation. His performance spoke for itself, in effect. And if that doesn't satisfy you, a successive sequence in which Christopher Lloyd dangles off a clock tower is so perfectly assembled from images of a speeding sports car and fumbling, cack-handed frustration that even on your fifteenth viewing you worry that Doc Brown might not be able to connect those cables in time. 

Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode

Gorillaz - The Mountain (feat. Dennis Hopper, Ajay Prasanna, Anoushka Shankar, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash)

Hot Rod by Phil Knott

Les Rallizes Dénudés - Wilderness of False Flowers

The Face of Another

Director Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another, adapted from a novel of the same name by Kōbō Abe, is a claustrophobic and unsettling experience. As well as a style of photography, courtesy of Hiroshi Segawa, that stays in close proximity to its subjects and appraises their faces (or even the webs of bones and muscle that flex underneath) like alien topography, the film's soundtrack repeatedly stresses a sense of unusual intimacy. The film's dialogue is a cacophony of aside and whisper. The crackling, single-channel audio dominated by the voice of actor Tatsuya Nakadai, playing a middle-aged engineer who has accidentally destroyed his face during a workplace experiment. In its earliest passages, before Nakadai's Mr. Okuyama is presented with handsome replacement features by an inquisitive psychiatrist, this voice is at its loudest. Okuyama talking his way through the abstracted existence that comes with having a countenance so ruined that it must be bound up and concealed from everybody else. 

So close is this voice that we often feel as if we've been bandaged up and trapped inside the mask with him. Thanks to his catastrophic injury, Okuyama has become unstuck in a post-Second World War society that turns away from deformity and the maimed, preferring to pretend that they don't exist. Okuyama's mummified face, and the frequent meetings he takes, immerse him in the strange, disconnected privilege that is foisted upon the pitied. He can rant and rave with impunity, basically. If anything, these diatribes are expected from such a creature. Not only does Okuyama resemble The Invisible Man in James Whale's film then, he even talks like him too - an aggrieved ego who chatters in violent fantasy about the anonymity that has been forced upon him. In one cackling aside he reveals to a shocked wife, who now cannot bear to touch her husband, that he has considered disfiguring her too, as a kind of redress for her sudden physical coldness. This bubbling mania is curtailed somewhat when Okuyama receives his mask. 

Retreating to a rented apartment, Okuyama busies himself by launching into the kind of superficial lifestyle that he believes befits his new face: spending money on clothes and sunglasses; drinking with the similarly good-looking, and curiously amoral, psychiatrist who cast his mask. As with John Frankenheimer's Seconds, released the same year, The Face of Another considers a person's sense of self in terms of curtailed possibilities. How the assumption of a new, even idealised identity doesn't necessarily override the confused, human longings that it now conceals. Concurrently with Okuyama's middle-class thrashing we see brief interludes that follow actress Miki Irie as a young woman marked by, presumably, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Unlike the comparatively affluent Okuyama, Irie's unnamed character is not only shunned for her facial scarring but quite unable to buy her way out of her predicament. Her despondency then does not revolve around the petty grudges and marital trickery that Okuyama blunders into but an all-consuming, screaming sadness that can only be silenced by crashing surf. 

Electronic Visions - Tundra

Mitski - If I Leave

Ram Man by Mizmaru Kawahara

Pulp - Begging for Change

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

One of the few projects spry, or low profile, enough to escape a recent trend at Warner Bros in which the sickly studio permanently shelved completed (but potentially unprofitable) films for a tax write-off, director Pete Browngardt's wonderfully energetic The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie finally makes it to these shores, courtesy of Vertigo Releasing. In fairness then to the shark-eyed and dead inside executives determined to transform all media into an easily digestible grey mulch, The Day the Earth Blew Up is, absolutely, an anachronistic offering. Neither Daffy Duck nor Porky Pig are voiced by bored, slumming celebrities and the overall shape of the comedy on offer is far more indebted to the Golden Age animation of Bob Clampett, and gazing askance at Red Scare science fiction films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, than the instantly dated attempts at tapping into the zeitgeist seen in far more shameless, texture-mapped features. Even the specific characterisations of the Lonney Tunes cast on offer here are frozen in a fixed moment. Daffy, in particular, is locked into the elasticated screwball persona, seen in his early shorts, that allows for the kind of innate sabotage required to keep a ninety minute story about living chewing gum chugging along. The Day the Earth Blew Up is, strangely enough then, emblematic of the sort of niche and inexpensive artistic expression that streaming seemed to be promising, when the giants were setting out their stalls, before everybody realised that their business models were actually based around an ability to assemble agreeable background noise for people paying more attention to their phones. 

Ryan Lott - Code Race (Extended)

The Andrew Oldham Orchestra - The Last Time

Metal Gear Solid 4 by Alexye

Derek & The Dominos - Layla

Frankenstein

Following an attention-grabbing prelude in which Jacob Elordi's beragged Monster stalks the North Pole, pummeling Danish sailors with an inhuman ferocity that is strikingly similar to that exhibited by Luke Goss as Nomak in Blade II, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, very obviously a dream project for the writer-director, decamps to its namesake's childhood. Rather than lay any foundations for a romance (or domestic intrigue) that never quite materialises, del Toro proposes, in Charles Dance's Baron Leopold, a father so completely awful that he ruins his first son's ability to successfully interpret love. The harsh, disciplinary teachings designed to shape a young Victor into a physician worthy of his father's name instead fosters an intense, combative arrogance. 

Oscar Isaac's Victor, now grown and determined to establish a dominion over death, is callous and unfeeling in this pursuit, an aristocrat who uses the bodies of his social inferiors as both jerking experiment and repulsive adornment. This, in del Toro's telling, is key to understanding the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and the childlike creature he manufactures. Once molded from the bodies of criminals and the pulverised soldiers of The Crimean War, Elordi's gaunt, Bernie Wrightson inspired Monster is expected, by a reproachful Victor, to instantly demonstrate an adult's grasp of their unfathomable situation. That the Monster can only mutter "Victor" back to his parent is viewed in purely mechanical terms: this new gizmo has failed to meet its creator's impossible expectations. Victor then channeling the stinging resentment wielded by his own father, broadcasting it at the generation of Frankenstein that he and his towering, tiled womb have begot. 

The gentleness and innocence present in Elordi's early performance is underlined by Mia Goth's Lady Elizabeth who instantly twigs that there is no continuity of mind or soul from the cadavers that Victor has used to construct this man. The Monster is, in all possibility, a new kind of life. She accepts this stitched-up child for what he is rather than what his parent wants him to be then; holding an amorous Victor at arms-length for his failure to console the innocent that has been brought into the world. Big screen adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus are steeped in the idea that their Victors are all playing God by creating life - their Adam - out of dust. Del Toro's addition to this pantheon is to view this creation in human or, maybe more accurately, biological terms: a twisted act of procreation that has been accomplished, solely, by an unbalanced and exacting male. It's a tweak that recasts the central child as a product of pure, spiteful ego rather than, at the very least, the outcome of physical affection. There's a crushing sadness in the fact that this Monster is assembled, like a kit, to be dispassionately assessed by an uncaring father rather than nurtured and adored by a loving mother.  

Angine de Poitrine - Mata Zyklek

The Most Dangerous Man in AEW by Daniel Warren Johnson

By Storm - Zig Zag

Madara 1000 - ɟןıdzz vol.2