Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a 2017 space opera blockbuster written and directed by Luc Besson.

It is based on a French science fiction comic book series, Valérian and Laureline, written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières. The comic book series ran from 1967 to 2010. Besson was a huge fan in his youth.

Many centuries into the future Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne) are elite security operatives of the United Human Federation. Their latest mission will take them to Alpha, a giant city in space inhabited by thousands of species from different planets.

We have already found out in the opening sequences that Alpha had been a space station orbiting the Earth but due to its growing size it was blasted into space.

And we also know that in the recent past the planet Mül was destroyed. It was home to a peaceful humanoid species. We know about Mül because of Valerian’s dream. Which might have been more than a dream.

Mül was also home a strange little animal with remarkable properties. We know this animal is important and we know the pearl is important but we don’t know why they’re important.

There is is something wrong on Alpha. An inexplicable radioactive dead zone is slowly expanding and threatens the city’s existence. Security personnel have sent to investigate. None have come back alive. That’s why Valérian and Laureline were sent there.

Aliens have attacked Alpha and taken its commander prisoner. Valérian and Laureline have to retrieve him. This will involve a great deal of action and excitement and danger, and also mystery. Part of the mystery is hidden in the files that nobody but the commander can access.

This film suffers from some of the same flaws as Besson’s earlier science fiction extravaganza, The Fifth Element. The plot loses direction as Besson focuses too much on visual coolness, and he just offers us too much visual coolness. He just keeps throwing too many new cool visual ideas at us.

The lengthy subplot involving pop diva Rihanna as a shape-shifting stripper is an unnecessary distraction should have been cut. She can’t act, it’s too silly and it slows things down. The movie ends up being half an hour too long.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets suffered from the same problem as Disney’s John Carter a few years earlier. Both movies did quite well at the box office but they were both so expensive that they still ended up losing a lot of money. It’s a broken financial model, that makes it too risky to make blockbusters that are in any way original.

I did like the two leads. They’re likeable and we care about them. I like that Valérian is allowed to be a brave masculine hero rather than inept male who needs a Strong Competent Woman to rescue him. I like the fact that for most part Laureline is an old-fashioned Feisty Heroine rather than a girlboss. Valérian is her commander and she doesn’t constantly undermine him. Laureline is also allowed at times to behave like a woman. She doesn’t come across as a female character who could just as easily have been written as a male character.

I liked their relationship. He wants to marry her. She isn’t sure. It’s increasingly obvious that she loves him but she needs to be convinced that he’s ready for marriage. Marriage is something she takes seriously.

This is a much more successful film than The Fifth Element, partly because Gary Oldman and Chris Tucker are not in it. It isn’t ruined by incredibly annoying characters.

The best thing about it is that it has no connection to Star Wars or Star Trek or Marvel comics.

While it needed to be trimmed just a little Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed some of the Valérian and Laureline comics - Valerian The Complete Collection vol 1. In the comics they travel through time a lot but for a standalone movie I think Besson made a wise decision in dropping that angle. The comics are fun!

And I've reviewed Besson's two great early movies, Léon: The Professional (1994) and La Femme Nikita (1990).

Millennium Actress (2001)

Millennium Actress is a 2001 anime feature film co-written and directed by Satoshi Kon. His first feature film, the superb Perfect Blue (1997), had been a surprise hit and received widespread critical acclaim. Millennium Actress was the first feature that was Kon’s own project right from the start and on which he acted as both writer and director. Millennium Actress, like Perfect Blue, deals with the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality.

Millennium Actress was greeted with enthusiasm by critics and is now established as one of the great anime feature films.

This is a movie that you have to stick with. At first it seems fairly straightforward but it becomes steadily more complex and more fascinating.

It begins with the demolition of a movie studio, the studio at which the famous actress Chiyoko Fujiwara had made all of her films. Chiyoko is now in her 70s and retired and lives in seclusion. Somehow documentary filmmaker and Chiyoko Fujiwara  superfan Genya Tachibana has persuaded her to be interviewed on camera. He arrives at her house with his cameraman in tow.

As Chiyoko reminisces about her life and career Tachibana and his cameraman find themselves inside her memories, filming her life as it happens. But is Chiyoko remembering her life or her films? Are the two indistinguishable to her? It appears that Tachibana and his cameraman are inside her films as well as her memories. In fact Tachibana becomes several characters in her movies.

The central obsession of Chiyoko’s life is her attempt to be reunited with a man she only ever met once, briefly. She spends years trying to find him. Or maybe that happened in one of her movies? It is impossible to separate her memories from her movies. The pursuit of a mysterious man seemed to be the plot of all her movies!

The man is a political dissident but politics plays zero part in this movie. The man is a young girl’s romantic fantasy - a handsome dashing rebel. He’s a rebel in the 1940s but he’s a rebel in lots of other eras as well.  

Does the man exist? He does exist for Chiyoko. Maybe he’s real if she believes he’s real. And of course he could be real.

There’s also the curse, and the key. And the man who hunts Chiyoko’s man across the centuries. We know the key is real. We’ve seen it. Her mystery man gave it to her for safekeeping. It unlocks the most important thing in the world. When she finds him again he will tell her what that is.

You can’t assume that Chiyoko’s whole story is a fantasy. There’s reality and there’s movies and they intersect or co-exist or exist simultaneously. Maybe reality creates movies or maybe movies create their own reality.


And there’s the role played by an older actress Eiko, who right from the start saw Chiyoko as a rival.

It might all sound a bit cerebral but this is also a movie about overwhelming emotions. This is a movie about love.

And it’s a movie about having a quest. About being willing to do anything, dare anything, risk anything, to find the one you love. It doesn’t matter if it takes decades. 

It’s also a movie about movies. It’s a love letter to cinema.

Millennium Actress was made using old school cel animation techniques and it looks great.

Finding a satisfying ending is always a challenge in this sort of movie but Kon pulls it off superbly. Millennium Actress is very offbeat but it’s a fascinating moving magical movie. Very highly recommended.

The Shout! Factory Blu-Ray looks great and the extras include interviews with the producers.

I’ve also reviewed Perfect Blue (1997).

John Carter (2012)

John Carter, released by Disney in 2012, was intended to launch a franchise based on the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Never in the history of motion pictures has a studio so successfully sabotaged one of its own films. A stunning combination of incompetence, cowardice, lack of imagination and malice caused John Carter to be a massive money loser. It was also a spectacular example of a ludicrously inflated budget ensuring that even if the movie did well at the box office it would lose money. The marketing was catastrophically inept.

The first mistake was the title. It’s based on the first of the Barsoom novels, A Princess of Mars. That’s a cool title so Disney changed it to John Carter, the most unexciting title that could be imagined.

So is it really a turkey? The answer is no. It has a few problems but it’s actually pretty good.

It retains the novel’s framing story. Edgar Rice Burroughs appears as a character in the framing story. John Carter is a cavalry officer left jobless, homeless and impoverished by the Civil War. He’s also embittered by personal tragedy (an unnecessary element not present in the novel). Now Carter hopes to revive his fortunes by prospecting and he’s discovered gold.

And then he’s on Mars. Burroughs made no attempt at any plausible scientific explanation or this. The movie, despite adding some technobabble, doesn’t either. It doesn’t matter. He’s on Mars and he’s a prisoner of the six-limbed green-skinned heavily tusked Tharks.

He gets caught in the midst of an epic power struggle and the beautiful princess Dejah Thoris tries to persuade him to come to the aid of the people. And to save her from a forced marriage to the power-hungry ruthless Sab Than. Pulling the strings behind the scenes are the immortal Therns.

Carter has no interest in noble causes but Dejah Thoris is both gorgeous and persuasive. He can be convinced to save a woman, if she’s the right woman. 

There’s lots of CGI and while I’m not a fan of CGI some of it is pretty impressive and some of it has that subtle lack of solidity and weight that makes it look fake. But overall there are plenty of cool visuals.

Despite being a tad overlong it does keep the action happening and there’s an abundance of battle scenes and exploding air ships.


The big problem is the star, Taylor Kitsch. He just doesn’t have hero quality. He comes across more like a librarian who’s a vegan and drinks decaf coffee. He has zero charisma. He lacks the necessary physicality.

On the other hand Lynn Collins is a pretty good Dejah Thoris. She’s beautiful and she has the pride that a princess should have. I personally think they should have put her in much sexier costumes (she spends much of the novel naked) but the geniuses at Disney didn’t see it that way. There’s also just not enough erotic tension between the two leads. Mind you, it’s hard to imagine any woman being excited by the wimpy Taylor Kitsch.

One thing I do like is the lack of cynicism and nihilism. This is an old-fashioned tale of heroic adventure. It has a hero who is unequivocally the Good Guy and a heroine who is unequivocally a Heroine.

One other thing I do like is the absence of ideological lecturing. There is good and evil in this tale but it’s old-fashioned evil - greed and ambition. And it’s old-fashioned good - courage and loyalty and love. 

The main change from the novel is the addition of the Therns, presumably to add a touch of mysticism (and perhaps they were intended to play a major role in later movies in the franchise had the franchise eventuated). 

It has some flaws but on the whole John Carter is solid entertainment. Highly recommended. A movie that deserved a much better fate.

Disney’s Blu-Ray presentation cannot be faulted.

I’ve also reviewed the source novel, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars.

Armitage III: Dual Matrix (2001)

Armitage III: Dual Matrix was released in 2001.

Something that needs to be clarified in regard to Armitage III: Dual Matrix right at the start is that this is not the third film in a series. It’s the second film in a two-movie series. It’s a sequel to Armitage III: Poly-Matrix. It’s called Armitage III because the heroine, Naomi Armitage, is a Third.

Armitage III: Poly-Matrix was in fact an OVA which was later edited into feature film format.

You need to have seen Armitage III: Poly-Matrix first, otherwise you won’t understand where the heroine is coming from and you won’t understand what she is. The background from the first film is that this is a world in which Mars has been colonised and has a large population of both humans and robots. Robots have become ubiquitous. The second-generation roots, known as Seconds, are useful for routine work. The Thirds, the third-generation robots, are a different matter. They are almost indistinguishable from humans, which makes many people uneasy.

Armitage was a cop working for the Martin PD, partnered with a human cop, Ross Sylibus.

Thirds have something very much akin to human emotions. Armitage knows she is a robot but she feels that she is also a woman.

As Armitage III: Dual Matrix opens Armitage is married (to Ross) and they have a daughter, Yoko. Yoko really is Armitage’s daughter. But Armitage is a robot. How can that be possible? It’s possible because Armitage is a Third. That’s the secret of the Thirds, the secret that has been closely guarded but now a sinister robotics tycoon is determined to get hold of that secret.

There’s also a move afoot to give robots legal rights. That has triggered a major political storm on both Earth and Mars.

There’s more to this struggle than is apparent on the surface. It has some connection to much earlier events, an apparently robot-inspired revolt known as the First Error.

It’s not just stubbornness that makes Armitage determined not to reveal the secret of the Thirds. It is vital that the secret remains a secret.

This is one of a number of cyberpunk movies (from Japan and elsewhere) dealing with the blurring of the line between humans and machines. In Blade Runner there’s Rachel who doesn’t know she’s a robot because she has her childhood memories (which are actually someone else’s memories). That’s her tragedy. In Ghost in the Shell Motoko has an entirely prosthetic body but she still has her (genuine) human memories. She still has her “ghost” - the essential human core of her consciousness - within the shell (the body). But she has to wonder if that’s enough to make fully human.

And here we have Armitage. She knows that she is a robot but she is a robot that may have crossed the threshold into consciousness. She feels things the way a woman feels things. But is she a woman?

One thing I love about the Armitage films is that Armitage is not a kickass action heroine who could just as easily have been a male character. Her femaleness is at the very core of the story. And being a mother is at the core of the story.

And although in the first movie Armitage and Ross start out having a kind of regular cop buddy movie relationship in this second film their relationship as husband and wife, and mother and father to Yoko, is crucial. This is what motivates all of their actions.

There is of course a vast amount of violent mayhem, done with energy and style.

By the mid-1980s anime dealing with complex grown-up subject matter was becoming a big thing. This was around the same time that cyberpunk was becoming the fashionable style of science fiction. In a way anime and cyberpunk grew up together. The Japanese took to cyberpunk like a duck to water. They loved the mood and the aesthetic.

By the time the first instalment of Armitage III came out in 1996 there had already been some great cyberpunk anime. Ghost in the Shell (1995) obviously but also Goku Midnight Eye (1989) and Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990). There’s also a slight cyberpunk flavour to the excellent Angel Cop (1989-94).

Armitage III: Dual Matrix is top-tier cyberpunk anime and it’s highly recommended.

I have the old Madman DVD which is sadly out of print.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

Brotherhood of the Wolf is a 2001 French historical horror/action movie set in 1764. It was directed by Christophe Gans.

It’s based very very very loosely on the legend of the Beast of Gévaudan, presumed to have been a huge wolf which killed over a hundred people.

In the movie naturalist Grégoire de Fronsac (Samuel le Bihan) and his Iroquois companion Mani (Mark Dacascos) have been sent by the King to help the local authorities trap and destroy the Beast.

They run into some trouble with a huge gang of ruffians but fortunately Mani is a kung fu expert (the Iroquois being of course renowned for their kung fu skills).

Mani also has vague mystical spiritual powers which of course makes him a superior person. He’s also the most morally superior person in the story.

Attempts to track the Beast end in failure and the Beast claims more and more victims.

Tensions are high but de Fronsac finds time to fall in love with the beautiful Marianne de Morangias (Émilie Dequenne). He also finds time for some hot bedroom action with a local whore, Sylvia (Monica Bellucci). Sylvia also has vague mystical spiritual powers which of course makes her a superior person.

We get a series of revelations indicating what is really happening. Each revelation is a bit sillier and a bit more lame than the preceding one. The central idea is very implausible.

And then we get to the Big Reveal, at which point I was sorely tempted to just switch the movie off and go to bed.

The plot twists are not so much twists as out-and-out cheats. Or perhaps just a symptom of a garbled nonsensical script.

Visually it’s quite impressive in a very gimmick-laden way with the same visual tricks used over and over again.

There’s a lot of clumsy ideological messaging. Lots and lots of it.

A huge problem is that all the major sympathetic characters belong to the world of 2001, not the world of 1764. Their outlooks, attitudes and beliefs are those of 2001, not 1764.

I was amused by one online reviewer waxing lyrical about the steamy erotic scenes between Samuel le Bihan and Monica Bellucci. He must have seen a different movie. I saw the full uncut version. The sex scenes are boring and terribly un-erotic. This is a movie with zero erotic energy and zero emotional energy.

The kung fu scenes are absurdly out of place and make a silly movie even sillier and they’re not even particularly well done.

The biggest problem is that the movie just goes on and on and on. For two-and-a-half interminable hours. The pacing is glacial.

None of the elements really hang together and they’re not tonally consistent. It starts out trying to build a subtle atmosphere of dread and evil. Then it becomes a kung fu movie. Finally it turns into a comic book-style superhero movie. The evil turns out to be very trite. The ending is chaotic, but not in a good way.

Given that I was never even a tiny bit convinced by the historical setting or by the characters I found it difficult to keep interested. I can’t recommend this one.

It looks nice enough on Blu-Ray.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is writer-director Mamoru Oshii’s sequel to his 1995 masterpiece Ghost in the Shell. 

Both take Masamune Shirow’s brilliant manga as a starting point.

This 2004 film is a sequel. I’m not going to reveal any spoilers for the first film here but you absolutely must watch the earlier film first. Not because of the plot but because of something very very important involving one of the main characters that happens in the first movie.

Gynoids (female androids) have been running amok and killing their owners. That’s disturbing. What’s really worrying and puzzling is that often the gynoids then commit suicide. That’s something that androids do not, and cannot, do.

Batou is assigned to the case. Togusa is now his partner, the Major Motoko Kusanagi being (for very complicated reasons) unavailable for duty. They’re initially puzzled that this case should have been handed to Section 9. Section 9 usually deals with much more overt threat to public security.

The gynoids are personal servant androids but the first thing that Batou and Togusa find out is that the gynoids causing the problems are a special type of gynoid. They’re sexbots.

The various branches of the Ghost in the Shell franchise all deal with the intersection of the human and the digital worlds. The blurring of the lines between man and machine. In this future cyborgs and androids are ubiquitous. Batou is a cyborg and there’s not much of him left that is entirely human. Motoko Kusanagi is entirely a cyborg. The only human element to Motoko is her Ghost. But of course the Ghost is the most important thing of all. Cyborgs have human brains and cyberbrains. The Ghost resides in the human brain. It comprises our memories and it’s our memories that make us human.

This is obviously the kind of territory that has been extensively explored in cyberpunk fiction and cyberpunk movies such as Blade Runner and Total Recall. The Ghost in the Shell franchise takes a deep dive into this territory.

Batou and Togusa are making progress, or so they think. That’s assuming that the things they have found are true. They may be trapped in a web of illusions and lies.

When they reach the ship things get seriously weird. Reality starts to fragment. In a world of virtual reality and artificial intelligences is there any actual reality? If everybody is permanently connected to digital networks and everybody has a cyberbrain would you be able to tell if you were real or not?

There’s plenty of violent mayhem but this is a very cerebral movie. This is not a cool sci-fi action movie. It’s cool, but it’s cool in an incredibly complex and philosophical way. Western sci-fi movie-makers (and makers of TV sci-fi) will flirt with really complex ideas but it’s the Japanese anime makers who are prepared to take those ideas to the limit.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is visually stunning but it looks nothing like the first movie. It’s moving into entirely new aesthetic territory. And it’s tonally quite different.

In western cinema the advent of digital technologies, CGI and the like, had mostly disastrous results. That was not the case with anime. In an anime movie such as this one what matters is having people who can use these techniques as something more than a crutch. Or a gimmick. And these techniques can be blended seamlessly into animated movies. In live-action movies they seem like they’re shoe-horned in.

You do need to watch the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie first. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a very different movie in many ways. It’s different thematically and stylistically. But to fully appreciate it it helps to have seen the first movie and it helps to have read the original manga. That makes it easier to understand why Mamoru Oshii chose not to make a straightforward sequel.

The extensive Ghost in the Shell franchise has a complicated history. It began as a manga by Masamune Shirow. Then came the first movie in 1995, directed by Mamoru Oshii and written by Kazunori Itô. Then in 2002 came the excellent Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex TV series. It does not follow on directly from the movie and may possibly take place in a slightly different timeline. In 2004 there was a second series of the TV series. And also in 2004, the second movie. In 2006 came the movie Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society. There have since been other iterations. It’s been a spectacularly successful franchise.

You could argue that it’s not a franchise in a conventional sense but rather a complex web of interrelated works.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is strange and moody and surreal and it’s very highly recommended.

Bikini Airways (2003)

Bikini Airways is a 2003 made-for cable skinflick. It’s a sex comedy but essentially it’s a skinflick. But it is directed by inspired low-budget cult auteur Fred Olen Ray so that makes it a more enticing prospect. And Ray knew how to get surprisingly good results on almost non-existent budgets.

It benefits from a basically good central idea.

Terri (Regina Russell) suddenly finds herself the owner of an airline. Which is not as great as it sounds since the airline employs a total of two people and is on the verge of bankruptcy. There is no money, but plenty of debts.

Terri knows that the only thing that can save the airline is publicity, preferably free publicity. Her boyfriend is a photographer and he specialises in nudie stuff. He suggests that hot near-naked babes would provide perfect publicity. And he is sure he can persuade his three gorgeous regular models to lend their talents to the scheme.

Having three bikini babes manning the check-in counter attracts attention but no customers, but the boyfriend still has one idea left. A young oil tycoon, Gary (Brad Bartram), had a bachelor party planned for the day before his wedding but since he has to get to Miami in a hurry for the nuptials there’s no time to have that party. But what if Terri’s airline could fly Gary and his friends to Miami and he could have the bachelor party on the way, on the plane?

Those three bikini babes will provide the entertainment.

The entertainment they provide is in the form of lots of hot steamy sex. These girls have a lot of energy and a lot of imagination, and no inhibitions at all.

There is, lurking in the background, an actual plot of sorts. It involves two relationships heading for the rocks and the chance of finding true love in unexpected places.

Comic relief is provided by the broken-down chief pilot Captain Sam and his incompetent co-pilot Dave. Captain Sam spends most of the flight taking photos of the sexual gymnastics taking place in the passenger cabin. We do have serious doubts about their piloting abilities.

This is a softcore film but the sex scenes get pretty raunchy and there are lots of sex scenes. Fred Olen Ray doesn’t have the genius of a Radley Metzger when it comes to shooting sex scenes but he does know how to make them steamy and sweaty.

Overall this is a good-natured movie. The photographer boyfriend is a bit of a jerk but he’s not evil, it’s just that he can’t keep it in his pants. And he is exposed to some pretty extreme temptation. You can’t entirely blame him for having it off with one of the Bikini Airways babes. Gary’s two friends get it on with the other two babes, but the girls are after all being provided as the in-flight entertainment.

And Terri and Gary take quite an interest in each other.

It’s all cheerfully naughty and nobody really gets hurt.

The acting is at best passable but let’s face it the cast members were chosen for their willingness to take their clothes off. Jay Richardson as Captain Sam is quite good fun. Regina Russell is likeable.

If you accept Bikini Airways for what it is, a skinflick with some amusing moments, and you don’t have a problem with naked girls and lots of sex scenes it’s rather enjoyable. Recommended.

The Retromedia Blu-Ray looks very nice. Extras include another much less interesting made-for-cable skinflick.

Femme Fatale (2002)

Femme Fatale is a 2002 erotic thriller (with a very strong neo-noir vibe) written and directed by Brian De Palma. It was a box-office flop at the time although it now has a strong cult following and its reputation has grown considerably. It’s one of my favourite De Palma movies. It’s so very De Palma.

It may simply have mystified and exasperated some people. It takes some wild risks. Whether they pay off or not is something you will have to decide. It depends on your tolerance for thrillers that break the rules.

The most important aspect of this movie is the one that can’t even be hinted at. You do not want to read any spoilers for Femme Fatale. I am not going to offer hints at all. Naturally most online reviewers go ahead and spoil the movie anyway so you may want to avoid them before seeing the movie.

What I will say is that you do need to pay attention when watching this movie. There are things you should be noticing.

It begins with a daring jewel heist during the Cannes Film Festival. The jewels are in the form of a snake brassiere worn by a supermodel. Sexy Laure (Rebecca Romijn) steals the jewels while having sex with the supermodel in the ladies’ room. The heist is a spectacular extended visual set-piece with very little dialogue. When it comes to sheer mastery of technique De Palma has never done anything better. Then we get a chase of sorts, or maybe it’s a stalking, and it’s done as another impressive visual set-piece.

Laure figures she’d be wise to get out of France. Start a new life somewhere. Which she does. That’s going fine until down-at-heel paparazzo Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas) snaps her picture. Laure cannot afford to have any photographs of herself. Much too dangerous.

Then the twists start to kick in. Nicolas thinks he’s the knight in shining armour rescuing a damsel in distress. It takes him quite a while to realise that Laure is not a damsel in distress. She’s a psycho bitch. She’s a femme fatale on steroids.

Nicolas is in the spider’s web now. More plot twists follow, before the really big plot twist.

When the so-called New American Cinema burst onto the scene round 1967 it saw itself, like the French Nouvelle Vague, the British New Wave and the New German Cinema, as a revolutionary movement that would sweep away the past and create something totally new. Tradition was something that needed to be scrapped. It was all very adolescent.

Brian De Palma made his first feature film in 1968 but I think it’s clear that that was never his attitude. De Palma saw himself as part of a living tradition of filmmaking. He didn’t want to scrap that tradition. He wanted to be part of it.

Of course his admiration for Hitchcock was part of this. But he didn’t see Hitchcock’s body of work as a resource to be plundered. He had seen Hitchcock’s movies. He understood them. He understood Hitchcock’s methods. He has absorbed them. He then set out to make Brian De Palma movies, making use of the lessons he had learnt from Hitchcock and other masters of the past. Sure, he liked to include Hitchcock homages but they were clever and witty and his movies were always Brian De Palma movies.

He lays his cards on the table right at the start of Femme Fatale. We see a woman watching Double Indemnity on TV. We know that we’re about to see a movie that draws on the filmmaking tradition that produced movies like Double Indemnity.

There’s lots of voyeurism in this movie. With a hero who is a photographer and a photograph as a key plot element that’s to be expected and voyeurism is a theme that De Palma knew how to handle. At times in this movie there are multiple voyeurs. Lots of people are watching Laure.

You want wild crazy camera angles? You got ’em. And lots of very cool overhead shots. You want split screens? You got them too. And naturally split diopter shots. De Palma could get away with things like this. This is a De Palma film so naturally it is very much an exercise in style and it really does have insane amounts of style.

Laure (Rebecca Romijn) is very sexy and very wicked. De Palma doesn’t stint on the eroticism.

Antonio Banderas is very good and very sympathetic, playing a nice guy who is just getting more and more out of his depth.

As for the element I can’t talk about, whether it works or not is up to the viewer to decide. It’s something that has been done before but then De Palma adds some extra twists.

This is one of those movies that is worth rewatching. The second time around you’ll be seeing everything in a radically different way and you’ll be able to appreciate the way De Palma never actually cheats.

Femme Fatale is definitely a neo-noir but it’s a lot more than that. Very highly recommended.

Femme Fatale looks great on Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray extras are, surprisingly, very worthwhile but do not under any circumstances watch the featurettes before you watch the movie. They contain a whole bunch of spoilers.

Mission to Mars (2000)

Mission to Mars is Brian De Palma’s 2000 science fiction epic and it’s a very very obvious homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The first thing that needs to be said is that De Palma was brought into the project late in the game when the previous director quit. The screenplay had already been finalised. The sensible thing to do would have been to drop the script into the wastepaper basket and start again but De Palma did not have that option. He was stuck with the script (which includes some horrifically awful dialogue). And the cast. De Palma was given an increase in the budget and perhaps that’s what tempted him. It’s a temptation he should have resisted.

The first manned mission to Mars in 2020 ends in disaster. Nobody knows what happened exact that whatever it was was strange and inexplicable. There is a possibility that one crew member survived.

NASA launches a rescue mission and it’s a fiasco. The survivors of the rescue mission do manage to reach Mars. They find the survivor of the first mission and he has a weird story to tell. Something about a force emerging from a mountaintop. He thinks he has found at least the beginnings of an explanation.

And then we find out what it was all about. It’s all deep profound cosmic stuff.

There are countless shots and images that are either direct homages to 2001 or are at least heavily inspired by Kubrick’s movie. Unfortunately Mission to Mars just doesn’t recapture the visual magic and inspiration of Kubrick’s movie. And, even though it was made more than 30 years later, the special effects are just not up to the standards of the Kubrick film.

Kubrick’s spaceship was cooler. Both Kubrick’s and De Palma’s spaceships are partially rotating to achieve artificial gravity. Both movies include scenes demonstrating the disorienting feel of astronauts living inside a rotating cylinder. Pe Palma manages these scenes quite well. Both movies include the kind of gigantic rotating space station that we were promised we would get in the future but the space station scenes in 2001 have a lot more style and wit.

In both movies the interplanetary spaceship runs into major problems. In 2001 the problems occur when the spacecraft’s onboard artificial intelligence, HAL, goes rogue. Very cleverly we never get a precise explanation of why he goes rogue. We are left to speculate. Was it just a random failure or does it have a much deeper significance? In Mission to Mars the spaceship runs into a meteor storm, just like in every 1950s sci-fi B-movie. This is not exactly inspired writing.

In both movies there’s an attempt to save an astronaut drifting helplessly in space, but in Mission to Mars it’s more sentimental and more corny and more conventionally heroic.

Mission to Mars also has an equivalent of the famous monolith from 2001.

There are elements homaged from various other science fiction movies as well. In fact there is nothing at all in this movie that could be called original.

Somehow, despite a vast CGI budget, Mission to Mars manages to be visually uninteresting. The better scenes are way too reminiscent of better scenes in better movies.

Both movies end up getting into philosophical and scientific speculation about our origins and our destiny. Kubrick’s movie ends on a mysterious enigmatic note. De Palma’s movie spells everything out, and it’s not worth spelling out. 2001 is a movie you can watch over and over again. It’s a movie you want to think about. Trust me, once you’ve seen Mission to Mars you will never want to rewatch it. You will never want to think about it. You will just want to forget it.

Given the awful script and cringe-inducing dialogue it’s difficult to judge the acting. The characters are mere clichés. I guess the cast members were doing their best.

The ending of Mission to Mars is unbelievably bad. It’s embarrassing and trite.

We all make mistakes. This movie was a very big mistake for De Palma. Perhaps science fiction was just not his forte.

I’m a De Palma fan but it’s difficult to recommend Mission to Mars.

I watched the German Blu-Ray which looks very nice.

It’s interesting to compare this film to John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars made about the same time. Both movies are generally regarded as misfires by major directors. Ghosts of Mars has some real problems but I think it’s the better film.

Gradiva (2006)

Gradiva, released in 2006, was Alain Robbe-Grillet’s final feature film.

In all his films Robbe-Grillet always made sure the audience knew from the start that they were not going to get anything resembling a realist film from him. He was going to be playing games with narrative. There were going to be multiple layers of reality and unreality. Maybe none of it is real. In fact of course none of it is real because this is a movie. These people are actors. It’s a made-up story.

The setting is Morocco, in the present day. John Locke (James Wilby) is a professor researching a book on the painter Delacroix. He has heard of some hitherto unknown sketchbooks by the artist. It’s an exciting discovery. If they’re authentic. He isn’t sure if they’re authentic or not.

They contain sketches done by the artist during his time in Mogador. But Delacroix is not known to have ever visited Mogador. The sketches are of a woman with whom he had a affair. The woman was later executed. If she ever existed.

We are introduced to a beautiful blonde woman (played by Arielle Dombasle). She is writing a story. For all we know she might be writing the screenplay for Alain Robbe-Grillet’s movie Gradiva. Later she tells another woman that she is writing her memoirs but she does not believe memoirs should be about the past. They should be about the future.

Locke sees this beautiful blonde woman and pursues her through the streets of Marrakech. He loses her but ends up in Anatoli’s establishment. Anatoli is an art dealer. Or he might be a white slaver. Or he might be a doctor. His establishment might be a brothel or it might be a theatre.

There are young women being whipped. They might be slaves. They might be actresses pretending to be slaves, or slaves pretending to be actresses.

Locke lives with Belkis, a cute Arab girl. She might be his slave or his mistress. Either way she is clearly in love with him. He is very fond of her but whether he is in love with her or not is uncertain.

The beautiful blonde woman tells Locke that she is an actress but while she does some film and theatre work she is mostly a dream actress. She earns her living acting in other people’s dreams. Her name is Leila, or perhaps Gradiva. She may be the ghost of Delacroix’s long-dead mistress.

Leila may at this moment be acting in one of Locke’s dreams.

There have been a number of murders. Locke has seen some of the corpses of the dead girls although they might be actresses.

Locke certainly has dreams. Some may be drug-induced. It’s also possible that the dreams have been induced by Delacroix’s sketches. Art is a powerful drug.

Of course, since this is a Robbe-Grillet film, there is plenty of sado-masochistic eroticism but since this is a Robbe-Grillet film we have serious doubts as to whether any of the whippings are real. The young women might be actresses. This could be a movie in which actresses are playing the roles of actresses.

Robbe-Grillet felt that his movies used the erotic as raw material but were not erotic films as such because there was always a critical distance. The erotic material does not seem real and there is no attempt to persuade us that any of the erotic encounters are real. There is an air of artificiality which is the exact opposite of the effect at which an erotic movie would be aiming.

For me the key to Robbe-Grillet’s work, and the reason I enjoy his work so much, is his playfulness. He enjoyed making movies. He wanted people to enjoy watching them. He wanted his viewers to enjoy the game.

By 2006 Robbe-Grillet was totally out of touch with contemporary tastes in cinema. That’s why this movie is vastly superior to almost all 21st century movies. What’s even better is that his whole aesthetic was out of fashion. Robbe-Grillet assumes that his audience will have no difficulty in coping with movies that operate on multiple levels and in which reality and dream and fantasy and illusion and art form an intoxicating cocktail. He also assumes that there is no need to give the viewer any clues as to where reality ends and dream takes over. He sees no need to spoon-feed the audience.

And of course it is always a mistake in a film such as this to offer the audience such clues. The whole point is that life and art and dream defy explanation. We’re not supposed to expect any clear-cut explanations. That would spoil everything.

The location shooting in Morocco is a plus. Any Robbe-Grillet movie is going to be a visual treat and this is no exception.

Gradiva is a mesmerising film. It’s very arty but it’s also witty and it’s fun. Art films are allowed to be enjoyable. Highly recommended.

The Mondo Macabro DVD offers a lovely transfer and includes an excellent in-depth interview with Robbe-Grillet.

I’ve reviewed almost all of his movies. La Belle Captive remains my favourite but I have a very definite soft spot for L’immortelle and Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) is dazzling. I also highly recommend his novel La Maison de rendez-vous (available in an English translation).