Tag: small American town

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The Iron Giant

Director – Brad Bird – 1999 – US – Cert. U – 88m

*****

1957. A giant robot falls out of the sky and is befriended by a young boy in Maine. However, the US government proves less sympathetic – animated feature is out in UK cinemas from Friday, December 17th, 1999

This has all the hallmarks of classic fifties sci-fi outings – giant monster, small American town, paranoid government agent, mobilised militia. For those demanding still more, it has a single working mum and a sympathetic beat sculptor, neither of whom would be out of place in a period Roger Corman cheapie.

But you shouldn’t pigeonhole The Iron Giant by genre because a further two factors mark it out as very different. Freely adapted from Ted Hughes’ marvellous children’s book The Iron Man but given a decidedly American spin by director Brad Bird (cartoon TV series The Simpsons, 2 eps, 1990-91; creator of Family Dog, 1993), this is without doubt the animated film of the year and arguably the film of the year period. We’ve grown so used to the Disney blockbuster model – cute characters (and merchandise), hit songs – that anything else (this employs neither device) comes as a shock.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Middle Man

Director – Bent Hamer – 2021 – Norway, Denmark, Canada, UK, Germany, Switzerland – Cert. 15 – 95m

****

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but… A man in a heartland American town becomes a middle man, whose job it is to convey bad news to local people – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 10th

Curiously for an English language film set in a small American town, this one was funded by a variety of European countries and Canada. While its visuals clearly owe much to the films of David Lynch, particularly Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway (1997) with their heavy night time interiors filled with dark, impenetrable black spaces, it eschews the over the top moments of sex and violence with which Lynch peppers these films with something much less jocular and more deadpan. Like Lynch it feels distinctly odd, yet in a completely different way. Unlike those films, it’s adapted from (part of) a novel.

Opening images. Factories in a town belch smoke. A small, industrial town on a river. This is Karmack, USA.

Frank Farrelli (Pål Sverre Hagen) is the second interviewee by the three person panel (the local sheriff, pastor and doctor played respectively by Paul Gross, Nicholas Bro and Canadian regular Don McKellar) for the town’s job of middle man, the person who has to deliver bad news, e.g.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Invasion
Of The Body
Snatchers

Director – Don Siegel – 1956 – US – Cert. PG – 80m

*****

The classic, paranoid SF outing about the residents of a small, American town being replaced by conformist, emotionless duplicates – on BFI Blu-ray from Monday, October 25th

This is an incomplete review, currently in progress…

Made in the middle of Hollywood’s 1950s B-movie Sci-Fi boom, this movie was made by Don Siegel who previously made hard-boiled crime thrillers after cutting his teeth as an editor of montage sequences in, among other things, Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) with a striking script and a strong cast headed by Kevin McCarthy and, in her first starring role, Dana Wynter, which also includes Carolyn Jones who would later achieve fame playing Morticia Addams in The Addams Family TV series (creator David Levy, 1964).

Based on a Colliers Magazine serial by Jack Finney, it’s built around the highly potent idea of human beings being replaced by emotionless duplicates who operate as a communal whole rather than individual people. It’s often been read as a metaphor for the anti-Communist McCarthy witch hunts of the period, but as noted in the fascinating documentary Sleep No More, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers Revisited (2006), the left thought it was a satire on the right while the right thought it was a satire on the left.… Read the rest