Andrei Rublev is a pussy

Now that you know that, you can go back to sleep in the cinema where the movie is playing. Tristan and I are asleep. I’m writing this on my phone asleep, even though you are not supposed to use your phone at Cinemateque (it’s distracting for others and can lead to brawls), but how am I to know – after all, I’m asleep.

I’ve slept through a lot of this three and a half hour movie. Tristan has to, but his excuse is that he took some hay fever medication beforehand, but I know the real reason, he thinks Andrei is a pussy. I wake up during a raid and see a panicky horse attempt to descend a flight of stairs covered in blood. The horse slips and falls off the stairs lands on its back and I shudder! I can’t believe I just saw a horse do that and think maybe that’s why it was banned in Russia for five years and then I go back to sleep. I wake up and the raid is still going. The Asian enemy (Tatars) are pouring boiling oil into the mouth of a decent fella.

Rublev is not shit, but it’s overrated to the max, a masterpiece of tedium and as beautifully sterile as you can expect from someone who gets eye-popping visuals and a laborious mise en scene without any real emotional pay-off.

Gawd could Andrei be more of a sad sack loser? The second I saw him, I thought cool, we’re in for some art-is-taking-it-to-the-Church punk rock because the actor playing him smouldered a little bit like our man Viggo. Wrong. As this boat of a film demonstrates, Andrei has not much backbone. He’s a passive putz pussified to the hilt, brooding about the miseries of life in the medieval mud-splattered suburbs. Fugg do I tire of films that Bible-spank that churchy heaviosity. For Andrei's sake, I'd much prefer it if this was movie was set in 1995, the year Pavement released Wowee Zowee.

Dude you make a three and a half-hour movie about a guy who weeps when a hot witch throws her naked body at him and you got problems. Roger Corman should have remade this as drive-in smut just to make Tarkovsky’s piles twitch.

I would not watch this again if you tied me up and threw a naked witch on me! My favourite scene is the one where the horse itches its back in slow motion (pictured).

If you see this movie on DVD at a prospective lover’s house run like that shithouse is going up in flames!

The Mortal Storm

Innsbruck, Austria is a mountainous, yet feasible cross country ski trek from the German village where Frank Borzage’s Mortal Storm (1940) is set in.

Here Viktor Roth, on his 60th birthday, is about to be honoured by the university he lectures at for achievements in science, except he doesn’t know that yet. Anyway, he’s a jolly good fellow, dignified and old, as Jonathan Richman might say. We meet his family at breakfast. Two energetic young boys (one played by a 21 year-old Robert Stack) bound into his room and wish him a happy birthday in a sing-song fashion.

A tender moment between them is shared. Viktor tells them they mean as much to him as his own flesh and blood. The boys turn around and say we don’t think of you as our Stepfather. Victor gets choked up, and so do you (and it’s not like you are the bastard son of anyone or anything).

The Father and his Sons do look nothing alike. The Dad is hard-lined and severe, while the boys are perfect Nordic blondes and blue-eyed. We also meet his stepdaughter — the great Margaret Sullavan. Her gift to him is a cashmere scarf that she ties around his neck as he heads out the door.

His lecture turns out to be a surprise party. A German song is sung. Two students approach the lectern and say a few kind words. They are played by Jimmy Stewart and Robert Young. A gift is presented. The audience, made up of students, peers, and his family, who are located in the balcony of the lecture hall — applaud with collective vigour.

Evening comes and we’re back at the Roth’s for a family dinner. Jimmy Stewart is also here. Cut to the servery where Robert Young is stealing a kiss from Margaret as she adds candles to the birthday cake. He threatens to announce their engagement and she appears to be in two minds about it, but ultimately feels it would be hard to resist (also to be in two minds about it: Jimmy Stewart). Cake arrives and Dad makes a fine speech about good humour, tolerance and other virtues that underpin their family and reinforce their position as a well-refined and progressive unit.

Robert Young proceeds to steal some of Dad’s thunder by announcing his engagement to Margaret Sullaven, while they both get upstaged by Adolf Hitler whose ascendancy comes over a radio news bulletin. Allegiances are quickly established. Young and the two Aryan-looking sons are thrilled with the country’s new direction and keen to make Germany a force by any means necessary.

In opposition are the Dad, Jimmy Stewart and, you could say, Margaret. Not that they are pacifists so much, just free thinkers. After all the Dad is a bloody scientist who can prove that blood doesn’t mean shit! You can imagine what happens. The poison of the Third Reich’s doctrine, led by sweaty, scar-faced and hideous Nazies, begins to spread. Even the most functional families get torn apart. Absolutely harrowing.

This was the second masterpiece of 1940 starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. Ernst Lubitsch’s Shop around the Corner was the first, a charming romantic comedy about small business capitalism (also starring Viktor Roth).

Not surprisingly Germany banned the importation of MGM products upon the release of this, a masterful film whose shadow looms large (two great recent flicks: The Lives of Others and Inglorious Basterds are hugely indebted to it). I love Margaret Sullavan. She is great. She went deaf in her late forties and no longer could act and then committed suicide.

Viaggio in Italia

Not to deny Ingrid Bergman her devastating performance, but at this point in his acting life, I doubt a woman alive other than a hooker could have stimulated George Sanders. The happy ending is not the most appropriate ending, but who gives a flying fig. The bitter pill had already been swallowed. This is troubling stuff. I'm gonna go have a meatball.

SKOLIMOWSKI

I plan on teaching myself how to walk like Jerzy Skolimowski next week. Soon I will be a tough nut with a shell that is hard to crack. A brick shithouse incredibly sturdy. Couple of Jerzy early films feature him walking the decrapitated Warsaw laneways, reciting poetry and charming utter babes if and when he feels like it. Right on, brother.

Moonlighting, 1981 (Slolimowski)
A team of Polish builders, led by the iron-fisted Jeremy Irons, go to London to renovate their boss's scummy terrace. It's cold out, Jeremy is colder and no one has any money. Their cultural challenges are rendered brutally. Jeremy fashions a contemporary moustache and figures out a way to steal from his grocer, but then he gets caught. He goes to church to confess his evil, turkey-thieving sins!

Deep End

Classic coming-undone coming-of-age story that gets young boys’ obsession with sex just about right. It’s pretty hard to take, but then again, so are young boys. The film is about a 15 year-old but it’s not for a 15 year-old. I’ll show it to my 15 year-old and he’ll either turn gay or admit that he is gay (something I would have already suspected anyway).

Story is about Mike, a virgin in the traditional sense (fornication) and also in regards to doing a job. All this is about to change. He’s cute and he’s hired at the local swimming pool. He looks like a cross between Parker Stephenson and Shawn Cassidy. He starts work and all the housewives want to bone him, repressed London coming unglued as Mike delivers more medicated shampoo to door #4 and 5. The Lolita-like redhead nymph is a legal age dynamo sex bait of the bath house. Her natural charm and effectiveness makes Natalie Portman rather unnecessary. She’s doing it to Mike’s former swimming coach. Her fiance is a pompous drip who studies blue movies with academic discernment. She torments Mike in wicked ways. He grows up fast. The repercussions are severe.

Two sequences stand out as total classics: One unfolds at a blue movie cinema, rivaling Mickey Rourke’s turn in The Diner for outright hilarity, but also delving deeper (hence the title, no, not really). The other takes place outside a peep show and involves the ingestion of numerous hot dogs and the pilfering of a life-size nude cardboard cut-out culminating in a ridiculous ruckus on a crowded tube train.

There’s an urge to refer to this film as Deep Red, for the contrast of perverse red against the rank landscape of 1970s London suburbia is luridly outstanding. The camera work is artful, the editing is droll, the performances are classic, the climax a tad unwieldy. Cat Stevens and Can provide the soundtrack that loses to Performance in a tenth-round knockout, but puts on a hell of a fight. Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski.

Worthless crap

In the City of Sylvia (2007) by Jose Luis Guerin
If the underused goth in the pub had raped, then murdered the vapid artiste, I would have still left the cinema unsatisfied.

Zabriskie Point and The State of Things

Zabriskie Point
Corny-ass, hippy-dippy, drippy dumbshit lameness on a grand visual scale, culminating in an uncomfortable-looking sandstorm orgy in the desert. It’s enough to make you want to work for Rod Taylor’s housing developer (the film’s emblem of evil), but you no longer can, see his revolutionary daughter Daria exploded him so he be unable to make you an offer. Viva the Revolucion’!


The State of Things
A sluggishly hip, innocuous thing by Wim Wenders about a sci-fi movie that can’t get made, which is sad because it looks more fun than the one about the director who goes off in search of money to finish it which is what we’re watching! So, director leaves cast and crew in a drunken Lisbon stupor and flies to LA where he puts the top down and becomes Phillip Marlowe in an attempt to find the egregious moneybags. 1980, in black and white with pornographic synthesizers busted out at the most peculiar moments.

Ten Things You Probably Didn’t Know About A Movie You Have Probably Never Seen

• The name of this silent movie is "Haxan – Witchcraft through the Ages" and it came out in 1922. The execution of its niche objectives is a solid 8/10
• Be forewarned it will terrify your children
• The crazy-eyed red devils are tongue-darting pervs
• The juxtaposition of naked female tush with devils whose long sharp claws poke at them with tireless fervour is good image-making
• Narrative by director Benjamin Christenson has a pleasing ironic tone (I don’t have any examples except when he gets one of the cute actresses into a thumbscrew and pretends she likes it when in fact she is yelping)
• There are 7 parts to it
• The music (doubtlessly added retrospectively) suxx eggs and complaints regarding the badness of it were plentiful afterwards by the moviegoing contingency. A lot of silents have this problem. Makes you wonder if the movie would have been better off without it and I don’t think it woulda
• Did you know something like four million men and women were destroyed in the middle ages in the cruellest fashion for behaving in a way incomprehensible to doctors, monks and other God-fearing sucks? Hard to comprehend, I know, but once you put it into terms that people can understand such as Def Leppard would not have been able to make ‘Adrenalize’ after ‘Hysteria’ the full force of its destructive impact really hits home
• The advance of civilization was defined by the sophisticated techniques people were toasted and tortured with.
• The costume imagery and photography (brilliant blue for twilight and red for hell, plus sepia-tones for poor-house interiors) are so consistently great that you begin to lose interest in the whole operation, which is sad, but inevitable in a movie that contains no dramatic narrative or discernible flow

Shallow flicks, man.

Couple a flicks by Louis Malle, one, ‘Les Amants’, would be wise to give the flick to, poor Jeanne Moreau, the film is such a disgrace and insult to her sexuality (apparently it made her hugely popular – go figure). Requires a suspension of disbelief so hallucinatory I’m certain it’s a recommendation from the director that we all go take a flying leap.

Jesse loved it, he saw Jeanne’s boobies after all, sez I’ve changed now that I’m engaged, suspects I’d call Dorothy a trollop if I saw Wizard of Oz. My beef was with the total lack of psychological detail to validate the character’s ludicrous actions. Some awakening. I think Tristan was in my corner on this one, but he wasn’t saying much, he was too busy enjoying the ribbing I was getting from Monsieur Jackson Sheperd.

By movie’s end, I wanted to shake Mr. Malle and say what planet are you on? To its credit, the movie was strongly paced and I didn’t look at my watch once.

Next came a good one (Le Feu Follett) about an alcoholic with a good melancholy score by Erik Satie. Get this: the guy finishes The Great Gatsby and then he offs himself! The whole time I thought the actor (well-played) was Alain Delon, mirroring his own descent into alcoholism, but no, just some other hunk who had gone to seed named Alain.

Both films were preceded by the seed that germinated Wes Anderson’s fun Life Aquatic picture: a deliciously entertaining Jacques Cousteau short from the 50s when Malle was his DP.

The Mother and The Whore and an Orphan Named Chuong

“That portrait is so bleak I feel obliged to disapprove of, even to despise it. But its power over me is such that I can’t despise it without despising myself in the bargain.”

— Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing about Jean Eustache’s The Mother and The Whore (1973)

My thoughts exactly Mr. Rosenbaum, I too, found this wildly hard-hitting film very confronting. Thinking about it now saddens me immensely, which is crazy because leaving the theatre the other night I couldn’t help thinking about how its characters were so overwrought, drunkenly poetic and frankly nuts that my only response to this 215 minute film was my, what audacity! The film will be forever marked by tragedy (the suicide of the director and one of the lead actresses) that illustrates the futility with what the movie was trying to say artistically. Now David Foster Wallace has taken his own life over similar frustrations. Must take a minute silence and vow to be less intimidated by DFW's Infinite Jest, a big, brainy, baggy, bloated book I’ve stopped and started at least three times.

and now for something way different, almost wacky...

On a hot morning sometime in August, I was at Dha Nang airport feeling impressively seedy. A tall European couple stood in front of the communal TV, preventing me and my interesting lady friend from watching an Olympic event involving mayhem in the pool, there was no swimming involved but there was treading in the water and the men were armed with spearguns and I think I saw a young manatee floating within the bloody melee, I persisted to watch this asinine spectacle, reading was simply not an option physiologically, I was having a hard enough time keeping the beef noodle soup and four cups of coffee down. So as I was saying, these awful, awfully inconsiderate people blocking the TV happened to be embalmed in various types of plastic surgery spanning the cosmetic rulebook from routine augmentations to more radical procedures involving sow ears and advances in decompressed fish oils, our making funny of them kept us in a buoyant mood. De Camponator’s boarding pass said Jolee for Joleen, her middle name, minus the ‘N’. A lot like Jolie, if you ask me.

I tell her instead of getting a refreshing towellette like everyone else does — you get a Cambodian boy named Chuong! This provided further amusement until the airline announced it was time to board and we dragged ourselves into the cockpit and got us there.

Mambo Girl, (1957 Hong Kong)

She Mambo, he Mambo, she crazy, she make you wild, make everybody Mambo too, Daddy see Mambo girl sing, he see her dance, he see her crazy, he see genius in her front foot, magic in her face, but Daddy can’t dance, nor can Mommy, Mambo girl is the daughter of a toilet attendant in Hong Kong, mambo repeat x infinity

“I’m a stud muffin,” I shrug. “Take a bite.”

I’m heavy into Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama, the Zoolander of literature, although literature might be too strong a word for what it is. Make no mistake Ellis is an amazing writer and I find his ridiculous tale of Victor Anderson, similar to, yet somehow more human than Amis’ Money, a book I was unable to finish. He doesn’t namecheck everybody, but he does namecheck Evan Dando.

Ben Stiller ripped this book off so bad. Thinking I was all insightful, I just read this on wikipedia: “Ellis has stated that he is aware of the similarities, and went on to say that he considered and attempted to take legal action."

I picked up more reading time since I (flew over the top of my handlebars and) wrecked my bike and started taking the tram again. I read Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, which disappointed me.

Kicking_K’s cover story in Plan B this month on disco label Italians-Do-it-Better is my favourite piece of writing in the magazine’s history. I actually felt cool reading it. How Victor Anderson is that? I don’t own any of the label’s stuff, but I think I will ask for the three-vinyl After Dark comp for my birthday. Two of the bands, Glass Candy and the Chromatics, are from Portland. Gee Portland’s changed a lot since Big Daddy Meatstraw were running things (or since I left town).

How cool are those popsicle maracas Jeff Koons designed for Google?

Loved '400 Blows' last night. Got really sad when it ended. Was really enjoying myself in the company of Antoine Doinel.
I went home and read essays on Truffaut and reread the New Yorker ‘New Wave at Fifty’ article from a few weeks back. Critics were never as exuberant in their writing about Truffaut as he was with his movies. I'm mainly referring to Pauline Kael and David Thomson. Godard of course came to despise Truffaut's "style" of entertainment.

Guy at work just casually mentioned how he cried watching the 'Bucket List'. He said he wants to see it again, but only on DVD because he doesn’t want to go through that again’(It’s prompted me to put a photo of Godard and Jean Seberg on the wall of my new workplace, thus establishing where my cinematic allegiances lie).

My trophy for winning the first annual New St Table Tennis Championship on Saturday is proudly displayed on top of the TV set. It’s a garden gnome holding a spade that looks more like a paddle after Tobe and Suze painted it red. Since it was too wet for a barbie, Suzie made lasagne and I put so much of it away. It was really yummy. But my tummy, oh my. I won the championship with a bellyache 7-0 over Joshtown.

Been listening to The Cannanes live at Applecore bootleg I scored off Ricky. It’s a score and a half. I feel like I’m in Tutankhamen’s Tomb for the first time. The Cannanes live at Brunswick Hotel was something I participated in after the TT tourney on Saturday, down the road from tobe and suze, hitting tambourine during the encore though my timing was off, everyone seemed to love it, except James and Gavin who glared and counted every mistake (five apparently). I even stopped mid-song to part my hair. We followed this with a legendary episode of the Name Game, which lasted until 4am. They should try and make a documentary about that!

Two More from Truffaut

Mississippi Mermaid

Jean Paul Belmondo is stinking rich, running a tobacco farm on an island in the Indian ocean. Hard up, he mail-orders Catherine Deneuve, as you do, who is just ‘adorable’ as he keeps reminding her (at least she doesn’t go ‘I know!’ as most modern actresses would; Catherine appears melancholy with a touch of wonderment thus making her astronomically beautiful. Jean-Paul has no choice but to put her face on a cigarette packet). Turns out, she’s loony. They make a terrific pair. She thoroughly emasculates him, remarkable given his rarefied beefy studliness. Crimes are committed and a lovers on the run tale ensues with shades of Losey’s Gun Crazy and Hitchcock-cliches abound, as the movie shifts to Paris. It’s clunky as hell and the disjointed last act seems to have been written in one 12-hour bender where the writer, struck by an attack of the schmaltz, turns pure malevolence into a sentimental weepy that is almost as amusing as it is preposterous.

Jules et Jim

Man, bohemians are nuts. At least the irreprehensible characters didn’t die. Although the guitar troubadour lives and that guy was a slut!

Two from Truffaut

Day for Night

Movie about a movie was probably Wes Anderson’s moviemaking template. Interestingly, in the movie inside the movie, Jackie Bissett is an English girl in love with her Fiance’s Father, a relationship quandary she would revisit in the coming decade as Rob Lowe’s mummy who bangs his best friend Andrew McCarthy on a moving escalator in ‘Class’. Or was it an elevator? Maybe it was both? Even though I replayed the scenes a hundred times at the time that was a long time ago. I was 13. If only Alex Chilton had written about that.

‘Day for Night’ is more ‘Love Boat’ than ‘8 ½’ and delightful for those very reasons.

The Bride Wore Black

Jeanne Moreau is on a cursing rampage to avenge the death of her husband who was murdered on the altar steps by accidental rifle-fire from a nearby apartment where five dildos are conducting a slippery get-together. By cursing rampage, I don’t mean she curses them to smithereens, she has Strychnine and well she’s Jeanne Moreau, a terrifying fact in itself. Not sure how she found out they done it, because I fell asleep. I’ll probably never find out because I wasn't that interested in the movie to begin with. I had a bloody great snooze. Perhaps I dreamt I was in a far superior caper, scored by some immaculate Bernard Hermann rip-off.

Lee Marvin made me do it

Half asleep in bed, I hear the faint rumblings of De Campo closing the front door. She comes into the bedroom. In her hands she holds a gigantic 1200ML sealed bottle of Bundaberg Rum that she found on the footpath in front of the house next to our recycling bin. She displays it proudly, label facing front.

“Lee Marvin.” I mutter. “Lee Marvin is behind this!”

(It's the morning of the first of three Lee Marvin nights that will take place over the next three Wednesdays at Cinemateque at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI))

At breakfast Olivia mentions the Lee Marvin connection I brought up. I have no idea what she is talking about. “I never mentioned him,” I say. Yet on top of the cupboard, there it is, the mysterious bottle of rum.

After work, I order a burger deluxe from the joint in the courtyard at ACMI. Why I ordered this I do not know. The burger has two robust patties that the bun is unable to contain. It’s hot out here and the flies are buzzing around my head and trying to get into my food and I am making such a mess with this burger that I feel I need to take a shower immediately afterwards. I am 35 years old and lacking the metabolism (not to mention the good sense) to process such a beast and yet here I am eating this double-beef monstrosity. Why, I ask, why? Two words: Lee Marvin.

The Professionals, Dir. Richard Brooks (1966)

A hell of a fun movie with a hell of a cast: Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Ralph Bellamy, Claudia Cardinale and Jack Palance. There’s horse-riding, dynamite, whiskey-guzzling, bodacious gunslinging babes, ample stunt-work, quality Mexican scenery, wicked salivating bandits and cool, badass dudes. What more do you want? Outstanding Hollywood product. The candied version of The Wild Bunch.

I stayed on for part of part two of the Marvin double, 'Hell in the Pacific', and was far less impressed with that, so I went home unencumbered by strange entity.

Two films from Bergman

All these women (1964)

A pretentious music critic romps around —in a highly offensive manner— the estate of a near-dead genius on cello, groping the genius’ wives and irritating the viewer with maximum detestability.

Scenes from a Marriage (1973)

Sexless strife and trenchant powerplays among bourgeoisies in crisis. Starring Liv Ullmann, who, I had to remind myself, is only an actress, and this, only a film. Masterful.

The Cabinet of Red Crayola

Movie capsule: Dr. Caligari
”Sleepwalking Cesare, under Dr. C’s command, wakes up after 23 years to embark on a murderous rampage inside the wobbly landscape of the mentally deranged.”

Pretty straight forward capsule. I would have preferred it to be sillier or more outrageous, incorporate some wit perhaps. At least I didn’t give the entire movie away like I did last week (I Walked with a Zombie).

I was keen to see The Ancients at the Tote after the film, seemed like a cool doubleheader, until I found out it was just the Ancient and decided not to. No backbeat, no dice is how I basically roll these days; with rare exception (Mia Schoen, Kirsty Stegwazi). Instead watched some TV: The Chaser (punchable), Summer Heights High (superbly acted), NEWStopia (meh). Even though it was greatly satisfying to see Shaun Micallef back on air the only redeeming moments for me were the inspired names of his correspondents and his facial expressions. Then again I didn’t know what the hell he was on about half the time, so what do I know. Maybe it was gobsmackingly genius.

My copy of Soldier Talk by Red Crayola arrived today. Apparently I should be excited to listen to it and evidently I am. Will my thirst for funk ever cease?

Movie Reviews (in less than 25)

I Walked With a Zombie
On a sugar plantation in Haiti, voodoo has taken a woman’s soul. Why? I don’t know why not ask her mother-in-law.

Cat People
Odd reaction to birds. Met him at the zoo. Wait, who’s this sneaky tramp? Apparently it’s the other woman. Panther time!

Jerry Lewis is a total stud and other miscellaneous thoughts

Friday night the action didn’t stop. Aleks and the Ramps delivered one of the shows of the year and I held a shaker for part of it. The afterparty was a bit weird how everyone turned into reptiles and shellfish except Carla (oh my darling hot hot Steve) who was this haloed beacon of light.

I have been wanting to talk about Buster Keaton and Jerry Lewis all week after seeing a smashing double feature on Wednesday, but an inability to write a worthwhile word or two about either of these comedic geniuses had prevented me. Sometimes words don’t cut it. Keaton is a profoundly moving and inventive slapsticker/surrealist. I wonder how long it would last if we shared a flat together. My temperament would probably suit him, though I doubt he'd appreciate my fascination with his deadpan and the subsequent fixation for hours on end. I would fetch his waistcoat and maybe we could go see a Fatty Arbuckle movie together. You know he broke his neck taking a fall in Sherlock Jr? He is a very alluring apparition in this film. See it before you die. It’s absolutely wonderful. He’s a spectacular dreamer and an amazing deliverer of hair-raising stunts.

Second on the bill was Jerry Lewis' The Bellboy. Nowhere near as transcendent as Sherlock Jr. nevertheless it is, to borrow a phrase from my eloquent movie cohort, Jesse Jackson Shepherd ‘a brilliantly executed series of gags’. Jerry Lewis is a total stud.

In other news, chickpeas have secured a place in our weekday meal rotation. A type of salad De Campo makes with zucchini and couscous. I'm not just saying that because she's been unwell either, poor tootsie covered in hives, most recent break-out occuring Saturday night while watching Taxi Driver. She was like what’s happening to me and I was like listen honey a lot of people break out in hives while watching Taxi Driver. It's not that uncommon.

I then considered writing a thesis on Taxi Driver and Punch-Drunk Love: A Study of Great American Loners. It would be fairly excellent.

I feel positively well-informed

Wasn’t really expecting the Michael Mann retrospective to do to me what it did, but it did and what can I say, but oh mann!

Caught two of the three sessions at Cinemateque, saw four excellent films, basically nine and a half hours of Mr Mann, I feel positively well-informed, first week it was Manhunter and The Insider, the second week was Crime Story and Heat (which we missed on account of an ANZAC day hangover) and then last night it was Thief and Collateral. Three of them I had never seen before and those were Manhunter, Insider and Thief. All very kick-ass.

Manhunter (1986) was the first of the Lector movies, and it’s hip as shit, serial killer bonkers. The detective wears a metallic blue tie over a maroon shirt and the killer has great taste in pumping hard rock. You won’t forget the wicked finale set to In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida so tremendously entertaining. Demme’s ending now looks unoriginal to Mann’s, as he basically pinched the mood, music and colours from under Mann’s nose. Postscript: Joan Allen is unforgettable as an undersexed blind, lab assistant.

Like Demme, Mann invests as much into the small supports as he does the big leads, as all directors should, but few actually do because it takes big brains and compassion for little people. I think it’s my favourite aspect of his work.

Next was the three-hour long Insider (1999) which was thoroughly engrossing from start to finish, even though it’s one of those journalist as hero studies like All the President’s Men, which I seem to be a huge sucker for. Pacino was fab, looking strangely like my Aunt Sally, and Crowe, acts like his heart could explode from suppressed rage any second. His family bails on him and he resorts to a suicidal bender in a luxurious Louisville hotel. I must say, one of the greatest joys of cinema is watching Russell Crowe getting tormented.

Thief (1981) has the music of Tangerine Dream and James Caan doing straight-up nihilism – with a limp! He’s done big jobs, spent his twenties in the slammer, wants to do one more big job and then sit around and watch daytime TV the rest of his life (he says this jokingly, but he’ll do it). The threat of sodomy was so severe in prison, he’s no longer scared of death. He drives a Cadillac, romances Tuesday Weld with the finesse of a wrecking ball and somehow gets entangled with kingpin Grandpa Munster who displays a very nice avuncular menace and how about them strawberry blonde sideburns! Grandpa buys Caan and Weld a house in the Chicago suburbs that I swear was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that they can live comfortably in with the adopted Sudanese baby that Grandpa arranged for them also. The last job recalls Riffifi and James Belushi, Caan’s partner, dies a slo-mo shotgun to the chest in Grand Guignol-fashion, it’s arguably his finest moment (I believe a surplus of magenta DuLox was involved).

Collateral (2004) is the bomb. My favourite of all Mann’s movies. To say it’s about guys and their dicks, a comment I had read before I saw the movie, and a comment I admired at the time, but honestly, after seeing it, I find the description so witless and lazy. I mean sure there’s gunfights, but Jamie Foxx is basically playing a timid girl, afraid of the world and Tom Cruise is cyborg du jour, modelling himself on Schwarzenegger’s Terminator and executing it with indestructible playboy creepiness.

I guess the reason I have never gotten into Mann before is that his movies demand to be seen on the biggest screen you’ve ever seen with Dolby sound that deliriously pumps your gnads (wrong word, I think...)