I spent hours yesterday writing about seven films which were among the many reasons I've been doing other things of late rather than blogging.
For once, I forgot the cardinal rule of computing: SAVE!
This is Version Two.
The series of expletives I yelled on switching the Mac back on after the first total power blackout in the district in years didn't enrich the Kid's vocabulary since she's learned all of them ages ago.
Such filthy language is, for some, one of the more irritating features of 'Human Traffic', John Kerrigan's film-making debut. Like the second of the movies I'm going to write up more briefly now, it includes a lot of drug-taking.
 Like nearly all the others discussed here, the film has aroused as much hostility as it has acclaim.
Kerrigan was 25 when he in 1999 used a largely unknown cast to portray a wild weekend in the lives of five mates in Cardiff who live for Friday night.
Billed in France as the "trash comedy of the year" but mauled by the people who distributed a cut and "translated" version in the United States, Kerrigan's semi-autobiographical film seems to be adored and echoed as the story of their own lives by almost everybody who was into the British club scene and extended raves of the 1990s.
I wasn't so unreservedly ecstatic. I've never dropped ecstacy, since I did my "experimenting" with drugs like LSD in the early 70s and haven't smoked dope since a few years later, but I much enjoyed both the already dated music and the movie.
Kerrigan's foes review 'Human Traffic' as a pointless and plotless trip by people who haven't mustered a decent set of exam results between them and escape into drugs, cheap booze and trance-inducing music because they have nothing less boring to do. Not me.
Almost every funny and sometimes sad aspect of this story about a bunch of close friends kicked my memory circuits into action: the lengthy preparations for a manic good time, the highs and the hangovers, the adolescent hang-ups about sex, the rows and the warmth.
My own such days -- except that my weekends were spent in jazz pubs and clubs -- are over, but this film brought back that life and came as a reminder that though the politics and social values change, each generation has its own heaven and hell.
One of the silliest attacks levelled at 'Human Traffic' is that it isn't 'Trainspotting' and could be an incitement to drug abuse. In fact, Kerrigan and a likeable and gifted cast get the isolation and paranoia of "coming down" as exactly right as he does an amusing twist on being high, and the script is as full of truths as it is of the crap everybody talks when they're stoned out of their brains.
 This film isn't about the big risks of recreational drug-taking and addiction to hard drugs any more than 'Saving Grace' (2000) is a serious film about drug dealing.
On its release, Marianne thoroughly enjoyed this film about the mayhem wreaked in a Cornish village when a green-fingered, middle-aged Grace (Brenda Blethyn) turns to the industrial production of marijuana in her greenhouse, with help from her Scottish gardener (Craig Ferguson), to avoid losing her home and everything in it.
I liked it too. Nigel Cole's comedy is completely potty and, on the whole, just about credible and all too human until the end goes right over the top. By then it's too late to care. No British film has made me laugh quite so much since Monty Python. The versatile Tcheky Karyo puts in a fun performance as Jacques, the French drug dealer Grace manages in her inimitable way to track down in London.
None of the other films which get an honourable mention or more are comedies and they are quite different one from another.
However, during last night's outage it occurred to me that all of them are about life-and-death confrontations. Three are already classics and both the others deserve to be.
All five are as near perfect by my exacting standards as they can be.
In 'Laissez-Passer' (2002), the always challenging French director Bertrand Tavernier nailed a widespread myth started notably in an essay by the late, great film-maker François Truffaut.
The conventional history of French cinema, which was encouraged by the revisionist job on the Resistance the country's Communists began doing even before World War II was over, holds that it became no more than a propaganda machine for the Nazis during the occupation in the 1940s.
 Redemption from the doldrums came only, this story goes, with the "new wave" Jean-Luc Godard set rolling through the industry in 1959 with 'A Bout de Souffle' ('Breathless').
If Godard, a young Jean-Paul Belmondo at his best when he started, and an even younger and gorgeous Jean Seberg hadn't been among those to ignite scandal and innovation in a head-on clash with the conformist film industry values of the time, Truffaut's own career might never have been as remarkable as it was.
It took a Tavernier to return to source in the memoirs of wartime assistant director Jean Devaivre and screen-writer Jean Aurenche and kill the myth about the death of French film at the hands of the Gestapo and the Vichy regime. It may have taken more than half a century, but 'Laissez-Passer' tells the story of these men and others who fought their own wars against the Nazis.
Aurenche (Denis Podalydès) used all the tortuous means he could to avoid any collaboration with the occupying power, obtaining backdated contracts from friends to bluff his way out of working for Continental, the main German-backed production firm. He stayed a step ahead of the police by regularly packing his bags and moving in briefly with one girlfriend or another.
His inability to keep his mouth shut almost costs him a one-way trip to the labour camps in Germany when he becomes so drunkenly reckless in his defence of the Jews and castigation of collaborators at a bourgeois dinner party that one of these women bravely manages to silence him by knocking him out.
 His friend Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin) reluctantly ends up in the lion's den working on feature films at Continental's studios, reconstructed by Tavernier for a detailed account of endless material hassles -- wood meant for building sets is requisitioned overnight, for instance, to make coffins for troops on the Russian front -- which the Germans imposed along with tight production schedules.
The film-makers, on the surface, have a surprisingly free hand in the entertainment they provide, but in the hidden threats behind the censors I saw a Hays Commission -- the "self-regulating body" that long kept the lid on American cinema -- with the powers of judge, jury ... and executioner.
Most of the violence in 'Laissez-Passer', after the death and havoc wreaked on civilians in a routine bombing raid by Britain's Royal Air Force at the opening of the film, is implicit but omnipresent.
However, Devaivre remained an active member of the Resistance throughout his career under occupation. One day, he is sent home by the Continental's doctor to rest up with a very bad bout of the 'flu. But seriously ill, he winds up a long way from Paris and ordered by his resistance superiors to cross the Channel on an RAF Lysander's night flight with some important photos he has taken.
By the time he gets back to his apartment and an absolutely terrified brother who has covered for him by answering the 'phone with sneezes and a handkerchief over his mouth, he is half dead and falls on to the bed shortly before the doctor returns with the thought police.
"If I told you what happened," he briefly informs his brother before passing out, "you would never believe me."
Tavernier's finest achievement throughout this nightmare episode is to plunge us into the depths of the incomprehension between Devaivre, with his double life and moral dilemmas in an occupied country, and the RAF and intelligence officers who interrogate him repeatedly before packing him off back to France with a parachute.
The most remarkable aspect of this masterpiece of a movie is that it's all as close to the truth as anybody can get.
Born 10 years after the Second World War, I was regaled by two of my favourite relatives with their experiences as RAF and army officers in a different "theatre" -- Asia and the Pacific. However, their war left one of these brothers with a lifelong hatred of "the Japs. Barbarians!"
Like everybody else, I saw and was bowled over by 'The Bridge on the River Kwai' (iMDB), but Japan was the only country in Asia I was long left regarding as incomprehensible.
It was not until 1984, in France, that I saw 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence,' released here as 'Furyo'.
 Director Nagisa Oshima chose two very unlikely people, David Bowie and Japanese pop star Ryuichi Sakamoto, to give outstanding performances in his own story set in a prisoner-of-war camp, which made an indelible and very deep impression on me.
Until I saw it again last week, it was not merely the musical score by Sakamoto that stuck forever in my head, but the confrontation that helped to change my whole outlook to Japan.
When Major Jack Celliers is brought to the camp run by the iron-disciplined Captain Yonoi, the two men begin a largely silent fight to the death. With his unbending, implacable hostility during a court martial and in the PoW camp, Celliers (Bowie) slowly wins the respect of his psychological and military foe (Sakamoto).
The main theme of this underrated marvel of a movie is the head-on clash of two cultures rooted in different religious traditions, opposed social structures and codes of honour and ethics which leave little room one for the other.
The character of the title, another superb performance from Tom Conti, is Colonel John Lawrence, who lived in Japan before the war and has become the interpreter between the PoWs and their captors in matters where the language barrier is only the beginning. He is thus treated by both sides with all the ambiguity his position entails, but wins out because of his profound humanity.
We last see Conti when the British have briefly won back their mastery over much of south Asia, the judges and defendants in the war crimes trials have changed sides and he visits another survivor, the almost illiterate Sergeant Gengo Hara (Takeshi Kitano) in his jail cell.
Between them, Lawrence and Oshima helped me to begin to see just how much the British and the Japanese have in common. Both were long culturally isolated, proud peoples living on small islands, often at war with their immediate neighbours for centuries and eventually at the heart of empires each nation was to lose in the wake of World War II.
The social psychology of these two countries on opposite sides of the planet is indeed different, but its roots and the reasons for it are far from as alien as it is comfortable to believe.
In the end, Lawrence lacks the pretentiousness to give Hara a definitive answer to any of his questions about what happened and his fate. But he tries to help, particularly with an observation that has lingered in my mind since I first saw the film and is part of my complex attitude to today's imperialism exercised by the United States. In going to war, he suggests, the Japanese nation was possessed by a kind of "collective madness".
When Lars von Trier made 'Dogville' 20 years later, he infuriated a batch of US critics and much of a public who roundly condemned a European director for daring to set a film in a small US town at the height of the Depression and making it so "anti-American"!
Which it isn't.
It takes an absurdly self-defensive outlook to read anything as simple as that into a dramatic, three-hour moral fable which grabs you from the outset and doesn't have a boring moment. Despite all the friends who urged me to see it months ago, I came to 'Dogville' knowing nothing about it and was thus astonished by the sparse stage-props that leave everything up to the fabulous cast and the obvious debt to Brecht (Wikipedia).
 The changes Nicole Kidman brings to a tiny, close-knit town as a girl on the run from gangsters who wins its protection, in exchange for services rendered, form a timeless and "could happen anywhere" story of what can happen when something or somebody is seen as a threat to civilised human beings who wouldn't dream of behaving like animals.
If I had just one word for this provocative film, which doesn't pull any punches, it would be "Terrific!" ... and days later, I'm still wondering what I would have done in the end if I had been in Kidman's shoes.
I'll do no more than pass over Billy Wilder's very funny 'The Seven Year Itch', which I had miraculously failed to see from the time it was made the year I was born until this week. My only reason for mentioning it and linking, bizarrely at first sight, to Amazon France, is that you can't get the "zone 2" DVD on Amazon UK. The best thing about this re-release, apart from Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell and George Axelrod's play is one of the bonuses.
 Hence my unannounced promotional bonus here. The documentary about the battle Wilder and Axelrod waged with the Hays Commission and Roman Catholic censors before they finally managed to get the film on the screen -- but divested of two moments dug up in Fox archives and available on the DVD and also of all explicit reference to ... God-fearing America forbid! ... adultery -- is fascinating.
I also knew little of the host of difficulties, which can't have been hilarious at the time, surrounding the single most famous scene of Monroe's career and involving an air vent, two pairs of knickers, a divorce and half of New York's gawpers.
My own first really aroused bit of jaw-dropped gawping in a cinema came when I was still young and impressionable and the most talented, gorgeous and sensual actress in my whole world, Susannah York, finally took all her clothes off before my eyes and even let John Hurt live out one of my many fantasies by getting into the bath with her.
The jammy sod! That was the English of the time for "lucky bastard". But this was about as far as luck went.
In Jerzy Skolimowski's 'The Shout' (1978), Hurt and his marriage to my personal screen goddess run into mortal danger.
In what's still one of the best movies ever wrongly pigeon-holed as "horror", the often surprising Polish film-maker (iMDB) opens
the story by Robert Graves with a cricket match in a mental hospital.
It's in the wooden cabin for the pair who keep score that Alan Bates begins his strange tale for the visitor from the away team and for us.
Hurt is an experimental composer and church organist who lives with York in an isolated cottage a good walk from the nearest North Devon village. After one morning service, the musician is pumping up a deflated bicycle tyre when an imposing man in an old greatcoat launches into a chat about the sermon and the soul.
Soon, Bates has managed to invite himself to Sunday lunch.
He begins to recount the 18 years he spent in Australia living with nobody but the aborigines. Once he describes certain powers he claims to have been taught in the Outback, Hurt is as fascinated as he is sceptical.
York is swiftly repelled and unnerved by the stranger.
Bates is a man of unconventional morals, but he shares your modest critic's impeccable taste in women. In short, he wants Susannah York.
 The multiple confrontation in 'The Shout' -- ethical, cultural and sexual -- hinges mainly on the unimagined power of sound, which Skolimowski, composer Rupert Hine and two musical colleagues, and a sound department headed by Alan Bell harness to literally devastating effect.
The acting is strong, the photography splendid and the plot solid and sinister, but if this film remains as powerful and disturbing today as when it was released, it's in part because the soundtrack remains exceptional.
Skolimowksi's second lasting achievement is to bring "primitive" beliefs and practices conventionally reserved for those interested in comparative religion and anthropology straight into the heart of "modern" civilisation with a challenging immediacy. Since I'm unfamiliar with Graves's original, published in a 1929 collection, I don't know whether he or the director are responsible for the masterstroke of adding to doubts by setting the start and the end of the story in a lunatic asylum.
And that's all, folks, for now.
Except for a footnote, again to commend the Amazon people. Discovering this film anew reminded me of two others, along with 'Battle of Britain', I've long wanted to see again: 'The Killing of Sister George' and 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'
That Susannah York, generally in possession of her clothes as well as her faculties, is a luscious star in all these first-rate movies, along with the unforgettable 'Tom Jones', in which she and Albert Finney famously make sharing a meal almost the same thing as sharing a bed, has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Blithely forgetting again to do so via this log of mine, which would have earned me a couple of bob under our partnership arrangement, I ordered the first three of those films from Amazon UK on Sunday night.
The Kid still wasn't dressed when she called me to the door to take delivery of the package before it was even Tuesday lunchtime.
6:02:47 PM link 
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