Howdy! I trust you’re going to the first-ever Days Are Numbers film night (on the 23rd of February at The Montpelier in Peckham, in case you didn’t know)? You are!? Jolly good! And would you like to know a little bit more about the film we’re showing that night? You would!? In that case, read on…

I’ve made no secret in the past of my love for the films of Aki Kaurismaki, and I have declared him as probably my favourite ever director several times on this very website. Leningrad Cowboys Go America! is also probably my favourite of all his films, and also almost certainly his most famous film. For the latter accolade, you could also argue the case for his semi-recent Cannes success story The Man Without a Past, but as we’re not showing that one we’ll stick with the Cowboys!

Leningrad Cowboys Go America! is a road movie that is completely unlike any other road movie ever made. It follows the misadventures of a Soviet-era Russian rock ‘n’ roll band in America, as they try and crack into the capitalist market with their bizarre brand of Cossack rock ’n’ roll – their sound matched only in strangeness by their staggering, mega-quiffed appearance. Along the way they struggle to learn English, drink, fight, get thrown in jail and even manage to come across a long-lost cousin – who they immediately enlist as their new lead singer, of course!

It is perhaps apt that this is Kaurismaki’s most widely-known film, as it perfectly showcases his unique desert-dry wit and finely-honed eye for a droll sight-gag. Imagine Laurel and Hardy on downers. But not only is it an irreverent comic delight, Leningrad Cowboys Go America! also boasts some captivating cinematography and mise-en-scene as America itself – glimpsed from its back roads and byways through the eyes of a foreigner - rarely looks quite so raggedly charming as it does here. Additionally, some of you may be more familiar with The Leningrad Cowboys as an actual band than as a film, and indeed, following the success of this first feature they became a bona fide act and hit the road for real!

And as if that wasn’t enough to whet your appetite, check out the terrific trailer we’ve concocted below!

Not so long ago we had a bit of a chat about the retroactively established 70s British subgenre folk-horror, didn’t we; listing the likes of The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw and Tam-Lin as some of the more notable efforts that potentially make up this somewhat loosely defined category…

Well, in The Shout I think I’ve found another film that might just about be able to call itself folk-horror, but we’ll have to stretch the definition a tiny bit to get it in there. For a start, it’s set in the present day (ie the time of its making), but this shouldn’t be too much of a problem as so too are The Wicker Man and Tam-Lin to name but two. More of a problem may be that unlike any other film or work of fiction that I’ve heard offered up as folk-horror, the “folk” element in The Shout is not native to these shores - but then, that’s also what makes it so interesting.

Alan Bates stars as bearded eccentric Crossley, who regales young cricketer Tim Curry with a peculiar story during a charity game at an asylum in rural Devon. This story kick-starts a bizarre flashback in which we see Crossley arrive as an uninvited guest at the home of a local musician and his wife (John Hurt and the late Susannah York) and in turn appal and intrigue them with his tales of living with aboriginals in the Australian outback – including the ghoulish information that he may have murdered several of his own half-native children. Despite fearing this stranger, and slowly realising that he may have his wife under some kind of spell, the musician becomes morbidly fascinated with his claim that he knows an aboriginal “terror shout” which can instantly kill anyone who hears it, and after Crossley grants him a demonstration in the rolling dunes of the Devonshire coast, things go from odd to worse.

So, as you can see, whilst folk-horror staples generally rely on paganism and olde Britannic folklore for their mystical spookiness, The Shout imports its myth and legend from the colonies, with the result being just as mystical and spooky, perhaps even a little stranger, for it. It’s still very much a British affair however, and the south-west scenery is rendered as a stunning, if uncanny and oddly looming, backdrop by Polish ex-pat Jerzy Skolimowski (who made one of the most beautiful and poetic British films of the 60s with the unfairly neglected Deep End). My one relatively minor complaint, however, is that Bates somewhat overplays his hand as the mysterious Crossley, delivering a performance that is a little too arch and theatrical to be wholly taken seriously. But then maybe that’s the point?

You can watch a pretty brilliant trailer for The Shout below, which is every bit as hammy and off-the-wall as Alan Bates’ performance in the film. It doesn’t come across that clearly in the trailer, but the sound design on the titular “shout” when you eventually hear it is top-notch and very unsettling, even if it probably won’t kill you…

Mark Cousins’ cousin Les Cousins – Daysarenumbers’ resident guttersnipe – casts a beady, embittered eye over another film that’s got right on his tits…

Really Serious Voiceover-bro: “You should know up front, this is not a love story.” Me: “Yes it fucking well is!”

It is a sodding love story though, so I don’t know where they get off lying to people and telling them that it isn’t. Okay, so Third Rock From the Sun and New Girl don’t actually end up staying together at the end of the film, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a love story. Let’s take a quick look at the film Love Story; not only do Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw not end up together at the end of Love Story, but Ali MacGraw actually fucking dies in hospital in a really sad way! But did the makers of Love Story try and convince people that it wasn’t a love story? No, they even went and called it Love Story!

This barefaced, shameful lie isn’t the only thing that bothers me about (500) Days of Summer, oh no – EVERYTHING bothers me about (500) Days of Summer. For starters we’ve got the despicably unnecessary and try-hard use of parenthesis in the title, which I am going to remove with non-consequential spite for the rest of this review. The plot, for what it’s worth, sees drippy office-worker Third Rock From the Sun fall in love with dippy office-worker New Girl, but because that is actually worth very little, they tell the whole thing out of sequence. Constructing your screenplay out of sequence got old the minute some fuckwit decided to rip-off Pulp Fiction for the first-time, and it really is lazy storytelling of the highest order – very much used in this instance to hide the fact that there is nothing remotely of interest narrative-wise going on here. We the viewer are once again being manipulated by the makers of this abomination. Are we just going to sit there and take it?

So without anything approaching a decent plot, what are we left with? Two things, really – an audio/visual assault of unamusing/unmoving set-pieces and a twats gallery of deeply unlikeable characters. One of these set-pieces in particular really sticks in my craw – the totally tiresome “Foreign Film” parody that is shoehorned into the middle of this film (although chronologically-speaking, it’s actually towards the end of the film *yawn*). It’s the oldest joke in the book, and I very much doubt anyone associated with the making of 500 – take that! - Days of Summer has actually seen a foreign film that isn’t Amelie. Likewise, one deeply unlikeable character in particular really gets my goat – Third Rock From the Sun himself. I think they seriously misjudged how much empathy a sensible person could possibly have for his character in this whole silly, sordid affair. He comes across as creepy, frightening and like he’s constantly packing a maladjusted misogynist boner. As much as I hate Zooey Deschanel (star of TV’s New Girl, lest we forget) I just want him to leave her alone.

And if it’s bad writing you want, 500 Days of Summer wraps things up with an absolute zinger. The Zooey Deschanel character in this film is actually called Summer, and at the end of the film after she’s sensibly got well shot of him, Third Rock From the Sun encounters a potential new girlfriend called… Wait for it… Autumn! Autumn. You would inevitably be laughed out of any creative writing class in the land for penning such a contrived howler as that, yet such a fate would surely still be too good for the writers of this insipid claptrap.

What you should watch instead: E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten – A 78 minute-long cycle of abuse, violence, torture, grime, dirt and disembowelment. Now that’s definitely not a love story.

by MCCLC

Now before we begin, I don’t want to hear any giggling from the back, and I certainly won’t entertain any demands to investigate my download history…

But, in all serious, it does continue to surprise me that more films haven’t been made about the subject of pornography. As an industry it’s always struck me that it simply has to have potential drama seeping (surely not spurting) from its every pore – love, emotion, atypical human relationships, money, abuse – it seems to have the lot. Films that do attempt to tackle this still admittedly rather taboo topic, however, seem to fall into one of three camps; they’re either overly occupied with authentic aesthetic (Boogie Nights), morbidly explicit (Lukas Moodysson’s A Hole in My Heart), or worryingly giddy and accepting of their subject (The Girl Next Door, I Want Candy and several other pretty shameful teen sex comedies).

Easily the best film I’ve ever seen that concerns itself with the business of pornography is Shohei Imamura’s in-turns absurd and philosophical social satire The Pornographers. The great Japanese filmmaker here bypasses the pitfalls that undermined the work of both Paul Thomas Anderson and Moodysson by refusing to show even the slightest flicker of any onscreen action and instead focus on what’s going on behind the camera. The film’s central character is the affable if inevitably slovenly smalltime porn peddler Mr Ogata, who sees his life dive into tailspin after his widowed landlady lover takes ill and leaves him juggling the care of a pair of selfish, rapidly maturing teenagers with the daily grind of his disreputable and increasingly dangerous line of work.

The Pornographers is largely powered along by Shohei Imamura’s highly distinctive direction; in fact, in the big Oscar ceremony that’s occasionally going on in my mind, he’s always a sure-fire contender for best director for his work here alone. Imamura spends most of the film carefully placing his camera behind curtains, slightly ajar doors, windows, and in several instances a fishtank with a stonking great carp in it (which Mr Ogata’s landlady believes is the ghost of her dead husband, but that’s another story), with each inspired set-up giving his story a perfect, voyeuristic framework. Another notable technique he employs is that of filming most of the drama in fixed long-shots, only allowing the camera to move in a scarce handful of scenes – it’s worth noting that for all his stylistic complexities, Imamura once served as an assistant to Yasujiro Ozu, and through its lack of movement The Pornographers also manages to invoke that master director’s hypnotic, gentle rhythms, all amounting to a vivid and endlessly fascinating whole.

You can watch the opening sequence from The Pornographers below. No subtitles, I’m afraid, but I’m sure you can guess what’s going on. Stay tuned for some wonderfully weird-y music, too.

Yes, indeed! Days Are Numbers are proud to announce that we’ll be screening Finnish cult supremo Aki Kaurismaki’s bizarre rock ‘n’ roll road movie Leningrad Cowboys Go America! for our inaugral film night at the Montpelier in Peckham on Thursday the 23rd of February!!!

There will also be lots of music and plenty of laughs,  so keep your eyes peeled for more info. In the meantime, have a butcher’s at this teaser trailer wot we just cooked up in house…

That’s right, folks. Exciting news… Days Are Numbers will be hosting their very first film night on the 23rd of February 2012 at The Montpelier in Peckham.

We can’t yet reveal exactly what film we’re going to show, but it’s bound to be something pretty unmissable, and there’ll be music, booze and other festivities as well.

Check out the trailer below to get an idea of the audio/visual freak-out that’s about to go down, and stay tuned to this very website for more info.

Just when you thought it was safe…

Hello and welcome to Director of the Month, your cut-out-and-keep guide to the very finest auteurs in filmland…

This Month: Ken Russell

Nationality: English

D.O.B: 03/07/1927 Died: 27/11/2011

Years active: 1964 – 2002

Number of films (as director): 19

Do say: “You are quite possibly the most easily identifiable and wildly original British filmmaker of all-time, in terms of uniqueness of style and grandiosity of vision… Yes, more so than Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock, even.”

Don’t say: “Calm down, dear… It’s only a commercial!” – He’s NOTHING like Michael Winner!!!

Who Hell He? When Ken Russell passed away at the end of last year, we here at Days Are Numbers were genuinely really rather upset. You see, Aneet and I had always referred to the great man as “Uncle Ken” (as did many others!), which is perhaps an odd moniker for a shamelessly bold and provocative film director responsible for a handful of the most controversial films ever made in this country. But then there was something genuinely avuncular about Ken Russell, as much of an enfant terrible as he undoubtedly was. I suppose this “uncle” tag most likely stemmed from Russell’s many appearances on British television over the last three or four decades (culminating in a stint on Celebrity Big Brother!), and the fact that he always came across as cheerily good-natured, despite having been dished out some truly rotten hands by the film biz. But I also like to think it’s because we’re all more than a little bit proud of Ken…

Come on, then! Name some great – truly great - British filmmakers? You’ve got the aforementioned Powell and Hitchcock (the latter making most of his great films in America), Charlie Chaplin (who made all of his great films in America) and admittedly a fair few others besides (I’d like to give a nod here to my own personal favourite, Bill Forsyth)… But how many of them could claim to possess the same jaw-dropping panache, visual bravura and the bleary, cheery way of manhandling life, love and death that good old Uncle Ken had? Let’s face it, UK-based British filmmakers (with the exception of Michael Powell) have never fully managed to tear themselves free from the constraints of their social-realist roots in quite the way that their French and Italian counterparts have, so thank God for Ken Russell. Through the 60s and 70s, and even into the 80s, he acted as an unbendingly forthright agent provocateur, making the sort of risque, bedazzling and outlandish cinema that had never been filmed on this soil before, and probably never will be again.

Six of the best:

Billion Dollar Brain (1967)

For his first big-budget film, Ken Russell took on what may initially seem to be a somewhat unsuitable assignment; the third motion picture outing for Len Deighton’s anti-007, not-so-super spy Harry Palmer. But what we have here is one of the most impressive films of the Cold War era, and that’s as much down to its tour-de-force direction as it is the source material’s Bond-baiting complexities. The plot sees speccy anti-hero Palmer (played to perfection by, you guessed it, Michael Caine) aiding Soviet Russia against an attempted coup by a right-wing American terrorist group (!), and Russell keeps it slipping and sliding along nicely, before capping it all off with an ice battle tribute to Eisienstein’s Alexander Nevsky. You won’t see that kind of thing in Octopussy!

Women in Love (1968)

Some films you can’t really talk about without referring to that scene, and yes, the Oli Reed vs. Al-bo Bates nude wrestling match in Women in Love is an absolute hoot. It’s also perhaps the most distinctly Russell-esque moment in his entire canon, but let’s not let it distract from the fact that this is one of the most beautifully crafted and haunting films of the 60s. In turns vulgar, pastoral, visceral and poetic, this is a note-perfect transference of D.H. Lawrence from page to screen, and if anyone can think of a more perfect combination of writer and director, then please let me know.

The Music Lovers (1970)

The first of three barmy big-screen biopics of the lives of the great composers that Ken Russell would helm, this is also by far the best. A swaggeringly provocative - and not strictly accurate - telling of the tale of Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers depicts the legendary Russian as a driven and devilish genius - a closet homosexual who ultimately pushes his neglected, nymphomaniac wife into the abyss of insanity. The musical-fantasy sequence in which several Tchaikovsky rivals – and even friends and relatives – are decapitated by cannon fire to the bombast of the ’1812 Overture’ is once seen, never forgotten.

The Devils (1971)

Not only the most controversial film Ken Russell ever made (no mean feat as we’ve already seen), but also his greatest and perhaps even the greatest British film of the 1970s - it is impossible to imagine that the intense, warped grandiosity of The Devils could have been pulled off by any other director. Ever. Uncle Ken favourite Oliver Reed is also on top form here as a preening but ultimately noble priest, who inadvertently becomes the eye of the storm when political maneuvering in plague-ridden, medieval France leads to some of the lewdest, most blasphemous mayhem ever committed to celluloid. However, as shocking as these scenes are (even today!), The Devils is also a very heartfelt and even poignant film, as devout Catholic Russell unflinchingly investigates the savage actions an all-too-powerful organised religion can sometimes drive its followers into taking.

Savage Messiah (1972)

From Ken Russell’s most controversial film, to his most underrated; another biopic, but this time ditching the great composers to focus on the life of French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Naturally enough, our hero had more than his fair share of sexual hang-ups and Savage Messiah centres on his doomed relationship with a Polish governess almost twice his age. Russell manages to capture the burning intensity of the artists’ notoriously nocturnal working life, and along with some very fine set design from Derek Jarman (taking it down a notch or two from his work on The Devils), we are also rewarded with the most sourly witty closing exchange in film history (but you’ll have to watch it to find out what that is).

Tommy (1975)

From classical composers and French sculptors, to rocking out with The Who! If it cried out for a flamboyant rendering with a quasi-religious slant, producers in the 70s knew who to call. A bit of a hodge-podge of an album, if truth be told, this seminal 60s rock opera gets a bombastic boost from Russell’s archly theatrical staging, psychedelic shock-tactics (Ann-Margaret drowning in baked beans!) and cheeky humour. The most mindbending marriage between rock ‘n’ roll and the movies ever, this is also strangely moving too.

What about the rest?: At first glance French Dressing (1964) may seem like a fairly run-of-the-mill British seaside comedy, but upon closer inspection many distinctly Russell-ian traits are already in place (including several quite stunning sequences set to classical music)… The Boy Friend (1971) is a tad overlong and suffers from some rather pedestrian plotting - but it also boasts some of Uncle Ken’s most infectiously joyous direction, and a showstopping song and dance routine from none other than Barbara Windsor… Mahler (1974) is a return to the lives of the great composers (Gustav Mahler this time, natch), although ever-so-slightly less feverish than The Music Lovers, and less memorable overall… Franz Liszt gets a good going-over in Lisztomania (1975), which could well win the title of “Most Mental Film Ken Russell Ever Made”, and it’s pretty fantastic too… Valentino (1977) was the first flop of what had been a perversely commercially viable run of films, prompting Russell himself to ask “What idiot made this?”, although it’s not actually all that bad… An even bigger disaster loomed on the horizon in the shape of Altered States (1980) a curate’s egg of mindboggling visuals and bizarre sci-fi melodrama which became a byword for both box-office poison and technical innovation… After all that, the S&M-centric neo-noir Crimes of Passion (1984) seems comparatively tame and forgettable… Gothic (1986) is much better (and the first Ken Russell film I ever saw!), being a bonkers, bawdy and, erm, gothic reimagining of the events that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein… Salome’s Last Dance (1988) delves behind the scenes of a private performance of Oscar Wilde’s banned play, coming on like a heady mix between Gothic and The Boy Friend, but it soon collapses under the weight of too much farce and too many in-jokes… The Lair of the White Worm (1988) is a totally bonkers blood ‘n’ guts tale adapted rather liberally from Bram Stoker, and if you ask me, it’s one of the most thoroughly enjoyable British horror films of the 80s… While he would bow out that decade with an underwhelming return to old D.H. Lawrence with The Rainbow (1989)… The engrossing Whore (1991) is sadly the sole 90s effort from a now very much maligned Ken Russell – it’s a cutting response to the pure fantasy of Pretty Woman as a never-better Theresa Russell (no relation) gives us an all-together more honest account of the oldest profession in the title role… It seems pretty harsh to judge The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002) too harshly as it was made for absolute peanuts, largely at Chez Russell itself, and even then it manages to retain a sort of winning, grubby charm…

And that’s yer lot, I’m afraid… What’s that? Yes, Ken Russell did direct 90s TV bonkfest Lady Chatterly… And yes, he also directed the frankly insane Uri Geller TV movie Mindbender. But let’s not bother with those now. If you’re hungry for more, get yourself on Youtube and check out anything from his early BBC days, before kicking yourself that TV isn’t even remotely that elegant and intellectual anymore. Additionally, I can’t recommend his first short, Amelia and the Angel, highly enough.

RIP Ken Russell. We’ll certainly never see your like again.

It took me a long, long time to get round to watching Death Proof, and to be honest with you, that was probably largely down to the fact that I haven’t been overly impressed with the general output of Quentin Tarantino in this century…

Don’t get me wrong, both Kill Bills 1 and 2 and Inglourious Basterds have their moments; it’s just that overall they’re a bit, well silly, and I rather assumed that Death Proof would be similarly flawed. It also didn’t help that its release was so truncated, what with the whole “It’s going to be released as a Grindhouse-style double-bill with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror… Oh no wait, it isn’t.” It just felt like it was going to be little more than an interesting stopgap, and even then only interesting if you have a passion for 70s exploitation cinema – which I sort-of do, but that’s beside the point.

But how wrong I was! Not only is Death Proof the best film Quentin Tarantino has made since Jackie Brown, but it is also the most intelligent and joltingly original horror film I’ve seen in a long, long time. Kurt Russell is on super-sinister, almost Snake Plissken-like form as “Stuntman” Mike, a man whose occupation may be no mystery, but whose motivations – at least initially – very much are. Following a playful, slithering build-up, during which we are introduced to a notably feisty quartet of potential victims, we eventually learn that Mike likes to smash into young ladies in his vocationally appropriate ”death proof” car, leaving them for dead and making it all look like an accident… And that he’s got our four new friends in his sights.

I really don’t want to say anymore about how the action unfolds, but Tarantino engrossingly spools out his story in a way that manages to critique the codes and conventions of the slasher genre, while simultaneously revamping it. “Stuntman” Mike is an extraordinarily original horror/exploitation bogeyman in that he is in turns aggrandised, demystified, fetishised and humiliated; and Kurt Russell has the time of his life the whole way through, with a special nod due to each and every female member of cast, as well. And also, don’t overestimate the whole “authentic Grindhouse vibe” that Death Proof was sold on (ie fake scratches on the film, deliberate sound glitches etc.), it’s really only used as an enigmatic stylistic tool here - remember how little Jackie Brown actually resembled a blaxploitation film? Well, that’s how little Death Proof actually resembles an exploitation film – and in equally the same way, it’s simply better than almost every film that it’s an apparent homage to.

Never mind all those fake trailers that were supposed to go in between Death Proof and Planet Terror in the cinema (Edgar Wright seems to be the only one who really “got” the idea, anyway), let’s instead enjoy the actual trailer for the whole sorry Grindhouse experiment itself… Happy Halloween everybody!

Vampires, eh? Those guys will never go out of fashion, it seems. Surely the man on the street’s bogeyman of choice, even if they are more likely to be found sulking in their bedrooms a la the Twilight kids or getting their heads kicked in by Wesley Snipes these days…

While Dracula is undoubtedly the most famous bloodsucker of them all, and a true screen icon from Nosferatu to Christopher Lee, many of my favourite vampire films are based upon a tale which actually predates Bram Stoker’s seminal story; Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella ‘Carmilla’, in which the chief creature of the night is female. Lady vampires were a very big deal in the 60s and 70s, and with Gogol’s similarly pre-Dracula short story ‘Viy’ also providing inspiration, these seductive tales full of sensual danger were a perfect fit for practitioners of classy Euro-horror. Roger Vadim gave us Blood and Roses, Mario Bava chipped in with Black Sunday, France’s Jean Rollin and Spain’s Jess Franco were very interested in inter-vampire lady love indeed, and even the Soviet Union produced its first ever horror film in the form of an adaptation of the aforementioned Viy.

Daughters of Darkness is perhaps the best femme vampyr film of them all, however, and represents everything that’s brilliantly atmospheric, sly and provocative about this beguiling subgenre. Kumel’s film introduces us to Stefan and Valerie, newlyweds stopping off at an isolated Belgian hotel, en route to visiting the groom’s family in England. There they rather spookily remain the only guests until the arrival of the glamorous and mysterious Countess Bathory, who manages to not only enthral and unsettle our honeymooners in equal measure, but who also may just be responsible – along with her similarly shady sidekick, Ilona - for a recent spate of bizarrely vampiric murders in the surrounding area.

If you’re looking for a brainy, artfully erotic vampire film for your Halloween viewing next Monday, Daughters of Darkness has so much to recommend it that it’s hard to know where to begin. It is beautifully shot and designed (in particular the icily grand hotel interiors), and the cast are uniformly superb, with Nouvelle Vague icon Delphine Seyrig absolutely spellbinding as the eerily charming Countess. Kumel, who co-wrote the screenplay with a few nods to ‘Carmilla’, keeps us guessing throughout, and the film has more than a few juicy ambiguities to roll our way, including several enigmatic question marks lingering over the Countess and even a few over supposedly trusty Stefan himself – all resulting in a sophisticated bloody vintage that gets better with age.

You can see a bit of what I’m banging on about if you check out the trailer from Blue Underground (who put out a terrific DVD release) below.