Thursday, December 12, 2024

The days of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy feel as innocent now as those little hobbits frolicking, unburdened, in the Shire – three films adapted with sincerity, before the disastrous Hobbit prequels, and before the modern resuscitation of the franchise. Andy Serkis is directing The Hunt for Gollum, which is scheduled for 2026, and this week we have Kenji Kamiyama's The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an anime film that takes place 183 years before Frodo Baggins. But despite offering us a different medium and a different era, the world of JRR Tolkien has never felt smaller.

The War of the Rohirrim draws from the appendices to Tolkien's novels, a compendium of Middle-earth history, which mentions an old and ferocious ruler of the equestrian peoples of Rohan, Helm Hammerhand (voiced by a suitably grandiloquent Brian Cox). It imagines what pivotal role his unnamed daughter, here called Héra (Gaia Wise, daughter of Emma Thompson), may have played. The film's villain is Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), leader of the Dunlendings, who takes vengeance after he's denied Héra's hand in marriage and watches his father die from a single punch by the notably beefy Helm.

Read the full review here. 

Out this week: 

It's the end of the year, and Hollywood's franchises seem to be pumping out their last dribbles of content: the callback-heavy The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (**) and largely incomprehensible Kraven the Hunter (*). But, there's also a second release this year from the masterful Luca Guadagnino, Queer (****) – you know, as a treat. 

Written by Clarisse Loughrey

Queer draws us into Luca Guadagnino's world of desire. It's Mexico City in the Fifties, and we've settled among a collective of outcast American expats, moneyed enough that they can go in search of paradise. Sticky red motel corridors are brushed by the lights of neon signage, the air heavy with casual sex, which seems to rush by with an exhale of breath – intimate, explicit, but somehow elusive. Outside, the night sky looks like spilled ink, like it does in Douglas Sirk's technicolour masterpieces of the midcentury.

Guadagnino has followed up this year's triumphant tennis drama Challengers with a film that would seem miles apart, yet treats desire equally as a kind of supernatural possession. It's often frightening in his work, because its victims are always left with their hearts exposed, an image he treats literally here as he did in his 2018 horror remake Suspiria, and its climactic display of a woman tearing open her own rib cage.

Queer's landscape is unsettled yet beautiful; through it trudges Daniel Craig's William Lee, alter ego of the postmodernist William S Burroughs, who wrote the film's source novel. Lee has disassociated to the degree that he's started to fade from our view. The film catches him disappearing like an image into television static. Guadagnino even throws in the odd, anachronistic track – Nirvana's "Come as You Are", or Radiohead's "Talk Show Host" – to echo his displacement. He's in the wrong time, in the wrong place.

Burroughs wrote his novella in 1952, as an extension to his debut Junkie, and shortly after he'd shot dead his wife Joan Vollmer, in what he'd come to claim was an accidental discharge of his handgun. It's a feverish, agonised document of addiction and abortive passion, into which the director has weaved further elements of the author's life.

Read the full review here. 

A document of where I've gone and the things I've seen 

Thursday, 5 December
I went to a preview screening of the first couple of episodes of Disney+'s Dream Productions. A "spin-off midquel" to Inside Out (2015), it's actually a canny and funny mockumentary about film production, with a character voiced by Richard Ayoade that seems to directly reference his role in The Souvenir Part II (2021). 

Tuesday, 10 December 

Stuck in the city with time to kill, I decided to give Gladiator II another whirl. Sharks in the Colosseum! It'll never get old!  

Wednesday, 11 December 

I attended the UK premiere of Mufasa: The Lion King. I'll share my thoughts next week – but, until then, you can read my interview with the cast and crew of the previous film. 

The UK premiere of 'Mufasa: The Lion King' 

Ahead of Nosferatu's release, director Robert Eggers has talked, at length, about returning the vampire to its symbolic essence. Its history, as a creature of the imagination, has been one of steady redemption and humanisation. Vampires sparkle now. They star in sitcoms. They sit around, languid, as rock stars, aristocrats, or enviable outcasts. Eggers's Nosferatu, as an invocation of Murnau's silent classic, via Bram Stoker's novel, asks us to reconsider the vampire once more as a metaphorical force of terror, a symptom of some greater societal shame.

In that sense, the remaster of Abel Ferrara's The Addiction (1995) is oddly perfect. His work is often drawn to the idea of evil – not as some abstract potential, some looming shadow for us to fear, but as a disease that lives inside each of us, threatening to crawl its way up to the surface. A Ferrara vampire, then, is pure metaphor – once infected, philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor) won't stop mining her education for a justification for her pitiless state, as she ruminates on RC Sproul's quote, "We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners." Pictures of war crimes and genocides, history's endless cycle of depravity, decorate her mind.

The Addiction is a devoutly Catholic tale. The way Ferrara links vampirism with drug dependency – Kathleen, at one point, takes a needle to extract blood from a man passed out in the street and inject it into her own body –  becomes intermingled with the doctrine of original sin. Kathleen and, subsequently, her victims, are unable to reject the suffering inflicted on their own bodies, because they're held under the profound belief that they deserve punishment, that they were born with a weight on their back. This is faith at its most nihilistic, and central to Nicholas St John's screenplay. "I'm rotting inside," Kathleen tells us. "But I'm not dying."

Abel Ferrara's 'The Addiction' is now available on 4K.

Bill Nighy attends the 61st Annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 25, 2004 in Beverly Hills, California.

(Photo by Carlo Allegri/Getty Images)

Studiocanal are celebrating the 125th Anniversary of the birth of Alfred Hitchcock by releasing a Special Edition 11 Disc Blu-ray Boxset of the director's early works, including his silent films The Ring (1928), The Farmer's Wife (1929), and Champagne (1928) and first sound picture, Blackmail (1929). I'll personally be working my way through, but I'll kick off here next week with The Ring. 

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