The title remarks upon a 54 year old crack and heroin addict who appears to be on his last legs. Robert Liebling is a fading rock star, who never had his big moment. Pentagram was a heavy metal band described as a street version of Black Sabbath. Liebling was their singer. Despite being an extremely powerful performer and artist – which becomes apparent to all who witness him on stage or on listening to one of his band’s albums, he was also the band’s undoing.

When we first meet Liebling it’s not quite a pathetic picture. It ticks all the boxes for pathetic. An aging child (Peter Pan syndrome,) with no skills or experience to progress him in the job market. No money, drug addict, still living in his parent’s basement. But there is more to Liebling than this position that he has found himself in. He is driven and he is an addict. If he can succeed and if he can kick it, he could be more than what we see. He’s far more interesting and vital as a person than what is granted the title of pathetic loser.

Liebling was unreliable as a performer due mostly to his drug habit. He was disrespectful when others would be cautious. He was a red hot ball of rage, sex, drugs and rock and roll. An artist with integrity; never willing to compromise. That is only part of the reason that their big breaks failed to deliver a rise to fame.

Pentagram did draw a loyal following in the 70’s but the live shows were all disasters – Liebling made sure of that. A fan (Sean Pelletier) who befriended Liebling, believes in him and spends most of the film trying to give Pentagram one last shot at getting a great record made and sold.

This story is a tragedy of what drugs can do to a man. How hard it can be to pick yourself up off the floor. How some semblance of life as an individual, a routine, interaction with society, being productive – can be important, as a way to move forward. For Liebling it’s all about the music, but the other half of his mind responds to this with – Yes, but it’s also all about the woman. And all about the drugs. Not necessarily in that order.

With the importance of this band to the heavy metal genre, it seems like a missed opportunity that this hasn’t equated to record sales. In the film we are introduced to Down’s Phil Anselmo – formerly of Pantera; one of the most successful heavy metal bands of the new age (80’s-00s). He approaches Liebling with a genuine offer to make a great record, if he can stay out of trouble and follow through.

Much of the focus of the film seems to be the question – Will Liebling pull it together long enough for one last shot at greatness. Liebling’s friend and manager, Pelletier guides most of the interview questions, so it doesn’t get deep and probing. The relationship with Liebling’s new girlfriend, halfway through the film is barely brushed over. We only know what effect she has on him – giving him a reason to quit drugs, making him feel alive and really start doing something with his life and eventually driving him half crazy.

She gets a restraining order against him, which he ignores and ends up doing jail time. Pelletier puts forward the argument that maybe for right now, this is a good thing. Because instead of being off trying to kill himself with drugs, he’s recuperating in a cell.

2.5 stars

Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) is mentored by Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) to attempt to study and practice an experimental medical approach called talking therapy. He tries it out on a serious patient, Sabina (Keira Knightly.) She has physical tics and jerks, irrational reactions to the smallest things. When she is committed to the hospital in the beginning – she won’t stop screaming, fighting, struggling, freaking out and laughing hysterically, for the whole trip that we see.

When Jung begins to interview her, she appears to calm down. Her reactions are physical in the jaw, stutters – drawn out and emotionally stretching. She suffers anxiety and at first it’s unclear what else she suffers from. When Jung reaches tough subjects, she is open and honest with him – which surprised me. Perhaps doctors were more trusted back then, even by those suffering paranoid delusions and physically affecting emotional spasms.

When he hits a sore point, she seems to react with fear, with what I thought was the need to urinate or defecate. In fact what she feels is a desperate need to masturbate – and the humiliation related to the fits (and sexually deviant reasons for them) that this brings forth. She is overcome by erotic impulses.

The music and the cinematography are suspenseful and deliberate, but the film is not a thriller; more of an eerie drama about sex and therapy.

The more often she meets with Jung to discuss her problems, the more she appears to heal – towards feeling and being well. Jung also tries to look into what positive social outcomes she could attain; where her interests lie, and therefore what kind of work she might pursue.

She wants to be a therapist, (though I believe the term if it does at this time exist, is still in its infancy,) like Jung. In order to help her, he enables her to assist him on some of his experiments and she proves to be a particularly insightful trainee.

Freud (who believes that all mental illness is sexual in nature) prescribes a friend to Jung’s care. Freud’s friend Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel) is something of a sexual anarchist. He encourages Jung to pursue his private desires to cheat on his wife with his patient Sabina. It becomes blurry which of them is in fact receiving the analysis, Jung or Gross.

Jung finally gives in to the carnal pleasures of Sabina who it seems is in love with Jung. He is her first. The wife (Sarah Gadon) is an unfortunate victim of this betrayal. She loves her husband, does everything to please him and even refuses to lay blame when he cheats, only asks that he return from it, as if it were a bad habit.

The friendship between Jung and Freud which starts so pleasantly and passionately with their thirteen hour discussion of their work, feels a struggle through Freud’s impression of Jung’s mistake in how he treats his women. And through Jung’s insistence that not everything is about sex and that Freud is not his father – a role in the relationship which he seems to resent Freud for attempting to perform.

Beautifully haunting music sets the scene. Jason Patric as the grownup Shakes gives a sufficiently haunted and fitting narration for the innocence stolen from these kids, because of a stupid prank.

Hell’s Kitchen – sweaty ass neighbourhood in New York. You know the place, the place you grew up hating. Spent your childhood and will never go back to.

1966. A bond of brotherhood for four young boys. Fearless and invincible is youth.

They are content with very little and feeling a sense of ownership over their domain.

A world where Catholicism is important as is a sense of street justice. No crimes against the neighbourhood are permitted, and punishment is severe. Robert De Niro is the cool, approachable and staunch mentor and priest, Father Bobby.

King Benny (Vittorio Gassman) is the friendly neighbourhood mobster who relents the insistence of ‘Shakes’ to hire him to deliver packages.

The theme so far is patience and coldness as valued personality traits – meanwhile these kids live their days in heat, and always with a sense of urgency – to get laid, to grow up, to get paid. Lives centred around moral grey areas. And yet still adhering to a code.
These are kids with no clue about culture, but pure passion for the sweet simplicities – peeking into women’s changing rooms, playing basketball and skiving off.

Father Bobby just wants them to keep out of any serious trouble. He looks out for the boys. When the littlest John (Geoffrey Wigdor) gets beaten up by one of his mother’s boyfriends, the kid ends up in the hospital. Father Bobby has a chat with the guy and threatens to put him in the morgue should something like it happen again.

When we see these kids as adults, changed by years, they still share that bond. Perhaps stronger now because of what they all went through in the detention centre.

Fatman (Frank Medrano) – “Keep yourself mean and cut your life around it. That street is like a soup dish of life. You guys are soft like bread.”

Pranks are part of daily life for these boys, consequences are not. It’s a shock to them and to the neighbourhood when they get in deep trouble and have to face time. But it is also somehow nearly inevitable – except it could have been avoided if fate hadn’t planted them in shit. Because Father Bobby was steering them straighter.

They are justifiably afraid when the incident happens and they end up facing time. So young, so soft. I feel for the kids. And for their loved ones. As much as they fear doing time, they have no idea what they are about to endure.

Be strong, be cold inside. Don’t let them touch your heart. And when you get past this, you will forget the ghost of your past which the state took from you. And find someone, some thing to bring that smile back. The grownup Shakes’ narration meets the feeling of terror that these boys are about to fall into.

I doubt they’ll ever find a way out. Even after it’s over. The event will alter their deepest selves and replace the life they were meant for, with one that tastes more real.

Kevin Bacon as Nokes is an incredible villain and he has been dealt with by the time this coming of age story becomes a courtroom drama/thriller.

3 stars

It has been stated that nothing changes in this tragic drama film. That because we find meaning in a story from the change in values between the beginning and the end, and the reason for that change, that there is no change in Leaving Las Vegas and therefore no meaning.

I disagree. A man, Ben (Nicolas Cage) sets out to drink himself to death and nothing sways him from this course. What changes is that he begins his journey alone and ends it no longer alone, perhaps in love. But either way, no longer alone. That is a change, and a profound one.

There is also one other, I noticed in my most recent watching of this film. He begins his journey intent on killing himself, and in the end he finally achieves his goal. That also is a change, the difference between the wanting and the doing. And I think even the character changes over the course of the movie. That he is never swayed from his decision, just makes it a truer story, not less of a story. And certainly not without meaning.

A portrait, as portraits go, this is a beautiful picture of a man falling. Into the bottom of his bottle.

At some point, self-abuse of any kind becomes uncomfortable for other people – socially unacceptable. The kind where you only do it on the weekends, or the evenings is fine. Everybody does it, that’s the secret. But when you start to become too obvious. Lose sight of the facade. Disturbing other people’s conservative day jobs, the daily grind and threaten to give the game away. Then it’s time to politely get rid of you.

Sera (Elisabeth Shue) is a prostitute. She approaches her work as a film actor would prepare for a role. She becomes the fantasy that they desire, she can be what they wish for. And she’s good at it. And she knows it. Her pimp, Uri (Julian Sands) is a scary guy – and not always on hand to protect her.

Vegas is the place to do it. Ben hires Sera for a night to keep him company. They end up just drinking and talking. The binge drinking will eventually make him useless sexually, well half useless. But she doesn’t care about that.

They become friends. It could only happen in Vegas. This is the romantic side of suicide and the sexy side of Vegas. The film catptures the purity of the emotional persona of Las Vegas, with all the dirty trimmings.

Sera talks things over with a psychiatrist in confessional tapes.
She meets Ben at a time when her pimp is paranoid and needs money. So he is less forgiving when she returns with less than a night’s work worth of cash. Uri, the pimp, is being hunted by his people so he lets Sera go.

And so Ben and Sera go out for dinner.

We see so many things – hints of ghosts of the charming screenwriter Ben used to be – before the drinking took over his life.

“You can never, ever ask me to stop drinking.”

This film is as much about the city of Las Vegas as it is about Ben’s journey towards death. It’s a city that doesn’t sleep, pause, give in, judge you – but it does forgive.

The city is a place like no other. A place, the third lead character in the film. It beckons to the rejected ones, the sick, the leftover people. The ones that can’t fall in line and conform to the tidy, neat little non-dodgy, conservative nine-til-five day jobs. The non-working class. That day job that watches with luminescent lights, to see if you’re shaking too much, smoking too much, thinking too much, talking too much, laughing too much, dancing too much, enjoying too much. If you are imagining too much, creating too much, trying too hard.

Sera and Ben, the happy couple, they say nasty things to each other as they struggle to negotiate their lives around their unorthodox relationship. Two crusty demons justifiably and consensually stranded in the desert.

There is a reason some people are stone cold cruel. Because if they weren’t, there are those who would take advantage.
Hearts will be broken. As they do in a tragedy. This is inevitable. People are broken repeatedly. This is Vegas. Home to the homeless, the defeated, the lost and alone. Where can she go, when Vegas doesn’t love her back? Only to him.

4.5 stars

Billy (Rick Schroder) has been in trouble – living by the law of the street, getting wasted and taking anything he wanted. Letting himself be led into worse trouble by his crazy raw-headed friend, Louie (David Anthony Marshall) – the shit gets deeper (shit happens, it’s just the depth that varies.) Billy gets in over his head, gets caught and finds himself, after doing kid time at juvenile detention, back at home with his brother, Joe (Brad Pitt) and his mother, (Carrie Snodgress). At home with nothing to show for his troubles.

Billy tries to start over. Stay out of trouble. But the locals aren’t making it easy for him and Joe’s resentment hurts. Joe runs track and he pushes himself too hard. Win at all costs, every time. Their mother appears like a ghostly waif, trying to support both boys but barely affecting either of them. The boys try to care for their mother, but she is ineffectual and out of touch, half crazy and ignorant of the bad in both boys.

Across the Tracks is a small story about two brothers from different worlds and what happens when those worlds collide.

This film is trapped in the 80s and Billy’s conflict with the ‘jocks’ at his new school is laughable – if only because they look odd and idiotic.

Joe is desperate for attention and reassurance, and with his dad gone, he turns to his mother for this. But she is often busy trying to clean up after Billy. This is at the centre of the conflict in this film.

Billy’s friend, Louie resurfaces to save Billy from a beating by the school jocks. Louie is the reason for Billy’s arrest and the initiator of the crime that got Billy put away. Billy didn’t rat on Louie, so Louie served no time. It’s obvious that the scale on this friendship swings one way.

The lack of subtlety in the message of this film makes it seem at times like a Christian TV movie. It is, however, elevated to the ranks of retro guilty pleasure due to the Stella performances by Schroder and Pitt.

Billy is wedged between his family and his friend. It’s hard for him to choose, because doomed to descend as this friendship is, he sees parts of himself or the person he sees himself as, in Louie.

Billy isn’t that badass he sees in Louie. And the playful friend Louie puts on, is a mask to hide the leech at his core.
Louie is a parasite that imitates the images of a misunderstood rebel, like the image of James Dean’s Jim Stark (Rebel Without a Cause.)

But only Billy is fooled by this. Joe is not. Their mother is the run ragged, tortured, leftovers of a person that she is because of Billy and Joe and their effect on her.

Running becomes the one thing that ties these brothers together, but Joe is so competitive (he has a lot on the line,) that running is more than a passion, it’s a religion to him and he takes it personally. Billy’s past is entwined with his self-image. It’s in too deep under his skin and Louie knows how to play with his weaknesses.

Joe tries to look out for his brother, but the old habits are keeping them apart.

3 stars

Claire Danes undergoes an impressive transformation to become the aggressively shy and curious, passionate, compassionate, amazing mind of Temple Grandin, the protagonist of this story.

She is a young student with Aspurgers syndrome and an interest in cows.

She has the mind of an engineer, but she also understands animals. From an early stage, she applies her attention to solving the problem of a badly designed cattle slaughter process. This is a world dominated by men, so it takes that much more tenacity to break down the barriers.

She has tenacity, as well as inginuity, confidence in her skills and in her thinking: sophistication, thoroughness, creativity and boldness.

Here is another film that utilises flashbacks to tell the story, but I feel here they elevate the structure of the film, rather than just showing off.

Temple is an expert at thinking things through and from all angles – she thinks visually and has an extraordinary imagination and spatial intelligence – which she constantly puts to use at breaking down the problems she faces in her areas of interest.

Though it does take her some time to turn these skills to benefit herself and her state of mind, to tackle the problem of her mental difficulties.

She adjusts quickly to a new way of life on the ranch, but she benefits from a friendship of sorts with the animals. They calm her.

Temple suffers violent panic attacks when something disrupts her cautious system of familiar methods for functioning socially. But with her family support and the support of some friends, she develops coping mechanisms.

Each phase of her life is another challenge. Her journey is inspiring. It’s a tough struggle, especially with the harsh judgements of cruel bullies. She most of the time brushes them off and focuses on the road ahead.

She manages her life and her disability – knowing that she will never be cured, but can still be happy and successful.

Temple approaches many of the handyman jobs around the ranch with confidence and excellent competency. While on the ranch, she has another panic attack and she decides to use a cow-calming device to calm herself – unorthodox but it seems to work.

Later, in college she builds her own person-calming device based on the cow-calming device. A hugger. Unfortunately this meets with disapproval from the therapist on staff and persecution from the faculty, until her family convince them to let her prove herself as a student.

School is tough for her as young people lack self control – cruelty can be an instinctive reaction to someone or something different. They attack what they don’t understand.

The real world is full of kind souls, even in a male dominated field. Temple, early on, is able to prove that the way her mind works is an asset, despite difficulty fitting in and at times, functioning in ordinary society. Although by the end of the film we find an incredibly accomplished, professional, extraordinary and confident woman.

3.5 stars

In an extraordinarily taut suspense drama, David Cronenberg paints a character portrait of a spider – with Ralph Fiennes as the traumatised, mumbling Mr. Clegg. Beautiful cinematography by Peter Suschitzky (of Empire Strikes Back fame) introduces us to the world of the story, based on the uniquely morbid novel by Patrick McGrath.

First we see Spider’s home. The train reveals society’s pace and eventually Spider’s own stunted, gradual stagger. We find our unlikely hero, Spider as he rediscovers his prior English home and finds the halfway house where he is to stay. England has changed. Spider is an alien in this place, mumbling in a desert expanse of memory.

He finds a cheeky friend in Terrence (John Neville.) The dialogue pace is prose-like. Mrs Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave), the landlady at the halfway house, is a clipped, dormant frustration – she has her reasons.

Spider must find somewhere to hide his secret notes. A paranoid patient, deep in the thick of his sickness. His world is claustrophobic, but we sense it is a home he made for himself. The scenery is bland, bleak and unchanging, but this is the life he chose.

He tries to piece together a past from the shadows and the scenery. The garden plot, a setting of importance – for the memories it reveals. Only tragic flashes of sorrow for now, but enough to reduce Mr Clegg to a pathetic, weeping mess.

The scene at the cafe might remind some of the process of separating the hours of the day with cigarettes and cheap tea.

There is a funny scene depicting a day trip out of the asylum – but its placement is out of sync. Feels disjointed, which might seem suitable considering the film’s subject.

Puzzles are a motif as Spider is struggling to reconstruct his past, which is a puzzle to him. We finally get to see what Spider is beginning to remember, as his past is juxtaposed with the present walks among the silent city. The streets are empty to support the mood of the film, a bleak, empty silence.

Gabriel Byrne as Bill Clegg, plays a father through his son’s eyes. The father is the victim of this tale – perfectly innocent, just trying to do his best.

Spider’s mother, (Miranda Richardson) sheltered him. He loves his mother’s image desperately, with something of an Oedipus complex. He is offended by the evolution of his mother, lashes out in an effort to protect his image of her.

5 stars