There was life after prog for Utopia. After years of hi-tech bombast and electronic freakouts, the band and their music lost ballast. By 1980, they were playing new wave-inflected pop-rock and Beatles pastiches. Bassist Kasim Sulton wears a skinny power pop tie and synth whizz Roger Powell looks like a Buggle on acid. The highpoints are the extremes: Todd Rundgren crooning "Hello It's Me" and "Cliché" alone, and the group in full-tilt cosmic mode for "Initiation".
Michael Chiklis often grabs the plaudits for his portrayal of detective Vic Mackey, controlling the dealers and gang-bangers of LA's fictional Farmington with his renegade Strike Team, but this DVD release of The Shield's first series is a jolting reminder of how creator Shawn Ryan conceived it as a complex ensemble piece steeped in moral ambiguity. Ryan exposes the politics and brutality that underpin police work, while the handheld photography makes gunfights, rape and murder hideously real. Brilliant.
Rumour has it that the CIA funded Halas and Batchelor's 1954 cartoon adaptation of George Orwell's political barnyard allegory. But even though it's dated and stilted, it remains not only darkly savage anti-Stalinist satire but also a quite stunning piece of animation. Surely long overdue for a Babe-style remake?
Barbet Schroeder's outré 1976 tale of feral love between petty criminal Olivier (Gérard Depardieu) and high-class Parisian dominatrix Ariane (Bulle Ogier), complete with scrotum piercing and golden showers, was originally denied a BBFC certificate. In retrospect, the analogy between S&M and romantic power games is overplayed, but Schroeder's willingness to draw sex and death so close together is compelling.
The nominal director is Lee H Katzin, but this was entirely Steve McQueen's project. Starring and driving, his 1971 film about the famous 24-hour race was his obsession, and he was in a strange place when he made it, his paranoid quest for perfection reflected in the extraordinary cinematography of motors in motion. Barely any plot, it's all wheels, speed and engine noise. Less a movie than a machine.
The 1973 story of young fairground worker Jim (David Essex) making it as a pop star on the cusp of the '60s captures the very smell of small-time rock'n'roll dreaming. It ekes real pathos from the bloating of Jim's ego. Keith Moon's his drummer. In the sequel, Jim turns Lizard King, forgets his roots, shags around and gives manager Adam Faith headaches. Great.
Ridiculous documentary in praise of the gigantic ego of producer Robert Evans, 'somebody' in the '70s but a self-promoting Hollywood Del Boy now. Sure, he bankrolled great films once (The Godfather, Chinatown), but this indulgent, visually static puff-piece (chiefly composed of photos and Evans saying what a fabulous mogul and stud he is) isn't one of them.
Burt Lancaster, gruff and manly, and Tony Curtis, delicately fey, star in Carol Reed's howlingly homoerotic tale of two leotard-clad acrobats in '50s Paris, vying for each other's respect, for the affections of Gina Lollobrigida, and for mastery of the triple somersault. "Teach me the triple!" says wide-eyed Curtis to Lancaster. "Are you crazy?!" splurts Lancaster, outraged.
Arthur Penn's follow-up to Bonnie And Clyde, based on Arlo Guthrie's blues hit about his arrest for littering and how it led to him being rejected for service in Vietnam. Penn's movie follows Guthrie as he wanders the US from draft board to college to commune, providing a time capsule of the dreams and rituals of late-'60s drop-out America; and one that, with its lingeringly downbeat ending, now looks prescient.
Prompting both genuflections at its breakneck brilliance and gasps at its gung-ho grisliness, Roger Avary's comeback has been a startling opinion-divider. Fans of the Bret Easton Ellis novel will relish the former Tarantino sidekick's fidelity to the blank immorality of the prose, yet the movie bursts with visual ideas. James Van Der Beek is fearlessly irredeemable as Sean Bateman (younger brother of the American Psycho), flailing across campus, gobbling up narcotics, rock'n'roll (it has a great soundtrack), girls, boys, suicides, whatever.
