The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
While I like and admore Wes Anderson’s unique style, in a full-length film, I realise, it can get a bit too insistent; ‘Oh yet ANOTHER beautifully balanced symmetrical shot in elegant pastel co-ordinates’…and in a full length film this can get overwhelming. But here, in a short film, it was just right. And the mannered narration, switching from one character to another with plenty of to-camera remarks becomes entertaining and not an irritating tic.
Lovely little gem; will be interesting to see the others.
The Swan.
https://youtu.be/k079JTEH3Pg (after news item...)ng one,
The strangest and weirdest of them all. The story itself was always a dark and disturbing one, even in the written collection and when reading you were never quite sure how much was real and how much was fantasy; it seemed to move from one to the other, almost moment from moment and so it made the reading of it a strange and unsettling experience. Here Anderson managed to find cinematic equivalents to have this effect. It had a very strange effect and yet it seemed to work - I think. Fascinatingly experimental.
Poison.
https://youtu.be/m_nY66io0F4 (after news item...)
Very dreary. A waste of time. Story, such as it was, did not work at all.
The Rat Catcher.
https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81711970 (clip not trailer per se…)
This story was always one of the weirder ones in Dahl’s Claud collection and so is this film. Its even more stylised than usual with unexpected mime and actors taking on, momentarily, animal roles. It is very strangely gripping and while at the start I was not sure that it was going to work, once it had got un cer way I realised how wrong I had been. Weirdly wonderful and disturbing - a summing-up of Dahl’s work, I suppose one could say.