Good Rep – November

My Saturday nights are wild. At around 8.55pm I stick on the kettle, pop a slice of Mother’s Pride into the toaster, fire up the ol’ idiot box to More4, and curl up with toast and tea just in time to hear Mark Cousins’ now familiar introduction to his wonderful The Story of Film: An Odyssey, the filmmaker's  love letter to the moving image, from the simple thrill of the Lumière Brothers to the hi-tech digital age [read our interview with Cousins from the September issue].

Cousins’ series (currently at episode 10 of 15) has ruined my social life but is enriching my movie world – a fair compromise I’d say. It’s also going to clean out my bank account when I get round to seeking out all the films that I’ve been introduced to. The GFT and Filmhouse are helping on that front, with each screening a masterwork that has caught my eye while watching the show.

Mother India (GFT, 20 Nov), from Mehboob Khan, one of Bollywood’s greatest directors, is an epic on the scale of Gone With the Wind, where a peasant woman, Radho (played by Nargis, an actor so famous in her native country that she’s joined Cher and Madonna in the one name club), weathers countless personal and social adversities. Blending the open wound emotion of American melodrama with the Hindu pop that has become the staple of the Mubi/Bombay studio system, it’s an India cinema touchstone. Cousins describes it as containing “both despair and exhilaration, like Johnny Guitar and All That Heaven Allows,” which has me sold, but the reason I’m so eager to see Mother India on the big screen (apart from the obvious reason that it’s the best place to see any film) is because of one eye-popping scene shown on Cousins’ programme. Hundreds of workers are toiling away in a sodden field of mud – nothing particularly mind-blowing – but with one audacious dissolve we see that the workers, led by Radho, form the geographical outline of India. It’s an image that blew me away on my 19 inch telly; in GFT's Cinema One it will be spectacular.

Another character to figure heavily in The Story of Film is Luis Buñuel, and the Filmhouse is screening the Spaniard’s The Exterminating Angel as part of its ace Introduction to European Cinema season (although the film was made and is set in Mexico). It’s basically a perverse disaster flick: some high-society types become trapped at a dinner party, and with their maids and man servants AWOL the clueless toffs regress throughout the film to become feral savages in evening wear. I’ve never seen this caustic takedown of the bourgeoisie, but it’s one of those films that crop up so often in film theory books that I feel that I have done – there’s even a nifty joke about it in Woody Allen’s latest (wildly overpraised) Midnight in Paris, where Owen Wilson’s character Gil plants the idea for the film with Buñuel (Adrien de Van) at a party he attends after inexplicably time-travelling to 20s Paris. I’ll be checking out this surreal masterpiece on 9 Nov.

A filmmaker who shares a similar line in salty satire to Buñuel is madcap Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven, and his scabrous RoboCop (Filmhouse, 17 Nov), set in a dystopian Detroit, is perhaps cinema's most vicious – and delicious – attack on Reagan-era “I’ll buy that for a dollar” America. Three decades on from the decade that fashion forgot, this blistering sci-fi is as relevant as ever. It’s screening as part of the heaven sent Psychotronic cinema season and, as usual, Psychotronic’s programmer Matt Palmer has tracked down a beautiful 35 mm print.

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

If you want an antidote to the acid-in-your face excesses of Verhoeven and Buñuel, try Terence Davies' graceful second feature The Long Day Closes (DCA, 28-29 Nov), the Liverpulian’s cinematic poem to his home town and his childhood passion for heading down the pictures. (The film’s young Davies stand-in Bud, a keen cinephile and revival cinema fan, would get a kick out of this blog series, I’m sure.) With Davies’ adaptation of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea arriving in cinemas at the end of November [see our interview with Davies from the November issue], it’s the perfect time to reacquaint yourself with this visionary filmmaker’s impressionistic and breathtakingly beautiful film.

Back to The Story of Film and a slight bugbear. In the latest episode (screened 5 Nov) there was a massive oversight. While giving a summary of The Australian New Wave, highlighting the likes of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Nic Roeg’s Walkabout, Cousins neglected to mention Fred Schepisi, for my money the movement's star filmmaker, and his two late 70s masterpieces The Devil’s Playground and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. No matter, because you can head along to the Filmhouse to catch one of Schepisi's fine later films Last Orders, an exquisitely judged adaptation of Graham Swift's Booker Prize-winning novel, on 28 Nov. With a cast – including Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren and Ray Winstone – that should make Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy shrink in embarrassment, Schepisi playfully shuffles narrative threads and his wonderful ensemble to create an honest, humane, and hugely entertaining portrait of lifelong freindship.

Feel free to suggest any upcoming rep screenings in the comments section below, and if you head along to any of the above, please let me know your thoughts.

Last Orders (Fred Schepisi, 2001)