With John Cameron Mitchell's domestic drama in cinemas this week, we consider what happens when directors have an unexpected change of tack.
Right now, there’s an emerging mini-trend of established directors throwing curve balls at their audience by releasing films which are just a little different.
Think the lifeblood of Michel Gondry’s work – colour, imagination, DIY creativity – being ruthlessly drained from The Green Hornet . There’s the restrained Rabbit Hole from John Cameron Mitchell , the flamboyant genius behind offbeat comedy Hedwig and the Angry Inch . And the solid, but relative genericness of The Fighter from former indie kid, and I Heart Huckabees director, David O Russell .
Bearing this in mind, we look at some of the more extreme examples of the trend, from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Although not a stranger to darkness ( The Red Shoes was, after all, based on a story of a dancer dancing herself to death) Michael Powell took a turn for the X-rated with this 1960 shocker which saw a killer with a camera on the loose in a beautifully shot London. All but forgotten by the British public until fairly recently, this is a troubled, troubling masterpiece that ranks amongst the director’s very best work.
Straight off the back of the Ourouboros narrative of Lost Highway came David Lynch’s most conventional, and strangely placid, film. A story of an old man on a tractor, it offers plenty of Lynch’s trademark Americana but little of the boobs and boogeymen of Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks . Even his other ‘straightforward’ movie The Elephant Man had weird symbolism and a nightmarish vision of the world.
Having verged on disappearing up his own arse in the ’70s with critic-courting mind-screwery like Don’t Look Now and Performance , Nic Roeg finally succumbed to his the lure of his own rectum in the ’80s. Thankfully he emerged for air with his most commercial and purely enjoyable film in a welcome fit of madness (he went back to rubbish straight afterwards). Anjelica Huston’s transformation into the Grand High Witch still haunts the nightmares of those well into their thirties.
Remains Steven Spielberg’s only comedy, and probably for a reason. Still, there is a lot to love in this crazy mess of a film, set in and around Pearl Harbour during America’s entry to WWII. A sense of fun and some pure spectacle almost glue together the dodgy narrative and scattershot performances and cameos. Despite all this, however, it’s a must see for cinefreaks and completely different in approach to anything Spielberg did before, or has done since.
Although, even now, his best work remains his first forays into feature making between 1968 and 1974 peaking with The Last Picture Show , Peter Bogdanovich was bumbling along relatively respectively (if at times under the radar) with reliable, soft-focused character-focused pieces until Illegally Yours in 1988. Not only was it an unusual foray into ribald comedy, it also is both Rob Lowe’s worst film (in a CV hardly heaving with classics) with Bogdanovich misfiring on all cylinders.
Formerly, a masterly, thought-provoking Broadway and West End playwright and maker of sardonic, nasty little films – Neil LaBute then made the dayglo, thought-killing remake of the classic ’70s cult horror The Wicker Man . Horrible – but surely not in the way intended – this campy critic’s nightmare features a truly unfathomable performance from Nic Cage. Sadly, this proved to be LaBute’s own gateway to hell as he’s since made another truly unnecessary remake, 2010′s Death at a Funeral .
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