...and a christopher lee double feature

the Whip and the Body: (1965. dir: Mario Bava) Ah, those Italian horror-meisters! The intoxicating use of color, and of shadow as both color and pace-setting device! Absolutely mesmerizing. Since most of the film involves voluptuous Italian women creeping in nightgowns down gloomy castle hallways and skulking in tombs, you could set it to a Pink Floyd record and call it a slow-moving light-show. Somewhere I read that Christopher Lee considered this the best of his Italian films, and he's got to be right about that. Certainly he is at his bad-assed sexiest as the whip-wielding Heathcliff in this giallo-flavored Wuthering Heights set at the sensuous Italian seaside, with the beautiful Daliah Lavi as his fruitcake-nutty Catherine. People keep getting offed with daggers through the throat, there may or may not be muddy footprints leading up from the tomb, and a sadistic ghost may or may not be taking a horsewhip to the lovely Italian lady on a semi-regular basis. Too tame to be a true giallo, it's still one of the most sensuous horror films I've seen. If I had a dungeon, this would be showing in widescreen on continual rotation.


Horror Hotel: (1961. dir: John Llewellyn Moxey) In Europe, it was called City of the Dead, more dignified but misleading. Really it's a city of Satan-worshippers who've traded their souls for immortality, obviously a whole different thing. It's got no pretentions at all, this little b&w classic, and atmosphere to spare. The town is constantly swathed in thick blankets of fog; the Satanists need beautiful outsiders for their human sacrifices, and there you have your jumping-off point. Lee plays a college professor who feels rather keenly about the history of witchcraft, so much so that he sends his star pupil to do research in the old hometown. I wouldn't show it opposite Curse of the Demon, but I'd feel comfortable pairing it with Night of the Eagle or Carnival of Souls, and that's high praise for me.

psychomania: the frog in the chapel perilous

In the parlance of the film, my mind is blown.

It's 1973, and Australian director Don Sharp, Hammer veteran and helmsman of such mediocre childhood favorites as the remakes of 39 Steps and Four Feathers (why Beau Bridges? of all the actors in the world?), has given the world an undead biker gang which terrorizes the poor old English countryside.

We open with the groovy psychedelia (and I'm not saying that derogatorily: picture me saying all of the following with absolutely sincere appreciation) of mist over an English henge. A gang of leather-clad bikers in clumsy death's-head masks weaves amongst its liths to the strains of John Cameron's perfect electric soundtrack. In spite of names like Hatchet, Chopped Meat and Gash, we find as we get to know them that there's something naive about these miscreants. Yes, they get kicks by causing motoring accidents, but they also sing hippie songs and weave floral wreaths and their main idea of mayhem involves kicking over parking cones and knocking down grocery trolleys.

Their leader, Tom Latham (Nicky Henson), is the handsome scion of a wealthy family who also happen to be worshippers of Satan in the form of a frog. (Although, granted, they never say it's Satan. One assumes. It might just be a frog.) He lives with his old mum, played by the adorable Beryl Reid, who's about as scary as the tea-lady at Selfridge's or the Queen Mum. In the flashback where she's selling baby Tom to the frog-god, she even looks like the Queen Mum, with the doughy, delighted smile and even the little hat. Also in residence is George Sanders as the unflappable and ever-present butler who seems to be some sort of emissary between this world and the froggish.

Tom is obsessed with the idea of returning from the dead, and, as luck would have it, built into the grounds of the family mansion is a Secret Room, a sort of Chapel Perilous into which one ventures only when one is ready to Face One's True Self, and it is ominously suggested that this room had something to do with the disappearance of Tom's father many years prior. In fact, one of the film's early moments of brilliance is the pivotal scene of high camp strangeness in which Tom ventures into the room. Once he emerges, we're ready to bring on the zombies.

But is it a zombie movie? Not exactly. Whether the old-school, limb-dragging and moaning variety or the newfangled superfast and snarling type, zombies are generally understood to be revivified shells, with little or none of the human personality remaining. These revenants look, move, think, talk and dress exactly as they did before death, minus only the fear of reprisals for their mischiefs. I'd call it a "necromancy" film, except these undead are not revived by an outside source, but by their own unshakable will to return.

In any case, Tom suicides and returns from the dead then convinces most of his gang to do the same, all in the name of kicks! And considering this movie's ample body count, it retains a very posh British innocence. It has no blood at all, and the deaths are mostly suggested. If it sounds like I'm mocking, I'm not: its earnestness is self-mocking, its humour earnestly underplayed but certainly intended. As evidence, I submit the scene where the undead Tom and his sidekick Jane burst into the police station on their bikes and the copper behind the desk pauses in his outrage long enough to politely ask a girl if she'll shut the door behind her; also the various gleeful suicides the gang-members devise; and, let's face it, any bit involving a frog.

On the other hand, it's not glib. It has compelling set-pieces -- you might even say haunting: the hippie funeral in which the gang buries Tom sitting upright on his bike like a warrior of old on his steed, or Tom waltzing easily with his mum in their groovy (I'm sorry; there's no other word for it) parlor. Or the ending, which I could not describe, even if I wanted to, not and still do it justice.

The acting has got short shrift in various (may I say) short-sighted reviews over the years. Granted, some come off better than others. Sanders applies himself with ardent seriousness, and playing a convincing devil has always come easy as lying to him. Robert Hardy (who one day will give an irresistible turn as Sir John in the Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility) has a harder time in the thankless role of the investigating Chief Inspector, who mostly shows up as a foil for the mischievous undead. But the real attraction is Nicky Henson. He looks like one of those gorgeous, snaggletoothed, shaggy-headed footballers that England unloosed on the world in the late '60s, and nobody has ever looked better in leather pants. Also (bonus!), he's both well cast and theatrically trained.

masterclass in oaters: the big trail and wagon master

the Big Trail: (1930. dir: Raoul Walsh) This was going to be John Wayne's big breakout role; after four years of trying, he finally bagged the big lead in an important Western. But because John Ford had been grooming him for his own stable, the two were estranged over it and it would be another nine years before Ford teleported Wayne effortlessly into superstardom with that gorgeous introductory zoom-in shot in Stagecoach.

Wayne is just a kid in 1930, and so are the talkies. I got that same pleasant shudder watching the Big Trail that I got watching the Front Page, a sense that movie-making hasn't settled yet into its comfortable tropes, that the river is still shifting, the rules are still being written. It's closer to silent films than it is to, say, Gone With the Wind, complete with title cards and actors with woefully untrained voices. Somewhere in the middle of the thirties, some genius kid in some back room at a major studio developed some fabulous audio techniques, but not yet. "They're still using ribbon-mics," my very knowledgable boyfriend says, and whatever a ribbon-mic is, it's not particularly effective. Wayne's voice sounds high and strained, Marguerite Churchill in the female lead is all whining, and Tyrone Power Sr. (!) as the bad guy is so gruff as to be unintelligible much of the time.

Still, there's much upside. The hallmarks of Dukedom are already there in Wayne: the big, graceful walk, the drawl, the charm; he just hasn't relaxed into them yet. A handsome young Ward Bond is here, too, lurking in the background of the wagon-train. The wagons themselves are huge conestogas, realistic but probably too ungainly to suit Hollywood's purposes for long, and the Indians are real Indians! None of the painted Brooklyn Italians they'll start using in future years.

Much of the photography is downright stunning, like the quiet, breath-taking end-battle among the giant redwoods. Walsh shoots the film almost entirely in long or medium-long shot, giving it a solid ensemble feel, but leaving one yearning in the end for that greatest of all cinematic powers: the intimacy of the lingering close-up.






Wagon Master: (1950. dir: John Ford) Ford had a peculiar sense of humor. The old woman with the horn, for instance. Was that funny, ever, to anyone? It must've been to Ford because he keeps the gag going. Personally, I'd spend any amount of time with Ben Johnson and Ward Bond on the smallest pretext, but I'll tell you what I love best about this movie, reportedly Ford's favorite of his own works: the scene in the Navajo encampment, when the rapist is stripped and tied to the wagon wheel and lashed,-- the way he expresses the mounting tension through still shots of faces, silently, without background music. It may be the biggest reason I love him, that love he's got for interesting faces. That he lets his story get sidetracked sometimes just to explore a character who seems promising to him, or one he just flat-out likes spending time looking at. John Ford never had to discover the close-up; it's his truest medium of expression.

equus: heroic and perverse

Generally I avoid movies made from stage plays. The two arts are different in sly ways; you don't notice the enormities of the abyss between the two until you stand at its edge and peer down in. Branagh made history because he mastered a happy way to capture Shakespeare on film that was not static or stagebound, and did it brilliantly until he started getting a little wacky, possibly out of restlessness with his designated "New Olivier" role. Does anyone really want to watch a Love's Labour's Lost that's been musical-theatrized? for God's sake, man, why?

Peter Shaffer's Equus is an extraordinary play, demanding of its actors and requiring a sure-handed director with a strong vision; the movie is perhaps even more so. Watching it again after all these years (the play was written in '73, the film came out in '77, directed by Sidney Lumet), I was stunned to realize how ominously close it skates to being truly ludicrous, how chillingly effortless it would have been, with one simple lapse or moment of oversight, to have made of it an object of easy ridicule.

Any true Harry Potter fan can tell you the basic story. A terrible crime has been committed: an apparently normal boy has blinded six horses in a stable with a metal spike and is sent to a psychiatrist, in this case played by Richard Burton. Quibble as you will with Burton's oeuvre, he was a courageous chooser of roles, and that may be why his CV is littered with as many disasters as triumphs (Bluebeard, anyone? the Assassination of Trotsky? or how about the obvious: Exorcist II: the Heretic, which also emerged in 1977 and in which Burton plays a similar character, a priest examining the teenaged Regan. It boasts, too, the dadaism of James Earl Jones dressed in a locust outfit, and is therefore not to be missed). This is one of his triumphs: from his riveting opening speech to his riveting closing speech, he knows exactly when to underplay, exactly when to cry havoc and loose the dogs of war. He was, in fact, nominated for an Oscar, which went instead to Richard Dreyfuss for the Goodbye Girl. The past is another country; they do things differently there.

The actors are almost uniformly awe-inspiring: Eileen Atkins, always brilliant in her fearless, no-nonsense way, Colin Blakely, Harry Andrews, and Joan Plowright, of whom I am generally more suspicious, plays enough against the obvious in her maternal role that I relax and trust her. Even Jenny Agutter, with her terrible, thin, cracking voice (newly emerged from a successful career as a child actress in the Empire onto the American screen with her woodenly awful performance in Logan's Run but on her way to the utterly lovable camp of An American Werewolf in London) gives a suitably low-key and entirely credible turn as the girl who unwittingly sets off the bloodshed.

Peter Firth, in his mid-twenties at the time but somehow unfailingly convincing as a teenager, has the bulk of the project resting on his back. All the most difficult bits are his, from the nude climax to the child-flashback scene to the religious incantation, and even the comparatively easy parts are not really easy. The first time he walks into Dysart's (Burton's) office, his physical presence is astonishing, communicating tension so extreme he's shaking, all the while keeping his facial muscles consciously smoothed into a mask of placidity. His eyes are haunted, but in some strange, unobvious way. Truly like a boy in hell trying to convince the world he is untouched.

The heart of it, though, is the subject matter. For all our modern obsession with sex and pornography, for all the Live Nude and Semi-nude human figures you can see on most channels and in most movies, I can count on one hand the number of films that delve bravely into sexuality with any kind of truth, and this is one. I've heard it claimed the film is weak because it does not recognize the central metaphor of the boy's horse-worship is really about repressed homosexuality. That's too small, though, too small a part of the vaster realm of Eros from which the Equus-worship is really drawing. It speaks, and with startling courage, about sexuality in its largest sense, the way you experience it when you're young and it feels dark and huge and ineffable and more important than anything, as if that's where the answers lie, all of them, divine as well as prosaic. In everyone's youth there is a time of searching, consciously or not, for the gods, and it is conducted most often in the domain of sex. Equus is about sex as the root of worship, and it's an intense, almost devastating success.


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"What we do with the eros inside us, be it heroic or perverse, is our spiritual life." -- Ronald Rolheiser, Forgotten Among the Lilies
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As an addendum, the other movie I can think of offhand that digs down into the truth of eros is Intimacy (dir: Patrice Chereau, 2001). The plot description on IMDB begins, "A failed London musician meets once a week with a woman for a series of intense sexual encounters to get away from the realities of life...", and that was enough to keep me away from it for many years. At last I gave in on a night when I needed to watch Mark Rylance act but wasn't in the mood for Angels and Insects again. It took me several minutes to get past the credits, because it begins with a song so strange and beautiful that I played the opening several times just to hear it ("A Night In", it turns out, by Tindersticks). Then I watched the entire film twice through immediately, with that sense of seeing something unlike anything else I'd ever seen before. I have not gone back to watch it again, since the intensity of that viewing is enshrined in my memory with a sort of perfection, and I am loathe to displace it. Maybe it isn't as good as I remember. Maybe it was the exact proper moment for me to watch it, and that's why it was so affecting. The way each sexual encounter wordlessly communicated the states of the characters seemed marvelous, and Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance seemed both fearless and completely without vanity. The sex is not simulated, and the bodies are those of real people, not movie stars, -- although Rylance, admittedly, might have had a decent career in porn if he'd wanted it. It doesn't pretend to be about love, but it is about how the entanglement of limbs is not exclusive to the physical, since any true intensity carries with it emotional repercussions. That said, there is no Hollywood "message" here, no simple statement of purpose, no easy conclusion reached. It is an exploration into eros along a previously unmarked road, at least in the world of cinema.

I counted the days until I could see these

Sometimes you run across a line of type announcing a pending movie and it lodges like a sweet, whispered promise in your brain. There have been times I've been so excited about seeing a film that I've had dreams about it before it opens. I remember dark dreams about An Awfully Big Adventure, for instance, that were nothing like the film itself but helped to make that cinematic experience even stranger than it would have been anyway. (You think Hugh Grant never did anything special? You must -- MUST -- see his turn as the petty, vain tyrant in charge of a regional theatre in WWII England. The scene in which he gives the opening-of-rehearsal speech with the closing night's vomit still clinging to his face is a piece of wicked greatness in which both he and the film itself revel.)

Some eight months ago I saw a mention of a new James Marsters project about a little mining town in the old West and WHAT HAPPENS THERE WHEN THE ALIENS INVADE. Sure, it seems obvious now, but why hasn't it been done a million times before? This movie was made for me. Specifically for me, as if someone reached inside my head, had a rummage around, and said, "Hmm. Old West. Aliens invade. And... yeah, James Marsters. That's a go." Brilliant. A Syfy special. I wrote the release date on my calendar and literally counted the days.

High Plains Invaders. It showed in August. And, alright, it's not perfect, but I taped it and I watch little pieces of it periodically. Marsters is great. Something's happened to him in the past year. Ever since he and Joss Whedon together managed to tap into some archetypal brilliance to co-create the character of Spike in the Buffyverse, I've been following his work with mostly scowling disappointment. Shadow Puppets? PS I Love You? Smallville? Grrrrr. Don't make me cranky. But in the last year there's been Moonshot, less a record of the first Apollo moon landing than a tribute to it, but still well-made, and Marsters shines as Buzz Aldrin (consider that Aldrin was in his thirties at the time, Marsters is pushing fifty now). And now this lovely little genre-mixing alien invasion piece, in which he's earnest and low-key and hits not a wrong note, in spite of the many sand-traps possible when you're firing six-shooters at big metallic insects with only a mediocre script to bear you up. Maybe it's that these days he's not trying so hard, as he seemed to be upon emerging from his eight-year stint working in Joss-world. He seems to have relaxed into himself. He's finally reached that age, too, when his pulchritude, which used to be almost insanely extreme, has softened into an easy, rugged, aging handsomeness.

The piece has more to it than Marsters. Most of the cast, -- and I find this often in Syfy originals, -- is better than its script, and the production design is inspired: faded, sort of sepia and autumnal feeling, cold and muddy, like the old West ought to be. The aliens look like they came straight out of War of the Worlds, which works for me. Now, of course, somebody's making a big-screen cowboys vs. aliens film, entitled, in fact, Cowboys Vs Aliens, and it happily re-teams Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr of Iron Man success. I'm right there in the front of the line for that one, as well. My firmly held belief is that EVERYONE should make a movie about cowboys and aliens, as I am an easy mark, an absolute fool, for a crossed-genre piece.


Another film I've had stored at the top of my Netflix queue, madly tapping my fingers and chewing my nails while waiting for it to be released, is a little British thing called the Haunted Airman that I first read about in the Fortean Times. Again, I'm suckered in by the crossing of genres: this time a war story crossed with a ghost story. Tenuously (apparently) based on horror-master Dennis Wheatley's novel the Haunting of Toby Jugg, it's a quietly eerie BBC-sponsored piece about a wheelchair-bound RAF bomber going crazy in a creepy hospital. I suppose it got wide release only because Robert Pattison has achieved megastardom among a certain demographic (not mine. I've skipped over the whole TWILIGHT thing, much as I skipped over the whole HARRY POTTER thing, knowing full well that I'd have dug right in there full speed ahead were I thirty years younger). Not that it's not worth seeing, but, intriguing as it is, it's one of those pieces of film that makes you think, "OK, now I'm going to read the book to find out what REALLY happened." Which is what I'm going to do. Julian Sands does what he does best, playing an enigmatic, possibly evil doctor. The flashbacks of the bombings seem strangely low-budget for the BBC and never seem to come together to form a specific point. In sum: I'm glad they made it. I'm glad I watched it. I'll let you know how good it is once I've read the original material.


And the third movie I've been waiting for: the spanking new remake of the old John Wayne film the Angel and the Badman. Yep. There ain't no accountin' for it, but there it is. Not the greatest movie the Duke ever made, it's the story of a gunfighter who falls in love with a Quaker girl and manages to lay down his arms without getting gunned down by the bad guy only through the intervention of a deus ex machina (in this case, an interfering marshall who's been dogging his footsteps).

Now that I think of it, we're crossing genres again: it looks like a Western, but it's really a romance. The remake has Lou Diamond Phillips and Deborah Kara Unger (the husky-voiced she of Cronenberg's Crash), both of them satisfyingly matured in their talents, but I was not surprised to see that it was originally made for Hallmark. It's one of those rare Western chick-flicks, like Naomi Watts' the Outsider (which is more satisfying as a chick-flick, incidentally, and, strangely, also about a Quaker falling in love with a gunslinger while nursing him back to health after a gunshot. Guess us chicks dig that), and it's gorgeously shot using color filters so every scene is far prettier than it would have been in real life.

It stays largely faithful to the original except in the one sense that made the original worth watching: because it had John Wayne in it! And you gotta love the Duke. (Yes, hush, you really do. If you think you don't love John Wayne, then there are two possibilities at work: either you don't love him YET, or you really do love him and you just don't realize it yet. I spent many years scoffing at Wayne's woodenness and what I perceived as lack of dynamic range. It was while I was watching They Were Expendable, a very somber John Ford piece released just after the war about PT boats in the Phillipines, that I realized Wayne's genius. In this very wooden, stilted piece, Wayne was a breath of fresh air, with his huge physical presence and grace and sheer glorious enthusiasm. After that, I went back and watched Stagecoach again and, by God, you just try to take your eyes off that man. Just try it, and then come back and tell me he has no movie-star genius. Watch the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. You got Jimmy Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, for God's sake! Andy Devine, Woody Strode, John Carradine, Strother Martin, Lee Van Cleef... Now look at the election scene in the saloon. The place is crowded with folks, all kinds of talking going on, much of it by Stewart and Marvin, no slouches when it comes to star-power. But who are you looking at? You're looking at the Duke, that's who, who's quietly sitting on the bar, doing little more than watching the proceedings. And, furthermore, you want to see a truly convincing portrayal of a macho man suffering heartbreak? Watch that scene, that terrible, lovely scene, in which Wayne drunkenly burns down his own house, the house he'd built for Vera Miles.)

And, yes, that's Luke Perry hiding half his face under that eye-patch.

the wrath of khan: subtlety is not an issue

To paraphrase some brilliant Brit writing in NME (he was speaking of Scott Walker at the time), there must be people in the world who don't love Ricardo Montalban in the Wrath of Khan, but what must their hearts be like?

It's not even a matter of liking; certain things surpass subjectivity. An old friend once told me he'd approached art criticism as if it was all subjective until the day his father overheard an Ornette Coleman record and said it was utter crap. In that moment, he suffered a revelation: sometimes the quality's there, and if you don't see it, it's due to a deficiency on your own part. A lack of effort, maybe, a cranky attitude towards that crazy post-modern music, or some misguided neural pathway etched into your brain.

Granted, a Ricardo Montalban performance inhabits a whole different stretch on the space-time continuum than an Ornette Coleman record, but let's call it like it is: a masterpiece is a masterpiece, and Khan is a masterpiece. Part of it is context: you don't want to cast some subtle, underplaying Trevor Howard opposite William Shatner, the Uberking of the Scene-Chewers. (You would, on the other hand, cast Christopher Plummer, that great eschewer of English subtlety who tosses himself full-force into the ham in Star Trek 6: the Undiscovered Country with his gleefully Shakespeare-barking Klingon, but that's another piece of brilliance for another day.) Montalban, I believe, is the only actor who ever balanced Shatner move for move. They are a perfect match -- but Montalban wins. The shameless magnificence of his outrageous choices and the impeccable smoothness of their execution combine to make it one of those rare and to-be-treasured performances that can be proudly ranked among the truly intrepid. Not only does he manage to speak lines like "From hell's heart I stab at thee," and "I'll chase him around the fires of perdition," with dignity, he speaks them like they're Shakespeare and a goddamn privilege to pronounce. He is an inspiration to behold. Magnificence in action.

And, while there is unquestionably virtue and courage inherent in making oneself ridiculous, a thing from which Shatner never shies ("Kha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-n!"), Montalban transcends ridiculousness, grasps hold of his role with both muscled hands and elicits cheers, not laughter.

Every year when I go to the coast I take Star Trek 2: the Wrath of Khan and watch it right before I'm due to come home. I'm not certain why. It's one of those traditions that sprang up in that realm somewhere outside conscious choice. Although I love this movie, consider it one of the great B-films, I'm impatient with it, too. I tend to fast-forward through most of Chekov's scenes, for instance, unless he's sharing the screen with Khan (sorry, Chekov), and I also tend to look away from the screen when Kirstie Alley's on (yes, I understand that she's cute, but she's no Vulcan. Robin Curtis in the third and fourth films... Now THERE'S a Vulcan woman who would make T-Pau proud.) The sentimental hogwash subplot involving Ike Eisenmann makes me gnash my teeth, too, since he was a favorite child actor of mine in the old days (he did a series called the Fantastic Journey with Jared Martin and the original Witch Mountain movies; awesome) and I was glad to see him onscreen here and sorry to see him wasted.

Still, show me a love affair in which the Beloved has no flaws, and I'll show you a pale, wan reflection of true passion. I'm convinced that there's no Trekker in the world so devoted that he must own ALL the original six Star Trek movies. The first one and the fifth one can be skipped without compunction. The others, -- the Wrath of Khan, the Search for Spock, the Voyage Home, and the Undiscovered Country, -- should be dusted off and enjoyed in all their imperfect glories at least once a year. Make it so.

things i've been watching: august 2009

In the Loop: (2009. dir: Armando Iannucci) Seldom does one really laugh all the way through a comedy. With luck one gets two belly-laughs and a fistful of chuckles. Maybe people just aren't as funny as we used to be. Maybe we're just too bitter. Here's one for you: In the Loop, a -- not just scathingly. What's the word I want? -- a skin-flayingly funny, dark, endlessly smart, and completely depressing British comedy playing now at your local cinema. It has the opposite of the Obama Effect. If you are one of the millions who felt inspired to political involvement during his campaign, this film is the antidote. By the time you hit sunlight, you'll not only never want to have anything to do with politics, you'll never want to read a newspaper, vote in an election, or live in a country with any sort of government, or, indeed, other humans in it.

Peter Capaldi has a big honkin' hootenanny with his once-in-a-lifetime role as a foul-mouthed Scots bulldog of a Minister whose thankless task it is to see that Great Britain comes in line with the PM's decision to follow America into a bogus war in the Middle East. You start out laughing, and there are jokes hidden under jokes, with the improvised feel of a great ensemble cast. It's filmed handheld under true light; it looks and feels a lot like the original the Office. It's not that it ever gets unfunny, just its meanness thickens your blood until you at last resemble Bernard Hill in his first appearance as Theoden King in the Two Towers by the time you try to leave your seat. When the credits roll down, literally every character has either sold his soul, been morally degraded, humiliated, or resigned. Most don't get to choose from the list, but get two or three, even all four. My favorite of the many shining performances is from Zach Woods as Chad, a pathetic but wonderfully funny power-worshipping aide who switches his lovestruck allegiance from one power-player to another as they fall and rise, and never manages to catch anyone's attention, really.

See this movie, by all means, and then go out and get weasel-faced drunk and pray to all your various gods for Obama and the fate of this country.


the Fall: (2006. dir: Tarsem Singh) >SPOILER ALERT< Gorgeous and phantasmagoric period-piece set in the early days of Hollywood. A crippled and suicidal stuntman lies helpless in hospital and tells an epic tale to a little girl with a broken arm to try and coax her into stealing morphine for him. Most of the film is the story as we see it played out in her head and hear it narrated by him. When he speaks of an Indian, we know he means a Native American because he talks of wigwams, but she sees an eastern Indian whose wigwam looks like a Taj Mahal. The disjointedness is dreamlike and enchanting. Lee Pace as the stuntman is wonderfully, opiately sensuous in his hospital bed, and although it has a happy ending, there is a climactic scene that is so heartrending I felt my sorrow aching in the palms of my hands as I wept.




Duel in the Sun: (1946. dir: King Vidor) >SPOILER ALERT< I never much liked Jennifer Jones when I was a kid, but then I saw her in things like the Song of Bernadette and Portrait of Jennie. Had I seen her in this, I think she'd have been my hero. My mom remembers her aunt taking her to see this when it came out and it was so sexy and passionate it left an indelible mark on her. And it still is: one of those movies that pulled no punches, left no holds barred. It's filmed in deep, passionate colors all the way through, deep reds and striking greens and yellows. Jones plays Pearl Chavez, an embodiment of sensuality, destined to inspire the animal in those around her, a girl whose rational capacities have been so utterly neglected that she is led through life by emotion and her netherparts. She is sent to live with rich strangers, and among them, two opposite brothers: Joseph Cotten as the left-brain, moral voice, and Gregory Peck as the dark embodiment of animal passion, Pearl's great love and nemesis.

In these days of quirky underplaying, Jones' performance looks like a typhoon. With utter shamelessness she throws herself headlong into each emotion, pausing only long enough to fully embody each as it passes. Her face expresses lust and hatred with hypnotic totality, and I could listen all day to that voice, sultry to the point of indecency. When Joseph Cotten reaches out to offer her a good-girl future living with his nice wife and him, away from her bad-girl present with Gregory Peck, it sounds stultifyingly awful, and although Pearl wants to be a good girl, we know she never can tamp herself down to that drab level, and she responds to him with, "I wish I could die for you," because she can only live passionately or die, there is no third choice.

In addition to that last, magnificent scene in which the hater/lovers kill one another while simultaneously crawling desperately across the desert for one last kiss, other reasons to see it include a powerhouse turn by Walter Huston as the self-styled Sin-Killer, a Texas preacher who puts in a word with Pearl towards salvation but admits it's a long-shot, and Lillian Gish as the matriarch of the house. Now THERE'S a woman who knows how to play a death-scene.