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.