performance of the week

Sybille Schmitz in Carl Dreyer's Vampyr

From naturalistic despair to truly unnerving animal grimace in a moment, she is stunning as the vampire's helpless victim who can do nothing as she feels her soul slipping away.

Schmitz was highly regarded in German cinema. You can watch her on Netflix in the Nazi propaganda film Titanic, in which the fault of the disaster is laid firmly at the door of "Britain's endless quest for profit." Regardless, the film was ultimately banned by Goebbels, who felt the panic of the crowd scenes as the ship was going down might lower the morale of dem Volke. (The filming was so troubled that its initial director was not just fired, but hanged.)

After the War, Schmitz was shunned by the film community for her Nazi collaboration, and she slipped into a shadow-existence of drugs and despair, inspiring Fassbinder's classic Veronika Voss.

twentynine palms: only for the hardy

Twentynine Palms: (2003. dir: Bruno Dumont) When you read the member reviews on Netflix, you find reactions ranging from disdainful annoyance to sputtering fury. My favorite is by a fellow who is fiercely insulted by a scene in which the characters walk up to a Dairy Queen, order ice cream, and, without asking what flavor they want, the girl brings them soft-serve vanilla cones, which they eat, then they walk away without paying. This man sputters: how could this condescending French director be so uneducated in American ways to think such a thing possible? To which I reply: you watched this movie, and THAT'S what you come away offended by?

Good God, there's so much. How about the vaguely disturbing scene in which David (there are only two characters, really, David and Katya, lovers and fighters: they have sex and they fight, have sex and fight, living in a sort of heremetically sealed cocoon of mutual rage and eroticism while the outside world rarely bumps up against them) is casually masturbating while he watches a Jerry Springer show in which a man is publicly confessing to his wife that he raped their daughter? In my world, that rates higher on the offensive scale than soft-serve vanilla. And, alright, once you've seen the ending, how can you focus your horror on anything else?

If you can watch it without knowing the end, you should. Here is the basic plot: two lovers on a road-trip. Ostensibly, David is scouting locations for a film amongst the Joshua Trees, but we never actually see him taking any notes or photographs or even paying much attention to maps. It seems a much more existential outing than that. Good enough: two lovers in the desert. Sort of Zabriskie Point or the Passenger, or Valley Obscured by Clouds. There is fucking and fighting, back and forth, so realistically drawn that you can't really look away. (Who among us has not had or witnessed that first fight, which begins with one person asking, "What are you thinking?" and the other replying, "Nothing"?) The lineaments of passion, with its darker reaches into the realms of mutual loathing, are continually and tirelessly explored by Dumont. It might get boring except that one has a creeping sense that something awful is bound to happen.

When it does come, it seems brutally random until you realize that actually Dumont has given us a very thorough build-up to his schrecklich climax. From the outset, every exchange with the outside world, even the most glancing, even just ordering food, winds up with some vague threat towards the couple. At a Chinese restaurant, the waitress is angry because they order so little. At the Dairy Queen, there is a marine in uniform hunched with whispered menace over his table. They discuss him, fight about him, and go back to their roadside motel to have sex. Crossing a street, they are furiously berated by a man screaming from the passenger side of a car for their jaywalking. When they stop outside a lonely house in the desert to befriend the dogs, the very stillness of the house feels portentous; you keep thinking get moving! get moving! get back in your car. On the one occasion when Katya is fed up and leaves on foot, she ducks behind a parked truck, inexplicably terrified, every time a car passes.

Don't watch it if you're feeling sensitive. Don't force it on friends or lovers. It's a trial by fire, this movie, one that I found worth the effort (in spite of its Frenchness, a thing which usually leaves me growling), but it does leave terrible images behind it, grafted onto your brain.

boondock saints: big shameless boy movie

(1999. dir: Troy Duffy) Yup. It's the biggest, smoothest, most utterly shameless Boy Movie I ever saw. It's got verve, style, panache, joie de vivre, good actors, a stupid plot, bad dialogue, all the bigotry and misogyny and jokey homophobia you expect from Boy Movies, all fashioned to fit tightly around the silliest scenes of violence you'll ever witness. The director, god love him, has vision. There's a steady, graceful hand (Adam Kane's) at the camera. Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus are fabulous. Willem Dafoe has a gleefully good time as the faggoty FBI guy in charge of the investigation, and Ron Jeremy is downright inspired as a mob slimeball who suffers a visit from Nemesis.

I think we can all agree that Quentin Tarantino has provided both magnificent wonderment and equal trouble for the cinephile at large: a good "rule of thumb" (see this movie for a bad scene explaining that phrase) might be that like Hemingway before him, nobody but Tarantino should try to write like Tarantino. Despite the considerable quality of these actors, most of the attempts at humor clunk to the floor in an embarrassing fashion. There's way too much yelling, and not one ounce, not one single whisper of subtlety anywhere. It has, however, got a nice, inventive, Tarantino-inspired playing-with-time structure, in which we see the lead-up to each massacre, then skip to the cops trying to piece together the events, and that works well.

But make no mistake: these are not "crimes" or "shootings", they are all, without exception, bloody massacres done self-righteously by these "angelic" boys suffering an utter certainty that God (they are good Catholic boys) is on their side, and that those they choose to slay are Bad. They do not discriminate between killer mafiosos and just some poor schlubs jerking off in porno booths: all are evil by their own infallible judgments, and so deserving of immediate and gruesome murder. (An interesting side-note: amiable as these two brothers are when they're not murdering folks, and as gorgeous as they are, thoughtfully stripping off their kits so that we can enjoy their musculatures, they seem to be completely asexual, even anti-sexual, which makes the film's fixation on homosexuality rife with implication. I'm sure these guys fixed that in the sequel, as some of their homophobic friends must have pointed out the obvious.) I'm not one to try and foist a uniform sense of ethics on film-makers, but just this week some kid took an automatic weapon into a mall upstate, and only yesterday another kid committed probably the most sickening mass shooting ever, at a grade school, for chrissake, and so can we please, please have some intelligent semblance of ethics in our filmmaking? Not forced by a new Hays Code, but can we all just grow up a little? take some personal responsibility?

(Now I've had my rant, let me say I firmly believe that ultimately the buck stops with the boy in question. We all go through crap trying to grow up, and most of us, no matter how many video games or movies or Black Sabbath records we have, never pick up the AK-47. The responsibility lies not with film-makers, but with the human holding the gun. And with the Republicans who allowed him to get it with such ease and facility. That allowed, can we all put our heads together and figure out ways to inspire the youth of America without intoxicating them with the adrenaline rush of the kill?)

I thought I might watch Overnight, the documentary about this director's bumpy rise and ignominious crash, but the idea of spending time with this guy without the ameliorating, intercessory influence of Flanery and Reedus is just too exhausting.

a boxer, biker bandits, and a really twisted murderer

Body and Soul: (1947. dir: Robert Rosson) A pretty good boxing picture is dragged up into the pantheon of greatness by the dizzying brilliance of James Wong Howe's relentless photography. That, and one of John Garfield's best performances. Howe's noir night-times are like nothing else, his day-times nearly as good, and that final boxing match is a dazzler.

Lone Hero: (2002. dir: Ken Sanzel) Why do I love this movie? Is it because you get to watch a tourist-trap destroyed by nasty outlaws? (Yes, I live in a tourist town; am I carrying secret angst?) Is it just that Robert Forster gives another of his incomparable performances? What is it about that guy? Does he inspire writers to create brilliant characters, or does he have a brilliant agent who roots them out for him, or is he just so good that he takes a middlin' character and elevates it into greatness with his dry wit and wry delivery?

This is the story of an aging kid suspended between youth and adulthood, working a kind of interesting but pretty much nowhere job recreating gunfights in one of those touristy old West towns like Virginia City or Tombstone or Jacksonville Oregon, with wooden sidewalks and a little train that scoots through town while tinny music plays and a girl in a hoop-skirt and bonnet points out places of historical interest. The "kid" is played by Sean Patrick Flanery, who you think you know, right? but who is transformed by this DP (David Pelletier), filmed so that he is the most sensuous creature in the world, which he may be, but I have yet to find him so in the few of his other films I've seen. Then there's Lou Diamond Phillips, about perfect as a psychopathic cop-killing biker, and Robert Forster as (you guessed it) the toughest gun-toting libertarian in this tiny Montana town. When a gang of outlaws on motorcycles ride in, John (Flanery) stands up to its leader, bringing down the wrath of the bad guys.

The dialogue is clever, the story moves at a good clip, there's gunplay a-plenty, and, although it follows the basic formula, you're never sure exactly how it's going to achieve the expected ends. There's some great music, including a raucous rendition of "Streets of Laredo" by the Headstones, and a lot of surprisingly effective good humor. In short, you go in expecting little to nothing, and you come out the other side with two hours of good entertainment, and I guess that's why I love it.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Perfume: (2006. dir: Tom Tykwer) It was a book first, and an enormous hit among my generation when we were still enjoying our morose and often noir-clad salad days. It was often said that, popular as it was, it could never translate onto the screen, as the story happens inside the head of one of the most enigmatic and laconic anti-heroes ever written, and its chosen vehicle, the sense of smell, can just barely be translated through words, and how does one do it through images instead?

I read somewhere that this was Kurt Cobain's favorite novel, and I believe it, because it's the ultimate Rock Star book. Here is the Artist as Sociopath. Hardly aware of the wake of destruction he leaves in his quest for perfection in his art (in this case, the serial murders of beautiful women whose essences he distills to design the perfect perfume), this anti-hero achieves the long-fought perfection, the world falls in love with his art and therefore with him. Then, of course, he must suffer the terrible loneliness of being Apart and Unable to Love, and is eventually, out of love, devoured by his fans.

This is the kind of book for which you ache with passion when you are seventeen and obsessed with Baudelaire and Rimbaud; it's a story for angstful teenagers. If you bring an adult sensibility to the table, it will probably spoil the feast unless you garnish liberally with vast doses of irony.

The film itself is no doubt as well done as it can be. Ben Whishaw is a young maestro, correct in every detail, showing us never too much or too little. The production values are gorgeous and smooth. The script relies overly on narration, but that, considering the source material, was probably inevitable. The early suspense is effective, and the story only loses its grip into absurdity in the last twenty minutes or so.

spies, assassins, and a half-breed renegade

the Bourne Legacy: (2012. dir: Tony Gilroy) The chase scene at the climax is so long and repetitive as to be a real snoozer, which is a downright shame, since the rest of it is surprisingly good: well-acted, intelligently written, with quiet, unspoken chemistry between the leads and a lot of suspense.

the Eiger Sanction: (1975. dir: Clint Eastwood) Clint Eastwood's entry into the '70s assassin/spy genre, an exalted field including Three Days of the Condor, the Eye of the Needle, the Eagle Has Landed, and Day of the Jackal. Laughably misogynist, clumsily written, clunkily paced, it lacks both the gravitas and grace necessary to fit in well with its compadres. The middle chunk was filmed in Monument Valley, which is why we watched it, but those scenes are no better filmed than the too-darkly-lit-without-being-noirishly-cool indoor scenes. The spy story makes no sense at all, and the adventure story is so slow by our current standards as to play as a leisurely amble. And yet, somehow, there is some kind of ungainly charm about it. (To give it its due, the second unit shots from the helicopter are very good, and George Kennedy gives an enthusiastic performance.)

Something about Eastwood as a director: when he is off his game, as he often is and as he is here, there is a feeling that the story is badly told only because his impatience to tell it outweighed his attention to detail (like a well-written script, well-lighted scenes, dynamic pacing, etc), and so we tend, against all common sense and standard operating procedure, to forgive him. For the love of god, why do we do it? Our madness must stop.

Navajo Joe: (1966. dir: Sergio Corbucci) This is the only spaghetti western I’ve ever seen in which the hero is sexy. (In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of one in which anyone at all is sexy.) (OK, other than Claudia Cardinale; you got me there.) Burt Reynolds, --young, athletic, straight off the gridiron,-- is smoldering hot as a half-breed (everyone in this film who is not weak is half-breed: hero, heroine, and villain) wreaking vengeance on a bloodthirsty band of outlaws in recompense for the murder of his entire village.

The action launches right in sans preamble, and although the lines (and, god knows, the dubbing) are generally cumbersome and sometimes risible, it’s still an evolving art (this is 1966) and Sergio Corbucci (Django, the Great Silence)finds some good moments playing with camera angles and letting his hero lurk omnisciently. It’s got all the de rigeur bits: there's one where Navajo Joe (who has his own, really ridiculous theme song with his name sung over and over, while the rest of the music is the kind of Morricone you expect and desire) throws down his weapon to save the heroine, and you're wondering why until you realize it’s because it's time for the requisite now-we-kick-the-shit-out-of-you scene. Awesome stuff.

truth and fiction at the ok corral part 2

(...in which I continue my quest to snuffle out the occasional historical fact from the mass of Hollywood hocum and bunk that's been spun around the West's most famous and enduring shoot-out.)


Gunfight at the OK Corral: (1957. dir: John Sturges again!) Burt Lancaster is Wyatt Earp, only he walks like a dancer and smiles too much. Or maybe it's not that he smiles too much, but that his face is far too lyrical to belong to the stoical Earp. Kirk Douglas is Doc Holliday, and dazzlingly tony in those fancy waistcoats. In fact, the one great good thing about this version is the easy chemistry between its two leads; when one or the other is missing from the screen, the story lags.

This one starts way before Tombstone, back in Dodge, with Wyatt Earp co-marshalling with Bat Masterson. Even so, he's already following Ike Clanton and Johnny Ringo, notorious rustlers, set up as a sort of nemesis-duo for him and Holliday (Ringo even steals Big-Nose Kate in this one), which of course is all fluff and padding, but plays well enough. This is, however, the one time you'll see Big-Nose Kate with an actually sizable nose (Jo Van Vleet!) and she and Holliday enjoy a trashy, tempestuous, completely dysfunctional relationship, a supposition which probably keeps some truck with non-fiction.

The lady gambler (Rhonda Fleming as Earp's entirely fictional love interest; he would have been involved with his laudanum-addicted common-law wife Mattie Blaylock at that time) is badly written and nothing but a maddening diversion. Maybe she's trying to be Feathers (Rio Bravo will be another few years down the line), but poor Feathers needs a better writer (apparently Leon Uris has some trouble writing for the ladies) and certainly a more fascinating actress before she makes her long-awaited entrance into this world. Another annoyance is that poker, as in so many films, is portrayed as a game won not occasionally or dishonestly, but with unebbing continuity if one lives, as Holliday does, within the graces of the appropriate gods. By his own testimony, his secret is not caring about losing his money or his life, and so he never loses.

Also annoying is the Donna Reed Show squeak of cleanliness exuded by the Earp clan, who were in reality as often running, living in, and arrested in brothels as they were working as lawmen. One of the more compelling things about the Wyatt Earp legend is that he is equal parts criminal and lawman, and it seems almost a random historical hiccup that he is remembered in his star-sporting and law-abiding persona. Reading about the Earp clan, you get a strong impression that they went where the money was, and weren't particular about what tasks might be demanded or what company might be kept.

It is the slaying of young Jimmy Earp, as in the Ford movie, which sets off the killing, although in real life he was the oldest brother and a saloon-keeper in Tombstone. He was not present at the OK Corral, left Tombstone with his brother Morgan's body and died of natural causes in his eighties in California.

As usual, the shootout itself is a big sackful of highly photogenic lies. Johnny Ringo is there (he wasn't), the invitation has been sent in advance for a specific hour (it wasn't), and it is Billy Clanton, not Ike, who stumbles into Fly's Photographic Studio and is there picked off by Holliday (he wasn't). Frank McLaury, hiding in a wagon, fires the first shot at Ike Clanton's urging (in reality, all participants were out in the open, maybe ten feet apart), and the only words we hear are Doc saying, "Hit the dirt!" when in fact it was Virgil who started things off by demanding the cowboys disarm. (Interestingly, Virgil was carrying a walking stick, which you don't see often at a shoot-out. He'd taken it from Doc Holliday after giving him instead the shotgun to carry.) This cinematic shootout is a massive endeavour of choreographed running and tumbling and hunkering behind things, a fiery climax that continues for several minutes longer than its original did.

The verdict: see it for Douglas and Lancaster, but don't expect to learn from it.

robert carlyle film festival: the last enemy

Welcome to an Orwellian dystopia. It’s not the future so much as an alternate present: Britain in the post-7/7 era (that’s post-9/11 if you’re American) has embraced a total relinquishing of privacy in return for the government’s promise of safety. No longer can you make the simplest monetary transaction, nor even enter a public building, without a state-issued ID card. Bands of riot-gear-sporting cops can stop you on the least pretext to run you through the system. Retinal scans are mandatory if you want to fly, and sensitive government areas are guarded by fingerprint-readers. Amidst this milieu of barely-civilized paranoia, an inexplicable plague has erupted among a group of recently vaccinated refugees, a well-loved British doctor who worked with them has been mysteriously killed, and his widow unites with his estranged brother to try and solve the mystery, their own footsteps often dogged by encroaching doom as well.

Having been watching Carlyle in glancing pieces of American television, I conclude he’s been diluting the brogue in recent years, which is too bad. At full tilt, a Scottish brogue is not just the sexiest way of speaking but wonderfully expressive: complete with roars and deep-throated trills, explosive stops and a full use of real vocal resonance, it’s enormously exciting after a lifetime of the flat, tiny sound originating from the very front of the face that we Americans tend to favor. Certainly it’s one of the best parts of this particular series, listening to Carlyle speak. His performance as a sphinx-like bad-ass is thoughtful and still, communicating utter confidence and easy menace. Good as Benedict Cumberbatch is (and this is, I assure you, the role that won him Sherlock Holmes: already he is fully at home as a socially graceless but brilliant and compulsive-obsessive scientist), the real joy is in witnessing Carlyle’s enigmatic and entirely fearless character unfold, then fold back up, then unfold again.

The rest (equal parts cautionary tale about sacrificing our privacies to Big Brother and childlike fascination with the power allowed once one does enjoy access to total information all the time) is not without merit, not badly written, not badly acted, but ultimately not entirely satisfying. There is a website which will elucidate the absurdities of the technologies vaunted in the series, and it runs maybe an episode too long… although my dissatisfaction may be due to watching these things in two-night chunks instead of spread in a leisurely fashion across a month as was intended. There are twists toward the end, some of them more gratifying than others, but the final scenes of the Cumberbatch character I found very lyrically melancholy indeed.

truth and fiction at the ok corral, part one

October 26, 1881. The prosperous mining town of Tombstone, Arizona, made rich and lively by a boom in silver. Grand enough to boast an opera house, two banks, four churches, fourteen gambling halls and sixty-six saloons, parochial enough to play host to violent flare-ups between town miners and the "country cowboys" who work the circumjacent ranches.

2:46 PM. Three brothers and a tubercular dentist of no small ill-repute start a long walk through town to disarm a band of cowboys who have been spoiling for a fight with them for many days. One of the brothers, Morgan Earp, worries that the men they seek will be on horseback; his brother Wyatt tells him if it is the case, they will shoot the horses first and then disarm the men.

2:47 PM. Virgil Earp, the city marshal, yells out, "Boys, throw up your hands! I want your guns." There is an ominous clicking as Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury cock their guns. Virgil shouts, "Hold on! I don't want that," but to no avail.

The shooting begins. Billy Clanton and Wyatt Earp fire first and simultaneously, Billy at Wyatt but Wyatt at Frank McLaury because he is known as the deadlier shot. Billy misses; Frank is gut-shot.

By 2:48, it is over. More than thirty shots have been fired. Three men will die of their wounds. At least one more will be gunned down some months later in retribution. The others will spend the rest of their lives reliving, retelling, distentangling the details of that thirty seconds, and living with its consequences.

The story has been a favorite in Hollywood since its beginnings, and Wyatt Earp himself was feted and lionized by the tinseltown elite. (Amongst the pall-bearers at his funeral were Tom Mix and William S. Hart.) But which of the many Hollywood versions tells truth about the incident, or about the notoriously abstruse details of Wyatt's own life? Even a cursory glance allows that OK Corral movies were generally less interested in historical truth-saying than in honoring or exploring the boundaries of the Oater and its heroes, and with expressing the current version of the ever-shifting American zeitgeist. Sadly bereft of TCM as I am, I can't find many of the early ones (the two Frontier Marshal films, both from the thirties, one with George O'Brien, the other with Randolph Scott, and Joel McCrea's Wichita are the ones I miss most acutely). Others, like Dodge City, veer so wildly off-track as to be unrecognizable as history at all and I leave them for another day.

Hour of the Gun: (1967. dir: John Sturges) James Garner offers a suitably stoical and fierce-in-family-loyalty Wyatt Earp. One of his kills may be my favorite in all of filmdom: the shooting of Warshaw, who goes flying back against the corral fence, bounces off to go flying back again as he gets the full six bullets. I realize how bloodthirsty that sounds, but you have to see it, how gracefully realistic it looks.

Sturges begins with a bold-faced lie: a message flashes onscreen promising that he's going to tell the story as it really happened. Hogwash, naturally; it's filled with blatant lies and fictions. One of the best parts is that it starts straight off with the corral. Jerry Goldsmith's music is great; there's a low-key suspense-theme playing while those four impressive figures meet up and embark on their death-march to that legendary thirty seconds.

One of the first things they get wrong is that although Doc Holliday (Jason Robards) was indeed carrying the shotgun, he was doing so because he had a long coat and so he could conceal it beneath its folds. This is the mid-sixties, though, and instead of his long coat and broad-brimmed gray hat, Doc is wearing natty peg-legs and Beatle-boots. It was an autumn day, cold with gusts of wind, but you'd never know that from most incarnations, this one included. In Hollywood's Tombstone, it's always sunny and warm.

Ike Clanton (Robert Ryan) should have been much younger, not the patriarch of the family, and he was also drunk as a skunk on the day of the shootout. He'd been up all night playing poker with Virgil Earp, the doomed Tom McLaury and local Sheriff John Behan, and he kept up the drinking as constantly as he could into the morning. He also would have been woozy and infuriated from having been buffaloed, disarmed, dragged in front of a judge by Virgil Earp and fined. It is true he was unarmed at the corral and escaped following the first shots into Fly's photography shop, but in this version, Ryan's Ike is obviously both cunningly masterminding this shootout and slipping away to avoid it, with no sign of the previous traumas or visceral involvement the real Clanton endured.

Robards does his sad, wizened drunk thing, which works alright, but throughout there is talk that his drinking is what causes his coughing, whereas the opposite was really truer: his virulent TB drove him towards the temporary salve of drunkenness. That seems to be a trope which is repeated in every film, that it's the boozing that did him in, not the TB.

Curly Bill Brocius looked nothing like the young Jon Voigt (who nonetheless plays a compelling outlaw), and was killed in a sudden throwdown with Earp-led vigilantes at Mescal Springs amongst outlaw compadres, not alone in front of a saloon. Also, he was one of the "cowboys", occasionally employed at the Clanton ranch but nothing like a regular worker there, and in this version he is practically a right-hand man.

On the stand during the post-shootout hearing (and there was one), Robards' Holliday claims to have fought during the Civil War, which he never did.

Morgan Earp's death is done right, shot through the window of a billiard hall.

The womenfolk (Big-nosed Kate, Mattie and Josie and the other WAGs) do not appear in this version, and they are not missed. I did miss Johnny Ringo, if only because the mystery of his death is such a strange one, but really only Tombstone gives Ringo the fascination he deserves.

Dubious historicity aside, I liked this movie a lot.

My Darling Clementine: (1946. dir: John Ford) You go for awhile without a John Ford film and a suspicion creeps into your head that he's over-rated; the cheese and hogwash stick with you, all the things that made you wince, and the other stuff, the real stuff, starts to fade at the edges. Then you throw one on: say, My Darling Clementine, the movie with the lamest title ever; the Wyatt Earp movie that really has nothing to do with Wyatt Earp whatsoever but is somehow more about him than his real life was. You throw it on, and it starts right up with the cheese of the choirboy-cowboy singing that Ford loved so much and you think, yep, yep, over-rated. After that, it takes about one minute (maybe not so much; I'll time it sometime) before you're bowing and scraping in contrition.

This was the first film Ford made after the War (They Were Expendable was shot while fighting was still underway), and maybe he'd had some nonsense stripped away because I'd say it has less sugary goo and doiley-lace than most of the rest. For instance, nobody has any dying words. Someone gets shot, he dies. His brothers or some people find him dead, there's some kind of stately pieta-type of tableau, then they move on, they go on to get justice for this dead fellow.

I was going to say the camera-angles are perfect, but they're better than that; they're too fascinating to be perfect. The noir-western lighting is flawless, as is the editing, which is breathtaking. Dorothy Spencer takes all these amazing shots Ford and DP Joe McDonald give her and allows just enough space for the story to tell itself comfortably, not a breath too little, not a second too much.

Whoever thinks about Walter Brennan as a master thespian? He's a steadfast, dependable journeyman, or so I always thought, and yet his Pa Clanton is a mighty character, ruthless and unhesitating and frighteningly canny. The scene in which he waits smiling until Henry Fonda's Earp has left the room then takes a bullwhip to his sons in punishment is awesome to behold. And certainly this Doc Holliday, mawkish sentiment and all, is my favorite thing that Victor Mature ever did, for what that's worth.

None of this, you understand, has anything to do with history, despite the old saw about Ford knowing Earp on the old Hollywood sets and getting the true gen straight from the horse's mouth; that's all crap. He might have got a visual detail or two, but the shootout in the movie has no resemblance whatsoever to documented witness statements of the time. The real mccoy lasted about thirty seconds: six guys are waiting in a corral, four guys walk down the street and demand their guns, there's shooting, Ike Clanton says he's not armed and Wyatt says then get the hell out of the way, there's shooting, and then it's over but for the legalese and the legend.

Ford's shootout is far more interesting. There's strategy and subterfuge involved, and beautifully used clouds of dust stirred up by a passing stagecoach, and all the bad guys are dead by the end, and two of the good guys who survived in real life (Holliday and Virgil Earp) are also dead. In fact, the whole movie is fiction from beginning to end, but it plays like a dream. The real story wasn't shaped like a movie, and this one's a doozy. It gets some little details right, like the Birdcage Theatre, which looks just like the real Birdcage in Tombstone, with its strange, low boxes and the box-like claustrophobia of its audience space.

This Wyatt Earp (OK, it IS the young Henry Fonda, so, yeah) is much nicer than the real one. Other changes are inexplicable: why did he cast Ward Bond as Morgan Earp when he obviously should be playing Virgil, and why is Virgil slain prior to the shootout when he actually survived (and is buried in a Catholic cemetery near Sellwood in Portland, Oregon, as a matter of fact) when it's Morgan who should have died? There's no reason for it except that he's telling us this isn't history we're watching, and it's not: it's something far better.

halloweenfest evening six: a triple feature

Kill List: (2011. dir: Ben Wheatley) Gruesome and grim as fuck kitchen-sinker about two schlub assassins trying to avoid, then giving into and going about, their given trade. Only then it turns out to be about something else entirely. Astonishingly well done, and utterly disturbing. The characters are so completely realized that once the closing teeth of the guetapens become apparent, it matters, gut-wrenchingly, to us, the helpless spectators. It's too soon to tell, of course, but this may well turn out to be one of the enduring classics of the horror genre.

Fingerprints: (2006. dir: Harry Basil) A lame-assed horror-of-the-week from the Urban Legend category, but sometimes, as after watching something as dread-inspiring as Kill List, a lame-assed horror-of-the-week is actually a relief. A lot of high-school angst, all-adults-betray-you moral lessons, but also some weirdly alright performances and some toasty warm lighting which makes for a comfortable, easy ride. Had I watched it in any other context, I'd have been impatient and malcontent, and I cannot, in good conscience, recommend it. The plot makes little sense, and it works satisfactorily neither as a slasher film nor as a ghost story, with the exception of a few spooky images involving a little girl and writing on a mirror.

These Are the Damned: (1963. dir: Joseph Losey) Eccentric Carnaby Street offering from Hammer, directed by the inestimable Joseph Losey.

Whilst on holiday in Weymouth, dirty old Yank tourist MacDonald Carey takes the virginity of sexy mod-bird Shirley Anne Field, earning the wrath of her weirdly possessive teddy boy brother (Oliver Reed, as wonderfully smouldering and conflicted as ever). He and his leather-clad gang chase the couple onto the grounds of a military stronghold, and that's when things get weird. These "damned" are not the hell-wreaking teds, as one first imagines, but the bizarre children imprisoned here in a dungeon built into a cliff-side, children with strangly ice-cold flesh and no experience at all of the outside world.

Those early black and white Hammer films fascinate me; it's as if they're still groping for their particular niche and so have not yet settled into any kind of safe boundaries. There's some cheese and some awkwardness, but Reed is devastatingly handsome and Viveca Lindfors is on hand with her magisterial alchemy and her spot-on, always unconventional choices.

halloweenfest evening five: werewolf hunter and pig hunt

*SPOILER ALERT, both films*

Werewolf Hunter: (2004. dir: Paco Plaza) Julian Sands was always a strange actor, right from the start. (Go back to Room With a View and revisit his initial declaration of love to Miss Lucy Honeychurch, the one in the parlor over the piano while he's wearing his tennis whites: it is the strangest unburdening of the heart that you will ever witness, and not due to the writing, solely to the delivery. It's all extreme grimaces and distancing glances to the side. It should not have worked, and yet somehow it's managed to charm us all over all these many years.) Most of the good parts of this movie are good because he is good in it, playing a serial killer with an unblinking confidence which sidesteps the bluster of arrogance to suggest a man with an unshakable calling in life, without backpedalling into doubt or remorse.

There is good camera-work, and a gorgeous scene with a runaway wagon on fire at night. This is the story of the first known captured serial killer in history (in Spain in the late 1800s), and how the werewolf metaphor played out in him. The movie uses it fruitfully, with wolf-traps and one really amazing wolf-to-man shift, complete with birthing caul and snapping bones.

Because the female lead (escaped victim leading the chase in her spunky thirst for vengeance) is not a very interesting character, and because she feels absurdly anachronistic (would the police of the time really have let her ride along as one of them? would she, a virgin, really have insisted her first lover give her an orgasm before she'll let him take her?), the film sags during the times we are away from him and following her. And, of course, mediocre films being what they are, we know that it will end with him at the end of her blade in a lovers' embrace. Ho hum.

In between, there are strange meanderings about the werewolf's accomplice, a man who witnessed the Wolfman slaughtering his wife and became a sort of apprentice, then turned on him and began shooting silver bullets (and missing). It's all vague and wandery, then there's a short trial and an acquittal on grounds on insanity, with a professor using acupuncture as the latest scientific method for... well, everything, apparently.

In short, the best part is the first, when we get to know the Wolfman in his chosen milieu, making soap out of human fat and seducing beautiful women to their various demises. That part (ominously, right?) makes sense, whereas the response of the world to the crimes once uncovered is muddled and unconvincing.

Pig Hunt: (2008. dir: James Isaac) This movie is way too violent for my taste, but even I recognize it carries a certain redolence of awesomeness. Untested young soldiers (plus one tag-along girlfriend and one tenderfoot with a sweet old dog) venture into the backwoods of Deliverance to hunt the godzilla of hogs. You see how you have to admire the unadulterated moxie of the thing?

The production values are far finer than you'd expect on such a film, and the soundtrack by Les Claypool jets off into real brilliance, only stumbling into stupidity towards the end, with vocal samples interfering with the movie. (But Primus records were always a melange of genius and stupid, weren't they?)

Various morals are set forward in this film:

1. When malevolent rednecks and sinister hippies come to blows, the hippies, it turns out, can hold their own.

2. Even if your political stance is anti-violent, it pays to be able to shoot straight if you're going to follow your boyfriend into the Deliverance backwoods. (The corollary: just because a guy is wearing camo and talking big doesn't mean he'll be able to shoot straight.)

3. Worshipping (and providing food for) Hogzilla is sooner or later going to come back to -- forgive the pun -- bite you in the ass.

There are more. (Like, if you're wounded and unable to walk in the Deliverance-backwoods and your friends say, "We'll be right back," you need some new friends. Except that you won't be able to have any because you, mi compadre, are a red-shirt, and doomed, doomed, doomed.) But I'll stop there.

Let's be honest: there are some movies that you know, from the moment you pick up the box in the video store, whether or not you'll like them. This is one of those.

halloweenfest evening four: the tall man and sauna

*SPOILER ALERT*

the Tall Man: (2012. dir: Pascal Laugier) I’m going to give away the farm here, so don’t read this if you’re planning on watching the film. The important news is that if you're thinking Phantasm, look someplace else.

That disappointment aside, this has much to recommend it. The production values are superlative, Jessica Biel is fantastic in the lead and the supporting cast is every bit as good. I was attracted to it because of the Urban Legend aspect: a small, dying town in some picturesque mountains in Washington (although I think it’s really Canada) has a legend of a child-stealer known as The Tall Man. That turns out to be a red herring, but the plot-twists are eyebrow-raising and revealed with a spot-on sense of timing. At one point you actually think it’s going to turn into a Rosemary’s-Baby “the whole town worships Satan” thing, until two scenes later when that (and everything else you think you know about it) gets turned on its head again. That takes some doing. I also want to hand out some credit for the sound effects in the forest: she’s been chasing down a child-abductor, she’s wounded and resting, it’s night in the forest, and the sounds around her are great, just perfect.

Here's the catch: it’s not a horror film. Not for most of us, anyway, although I imagine much of it would be fairly disturbing for parents. Call it a horror film aimed specifically at mothers. It brings up all the dread questions, starting with the obvious: what if someone stole your child? then moving on into subtler forms of psychological torture: what if someone else is better equipped to raise your child? Is it not pure selfishness for you to keep hold of him?

An interesting point: there are no fathers in this movie, only mothers. I take it back: there’s one father, and he’s a mom’s lowlife boyfriend who’s knocked up her teenaged daughter. Every mother in it, even that last one, is depicted as strong in her way, which is one of the great virtues of the film. In fact, it has many virtues, but the question you end up with is… well, a little Mitt Romney, a little Dark-Knight-Rises-rich-folks-know-best. Do rich people, in fact, make better adoptive parents if the true biological parents are poor? To be fair, the movie agrees there are no simple answers, but it does leave you with an unpleasant taste in your mouth.

Sauna: (2008. dir: Antti-Jussi Annila) Stately, burnished Gewissengeist offering from Finland. Just before the turn of the 17th century and on the heels of a dreadful war, a joint embassage of Russian and Swedish ragtag soldiers and scholars, atheists all, travels through desolate land, demarcating the new boundary between their countries. As if the existential futility of that task needed bolstering, it gets it when we see they make peasants kiss a holy relic and swear by their souls that they will be subjects of the appropriate ruler.

A terrible crime is committed at the outset by two of the men, and it seems to curse them as they venture into a vast and unholy swamp at whose epicenter is an unholy sauna. (Apparently the sauna enjoys a far more central role in Swedish culture than our own, so the image must convey a heavier sense of dread in that colder, paler neck of the woods.) By the (very bitter) end, both countries are fighting to sign the malevolent place over to the other.

The film carries a poetic dignity alongside its filthy trudging and body-fluid creeps, unmistakably reminiscent of Aguirre, Wrath of God.

halloweenfest evening three: manson and cabin in the woods

Manson: (2009. dir: Neil Rawles) Every element of this real life monster movie is impressive. A documentary created for The History Channel, it has at its core filmed eyewitness interviews, most substantially with Linda Kasabian, who was on hand (although apparently not sanguinely involved) at both the Tate and LaBianca murders. The lighting, the camera work, the sound and music, and especially the acting in the reproductions, are charged and adroit. (The girls, of course, are way too pretty, but this is Hollywood, and, to be fair, the actor playing Tex Watson is too pretty, too.)

Adam Kenneth Wilson is upsettingly sexy as Manson, employing a southern drawl which may or may not be accurate (Manson was born in Ohio but raised partly in West Virginia), but is disarmingly soothing to the ear. Wilson also has the kind of chilling verisimilitude in playing violence that probably condemns him to a repeat of the career of Steve Railsback, who played Manson in the old Helter Skelter miniseries from the '70s, and, more recently but just as disturbingly, Ed Gein.

There's a scene where Tex, Linda, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins have just returned from the Tate house murders and are still sitting in the car. Charlie leans in the driver's window and asks each in turn, "You got any remorse?" After Linda dutifully and untruthfully answers no, he watches her, drumming his fingers on the door. It's a simple scene, and completely unnerving. The way the suspense builds up to Linda's planned escape is mesmeric.

There's a danger with this kind of true horror, as Trent Reznor found out after he purchased the Tate/Polanski house for its notoreity: in a 1997 Rolling Stone interview, he speaks of meeting Tate's sister, who asked him if he was exploiting her sister's death. Reznor realized there may have been truth in it, and moved out. Reliving the story all these years later, experiencing the horror of it in the same way one would a fictional horror, is it disrespectful?

the Cabin in the Woods: (2012. dir: Drew Goddard) Co-writers Drew Goddard (who wrote for both Buffy and Angel before penning Cloverfield) and Joss Whedon (who requires no introduction) have created a meta-fictional zombie movie which is so delightfully clever as to breathe new life into a weary-assed old genre. I wish, in fact, it were a television series instead of a film, to see where these two would go with it. Some old Joss-head favorites are on hand (Amy Acker, Tom Lenk, Fran Kranz) along with some more recent ones (Chris Hemsworth). It's funny, it's well acted, it takes the Evil Dead zombie cabin and explodes it into the realm of the Lovecraftian by way of the Orwellian. It's best to know as little as possible before you watch it; suffice to say that the idea is great, the execution is great, and wizened horror-film fans are in for a big party.

halloweenfest evening two: something wicked this way comes and dorian gray

Something Wicked This Way Comes: (1983. dir: Jack Clayton) It looks like it’s going to be about young boys and that troublesome passage into adolescence via the delicious metaphor of a malevolent, nocturnal carnival. Rather, it’s about the aging of men, and the sorrows and regrets of passing into middle years while feeling your choices are all behind you.

The atmosphere is lovely and autumnal, the carnival is dark and sumptuous, threatening and enticing in equal measure, but the story is ham-handed and allows its “alleg’ree” to stand in the way of our total immersion.

This movie was the first time I ever saw Jonathan Pryce, who is menacing indeed as the urbane and supernatural carnival ringleader, and it provided a much-appreciated first comeback for Pam Grier as the exotic embodiment of what Gabriel Garcia Marquez used to maddeningly call "the mangrove swamp" of female carnality.

The Carnival is a travelling Walpurgisnacht, and like all Walpurgisnacht feasts, this one's purpose is to ensnare souls, and souls are ensnared through weakness: in this case, the normal adult longing for lost prowess or beauty or opportunities. Children have a better chance, as they do not yet despair, but one of the boys in question is weak in his impatience for the onslaught of adulthood, and so makes himself easy prey for the crepuscular forces.

There are good, shiver-inducing pieces: at its epicenter, the carnival has a carousel which will age you or make you younger, depending on which way it turns, and the lightning rod salesman is a nice touch. It is a Disney film, so between Walt and Ray Bradbury, who wrote the novel, the aroma of nostalgia is pretty thick, but it works alongside the main theme to evoke the loss and regret and yearning.

I was disappointed with it in my youth when I saw it in the cinema, with its broadly-painted, one-stroke characters (the one-armed barkeep who longs for his days as a football hero, the portly barber who yearns for exotic women, the hatchet-faced librarian who once was a great beauty). The adults, as too often happens in movies ostensibly aimed at children (although I would argue this is really made for the masculine middle-age-crisis set), even the Jason Robards character, who is given much screen-time and whose soul is laid bare for us, seem simplified to exist almost solely in relation to the children, either as help-meets, tormentors, or as travelling moral lessons.

So I'm still disappointed with it. But if you keep your expectations low, you'll find small treasures abound in this movie's cobwebbed corners.

Dorian Gray: (2008. dir: Oliver Parker) A decent enough re-telling of one of the world's great horror stories. It's visually luscious in a way that would make Wilde happy, I think, and captures the sensuality without overdoing. It's well-acted and well-written, with the necessary padding (the novel itself is slim and, to its credit, leaves many details to the imagination) more than reasonably well done.

The trouble, and it's inherent in the story itself, is the same that one comes up against when filming Lovecraft: the titular portrait is itself the final shock, and while Wilde used our imaginations to bring it to life, what possible visual can give it sufficient shock value to evade anticlimax? Although the build-up in this one is just about perfect (a stunningly gorgeous portrait to start with, slowly growing hollow-eyed, festering and maggot-ridden), in the end it just looks like a picture of the Cryptmaster, and how scary is that?

Apart from that daunting obstacle, though, Dorian (Ben Barnes) is beautiful, Colin Firth is equal parts over-intellectual and too-much-debauched as the louche and ultimately conflicted Lord Henry (much more conflicted here than he is in the book, I think), Ben Chaplin is about perfect as the barely-closeted, magically gifted artist Basil Hallward, and the camera moves with lovely grace and ease between them. It lacks the heavy menace of the old black-and-white Gothic George Saunders version (and lacks Angela Lansbury, too, who is stunningly vulnerable as Sybil Vane), but it has a rather effective coda and final shot, making up for earlier disappointments.

westerns from a troubled decade: invitation to a gunfighter and the stalking moon

Invitation to a Gunfighter: (1964. dir: Richard Wilson) Man, I hate George Segal and his ham-fisted over-emoting. Yul Brynner, arrayed in his usual dignified stoicism, must be vaguely embarrassed every time they're onscreen together, watching Segal bend and grimace and furrow his massive brow.

I also hate what television drama did to Westerns in the early '60s, particularly to the writing and direction: all that talky, stagebound, psychobabbly melodrama. Thank the gods for the Italians, who saved the day before the decade was out. A guy rides into a town with no name and no heart, just a gun, a serape, a stubby cigar, a wide-brimmed hat and a steely-eyed gaze. By the time he rides out, everything has changed. Instead of psychobabble, there's tricksy mischief, and instead of melodrama, gunplay and explosions.

This, needless to say, was before the Italian influence took hold. Very much in spite of Yul Brynner's glorious presence, much of it is dull, most of it overwrought, and the ending is stupid. About five people in the cast were in Star Trek episodes, which never really bodes well for a Western, I've found.



The Stalking Moon: (1968. dir: Robert Mulligan) This, on the other hand, is ready for a remake. I guess, times being what they are, it'd have to be politically correcticized some, but it could easily be done. It's an old-school oater and it doesn't succumb to that confusion which took hold in the sixties, after which nobody knew how to portray violence or Indians or the cavalry or anything else. (Until, that is, the Italians saved the day.)

Gregory Peck is a retiring army scout who takes Eva Marie Saint and her son, longtime captives to an unnamed Indian tribe, under his wing when the boy's vicious warlord father comes after them. I found both leads a trifle disappointing, but to be fair, the whole thing is done mostly in medium long-shot, and that's a hard range in which to act effectively. That said, Robert Forster plays up a storm in the sexy-halfbreed-tracker-sidekick role, doing a sort of half-Charles Bronson, half-Paul Newman, all-James Dean impersonation. It's particularly great to see this now after just having watched the Descendants ("I'm going to hit you now." LOVE that guy.)

It's extraordinarily well written, with no more words than are needed. There are a few "huh?" moments in the story, but the momentum is such that it carries you through. At its best, it's grippingly suspenseful, with an unseen powerhouse of a killer on their trail and a small, stoical cast in claustrophobic circumstances surrounded by gorgeous scenery. I'd have preferred to see Charlton Heston in the lead, but Peck is no slouch, particularly in action scenes.

Seriously, I mean it. Someone should remake this.

retro '80s evening at the halloweenfest: beyond the black rainbow and night of the creeps

Beyond the Black Rainbow: (2010. dir: Panos Cosmatos) Here is no ordinary slasher film but a Night Sea-Journey, complete with Kurosawa-esque (Kiyoshi, not Akira) use of ambient noise to lull and enervate simultaneously, with fearlessly long, even shamelessly sluggish scenes, and dialogue which might seem tepid were it not delivered with such fierce virtuosity as Canadian actor Michael Rogers gives it. And it's got one lulu of a cinematic drug-trip in it: not as good as the 18-minute mega-vision from the uncut version of Jan Kounen's 2004 Blueberry, more modest than that, but still a cracking good sequence wielding a powerful metaphorical uppercut.

What's it all about, you ask? Call it an exploration into how a true theophany (or perhaps the terrifying banality of the real world following such a moment) can make a serial killer out of an innocent spiritual seeker. Anyway, that's what it was about for me. It's possible that any five viewers would give you five different answers. Part of its creep-factor is that it's set in the early '80s, complete with Reagan's anti-Russky scaremongering on the television in the background, but in a futuristic compound without windows or fresh air, so that time and the real world seem distant and virtually powerless entities.

If the ending is a disappointment, it's only because the story-telling until then has been so radically unexpected that the downshift towards "normal" is a little like coming down off some very fine Orange Sunshine.

Regardless: this first-time director has guts and vision both. Keep your eyes on him, and on Michael Rogers, who looks like Christian Bale in the Machinist and is riveting, without mis-step, as the spiritually malformed Dr. Nyle.

Night of the Creeps: (1986. dir: Fred Dekker) You could call it a classic of sorts. It's one of those early, good-humored pokes at the horror genre, more specifically the zombies-disrupt-the-prom variety ("The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is they're dead"), with alien invasion and slasher tropes tossed in. Long-time horror pro Tom Atkins (the Fog, the Ninth Configuration)is outstanding as a chain-smoking, disillusioned cop scarred by having seen his estranged high-school sweetheart hacked to death with a long-handled axe and having subsequently tracked the psycho down, murdered and buried him.

The fun starts earlier than that, though, in the first minutes: we are onboard a very enjoyably cheesy alien spacecraft where there's apparently a mutiny underway. Through subtitles, we come to understand that one of the aliens is stealing a potentially lethal "experiment", trapped in a metal tube. Next we see of it, it's crash-landing near a teenage make-out spot sometime in the 1950s, and the seeds, as they say, are sown.

You wouldn't call it one of the best, not now, but it was one of the FIRST of the best, I'll wager. Now it feels a little slow and dorky, but it keeps a tone sufficiently light to buoy it up across the bumps.

snow white and the huntsman: a portrait of female rage

You see it for one thing: Charlize Theron as the Evil Queen. Because Charlize Theron is a master of her craft, marvellous to watch, her choices clean and intelligent, and her role as written is the most interesting in the part of the film. And, to be frank, even she gets a little kabuki with it before the end.

What Kristen Stewart has to offer as an actress is a tough vulerability, a sort of street-urchin stubbornness, and a very particularly modern-day honesty communicated through her own peculiar brand of petulant underplaying, all of which combine to make her a much-needed surrogate through whom girls of a certain age experience themselves. In fact, these qualities have made her a star amongst a particular demographic. That someone decided they would also make her a good fit to play Joan Jett was a solid inspiration, and that worked out rather well. That any human would think they made her a good fit to play the Female Embodiment of Purity and Innocence is baffling to the point of dementia.

Her bearing and body language make it impossible to buy her as anything but a 21st-century girl, and her innate toughness makes scenes like the one where she quiets a fierce bridge-troll through sheer force of Innocence and Purity (a scene which ought to have been utterly charming, since the CGI troll is so utterly charming in his response to her) frustrating, to say the least. More problematic is the great resurrection towards the end, where she rises from the dead to give an "Agincourt" speech which inflames the army of Good Guys to fight and die for her cause. What it needs is a Cate Blanchett, and Stewart, for all her amiability, has nowhere near the charisma to pull it off.

Much of the story is difficult to swallow, and not the parts you'd think. I, for one, have no problem with the idea that a magpie Snow had saved as a child returns to lead her through her prison-break and to a magical white horse which bears her to safety. That is exactly the kind of thing one expects in a fairy tale. What I DON'T buy is that after spending ten years locked without a moment's respite in a dungeon her muscle-tone is such that she can outrun, outride, and outswim an army to find her escape. Should her skin not be diseased with lack of sunlight, therefore nullifying any "beauty" issues the Evil Queen might be harboring? And, having spoken to almost no one in all those years, should she not be, if not a little gibberlingly mad (a la Amy Acker at the beginning of her role in Angel), at least completely socially inept? She walks out of that cell like she's only been in it a day or two. You scoff at my persnickity attitude, but consider how easily this all might have been solved: the Evil Queen is more than adept at magic, and might easily have placed Snow in a sort of Rumplestiltskin/Sleeping Beauty magical sleep from which she might awake with (magically) renewed vigor. I swear: good film-making is all in the details, and if you're making a fairy tale, put yourself into that fairy tale space, will you?

But let that pass. Although there is no discernible chemistry between Snow and her Huntsman, Chris Hemsworth, it turns out, is an utterly dependable actor. He owns the power of presence to play Thor, the droll humour to deliver the wisecracks up to his inevitably spectacular death in Cabin in the Woods, and now the easy confidence to slip, when it's demanded, into the scenery as Snow's strong-man sidekick. The dwarves, when they at last appear, turn out to be Eddie Marsan, Ian McShane, Ray Winstone, Toby Jones, Bob Hoskins and some other fellows I should probably recognize, all effectively CGIed into short, stocky miners. They're an enjoyable lot, without having all that much to do.

The fairy tale morphs as it goes on, kyping bits from the lives of Sleeping Beauty and Joan of Arc, and the coronation at the end is an almost embarrassingly underwhelming finale. Any common script-girl could tell you what this audience is interested in seeing is not Snow crowned queen, which we assume is inevitable, but Snow finding true love with her Huntsman, which is more problematic, royal entanglements being regulated as they are, and this we never see.

In the end, this story belongs to the Wicked Stepmother, who has been brilliantly embodied as the epitome of Female Rage at centuries of patriarchal oppression, and, more tellingly, centuries of secret female collusion with the enemy. The skewed, dishonest factor lodged near the heart of the movie is that, at loggerheads with the script, the film-maker secretly values Rage over Innocence, and so the character of Snow loses power in ambivalence while the Evil Queen is ultimately only defeated by her own self-loathing.

sorcerer: the gods live in the details

In Vera Cruz, an assassin wearing dark glasses and white patent leather shoes shoots a rich man in his apartment. (In this film, you can tell assassins because they have white shoes.)

In Jerusalem, three young men in yarmulkes (one is carrying white shoes) blow up a building. Only one of them escapes death or capture.

A rich man gazes out a window onto a Parisian street. He is troubled; life weighs heavily upon him; he is French. He and his intellectual wife of ten years talk a little philosophy, then he goes to sit in a hostile office and face corruption charges which will lead to disgrace and incarceration if he doesn't come up with a great deal of money very quickly. His partner in crime shoots himself, and we watch the rich man stumbling away up the road.

In New Jersey, Irish gangsters infiltrate an Italian Catholic wedding. The gangsters slip into a back room and rob the place, shooting a priest. They quarrel as they drive away; the car crashes. Only Roy Scheider survives to limp away. We see the Italian mobsters vow revenge.

When these four men recur, they are all inhabiting the same poverty-stricken mud-village somewhere in South America, a village ratfucked by the American oil company which is the only employer in the region. The only hope of escape any of our criminals have is to take on a suicidal mission: the company is offering bulky wages and proper citizenship to four men who will drive unstable explosives over terrible roads to quell an oil well on fire.

This, then, is William Friedkin's reimagining of Clouzot's classic Wages of Fear. It came out in 1977, and this, my friend, is how to write, shoot, and edit a film. The unvoiced details (do filmmakers even use those anymore?), like the bride's black eye as she promises to love, honour and obey, or the names painted on the old death-trap trucks they have to drive (one is called Lazaro, the other, which looks like it has teeth, Sorcerer), or the wary way the convicts eye one another while working in the village, each wondering which is the assassin sent for him, tell the story with minimal verbiage. The editing is flawless. Friedkin uses the camera to tell the story, shaking it only once, when it's running with the police to arrest the terrorists, and once we speed with it along a French street, and once, marvellously, at the end, we back with it away from a scene of peace in a ramshackle saloon, out through a screened window, then lift smoothly upwards and turn slowly to reveal the arrival of a crucial taxi. The camera movement communicates, somehow, that this is all destined. It is like a humbler but still quietly breathtaking version of Antonioni's final shot from the Passenger, which has to be on anyone's short list of the most magnificent end-shots to any film, ever.

It's closing in on the '80s, so there's synth music, but this time it actually works in the story's favour, a Tangerine Dream suspense-track which uses subtle dissonance to build tension. And tension there is. The rope/rotting wood bridge passage is nearly unbearable. Then there’s Scheider, with that classic, rugged, scarred but endlessly emotive face, giving another of his world-class performances.

Is it great enough to call it an overlooked classic? I think so. It's got some flaws: a few clichés, visual (the wasteland reflected in his windshield seems to swim around his head as he goes mad) and spoken (“What will you do with all that money?” “Get laid.”), but they are dwarfed, in the end, by virtues. Although it will always take a back seat to the Exorcist and French Connection, it's still one of Friedkin's greats, and one of Scheider's.

last night's double feature: bernie and exit humanity

Bernie: (2011. dir: Richard Linklater) I'd forgotten about Linklater, how he never gives you what you expect. I was thinking Jack Black, you know, I was thinking comedy, and there is some, but it's not laugh-out-loud, it's more a roiling, low-level amusement. This is half-documentary, half-comedy about a truly pleasant guy who is driven to a cowardly piece of butchery, his cover-up, his trial, and how it affected the little town of Carthage, Texas. It's based on a true story, and it seems that the townsfolk interviewed are unscripted, but they’re so brilliant, it's hard to tell.

Black does his usual scrupulously good work, but it's Matthew McConaughey who really cleans up. When is McConaughey going to be universally lauded as the master of comic acting that he is? The physical choices he makes for his character, a sort of ambitious, dastardly, low-life DA, feel true and appropriate while being simultaneously hilarious. The other guy who's truly funny here is not so much Black, whose character is really tragic, but one of the townsfolk, a guy in a bar wearing a baseball hat who has wickedly funny things to say about Texas ("the people's republic of Austin") and the folks who ended up on the out-of-town jury ("they've got more tattoos than teeth"), among other subjects. Is it scripted? If not, I want to hang out with this guy.

This is part of Linklater’s ongoing effort to record -- or possibly to decode, -- pieces of history from his own neck of the woods in Texas. Tuck it in there next to the Newton Boys, which is, however, a scrap of juvenilia in comparison.

Exit Humanity: (2011. dir: John Geddes) The crucial thing to say is that I'm right there in the crowd cheering for John Geddes; I think he's got great things ahead of him. This, noble as the effort is, is not one.

Listen to the idea: at the end of the Civil War, a zombie plague strikes and threatens to wipe out humanity. A good-hearted reb is our narrator, recording his terrible experiences in a book for posterity as he tries to find some road back into faith along with a way to end the horror.

I'll go out on a limb here and guess that it was adapted from a graphic novel, and not just because Geddes rather beautifully incorporates illustration into the action scenes, even using them to replace action entirely, which works surprisingly well. It also suffers from the usual graphic-novel maladies: a tendency to skim lightly over the top of a story instead of digging down into human interaction, an over-reliance on narration (which, in this case, is delivered by Brian Cox, so not so very terrible), and a truly appalling lack of inspiration in the dialogue, which is so flat and by-the-numbers it might have been scribbled on a napkin in the parking lot a few minutes before shooting when someone realized they needed to give the actors words to speak.

That said, newcomer Mark Gibson is splendid as the beleaguered soldier, mining a continual wellspring of truth from a role made out of bad lines and histrionics. The zombies are believable (in that they keep a sense of internal cohesion within their hive-character) and they look great. (It's nice sometimes to have the old-fashioned, shuffling zombies back; that's how zombies moved when I was a kid, pre-Danny Boyle.) The palette is washed-out, giving that old-fashioned, near-sepia look which actually works for this, emphasizing the intensely blackened zombie eyes and blood.

Stephen McHattie is wasted as a drunken doctor looking for a cure (and, speaking of McHattie and zombies, I'm still waiting for Pontypool to hit Netflix. Is anybody listening?), and, outside of the main guy, you never feel the other characters are thicker than paper-thin. Geddes also gets my goat by doing that shake-the-camera thing to indicate an action scene instead of actually staging a decent action scene and filming it well, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he's doing it for budgetary reasons, and once he scores some major rich-guy backing he'll exercise a vaster ingenuity.

All that said, there’s something lovely about a zombie movie which first and foremost examinines the question of faith and its slow recovery after the world becomes a place of despair. I also love the idea of a zombie film in which most of the violence is suggested and the world is gorgeous.

In short, a lot of the stuff he got right. The next one just has to be better written, is all.

anonymous: pretty lies

Who could have expected such good, old-fashioned film-making from infamous schlock-meister Roland Emmerich? What a marvellous story, and so marvellously well told! No distracting camera movement, no moment of fat left to over-lengthen any scene. Olde London-town looks wonderful, true to life, dirty and lovely, and the details! like the theatre, and the way the groundlings take active part, pitching in to fight the French at Agincourt when so inspired, it's all wonderfully exciting. Historically, of course, the story is total rubbish; to paraphrase Himself, the story maintains so politic a state of rubbish that its lies will not allow any hint of truth to intermingle with them. But that's true enough to Shakespearean tradition, too, as the real Richard III would tell you if he could dust himself off and speak his piece.

And, ye gods, the actors those cold islands produce. What a lioness is Vanessa Redgrave as she ages! Last year she also gave us a dazzlingly original Volumnia in Ralph Fiennes' stripped-down and energetic Coriolanus, creating a woman who so longs to be a soldier that her salute near the end is nearly heartbreaking. Her calm, kind instruction to Virgilia in the arts of raising and loving soldier sons and husbands, so wonderfully matter-of-fact, is unlike any I've seen, with no trace of disdain for the weaker girl, a performance of completely assured genius. Here, as the aging Elizabeth, she paints a complex but believable portrait, managing to weave together the contradictory bits that writer John Orloff gives her. The way it's written, a lesser actress (that is, almost any actress) would have emerged with two dimensions, giving maybe a single glimpse of a third, but Redgrave is astonishingly good as the theatre-enthralled, flesh-loving, increasingly age-confused monarch who keeps a loose grip on her kingdom by bowing to her counsellors, those chilly, ambitious Cecils.

If for no other reason, it's worth watching just to spend two hours in those lost streets and taverns and theatres, which feel tangible, sweat-smelling and mud-filled under Emmerich's magic paintbrush. He's wasted an extraordinary amount of time, ours and his own, in previous films destroying our world in vivid detail. Now that he knows the joy of creating lost worlds in equally acute detail, perhaps he will become the master of re-vivifying lost times, even if he does spend his time telling silly lies whilst inhabiting them.

*************

POSTSCRIPT:

As to the issue of who wrote Shakespeare's plays: just today I see that veteran actor Janet Suzman gives a good, solid poke in the eye to all the posh-boy Oxfordians in her new book. Those Oxfordians (that is, those who believe, as this film posits, that no low-born commoner like Shakespeare could have risen to such genius, and that therefore Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, must have written his plays instead), generally rest their argument on three major points: what they call Shakespeare's lack of education, the fact that Oxford is on record as having travelled, particularly to Italy, a country which Shakespeare loves to bring to life, and the eerie lack of books in Shakespeare's will when he died.

Suzman wrestles down the first two points (Shakespeare's education was, in fact, equivalent to that received in a modern university, and, as to Italy, there's a little thing called imagination, fed by maps and reading), leaving the question of the books. How could the greatest writing genius of all time die without leaving a library? To which I reply, he left no trace a library in his will, which is a very different matter.

Look at this: what kind of library would a man like Shakespeare have had? A vastly illegal one, for a start. It would have been filled with heretical tracts (hermetical works, books by Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, etc), not to mention Catholic works, works on occultism, alchemy, and probably no small amount of pornography, any piece of which could throw half a neighborhood into the Tower. Either the man passed it quietly on to a worthy successor before he died, or else his good, probably non-reading wife Anne burned them in a panic before they could be uncovered.

the skin i live in: permanent damage

Here’s my history with Almodovar: twenty odd years past, I went to an art-house in Portland to see Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and hated it so much I’ve resisted seeing any of his films since, in spite of some frothy encomia from critics. I have been leaning reluctantly towards giving him a second chance since Flower of My Secret, and decided at last to take the plunge with The Skin I Live In.

What did I hate about Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down? I was much closer to my college years then, and therefore more sensitive about sexist propaganda, having so recently had my feminist consciousness raised. The film as I remember it was a wacky romantic comedy about blossoming love between a kidnapper and his victim. I assume (as opposed to remember) that Almodovar was exploring inter-gender issues of dominance and power, but it seemed like a load of chauvinist crap. Granted, at the time I had precious little earned wisdom about inter-gender issues of dominance and power, and so smug self-righteousness was easy to summon.

Now: what is The Skin I Live In about? Inter-gender issues of dominance and power between a kidnapper and his victim! I am not kidding. Here’s my question for you: have ALL his intervening films been about this same thing, or did I just pick my moment with crazy prescient irony?

All that said, TSILI is an extraordinary film. It’s as if he decided to remake Eyes Without a Face and then took it way off on his own crazy Almodovar trip. Think Eyes Without a Face, only way, way more twisted. Nobody gets chewed on by dogs, but things that do happen make a dog-chewing seem like the happier alternative.

In fact, I didn’t realize how truly disturbing it was until I woke up this morning with my mind haunted by it. Because Almodovar has such a beautiful, unpretentious visual style, you don’t realize how rough the story really is at first. He’s like Polanski: a master story-teller, all his techniques just so. His pacing is fantastic. He carries you along seamlessly, without a bump, without a hassle, and your aesthetic sense is pleased by the scenery, and Antonio Banderas is so good, and the story is so strange and compelling, and then you wake up in the morning and go ye gods! my psyche is bent! Can I fix it, or is this permanent?

(BIG, BIG SPOILER ALERT: And as far as the feminist issue goes, all the men in this particular cinematic world are basically dicks, and the women deal with that depressing factor by dying. There is one single woman in this movie who successfully fights instead of throwing in the towel, and she turns out to be a man. I’m totally serious.)