leaves from an old notebook

Little Miss Sunshine: (2006. dir: Jonathan Dayton) One of those star-studded "indy" films. Quirky deadpan humor so heavy-handed it might as well bear flashing captions beneath it reading QUIRKY DEADPAN HUMOR. The characters are all types, not characters (the suicidal uncle, for instance, was A Bill Murray Character Not Played By Bill Murray), but some are more enjoyable than others: for me, it was the brother (Paul Dano), the suicidal uncle (Steve Carrell), and the little girl (Abigail Breslin). I love Alan Arkin with the heat of a thousand suns, and I'm glad to see him sporting a statue of Oscar, and I did enjoy watching him cuss and shoot heroin and coach his granddaughter in a dance the judges would never forget, but we all know the Academy clutched at this opportunity to fete him for all the great, dark-humored and previously unrewarded work he did in the '60s and '70s.

The movie falls into two parts: road-trip and beauty pageant. The pageant part was just insipid; the road-trip part had bright spots. None of it made a lick of sense. It felt like someone really, really wanted to make a Wes Anderson film but lacked his vision, technical prowess, and his wonderful warmth of heart.


the Ragman's Daughter: (1974. dir: Harold Becker) A very late kitchen-sinker written by Alan Sillitoe, one of Britain's original Angry Young Men. Victoria Tennant was at the time a vapid, winsome-looking model, and Becker's direction is uninspired, so the film lacks the fascination of earlier Sillitoe offerings the Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. It has in its favor an easy tempo and a strong focus on faces, but its loose gait also points up its thinness of story. In the end, unless there's a strong plot moving them along, the conversation of 18-year-olds is not usually very interesting.

There is a strange dislocation in time involved. I suspect as written it's the older, stable, family-supporting, hard-working version of the hero thinking back longingly on this romance in his vibrant, outlaw youth, but as it comes across the two selves seem to be inhabiting the same space. Which might have led to something interesting, but never did.


the Devil and Daniel Webster: (1941. dir: William Dieterle) Fairy tale fable with painted backdrops and good humor, particularly when poking fun at the pride of New Englanders. It's a little clunky in its pointed nonrealism, more like a filmed stage play than a movie, but all is forgiven because Walter Huston is a godsend and a joy. This is also the film's Achilles Heel because Huston's devil is so completely the master of all he surveys that the ending seems ridiculous when the verdict goes against him. In those scenes when the film glides into the fantastical and away from its hammy moralizing, it genuinely soars, making a life of evil look enormously enticing. Simone Simon is on hand to help with her notoriously feline sensuality, and Anne Shirley draws the short straw as the long-suffering wife who does nothing but sit, look pained, be martyred.


the Last of the Mohicans: (1992. dir: Michael Mann) I saw it in the cinema and it burned clean for me, by which I mean mere hours afterward I could remember little or nothing of it. I put that down largely to the darkness of the photography, my extreme closeness to the screen, the overuse of fade-outs which lent it a distancing sense of montage rather than story to be followed, and further distancing by a continually swelling string section.

Watching again on television and expecting little, I saw it in a new light. The acting ensemble is flawless, much of the filming effective, and that crucial scene in which Hawkeye, the British officer, the bad guy and the Mohawk chief are deliberating in three different languages is fabulous: none of it is properly translated, so we must guess at what's in French or Mohawk.

Wes Studi is tremendous, as is Madeleine Stowe, and one's eyes are drawn constantly and inevitably to Daniel Day-Lewis whenever he is onscreen, like some unstoppable magnetic force. And it's got one of the most stunningly heart-stopping romantic moments in the history of cinema: that infamous, uber-swoony moment when he cries out to her that he will find her, no matter what, no matter where she goes, he will find her. It's something in his voice, I think, the perfect timbre; it shakes you right to the bone.

horrorfest evening nine: cheese from the 70s

the Car: (1977. dir: Eliot Silverstein) I'll be honest. I expected a hidden gem here. Instead, it's got everything you expect from a schlock 70s horror film: a silly idea, a bad script, stupid characters, lazy editing, a low budget, mediocre acting (not RG Armstrong, though; that guy always rocks); I could go on. However, it did one thing exactly right: the car itself.

The car gives an Oscar-worthy performance. It really does feel like a coldblooded, playing-with-its-food psychopath which has moments of terrifying tantrum freakout when it can't get its way. This being the 70s, we are never certain why this evil spirit erupted from the red canyons of Arizona, as we are never certain why it took the shape of a car. Does it have something to do with the Anton La Vey quote at the beginning? Probably not. None of this matters, though, because the car itself makes the movie worth watching, even with all the other stuff working against it.



*SPOILER ALERT*

the Fury: (1978. dir: Brian De Palma) You know what's fun? Watching John Cassavetes in movies like this. He never phones anything in, not that I've seen. He gives himself to this villain completely, seeming to take it as seriously as any role in his own great films. He is compelling to watch, and when he's speaking he makes the script seem better than it is. What a master, a magister tenebrarum in the shadowy art of cinema.

Now, the program notes: I started late with De Palma, and find myself generally restless with his movies, Blow Out being the only exception that leaps to the fore. (Bear in mind that I have yet to see Carrie, Carlito's Way and Dressed to Kill, among others.) In this one, he seems to have said to his actors, "Use a lot of bold hand gestures. Lots of them. I want to see your hands moving all the time, damnit." Or maybe it's a natural actors' mechanism, over-using hand gestures in a mad, last-ditch defense against our realizing the mediocre quality of lines they're having to speak.

The Fury was adapted by Robert Farris from his own novel (he wrote All Heads Turn When The Hunt Goes By, a classic horror tome which I found oddly disappointing, probably because the title is the paragon of titles, it cannot be matched, and so I was expecting food fit for gods behind it). The script doesn't quite find its grasp. The actors do what they can. De Palma has fun with the effects. The climactic image of Kirk Douglas finding his son in a darkened, burnt-out, blood-drenched room, hovering silently several feet above the floor, is effectively weird.

It's too long, this film, giving us a lot of filler we don't want, and the story more than once pulls out of focus into a kind of opaque I-guess-that-makes-sense leap-of-faith realm. It's an action film with horror elements (kids with scary psychokinetic powers that get out of hand). Kirk Douglas, probably sixty at the time, does his action hero thing, and that's alright, but Amy Irving, whose best talent is for hyper-emoting, and she does a vast deal of it here, has such a pretentious way of speaking that it takes at least half the film to bond with her. Her earnestness and ethereal beauty will win you if you stick with it, but then, alas, she gets a little kabuki in the end-scene (not in an interesting way like Isabelle Adjani in Possession, but in a kind of embarrassing way, like Winona Ryder in Dracula). Andrew Stevens is always a little scary, and one of the big set-pieces which does work very well involves his character walking in a fit of choler through a carnival, oblivious as electric lights explode when he passes.

Another of the grand set-pieces is the great escape scene, when Kirk Douglas is rescuing Amy Irving from her captivity. De Palma shows us the entire sequence in slow motion, some minutes long, with no sound except a bombast-score from John Williams (see * postscript for my tempered rant on that fellow). It is bold and, although not entirely successful, I applaud the effort.

The ending is abrupt, leaving us wondering what happens to the one character who's left standing. But when you think about it, how do you follow an exploding Cassavetes? You don't, and De Palma must have known that anything other than an immediate roll of credits would feel wan and sere in its wake.


* Personal aside on John Williams: apart from the music for Star Wars and Jaws, both obvious masterpieces, I would argue that this man was, in retrospect, a great scourge across the land in the '80s, his iron-clad dominance over movie-music an annoyance at best, his trademark sound become a cliche.

dirk bogarde: photographing thought

If you had the good fortune to watch the Dirk Bogarde version of Tale of Two Cities while you were young and impressionable, then it will have made an indelible mark on you. With age, there are cracks at the edges: Dorothy Tutin's Lucie Manette seems one-dimensional, although unoffensive enough. A crucial plot-point, the supposedly uncanny resemblance between Sidney Carton (Bogarde) and Charles Darnay (Paul Guers), requires so vast a suspension of disbelief as to daunt the cheeriest filmgoer. The ending dances dangerously along the cliffside of emotional blackmail with Carton's gallows-edge friendship with the absurdly innocent beauty who goes just before him to the guillotine.

Still, its power survives because the story is one of the best romantic adventures ever written, and because the secondary roles are filled to perfection with the likes of Ian Bannen, Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasance, not to mention a stunning Madame Defarge turned in by Rosalie Crutchley, striding through the movie like an Act of God. I don't think you could remake it after this: she so fully embodies the character that she owns it absolutely, as Brando does Stanley Kowalski, and any new portrayal would be either an imitation of or a reaction against the perfection of this one.

If Bogarde weren't there, Crutchley's performance would be the thing one took away, the touchstone by which one remembered the film. Thank God, though, Bogarde IS there, playing a role that Dickens seems to have written for him, playing it with a deadly blend of sardonic wit and stoic resignation, punctuated by wild moments of zealous idealism. His Carton is the Romantic past his prime; all hopes have been crushed beneath the brutal drudgery and banal horrors of daily life, while death is still an impossibly distant promise of release. He manages to go on by dulling the rough edges with a constant drunkenness, at least until he meets the unobtainable girl who will reawaken his passion for life. Bogarde's performance is unassailable, and it's all but impossible to look away from him, even when he's standing still in the background. Every small, cynical twist of smile is perfectly timed, and his most demanding scene, when he drunkenly confronts Lucie with his impossible love, could not be more real: it veers wildly between the mortifying and the courageous, a combination of awkwardness, self-loathing, and undeniable nobility.

Although Tale might have been his apotheosis as a matinee idol, it was perhaps in his collaborations with writer Harold Pinter (the Servant, Accident) and, more importantly, with director Joseph Losey (the Servant, Accident, King and Country), that we find his greatest legacy. He was a great taker of chances in the roles he chose, exploring psychological darkness and diving into small, "problem" films which travelled as far from easy Hollywood glamour as he could go.

King and Country is a mid-sixties anti-war film adapted from a play and set in the trenches at Passchendaele. Sprung up from a genre that was popular in British theatre at the time, it starred the unimpeachable Tom Courtenay as a simple, fed-up Englishman being tried for desertion. Losey's camera is a vital force, a living thing, surreptitiously climbing and moving in too close, all without drawing attention to itself, and it saves the movie from its static, stagebound script without sacrificing the merciless claustrophobia of the trenches. There is never a moment, not a single flashback, which gives us respite from their closeness or from the wasteland of the battlefield, except for a single still photograph of the King in his regalia riding alongside the Kaiser, possibly sharing a joke. Although the tragedy seems to belong to Courtenay's doomed foot-soldier, it really resides in the pocket of Bogarde's wiser, more experienced, more fully despairing Captain Hargreaves, who knows from the outset that the trial is a sham formality but must do his utmost to defend the fellow anyway. After it's done, and Hargreaves is barely holding his own against a tide of anguish, he asks the presiding officer a rhetorical question to which he receives a devastating answer. The camera remains still, the officer in extreme forefront, but in the following seconds, the revelation playing across Bogarde's face is the film's true emotional climax.

If I had to choose his three most important films (allowing that there are many I have yet to see), I would say the Servant, Accident, and Victim. This triptych of psychological terrorism is by no means flawless even for a rock-solid Pinter fan. And if you are not a Pinter fan, if you find his earlier stuff pretentious and over-stagey and under-articulate, the first two will be hard going for you. What Pinter does in these scripts (separated by four years; the Servant came out in 1963 and Accident in 1967, but the gap feels longer) is what he does best: brings to life dark, malevolent power struggles which manifest without anyone ever speaking plainly about anything. Bogarde has a facility for it, expressing to us in tiny facial tics or a shadow of emotion fleeting past the eyes exactly what he is thinking.

As for Victim, it's one of those films which was more important at the time than as it ages. In 1961, an Englishman could still be tossed into the hoosgow and his life and fortunes ruined for the crime of being gay, and this was the film which took a brave stance against that bigoted law. Taking the role (which quietly put to rest the matinee-idol portion of his career, incidentally) was stouthearted, as Bogarde was gay himself. Because it's a film with a mission, a mission which is long since accomplished, there is a tiresome tendentiousness about it, but its production values are so good, and it so brings to life the moment in history (London just building up to "swinging") that it's still worth watching.

There is a popular quote of Bogarde's (I don't know where it came from; probably one of his many engagingly written memoirs): "The camera can photograph thought." He seems to have built his acting style firmly around that simple, resoundingly true premise, and it is why he so fascinates: enigma that he is, he shows us his thoughts, which are more interesting than those of most actors. If you revisit Darling, that Carnaby Street spectacular in which Julie Christie first knocked off all our socks, now she comes across like a prettier, girlier Courtney Love and Laurence Harvey just seems rather carelessly vacant, whereas Bogarde's intelligence communicates itself continuously, particularly in the cracks and folds between speeches. Therein lies the eloquence of his personal daimon, and it is the reason we will keep watching him, long after others from his era are forgotten.

horrorfest evening eight: burke and hare and deathdream

Burke and Hare: (2010. dir: John Landis) Oh, for the love of God, is there no one who can write a comedy about grave-robbing that is in the slightest wise funny? Where's Martin McDonagh when you need him? There's the fellow to hire; he could write a Burke and Hare story that would stain your teeth and make your hair fall out. This one is even worse than I Sell the Dead, were that possible, which I'd have said it wasn't, not until I saw this pap. That, of course, was before I knew it was directed by John Landis, he of the excruciatingly anti-Midas touch. It's full of lovely actors and the worst gags you'll ever hear, the kind of gags that are too clunky and obvious to have made it into one of the Airplane! movies, the kind that a twelve-year-old would toss into the bin as unfunny without a second thought. Gags dependent on anachronistic elbows to the audience's collective rib about the origins of the phrases "protection racket", "funeral parlor" and "Listerine". The combined and considerable talents of Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis are helpless to create one single redeeming moment in this entirely humorless, completely retarded dungheap.

It's just possible that this is all a Byzantine intrigue on the director's part, a scheme to make movies so bad that Animal House looks like some kind of masterwork. And, yes, compared to this, it really, really does, so congratulations, and we're sending a squad of zombies to your house right now to brand you with a great U for Useless on your forehead, and simultaneously we hereby revoke your right to direct, for now and all of eternity. We, the horror-movie-going public, no longer quite believe that you directed our beloved an American Werewolf in London, but that thin sliver of doubt is the only thing standing between you and immediate death by silent, seething, hive-minded, undead mob. So watch your step, buster.



*SPOILER ALERT*

Deathdream: (1974. dir: Bob Clark) Low-budget horror-auteur Bob Clark of Black Christmas renown mines the monster-infested loam of post-war trauma, leaving an uneven but darkly creepy revenant story. A young soldier dies in Viet Nam, then comes home anyway by virtue of the sheer torque of his mother's iron will. But instead of the cleancut, happy-go-lucky boy they once knew, his family has a changeling on its hands: sullen, emaciated, pale, emotionless, addicted to injecting human blood into his veins to keep his undead flesh from decaying. Without overworrying his metaphors, Clark touches on the shellshock, drug addictions, alienation and loss of soul suffered by veterans returning to the desperate suburbias of America in the early '70s.

The casting is inspired: John Marley and Lynn Carlen are the stricken parents, six years after playing an unhappily married couple in Cassavetes' Faces. Christopher Walken was originally slated to play the lead role of young Andy, an idea which sends pleasant shivers down my spine, but his replacement Richard Backus hits just the right notes, oscillating in steady motion between unbreachable taciturnity and unflinching violence. Behind the scenes, this project also boasts gore-maestro Tom Savini's initial forays into hideous maquillage, fresh off the boat from the war himself.