the two-fisted filmgazer

leaves from an old notebook

2012-01-19T12:55:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-12T22:20:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-04T11:45:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

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.

horrorfest evening seven: the Gewissengeist film

2011-12-21T00:21:00.000-08:00

Allow me to call your attention to a favorite subgenre of the horror film by giving it a name: the Gewissengeist film. That's "conscience" and "ghost" strung together, and everything sounds more impressive in German.

This is how you make a Gewissengeist film (and I wish you would. The formula works very well indeed):

1. Take a handful of excellent character actors, British whenever possible.

2. Trap them in a confined place: a submarine, perhaps, or a bunker. Wartime is an opportune setting, with WWII crossing the finish line with a conspicuous first place lead over other wars, probably because Nazis are so easy to turn into evil ghosts and zombies whilst retaining that weird photogenicity. It need not, however, be wartime as long as...

3. ...there is some terrible threat of physical danger from without (ie: the enemy or a posse closing in) to offset the growing supernatural threat from within.

4. Wartime, however, also affords plenty of chances for good people to do bad things, which leads us to the instigating plot-point: some -- but generally not all -- of the characters have, usually prior to the action of the film, been involved in an atrocity or travesty of justice in which innocents were killed. The ensuing psychological tension combined with an eerie, furtive, supernatural presence propels the action into madness, chaos, and, for the lucky few, catharsis and new beginning.

5. The entity in question is real; it exists independently of the characters. In my favorite examples of the subgenre, it rarely takes direct action (as in Below). It lurks and hunkers, rather, like Banquo's ghost; it goads and directs, threatens or warns, messes with machinery and minds, but you never see it clearly and may never be certain in the end exactly what it is. In lazier hands, it becomes the usual macabre specialist in creative gore-dispersal which Hollywood assumes that we want.

6. Lastly, this supernatural force may or may not be directly connected with the crime committed. Sometimes it is, but more often the general premise seems to be that it's your bad conscience which lays you vulnerable to curses and other malevolence from beyond the grave.

Below (2002. dir: David Twohy) is the quintessence of Gewissengeist, and an overlooked stunner. The ensemble cast is splendid, and the tension builds relentlessly without sacrificing subtlety. It's got genuine scares, tense action sequences, a perfect story. The submarine lends itself beautifully to the claustrophobia necessary for the Gewissengeist film to work its dark magic. Bruce Greenwood is the captain who must pay for his crew's terrible mistake, Zach Galifianakis has a fine turn as a horror afficianado with theories about "the malediction", and Jason Flemyng may be the best actor around to fill those all-important but glamorless character-actor shoes.

The Bunker (2001. dir: Rob Green) is less successful but still fascinating. Nine Nazi soldiers are stuck in a bunker in the last days of the war, and the Yanks are encroaching. This particular bunker was built on grounds of ancient evil, and you know what that means: something's skulking in the tunnels. More crucially, seven of the nine share a terrible memory which preys on them to varying degrees. The best thing about it is the flashback to the atrocity. Done in heavy, saturated yellows and greens and in slightly slower motion, the sound-scheme is brilliant: all noises are muffled except gunshots, the heavy drone of insects, birdsong, and the terrible clicking of a camera shutter. Taken together, it's absolutely haunting. The race to the climax unfortunately opts for loudness and gore over substance, but it's still a pleasure to be trapped for an hour and a half with this solid group of actors. (Jason Flemyng again!)

Dead Birds (2004. dir: Alex Turner) is both unique and wildly unsettling. Set in Alabama during the Civil War, it begins with a brutal bank robbery and follows the ragtag group of miscreants to a cursed plantation house. Nobody is innocent in this one, and no one finds redemption. The cast is stellar (Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit, Isaiah Washington. Michael Shannon!) and the suspense'll keep you from sleeping soundly unless you wash your brain with a comedy before retiring.

POSTSCRIPT: As for Triangle, I'm going to amend my previous statement that it fits into Gewissengeist. Rather, I'm making up a new category for it: it's a Bardo film. It's all about conscience, to be sure, but no independent supernatural agent is necessarily involved, and really there's only one person whose guilt is being explored, so it's possible the whole thing is her mad, post-mortem rush through that liminal labyrinth of terrifying hallucinations and karmic feedback that the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the Bardo state.

Other examples of the genre, off the top of my head, might be Siesta, Jacob's Ladder, and even, arguably, Inception.

last night's double feature: inserts and the delicious little devil

2011-12-15T14:48:00.000-08:00

SPOILER ALERT

Inserts: (1974. dir: John Bynum) I remember when this came out. I was already a Richard Dreyfuss fan from American Graffitti, but of course I never saw this; this was rated X, and I was ten. Even if I had found someone willing to sneak me into a drive-in, I wouldn't have gone, since it's about porn, and porn embarrassed the crap out of me when I was a kid.

Folks will tell you the reason this was a failure was because of the X-rating, but don't be fooled. It's a failure because it's a goddamn failure. And, man, I was so looking forward to it. I'll watch or read anything right now that deals with Hollywood during that transition between silents and talkies. (I'm on the prowl for a decent book about Thomas Ince, if you have any suggestions.) I'm chomping at the bit to see The Artist, but this is the sticks, and patience is a damn virtue, right? And this, my friend, is a piece of crap.

I'd call it a bad movie based on a bad stage play, since it's written like a bad stage play and it all gets shot in one stupid room, but according to IMDB it was written specifically to be filmed, which just goes to serve as a further sad example of that ongoing moral lesson about how directors should not be allowed to shoot their own scripts unless they're Woody Allen, and not always then.

There's some decent acting: Dreyfuss has a few inspired moments, but many of his choices are already (in retrospect, granted) starting to look like practiced shtick. Jessica Harper and Veronica Cartwright do some shining, the latter as a good-hearted, heroin-addicted has-been, the former as an ambitious starlet. Stephen Davies looks like he's acting for the nosebleeds at the Royal Opera House, and Bob Hoskins is utterly predictable all the way through, but so is the damned script. I made a game of it. "Now he's going to find the overdosed body," I'd say out loud. "Now that'll be Clark Gable at the door." "Now he's going to turn the lights out, and it'll be a really lame and ponderous metaphor for the lights going out on the entirety of his career, the entirety of his life." The one thing that kept me hanging on, the one thing that kept me watching, was the hope that the Dreyfuss character (they call him the washed-up Boy Wonder; he doesn't have a real name anymore, get it?) would talk some more about Wally Reid, whose death obviously impacted him with some force. I was disappointed. There's one monologue early on in which he describes the moment in which he found out about the death, but Bynum pulls the camera in slowly on him while he's speaking it, and he's cleaning his fingernails as he does, and it's all too damned precious for words. Bah! Humbug, I say.

the Delicious Little Devil: (1919. dir: Robert Z Leonard) Mae Murray was a sexy clown from the silents whose relaxed carriage and lack of vanity still invites affection. She began as a dancer and enjoyed immense stardom as a comedienne at Universal and MGM in those early days, reportedly earning as much as $10,000 a week (which is almost exactly a gazillion times what I make right now, nearly a full century later, thank you very much) then ending her days in penury after a bad marriage to a wicked prince and failing to make the leap into talkies. This is an impish comedy about a nice girl who's too vivacious to keep a hat-check job but has layabout relatives to support and so goes into disguise as a scarlet lady with a scandalous past in order to secure a job at a nightclub. Directed by Murray's third husband, it keeps a jovial pace and allows her the space to win us, with her Peacock Walk dance, for instance, or her manic preparations in her dressing room, or with her facial gestures alone. (My favorite is when she lets her eyes widen and her face go slack and presses her lips together so they disappear.) Her straight man is one heavily-powdered and very young Rudolpho De Valintine, a relaxed and good-natured foil as the rich boy who loves her in spite of her sins.

my miniature robert ryan film festival

2011-12-15T13:30:00.000-08:00

SPOILER ALERT

Caught: (1949. dir: Max Ophuls) Ryan is fearsomely magnificent as Howard Hughes, shallowly disguised. Barbara Bel Geddes is the innocent gold-digger who has the misfortune to marry him, and James Mason is the do-gooder pediatrician who falls in love with her. Max Ophuls directs, and the way it's shot is the real star. The script is also very good, although it falls into some cliche by the end, a convenient heart attack and even more convenient miscarriage, all provided thanks to the Hays Code. Last I checked this wasn't domestically available on DVD, but it ought to be, both for Ryan's performance and for the stunning camera-work.

Act of Violence: (1948. dir: Fred Zinnemann) The sounds of this suspense thriller (about a threatened vengeance for a secret wartime offence) are the sounds of nightmare: Ryan's dragging foot as he walks around Van Heflin's darkened house while Heflin and Janet Leigh crouch, terrified, in the shadows, or the sound of Ryan's boat creaking as he rows out relentlessly after his prey. Otherwise, it's grotesquerie in suburbia: a parade of drunks at a convention is another nightmare image. The closing noose of tension, those slow-collapsing walls, reminds me of Odd Man Out: as if the Heflin character took the killshot when he first heard the Ryan character coming, and from there on it's one long, noirish descent into hell.

Escape to Burma: (1955. dir: Allan Dwan) A project unworthy of its stars, alas. I love Stanwyck and Ryan together; he's big enough to match her strength, and she's strong enough to match his presence. This is a movie full of set-pieces, though, instead of a movie about people: there's a jungle pavilion bit, bits with elephants, stolen rubies, a tiger hunt, native bandits. The plot itself is just a MacGuffin for a big, kind of faded, Technicolor extravaganza: the Ryan character is being pursued by the authorities for the murder of a royal prince. He finds his way to Stanwyck's teak-and-elephant plantation, where passion is inevitable. They don't have much to say to one another; nobody does. Characters spend a lot of time walking across enormous rooms to pour drinks without conversation to fill the space. They're just waiting for the next action sequence.

horrorfest evening six: the dunwich horror and triangle

2011-12-14T11:37:00.000-08:00

SPOILER ALERT

the Dunwich Horror: (1970. dir: Daniel Haller) Trippy, '60s interpretation of the great Lovecraft story, one which is probably unfilmable as written, but catches so strong a hold on the imagination that it is, I trust, destined to be re-interpreted by moviemakers for all of eternity.

This time, the plot is dumbed down to include a ridiculously passive virgin-for-the-altar character (pity poor Sandra Dee), and the gargantuan and goatlike Wilbur Whateley is shrunken and humanized into a man who looks very much like a hipster version of Dean Stockwell. It has been re-set in 1970, relegating the "I look like Sandra Dee, I'm 27 and still lousy with virginity" idea to the slop-bucket of the utterly absurd. That said, there is still evidence of the true story squirming beneath the mountainous blasphemy of updates and rewrites, like the inclusion of that raucous flock of whippoorwills who hunker and wait to catch the souls of the dying as they leave their bodies.

In any case, the revelation for me was that psychedelia was a nice, low-budget way of expressing a Lovecraftian monster in those pre-CGI days. When the brave redshirt girl marches up and opens the fearsome, locked attic-chamber to release the beast, -- and, no, you won't find this scene in the Lovecraft story,-- she is overwhelmed by psychedelia. Consider the description of this monster in the original prose:

'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd in Heaven - that haff face on top..."

YOU try and film that without help from a computer.

Anyway, it's not a success, not by any standards, but it's an interesting failure, like a time-capsule from the Altamont era.

SPOILER ALERT

Triangle: (2009. dir: Christopher Smith) Ambitious Gewissengeist(*) horror outing by the director of Black Death, a man whose Christopher Nolan-ish, David Twohy-ish boldness in story and attention to detail attract me utterly. Flawed as it was, Black Death won me with its intrepid audacity (did I just say the same thing twice? consider it an attempt to emphasize the compliment). Triangle is more problematic, but equally bold, using both Time Vortex and Ghost Ship tropes, and using them rather well.

(The less you know about this film, the better, so stop reading now if you haven't seen it yet.)

A Time Vortex is a tricky thing, turning on a dime from suspense to Keystones Kops once you have more than a couple of versions of the same characters inhabiting the same space. Also, because it's plot-driven with an emphasis on action, an admirable attempt, the full dimensions of the characters have been sacrificed to favor pace and forward movement. Smith has made a crafty attempt to circumvent this flaw by casting extraordinarily well (would that all directors were so crafty), but the result is still not entirely effective. The other extremity of that particular stick is that once you know the ending, the "heroine's" maladroit and sometimes downright crazy-assed decisions become less inscrutable, but by that time certain skeptics in the audience may already have turned the channel.

*Gewissengeist: Conscience-Ghost

horrorfest evening five: two more classics

2011-12-07T19:58:00.000-08:00

Island of Lost Souls: (1932. dir: Erle C. Kenton) I've never been completely sold on Laughton as an actor. He'll be going along subtly and smoothly, on his way to a great performance, then at a crucial moment he'll tip one right over the top, a wink to the audience, perhaps a bid to be loved and understood, I don't know, but I'm generally disappointed. In Island, he comes unutterably close to giving a seamless performance as the power-mad doctor hiding his sadism behind the objective mask of science. Although he gives us the odd wink, he also strides boldly toward that rare beast, the consummate turn.

It's a small masterpiece, this first of three Hollywood re-imaginings of HG Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau, and utterly chilling, even today. Unfettered by the circling-but-not-yet-landed Hays Code, the references to rape and violence are unconcealed and all the more unsettling because they are interspecific. Even if you've read the book or seen the later (and lesser) films, its twists are unexpected, and, clocking in on DVD at a svelte 70 minutes, it keeps to a good clip without sacrificing atmosphere, which it has to spare.

the Thing from Another World: (1951. dir: Christian Nyby, with possible input from producer Howard Hawks) Understated, jolly banter between easy-going, likable characters on an Arctic military base is interrupted by a crashed UFO and its blood-drinking Vegetable Man occupant. It's a true classic, this. You know in the Bad and the Beautiful when Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan have to make a B-picture about terrifying cat-men on a budget and hit on the brilliant idea that the way to make them terrifying is to make damn sure they're hardly seen? That's the key to this one, as well. Despite James Arness' imposing stature, he looks pretty silly in his carrot-man outfit, so we only see him in sudden, vicious glimpses, and it works like mad. This is a low-key movie with great moments: when the men trace the shape of the fallen ship below the ice and realize it's spherical, for instance, or in the end-recap from the reporter relaying his story back home, with his chilling refrain: "Watch the skies! Keep watching the skies." A gem of fifties paranoia to file alongside Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

the filmgazer referral service

2011-11-24T11:11:00.000-08:00

If you liked the Third Man
the Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Odd Man Out

try the Man Between.

Once again it's Carol Reed filming amongst the broken shards of postwar Berlin. Once again James Mason is a political fugitive, this time trying to free himself from the Cold War trap of the East and flee to the West. Reed has a stunning talent for communicating the cynical amorality which takes hold during difficult times, and Berlin as he films it feels like walking back into an unreproducible moment. Like Spy's Richard Burton, Mason's best brilliance lay in communicating the tumultuous inner life of a particular brand of cold, arch, cerebral character, and this is a very well-written example. That lovely, subtle irony at the end, which I won't give away, involving an ever-lurking boy on a bicycle, is heart-breaking.

If you liked Birth
Secretary
Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast

then try Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

Leonard Shainberg, who directed that most unconventional love story, Secretary, turns his camera on another, equally unconventional, but for different reasons. Fur is the sweet, sensuous, visually compelling story about a fictional friendship which led Diane Arbus into her life's work. Critics thought it was over-sentimental and wallowed in its own strangeness, but it's well-acted, with strong chemistry between Nicole Kidman as Arbus and her fur-covered beloved played by Robert Downey Jr. The photography is both gorgeous and intimate, giving us that same feeling that Birth did of being simultaneously inside Kidman's head and just beside her, intimately and endlessly watching her reactions. As she's one of those rare actors whose face I could happily watch for a very long time, and as one of the main objectives of this film seems to be to hypnotize its audience into a sort of sensually opiate state (much as that old, strange Beauty and the Beast did), I thought it was well worth the time.

horrorfest evening four: cloverfield and i sell the dead

2011-11-23T21:47:00.000-08:00

Cloverfield: (2008. dir: Matt Reeves) This is the kind of movie you point to when people ask why genre films are important. This, Attack the Block, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead. They are like snapshots of our cultural underbelly in a particular moment. If a historian from the future is researching the turbulence during the sixties over Civil Rights, he watches the newsreels and listens to the speeches, but then he must watch Night of the Living Dead as well. That's where he'll get the uncensored, chthonic rabidity of emotion which clawed its way up from beneath it. For the Red Scare, it's Body Snatchers. For the growing nuclear menace of the Cold War, War of the Worlds. For the terror of nuclear technology in general, possibly the Day the Earth Stood Still, or even the James Arness movie Them! in which he fights a whole population of giant ants, and which is surprisingly effective, even in adulthood. Point is, the straightforward media outlets will only tell you so much. Look to genre films to give voice to the irrational mutant weirdness which comes squalling alongside any major cultural shock.

Cloverfield is, on the surface, what would happen if Godzilla (not him exactly, but something very like him) attacked Manhattan today and we saw it not through the eyes of the scientists and military and people who have power to fight it, but through the eyes of the normal joe who can do nothing but gather his loved ones and flee. Really, though, it's about 9/11. The only direct reference is when a character amidst the unexplained chaos moans, "It's happening again," (which made me cry, incidentally) but it brought all those (still lingering, just buried) feelings back up from that decade-past day, all that raw fear and grief and channelled it into a more complete catharsis than any other I've managed to conjure in these ten years.

SPOILER ALERT

"Found footage" films are hard, because there are always one or two shots that you think, "OK, why are you still filming?" and it pulls you up out of the story. This has those, but they are few. (The worst is when the photographer gets it and the camera falls just right to show his dead body. It only happens in Hollywood, and it always makes me scowl.) To make up for it, there's a wonderful device at play: the footage we're watching has been taped over images of the romantic day the two leads spent earlier at Coney Island, and just as the tape runs out, the camera is pointing out over the ocean and if you look very closely you can see the alien's ship falling from the upper right hand corner of the frame into the sea. I bring it to your attention because it's so subtle that if I hadn't been alerted to it in advance, I would not have seen it, and it's a perfect detail.

I Sell the Dead: (2008. dir: Glenn McQuaid) There's just enough plot in it to fill a segment of Tales from the Crypt. The director spent most of his time getting the "look" of the film, which is a fashionable blend of sepia-edged Victorian and primary-colour-bright comic-book. He hired good actors, and then gave them nothing of interest to do. It's not funny, and not scary. The pace drags like hell, which would kill it dead even if the script was not already moribund.

It is rare that I will rate a movie one-star on Netflix. Even something ridiculously bad like the Curse of the Komodo gets two stars, because, although I didn't like it, it didn't do more or less than it pretended to. Its reach was short, but its unpretentious grasp complete, if you know what I mean. When I give a single star, it's because there is the potential for so much more than is realized that one leaves it with fists clenched in frustration and a bitter-tasting resentment toward the director. I Sell the Dead gets the one-star treatment. These actors were ripped off. Their time ought to be restored to them along with a suitably hangdog apology.

As luck would have it, though, for those of us who are keen to watch a rollicking comedy about grave-robbing, the Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis Burke and Hare is on its way to DVD even as we speak.

horrorfest evening three: a triple feature

2011-11-13T15:48:00.000-08:00

Troll Hunter: (2010. dir: Andre Ovredal) I bet the more you know about troll-lore, the funnier it is, but it's impressive even to us uninitiated in the annals of trolldom, this "found-footage" mockumentary in which a student film-crew hooks up to travel through Norway with the official government Trollhunter. The trolls sound awesome and look great. The end is disappointing, but not enough to queer the ride. This is not a job for a Christian man, believe me.

the Grudge: (2004. dir: Takashi Shimizu) It's unfair, I know, to watch the English-language version before the original, but it's directed by the same fellow, right? And using gaijin actors there's an added "stranger in a strange land" level of isolation which can only add to the atmosphere of doom, right? It's a haunted house film, but it's got that tricksy Japanese thing where the ghost can follow you anywhere once it gloms onto you. Really this movie is just a series of cheap scares, although that is not to suggest that some of those scares are not very effective. The body count is crazily high, higher than the end of Hamlet, and Hamlet has four hours to build up to it. It's also unclear to me why some of the bodies vanish and others do not. Am I to understand that some have been spirited away to an infernal dimension of torture? It doesn't seem to matter to the filmmakers, as long as they get your adrenaline up and running. Not my favorite entry in Sarah Michelle Gellar's CV, who, since the Buffy salad-days, has had a few very-close-but-no-actual-cigar near-misses for me, namely the Return and Possession, this last an intriguing psychological thriller with an unbearably sexy Lee Pace which only lost me with its fudged ending.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Curse of the Komodo: (2004. dir: Jim Wynorski) Unfair, again, I know, to actually review a movie like this as if it were akin to other, real movies. The image above pretty much sums it up. The komodo is the result, of course, of a military experiment gone awry. The monster is utterly impervious to bullets, but these humans do nothing but shoot at it for two hours. Nobody even tries to justify it with some lame idea like, "Maybe if we get it in the mouth or eyes...?" It's the kind of movie in which the scientist's voluptuous daughter goes out to take a long and entirely gratuitous naked swim in a komodo-infested area. If the komodo slimes you with its saliva, you will sicken and die within hours, but before you die you will become a green-skinned zombie harboring murderous intent towards your fellow humans. (Just a warning.) In the end, the scientist who created it pulls a Sheriff Brody/Quint combo, allowing himself to be crunched while carrying a fistful of high explosive. See it for the naked swimming, if you want to.

valentino: an appreciation

2011-11-13T13:24:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid I watched the Sheik to see what the fuss was about and came away unimpressed. I chalked the Valentino Thing up to adult weirdness, that inexplicable X-factor which causes apparently sane humans to pretend that yappy, rodent-like dogs are cute, or to spend good, hard-won money on things like pedicures. In fact, now that I've seen several of his films, it turns out his most famous role may be his least accessible to the modern audience, with its eye-popping lust and maniacal laughter.

I got curious about him again because someone in that TCM series called Moguls and Movie Stars was talking about Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and she said, "When Valentino stood up to do that tango he was nobody. By the time he sat down, he was a star." And it's absolutely true! His charisma is full-bore, no-holds-barred, straight out of the gate. Apocalypse wasn't his first film (in fact, it was his 22nd or so, if you count the ones in which he was only dancing), but it was his first starring vehicle, and his star-quality is there from the first shots. Even before he tangos, the way he smokes a cigarette reeks of sexual confidence. He smoked in all his films. He had a way with a cigarette. I'm fair certain a generation of young men probably died of lung cancer trying to capture that same je-ne-sais-quoi.

With all my newfound enthusiasm for the man, imagine my utter dismay when I finally got for my birthday a copy of David Thomsen's New Biographical Dictionary of Film only to find that he doesn't "get" Valentino, dismisses him as a "flimsy being" and "clearly...no actor". He "gets" the Duke (he'd better, or he's no expert), lauds him as a great star, rather than a great actor. So why not Valentino?

It takes some transition time, adjusting to these old movies, because silent film acting involves posing and extremes of expression which test our modern comfort-levels, but Valentino is amazingly naturalistic during much of Horsemen, and, indeed, throughout many of his films. By the time we get to Son of the Sheik, his swansong, he's less so, no doubt mirroring the feverish style of the original. But I swear: when he's kissing up the inside of Vilma Banky's arm, then the palm of her hand, you can feel it on your own skin. He has an immediacy of flesh appeal, a physical presence which broadcasts itself right off the screen in the way that Brando's did in Streetcar, a quality which would have made him a star in any era.

Despite the muscular virility he communicates onscreen, there is an androgyny about him and he was dogged in his day (and haunted on his untimely deathbed) by near-hysterical accusations of unmanliness. The only modern equivalent that comes to mind, and it is of only passing similarity, is the near-universal male puzzlement at the near-universal female swooning over Captain Jack Sparrow. It's hard to remember now, after the weary-inducing ennui of three mediocre sequels, but the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was a revelation of joy, and Johnny Depp was catapulted from "devastatingly handsome but strange character actor" to "Sexiest Man in the World" status overnight. And the guys didn't see it. I suspect there was not a female between twelve and eighty who did not get the annoyed query from spouse, boyfriend, or any other heterosexual male in her circle: "Really? But he's so EFFEMINATE." In these metrosexual-friendly days, a star can shrug off or even exult in such confusion, the stress of which was more troubling in those days of violently-enforced homogeneity.

He had the most wonderful hands, Valentino, and a dancer's grace in moving. In the very strange and occasionally magnificent Blood and Sand, there's a sadomasochistic relationship between him and dragon-woman dominatrix Nita Naldi. In the scene where she incites him to mad jealousy by flirting with a bandit, he moves with exaggerated machismo toward the bandit then folds into a sinuous, Nijinsky-esque "S" shape while she torments him. His body is extraordinarily communicative as well as athletic, and, seducer that he is, much of his charm rests on a James Dean boyishness: witness the way he looks after Gloria Swanson, hands in pockets, from the porch of the Swiss inn in Beyond the Rocks.

On the other hand, he could smoulder like nobody else. Although certainly nobody wants to be raped in the desert, every woman wants to look across a crowded room and see the man she forcefully desires smouldering with desire for her. Today, only Antonio Banderas comes close.

I love that the women in his films are rarely what you'd call pretty. Either they are striking but gorgon-like, like Swanson or Naldi, with her vast, soft expanse of back, --which I love!--, or they're pinched and ridiculous as in the Married Virgin and the Sheik, or just very ordinary looking, like Dorothy Dalton in Moran of the Lady Letty (a low-key favorite of mine). It makes him the lover of Everywoman. One of Krishna's greatest miracles was at Vrindavan when he made love to a thousand cowherd girls on the same night. I imagine that sitting in a cinema in 1926 watching Son of the Sheik was a little like that: one man making love simultaneously to entire cinemas filled with women, all across the land.

horrorfest evening two: classics i missed the first time around

2011-11-07T17:48:00.000-08:00

Black Sunday: (1960. dir: Mario Bava) In that oppressively steamy hothouse that is Italian Horror, Black Sunday stands out as a somewhat restrained classic. Yes, it's got the unforgettable opening set-piece in which the Mask of Satan is nailed onto the squirming Barbara Steele's face with a single blow from a sort of sledgehammer. It's got the grossness of maggots and puddles of eye-jelly in a decomposing corpse. It takes Sam Raimi-esque glee in giving us a protracted look at an animated corpse-face melting in a fire. And, naturally, it's got Steele's heaving bosoms. I'm not saying it's exactly dignified. But Bava holds back, using all manner of polished technique to build a very fine atmosphere: wonderfully noir-lit black and white, tension-building slow pans followed by sparsely-used quick-cuts, Dutch and other strangely-angled shots. There's a lovely, dreamlike shot of a peasant girl watching a formidable carriage, which, in fact, is carrying Satan's emissary on an iniquitous deed, drive in ominous slow-motion through the night, and I especially enjoyed the effect of the erupting tombs.

Children of the Corn: (1984. dir: Fritz Kiersch) Where did I get it stuck in my craw that this was a classic of some kind and my horror-education was incomplete until I watched it? This movie is a piece of crap. Scarecrows have a certain amount of built-in eeriness. "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" is a very creepy concept. Children wielding scythes also enjoy a certain amount of fundamental creep-cred. But this is a piece of crap. Except for the kid playing the Big Bad (see above), you will never, not at your local grade school pageant, nowhere, find worse child-actors than in this film. The cutesy voiceover is godawful. The dialogue is terrible, and the people are all Stephen-King people, which means they're unbelievable and unlikable simultaneously.

Messengers 2: the Scarecrow is much scarier, with better images, better acting, great tension building. AND it's got Norman Reedus, whom I suspect is an unsung treasure. Go for that one; give this one a miss.

the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: (1974. dir: Tobe Hooper) I can't imagine, on the other hand, how I waited so long before watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. From the very beginning, from that long, static shot of the atrocity in the graveyard with the radio voiceover, then the guy rolling on the ground saying, "The things I've seen! I've seen things...", even then you can feel it's going to be an extraordinary ride, like some grotesque approaching.

It occurred to me that maybe the reason that this first Chainsaw was so great (as opposed to the many execrable sequels and remakes, one directed by Hooper himself) was partly the editing. Because some of those effects, like the slamming of the metal door after Leatherface first appears and kills the guy, that hair-raising noise with the eerie quiet afterward, or the exploration of the chicken/bone/feather room... And of course, its brilliant ending, with the gruesome chainsaw dance of frustration then cut to black... Those things might all have been magic from the editing room. I mean, once it had all been dredged up out of Tobe's id and perfectly filmed; give the guy his credit.

What a movie. How does one prepare for it? I was slack-jawed with awe as the end credits rolled. I can't even imagine watching that on the big screen when it came out. It must have been a mindfuck, a cinematic apocalypse straight out of left field. And notice, please, that I'm not even mentioning the dinner scene, which is so utterly brilliant and yet so very, very wrong in every conceivable way that I think one should not attempt to speak of it except in the vaguest, most Lovecraftian adjectives ("Noisome! Blasphemous! Necrophagous, charnel and miasmal. Nighted.")

Daughters of Darkness: (1971. dir: Harry Kumel) Not so much a horror film as an erotic mood-piece for those intimate, blood-sipping evenings in your dungeon. John Karlen, fresh off the set of Dark Shadows, is very good as the secretly twisted young honeymooner, and there's an entirely unforeseeable plot-turn which sets it at least a rung above other eurobabe horror erotica of the time. Delphine Seyrig is flawlessly stylish as the Countess Bathory, embodying a sort of hypno-opiate sensuousness of manner which may have been precursor to that wonderful, somnolent acting style in Cronenberg's Crash.

the first evening of my post-halloween horrorfest

2011-11-07T17:11:00.000-08:00

Lake Mungo: (2008. dir: Joel Anderson) How's this for something new: a subtle and dignified docu-style horror film? Shot well, edited well, and extremely well-acted, it engages fully but only if approached without expectation. It communicates its horror without shocks or gore but through a slow, thickening sense of dread, a sense which appears to be dissipating towards the end into a cleansing redemption only to reverse itself with awful effectiveness.

A teenaged girl has drowned on a family picnic outing; after her burial, strange things begin happening around the house. This is a contemplation of mortality, of grieving, the nature of death, and how ultimately unknowable we all are, one to another, even to our most beloved. I found the ending to be quietly disquieting, and terrible in its implications.

Thirst: (2009. dir: Chan-Wook Park) A priest particularly inclined towards samaritanism is infected with vampire blood while volunteering for an experiment which might cure a deadly disease. It begins as a funny, sexy, visually pleasing and intelligent bloodsucker film. The longer it continues, the more it gets mired down in its own metaphors,-- a little too long and a little too earthbound for my taste,-- although it never loses its optical panache.

Attack the Block: (2011. dir: Joe Cornish) Accustomed to my London-Slum-Stories appearing in various shades of concrete and overcast greys, it took me awhile to get past Attack the Block's music-video palette. I'm glad I put out the effort, since wrapped inside it is a fresh, vivacious, well-written and unpretentious reworking of the old Alien Invasion motif. You know the one, in which an attack from outer space is used to comment on pertinent social issues: in this case, the plight of poor kids in London. (Those riots earlier in the year, they were part of Cornish's PR campaign, yeah? Bold.)

Man, this film was fun. I'm not overfond of over-the-top, self-conscious English humour (Simon Pegg, Steve Coogan, Russell Brand, etc); I prefer mine in the subtle and droll category, thank you. This one was droll and suspenseful, lighthearted and pointed, as summed up in the capstone image of the young hero dangling from an upper storey of his tenement by a tenuous grasp on a Union Jack. John Boyega is perfect (and will be dead sexy when he grows up) as the enigmatic Moses, the leader of a teenaged street gang, a gang fully believable in their decoction of innocence and burgeoning sociopathy. These are the Dead-End Kids of the modern world, and when aliens attack amidst the chaos of Mischief Night, it becomes Moses' night to fight his way into manhood. It is his initial decision to kill the invaders' outrider which brings down the wrath of its followers onto his neighborhood, and it is in his decision to take responsibility for his actions in which we find the meat of the drama.

See it now, before Hollywood resets it in South Central L.A. with its metaphors all overblown and hanging out of its baggy pants.

almost famous: almost perfect

2011-10-26T12:32:00.000-07:00

There exists a small but important category of films which try to capture a moment, past but treasured, in the life of a music scene. Ken Russell is a frequent romper in this sandbox, his forays ranging from Tommy to the Music Lovers and beyond. A few of my favorites, off the top of my head, are 24 Hour Party People with its diligent and very funny portrayal of the Manchester scene, and Todd Haynes' flawed but enchanting (and homoerotically epic) Velvet Goldmine, which brings to life the vibrancy of those early Glam Rockers. Almost Famous is for those of us Americans who fell in love with music when it still came on vinyl, those of us who remember the magic of the gatefold and the inner sleeve and spent our Sunday evenings with one ear glued to a transistor radio while Casey Kasem announced the week's American Top Forty. Cameron Crowe will never again make a film anywhere near this good. How could he? It was the movie he was born to make,-- all the others are some kind of filler,-- and there's hardly anything wrong with it.

These days I am hard on Philip Seymour Hoffman. I would not, for example, have handed him a gold statue for his overweening, overmincing, truly annoying portrayal of Truman Capote. Not that Capote wasn't the Monarch of Overween and Overmince, but PSH made it look like a heavy and difficult task, whereas Capote always made it look easy. (So, incidentally, does Toby Jones in Infamous, released --or, rather, swallowed,-- by the studio at the same time as Seymour Hoffman's biopic.)

Still, I would without hesitation give him an Oscar for this, his Lester Bangs. Although he's got maybe thirty lines in the whole picture, his readings are both hilarious and heart-breaking, and keep wonderfully true to the man himself. Nostalgically, that means something to me, as there was a time when I, too, wanted to be Lester Bangs.

While I'm at it, let me wax on awhile about other performances. Kate Hudson did one thing wrong: the opening "stewardess" routine. It may be the way it's filmed; anyway, something rings untrue about it. In the context of a lesser performance, the glitch might have gone unnoticed, but in a two-hour tour-de-force during which it's the single false note, it stands out. I'd have given her an Oscar as well, sure, and Frances McDormand, too, who brings wit and depth and intensity to a potentially thankless role as the unhip mom.

This is my favorite thing Billy Crudup ever did, and I can't think of anything he's ever done badly. Has he given a bad performance, ever, in anything? And Jason Lee is perfect as the arrogant lead singer, because he's more than that, and less than that, all at once and without contradiction.

Almost Famous makes me want to fall in love with music again. From the opening scenes it captures that magical shibboleth music was, maybe still is, when you're young. Only back then, there was this mystical ritual after you got your long-awaited record home from the local record-store (which usually had a headshop upstairs): the stripping off of the thin plastic overwrap, the smell of the cover, open it up, look at the secrets of the gatefold. Slip the record out of its sleeve, feel the weight of promise as you glance at the lyrics. Slip the vinyl out, look it over. Is there a secret message scribbled anywhere? Once the Replacements wrote "We're sorry, Portland," in the lacuna at the end of the last song. We were all overjoyed when we found it. It was an apology in reference to their last drunken debauch at Satyricon, a legendary show during which Tommy stripped off his clothes (my friend Tres ended up with his green polyester houndstooth jacket, another friend got one leg of his green polyester houndstooth pants), and my co-worker Rebecca got to drum awhile because the whole thing was so drunk and disorderly. The apology was on the Don't Tell a Soul LP and they played at Roseland that tour. They were on their best behaviour, and it may have been their dullest live performance ever.

But I digress. THEN you put the record on, generally with headphones the first time. And if it was any good, if it was Zeppelin or Lou Reed or Pixies or fucking Jane's Addiction, it might change your perception of reality for good, like an acid trip does, flip all the switches in your brain the other way and then sometimes, if you're lucky, not all of them get switched back into normalcy, and you're looking at the world through the pane of a different window.

That's what Almost Famous is about. About the hypnotically numinous promise that rock and roll held out,-- holds out, I reckon; I'm just too old to see it anymore,-- and the inevitable disillusionment which comes crashing down in its place after the high is over. But the sweetness of the movie's nostalgia is not twee at all, and Crowe manages to give us an autobiographical piece that is funny and unpretentious and non-egotistical, a full-on piece of magic.

robert carlyle film festival: eragon

2011-10-26T10:42:00.000-07:00

Stefen Fangmeier is an accomplished Visual Effects guy around Hollywood, and this is his maiden voyage in the director's chair. It is also a knock-kneed, by-the-numbers, teen-aimed fantasy that has not one iota of that visceral id-muscle which fuels Harry Potter or the Twilight series. It follows the Joseph Campbell playbook fairly carefully, charting a normal lad's journey into his destined True Love and True Work, both found in the same dragon. She is his Dragon; he is her Rider; this was Destined from Before Time. (The Dragon's egg will not hatch until it is in the presence of its Rider. Also, if the Rider dies, his Dragon will follow, but not necessarily the other way round.)

Observe the checklist: family (in the form of a very nice uncle played by Alun Armstrong in an entirely futile performance) gets offed early by evil forces trying to keep our hero from his fate: check. Beautiful anima-figure sets it all in motion by stealing the egg and casting it into our hero's path, then recurs to set our minds at rest that although his dragon is his soul-mate, he'll have an appropriate screen at which to project his libido: check. Gruff and wizened mentor arrives: check... in the form of Jeremy Irons, in a very fine albeit, again, wasted performance. Boy and Dragon have adventures, check, pursued by the evil minion (Carlyle) of the evil king (Malkovich, annoying as usual. Luckily, his screen-time is minimal, and he's usually playing off Carlyle, who makes up for his sucking-void lack of presence).

Carlyle is easily the best thing about this whole mess; he is the eerie warrior called Durza. Nearly impossible to kill, the look on his face when he takes an arrow through the forehead, a mix of ecstasy, triumph and Schadenfreude, is utterly chilling. That's the best moment. You can fast-forward to that, then turn it off afterwards. I'd tell you how it ends right now to save you the time, but the ending is so unextraordinary that it's gone completely out of my mind already.

johnny depp double feature: dead man and benny and joon

2011-09-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

*SPOILER ALERTS; BOTH FILMS*

Dead Man is the only Jim Jarmusch movie I like. Like his others, it is overlong, slow, rambling, and suffers annoying descents into triteness of dialogue. Unlike the others, its mise-en-scene is sufficiently magnificent and its talent sufficiently compelling to raise it up into a sort of shambolic greatness. It doesn't hurt, also, that its story,--the slow journey of a man to his inevitable death,--has a sort of catharsis built into it.

When I call its mise-en-scene magnificent, I mean that the film is composed of near-perfect elements interwoven to create a world of essential integrity. It has interesting and well-chosen camera angles ably edited, sets filled with fascinating details photographed in eye-pleasing black and white, massively talented actors (Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott. Robert Mitchum!) who bring unusual heft to the usual raggediness that is a Jarmusch script. There's a story steeped enough in mythological symbology to give it a needed depth (also unusual for Jarmusch), a hypnotic one-guitar-with-reverb score by Neil Young, and the beautiful, plastic face of Johnny Depp. All of these elements entwine to pull off the feat, although it is just by a nose, just barely by a nose. A different editor, a different actor, if it was filmed in color,-- just one or two false moves, a few more unravelled edges, and it'd have been a goner.

It is, in a very real sense, a paen to Depp's astonishing beauty. We spend a good amount of time watching his William Blake, in close-up, dying. He may be dying from the first moment we meet him on the train from the east (as suggested by the alarmed comment of Crispin Glover's Fireman that Blake is headed for the end of the line); if not, he's certainly picked up his death-wound within the first half-hour. Think of it as a hipster translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There are demons and trials and trickster guardians and portals to be passed through. There's even one very funny scene I'd rank nigh onto brilliant: when he stumbles up to a campfire manned by Billy Bob Thornton, Jared Harris and Iggy Pop, a sort of ersatz family vaguely but disturbingly reminiscent of the one in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

With Jarmusch, relaxation into the flow is imperative. Once you start fidgeting and fighting it, you may as well turn it off, because it's never going to sell you if you don't buy it from the outset. Back in my university days, I'd have recommended you get a little baked before you sit down to Dead Man; relax and let the strangeness wash across you like a tide.

The only reasons to watch Benny and Joon, on the other hand, are either nostalgic or for canon-completism for any of four or five rising stars appearing in it, including William H. Macy and Oliver Platt. Its only real claim to importance is its placement in Depp's CV. Emerging two years before Dead Man and in the same year as the equally quirky but much darker Arizona Dreams and What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, it marks his cautious emergence as the world's strangest young leading man after his extreme anti-pop-idol rebellion of Edward Scissorhands.

Do they even make movies like this anymore? It was quite the industry in those days, as I recall: brightly-colored sentimental hogwash about mentally-challenged but generally adorable people whose love overcomes all obstacles. The genre was always (am I remembering this right?) marked by the musical montage: this one incorporates two or three full-length songs while the characters brood or walk around or go about their daily lives. Catchy songs, too, including that one-hit monster-wonder by the Proclaimers about walking five hundred miles, remember that? And a gorgeous Joe Cocker rendition of an old Blind Faith song, "Can't Find My Way Home," one of the saddest and most beautiful songs ever written.

It's inoffensive enough, with generally good acting (Julianne Moore, inspired as always, plus Aidan Quinn and Mary Stuart Masterson), and it follows the expected formula, providing the proper dosages of hope and heartbreak on its way to its happy ending. It's Depp's talent for underplaying that keeps this clear of The Sucking Fen of Treacly Emotional Manipulation. It's his underplaying which makes him great, which makes him interesting to watch even when he's overplaying (Jack Sparrow, anyone?), and although this should be classed among his juvenilia, it's a near-heroic effort to create a singularly memorable character.

Let me preface my final comment by saying that it's not particularly easy to warm my heart. Things like finding Tom Hanks on the top of the Empire State Building and pledging true love on the Titanic leave me not just cold but surly to boot. That understood, Benny and Joon is worth the watch for its climactic scene, in which Sam demonstrates his love by scaling the fortress wall to swing in front of Joon's hospital window. The music, the use of slow motion, and especially the Buster Keaton deadpan on Sam's face, make it one of the most truly effective heart-warmers I can remember.

fright night and the art of the superior remake

2011-08-26T14:56:00.000-07:00

In the giddy aftermath of falling in love with the New World, I watched fourteen Colin Farrell films. I hated or actively disliked ten of those, although I sometimes found myself enjoying his performances whilst he swam against the bilgewater tide. My personal line on Farrell is that I prefer him playing comedy (In Bruges) or an everyman (Ondine, although I can't in good conscience endorse the film as a whole) as opposed to yuppie or studmuffin. That said, he's smokin' hot as the deadly power-vamp in Fright Night and I notice I don't particularly mind. He can also be very funny, which may be what makes all the difference. (When attacked with a crossbow by a man whose parents he killed years before: "You've got your mother's eyes. And your father's aim.") Add Anton Yelchin as the boy-next-door looking to find his way into manhood, throw in David Tennant (who may be one of my favorite humans on the planet, and I don't know why, exactly; that's the kind of sinewy charisma he commands) as a yellow-bellied vampire-slayer, and you've got yourself a party.

The original Fright Night emerged in the pre-Buffy, pre-Twilight eighties, and it marked a crucial moment in the history of the vampire film, bringing one taloned foot into comic banter and the other into modern teenage rite-of-passage. As such, we might do it homage as a big grandaddy to the vampire artform as we know and love it today. Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark is the greater film, no question, but perhaps FN made more difference, in the end.

In this remake, Buffy the Vampire Slayer magister Marti Noxon gives us a script which bows to the spirit of the original while making vast improvements. Gone is the tired "your girlfriend looks just like my first love before I was turned" plot-device. In this one, as an early victim points out, there is nothing soulful or romantic about the killer: "He's like a shark. He feeds then moves on." As such, he is an apt metaphor for a certain kind of predatory player who feeds on the sex and heartblood of his women before turning his gaze cruelly and inexorably away.

You could launch a successful TV series from this movie. It has much to recommend it, and veins of gold to be mined. I like that the "everyone thinks I'm crazy but I know that guy's a vampire" bit doesn't get too far over-stretched. By about the halfway point everyone important recognizes the monster as such, and from there on out it's all about how to get that stake angled properly through that chest-space. I like that it's extraordinarily difficult for the hero and heroine to kill even a newborn vampire, who, true to Buffy-roots, keeps up the wisecracking until the pointy end. I like that it's set in Vegas, grown-up Disneyland to drifters and nighthawks, a place where daytime can be easily circumvented. I like that a nightclub is openly recognized not as a place of safety in numbers, but of dangerous anonymity wherein the most awful crimes might be ignored in a crowd of lotus-eaters over-steeped in the opiates of their various pleasures. I like that there is a vast, implied mythology behind the vampires' history: we find out that Farrell's Jerry ("That's a terrible vampire name, Jerry.") comes of a particular and ancient Mediterranean strain of beast, one with proliclivities towards colony-living and slow-feeding on living victims over days or weeks. "Snackers," a character scorns.

The characters are likable, the end-battle is satisfying, the metaphors are appropriate. There are great images: the vampire-slayer stuck in his panic room with a writhing, undead arm, or Jerry coolly setting a cross aflame with a touch, then extinguishing it with a breath.

strong women acting well

2011-08-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

Clash By Night: (1952. dir: Fritz Lang) The bad of it is that it's written by Clifford Odets; the good of it is that it's directed by Fritz Lang. Odets gives us one of his studies in drunkenness and misogyny and emotional crimes committed in the name of loneliness. Lang surprises us with breathtakingly unexpected shots, like when Robert Ryan stumbles into his close-up just as the wedding party roars up in the background.

Stanwyck is strong as an ox, the loveliest ox in the world. Ryan seems strangely miscast, as if he's having to geld himself in order to find his inner Odets. Then if you've ever had or raised a baby or been around one for longer than thirty seconds, the plot makes no sense because there's a cute little MacGuffin baby who exists solely as a plot device, rarely makes a sound and gets left on its own in an empty house for days and nights at a time while its parental units undergo their emotional turbulences. The good of it is that the baby seems adept at taking care of itself; the bad of it is that the ending of the film is heavily weakened by this absurdity. To compound the ho-hum factor of the ending, Stanwyck's connubial Hera instincts kick in very suddenly and inexplicably to dislodge a previously towering Aphrodite entelechy, and the final reconciliation scene is flat and unsatisfactory, reminding me of the ending of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Both authors wrote themselves into dead ends in which the only possible happy endings are imcompatible with their own cynical understandings of human nature.

Alongside Stanwyck there is the joy of watching the young Monroe before she'd been mewed up in her eventual Marilyn mould. In this one she plays a vivacious tomboy who likes to pick fights with her boyfriend so she can throw punches at him. She and Keith Andes as the boyfriend embody the anti-Odets health and vitality necessary for true happiness.

Don't Bother To Knock: (1952. dir: Roy Ward Baker) And speaking of Marilyn, anyone who thinks she couldn't act needs to see this low-key, small-cast little psychodrama. Richard Widmark is a playboy and a very young but already assured Anne Bancroft is the chanteuse who's broken with him not for lack of love but for lack of a foreseeable future. If that sounds cliche, you have to hear the way it's written: you've never heard it like this before. The script is a quiet dynamo. Monroe is a troubled girl recovering from a suicide attempt who gets a job babysitting and reverts back to more than a little crazy once she catches Widmark's eye. Although she's playing a sphinxlike character, and playing it well, there is never a moment when we do not know what she is feeling. Her choices are clear and plain, her grasp of the character complete. Each emotion barely touches her plastic features, grazing her face with its wings before it moves on to be followed by the mere suggestion of another. It's a lovely performance, and when the little girl is leaning out the window and Monroe says, "Don't fall," it's one of the scariest faces I've seen.

*WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD*

the Romantic Englishwoman: (1975. dir: Joseph Losey) When I was a kid I worshipped Glenda Jackson like a goddess; I'd have voted her into Parliament if I could've. This wasn't my favorite of her films, but I liked it, and I'm amazed, on watching it again, that it's not actually about the Glenda Jackson character at all. She's such a powerhouse actress that I only saw her, but it turns out the movie is really about the Michael Caine character, the cuckolded screenwriter who must fight through his baser instincts to play the noble husband, taking his wandering wife back and offering (although he never has to back it up) to try and rescue her doomed lover. It's a man's movie, for crying out loud. And all I remember are Jackson and the fantastically strong and wonderful Kate Nelligan in her three-scene role.

Helmut Berger as the young gigolo comes across more gay than androgynous, and there is no real electricity between Jackson and him. Oddly, it's not needed, as the important story is in her character finding her freedom, working through the boredom built into modern life, and she is so unfailingly intelligent that we know, even in moments when she seems fixated on him, that her obsession has little to do with any particular man, that he is a symbol, a barely tangible dream. That's why the last quarter of the film drops in quality, after the two run off together and try to form a life. At that point it becomes apparent that we are seeing the story as it is imagined in the mind of the screenwriter, who has no clue what his wife wants or is doing, really. When he steps in to save the day, it's ridiculous wish-fulfillment. By that time, the wife has become a non-character. And STILL she's brilliant to watch, because Jackson makes choices like nobody else ever has, and that's always riveting.

robert carlyle film festival: the beach

2011-07-20T12:51:00.000-07:00

Back when I worked at the bookstore we used to hand-sell this book like mad. Smart hipsters would come in (this was Portland at century's turn) asking for a summer read and we'd head straight for Alex Garland. It's the story of a kid searching for adventure in Thailand, being given a map to a secret Shangri-la by a crazy man just before he offs himself, then taking a beautiful French girl and her boyfriend with him on a quest to find the place. This was Garland's first novel, he was still a kid, really, but his voice was already strong, his narrative well-structured, his hunger for philosophical inquiry ignited, his sensibility a little stranger and smarter than most, and he hadn't yet launched into wild-exploration mode as he did with Tesseract and Coma, worthy works but less readily accessible than the Beach, lacking in its buoyant, dangerous vivacity.

Then the movie came out, and we couldn't give the damn thing away.

I missed it in the cinema at the time, and now I wish I hadn't. It seems to me (from my far-off recollection) that it follows the letter of the novel rather exactly, while missing its spirit almost completely. The then-nascent Danny Boyle gives it the interestingly-skewed but lushly beautiful cinematography and flow of a music video, and when you're done, that's what it feels like you've seen.

That's too harsh, though. It has more to offer than I thought. Boyle is intrepid at the helm, albeit navigating down an ill-chosen canal; Tilda Swinton gives Sal, the island's Big Kahuna, a bold and cryptic turn which is entirely appropriate and delivers her with such lucid comportment that the character feels full and true despite limited screen-time. DiCaprio, on the other hand, misses plumbing that deep well of inner darkness the hero needs to plumb in order to carry the story.

All in all, the movie loses the book's creeping, Lord-of-the-Flies sense of menace and we wind up with a cadre of Euro-narcissists in their own private seaside resort, making it difficult to care about outcomes.

Robert Carlyle plays the catalytic trickster who calls himself Daffy Duck, takes a shine to the serious young hero (a hero more thoughtful in the book than the film, in which he seems less introspective than the plot requires) and leaves a map to paradise as a parting legacy before opening his veins in a squalid Bangkok bedsit. He has only one scene then a sort of reprise as a dream-character later, and brings to it all his psychotic intensity, which is considerable. Boyle lights him well in his early scene, eerily and strongly, because this instigating moment is crucial, and if we don't buy it, the movie is a goner.

But we do buy it, against the odds, since the script seems, well, daffily lightweight in its logic, having lost in translation the truth of yearning communicated in the novel. When Daffy speaks of the perfection of the beach, a perfection which has driven him somehow mad, the weight is in the delivery, not the words themselves. Carlyle has once again so thrown all his heft into his role that he drags the script up a notch with him through sheer torque and will-power.

His magic doesn't stretch far enough to save the film, of course, which is, however, not the catastrophe I was always led to believe. And sometimes even a bad movie leads to good things: in this case, the later fruitful pairing of Garland and Boyle in 28 Days Later and Sunshine.

last night's history of filmmaking double feature: shadow of the vampire and safe conduct

2011-07-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

Shadow of the Vampire begins with a question that we've all asked ourselves at one time or another: what if Max Schreck wasn't an actor at all, but really was a vampire? Director E. Elias Merhige takes us onto the sets and locations of Nosferatu as FW Murnau (John Malkovich) creates the original classic vampire film with the help of a real vampire. It sounded like some kind of heaven to me, but there are really only two reasons to see it: to hang out on these German film sets in 1921, which feel marvelously real, and for Willem Dafoe's fantastic performance as Schreck. He's genuinely chilling, he's surprisingly funny, and sometimes both at once. Some of the supporting cast is inspired, like Cary Elwes as the cameraman/dispenser of pharmaceuticals, but Malkovich is, as usual, a little annoying most of the time. And the script makes very little sense, particularly in the final scene of madness when Schreck demands his promised tiend and a ridiculous battle ensues between heartless vampyr and heartless filmmaker.

Safe Conduct is funny and smart and very well-paced, which, at nearly three hours, it must be to survive, starting off at a fast clip and later mellowing so that we may spend more relaxed time with our hero (Jacques Gamblin). This is the life of a filmmaker in Paris under Nazi domination. Does one work with the Hun? or abandon one's craft for the duration? or secretly work against the oppressor from within his own system? The questions are hard, the caveats appended to any answer offered are troubling, and director Bertrand Tavernier doesn't shrink from the complexity of it, although he is also not averse to sprinkling a little sentimental fairy-dust, either.

It has Tim Piggott-Smith in it, always a good thing, in a wonderful late segment in which the hero, having spontaneously stolen some Nazi documents, finds himself bundled off to England by the French Resistance to convince the chummy, hard-nosed, tea-drinking Brits that he is no German spy trying to pass off false information. The best of it is that good and evil are not simple: every seemingly heroic act is going to rebound against somebody, either the perpetrator or an innocent, and the perpetrator must choose whether to confess his crime or watch an innocent suffer for it. It's beautifully filmed and the details feel true. It's a little pat, a little too well-tied-up, a little too much an encomium to France's Greatest Generation to feel completely satisfying, but for an exercise in tribute and sentiment it succeeds remarkably well.

must-see classic horror films

2011-07-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

Don't Look Now: (1973. dir: Nicholas Roeg) I'd be hard-pressed to think of a bolder one. The bulk of it is set in Venice, and not the pretty, touristy Venice we're used to seeing: this is the Venice after the season ends. You can practically smell the standing water, feel the moisture in your bones. This film changed my life when I saw it as a kid; you might say it scarred me. It was the first time the Yeatsian concept that following one's destiny might not always be to one's benefit ever occurred to me, and I trusted life less after that. The movie employs an easy pace, a slow build-up to a powerful climax, and has one of the most realistic sex scenes ever filmed, between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, both at high points in both their respective charms and creative powers.

The Uninvited: (1944. dir: Lewis Allen) This old-fashioned ghost story (based on a surprisingly engaging and sometimes shiver-inducing book by Dorothy Macardle) stands apart from today's horror because its tone is is so heartily, healthily English. A brother and sister (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) rent a house on the Cornwall coast then have to delve into its past to try and exorcise its ghosts. They're the kind of children-of-Churchill, we-survived-the-Blitz English folk that used to show up frequently onscreen, and that gives the movie a hardy, chin-up-through-hard-times, wisecracking tone which blunts the force of any true horror, but inspiring pessimism was not the point of the genre then so much as coaxing up pleasant shivers, as this does. It also dishes up a well-written mystery. The b&w cinematography is deep-velvet gorgeous; it won an Oscar, in fact. I was lucky enough to see this the first time on the big screen in an arthouse somewhere, and it's truly one of the more seductive haunted houses you'll ever see, with its vast windows overlooking rocky cliffs and crashing waves and its spiral staircase which all pets avoid. A real stunner.

Black Christmas: (1974. dir: Bob Clark) Wow. Talk about seminal. How did I go so long without seeing this? It's one of the great grandaddies of the slasher genre. Girls in a sorority are plagued by (truly chilling, even after all these years) violent, anonymous phone calls, and Christmas break becomes an adventure in horror. These girls are not interchangable; you care about them and really, really don't want them to die. The red herrings are well-placed and well-developed, and the ending is utterly chilling.

The Innocents: (1961. dir: Jack Clayton) I do not hesitate to call this one of the best horror films of all time, and better than the book it's based on (Henry James' Turn of the Screw). The elements are consummate: the richness of its chiaroscuro, the jaw-dropping mastery in the conjuring of the invisible world and the all-important, unanswered question: is it psychological, or ghostly? The use of silences, as when the drone of insects suddenly stops. The eerily precocious way these child actors (the incomparable Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens from the Village of the Damned, aged eleven and twelve respectively) have about them, throwing long fingers of doubt across their apparent innocence. The ending is absolutely devastating every time I watch it. Full five stars, no question.

Dust Devil: (1992. dir: Richard Stanley) Ye gods. Flawed but fascinating. I think if Richard Stanley were to remake this every ten years, it would be the most fantastic experiment in filmmaking that the world has ever seen, but it HAS to be Richard Stanley, and he HAS to have full control over the project. Somebody with money and power, make it so. Meanwhile, in this original, "Director's-Cut" version, there are images which will stay seared into the fabric of my brain forever. The aftermath of the first murder, with our mythic antihero arranging the entire house into a gory but precise artwork of exact details in order to fulfill his ritual needs and prolong his life, for instance. And, again, when he falls in love with one of his potential victims, and the power of it manifests in far-off explosions and the skittering of objects across a table-top. It lacks unity, this film. I understand that its filming was problematic, the editing process more so, plagued with all manner of troubles, and you can feel it in the final product, but it's still a classic, deserving our continued attention.

movies in praise of yearning

2011-07-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

In the City of Sylvia: (2007. dir: Jose Luis Guerin) A young artist makes a pilgrimage to Strasbourg on a quest to find a girl he'd met briefly six years previous in a bar. It sounds like nothing much. Instead, it's the framework upon which Guerin hangs a truly unique and delicately filigreed sequence of perfect, intimate shots. The unnamed artist himself is not so much suffering a yearning for Sylvia as he is using her as catalyst for an adventure in the scrutiny of women. We see all manner of women through his eyes, and the camera has no qualms about lingering longer than any American camera would dare, Malick-like, on some fascinating image: the back of a girl's stationary head, for instance, as her long, straight hair is whipped in the wind. We watch a long still-life on the endtable in a motel room at night, with a key and a crucial map drawn on a bar napkin, watch as headlights pass and alter the lighting across it in pleasing ways. This camera also plays games with us: in a long scene at a cafe where nothing happens except that the artist watches the people there, we see a two-shot of a man and woman sitting silently next to one another, facing forward, and we assume they are together until the woman sets down her drink and rests her head on the shoulder of the man on her other side. Although one senses that not finding Sylvia may be a better thing than finding her, the film itself is a paen not to the pain of yearning, but to its joyful side and the creative inspiration which rises up from it.

Terrence Malick: With the exception of Badlands, whose characters are too non-introspective perhaps to yearn properly, all Malick films incorporate heavy yearnings woven into their fabrics. Think of Sam Shepard silently falling in love with Brooke Adams' dark beauty in Days of Heaven from his distant hilltop, then of Richard Gere luring her from her husband's bed on a later evening. In the Thin Red Line, Ben Chaplin's soldier pulls himself length by length through an endless war using thick strands of daydream about his beautiful wife, then finds himself foundering and bereft after she writes him a terrible letter. The New World, perhaps the world's masterpiece of yearning, has at its center a breathtaking sequence in which Pocahontas yearns herself crazy then to the brink of suicide over her lost Captain Smith, only to find her salvation in one gorgeous moment of divine grace.

In the Mood for Love: (2000. dir: Wong Kar Wai) Much ink has been spilled about the beauty and grace of this symphony in forlorn and unfinished love between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan. It falls somewhere between a stately minuet and a very intimate, very sensual samba. In moments more like a fashion show than a film (we spend a lot of time watching Maggie Cheung's lovely ass in gorgeous '60s sheaths as she walks out of rooms and up stairs), it nonetheless provides the long-lived melancholy of impossible love with an indelible language of its own.

Destiny: (1921. dir: Fritz Lang) This is one of those early triptychs, like Paul Leni's later Waxworks: Lang uses the overstory of a zaftig madchen playing a game with Death to win her round-faced lover back from the underworld as a framework to hold three stories of crossed love which traverse the globe and history. The exquisite sense of longing here does not emanate from the ostensible heroine, who seems to be seeking her lost lover more out of a confusion about what to do with herself in his absence than some deeper, more legitimate feeling, but from der Tod himself, strikingly played by Bernhard Goetzke, whose stony face communicates an anguish of longing to break out of his dreadful role. The legend is that Lang was inspired to this film by a dream he'd had in his youth, and what it lacks in depth it makes up for in compelling images, like a girl walking up stairs framed by a mysterious gateway after she's taken poison.

Damnation: (1988. dir: Bela Tarr) Even more heavily stylized than the Wong Kar Wai (heavy in more than a single sense), Damnation is a slow-moving study in shades of gray. It moves at about the pace of hardening cement inching down an inclined plane, enjoying the pleasures of textures and framing as it goes. It doesn't so much praise yearning as wallow in it, as a man might dive into a water-tank and revel in the waters as his strength leaves him, all the while knowing the walls are too steep and slick for him to climb back out, and that he will die there.

Karrer (Miklos Szekely B.) treads heavily through a Soviet-bloc town made out of concrete, rain and mud, bearing like Atlas the weight of impossible love, or rather the impossibility of love. His beloved is a Nico-like chanteuse who sings sitting down, her hand covering her face, her song so weighted with despair it can hardly emerge. This is a bleak, Slavic brand of yearning, hardened and flattened into a sort of walking damnation, its cause equal (and equally cruel) parts inexorable fate and human caprice. In fact, it is so very bleak as to play as a sort of joke, like a Bergman parody in a Woody Allen film, and I wonder if there is not a strong undercurrent of satire which fails to register because I am experiencing it through the distancing medium of subtitles, and the culture gap of having grown up in the mercurial giddiness of capitalist America.

robert carlyle film festival: the world is not enough

2011-06-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

*SPOILER ALERT*

I only watch Bond films if I have a very good reason to do it. I never liked Sean Connery in the role (way too smarmy and self-satisfied). Roger Moore was less arrogant, unsmirkingly underplayed everything, and so demanded less of my attention, which I very much appreciated.

Because you don't watch Bond films for Bond, do you? At least I don't. It's always for the villains and their incomparable sidekicks. I watched one once (not a very good one, I think) for Michael Gothard in the evil right-hand-man role. I watched Casino Royale for Mads Mikkelsen, and all I really remember is the tear of blood. When I was a kid there were a couple featuring the "Jaws" sidekick, one with a great Carly Simon theme song, and those felt like the epitome of Bondiness. In the end, though, I think nothing will ever surpass Live and Let Die, with its wildly contagious Paul McCartney theme song and its immortal Trio of Malevolence played by Yaphet Kotto, Julius Harris and Geoffrey Holder.

The World Is Not Enough I ventured into the cinema to watch because of Robert Carlyle, and found it vaguely disappointing, it being my first Bond film in many years. I watched it again last night and was better pleased. Directed by that able craftsman Michael Apted, it moves along easily through the necessary Bond-ish wackiness to its inevitable, all's-well-with-the-world-and-007-gets-laid denouement. The discrepancy which made this an unsatisfying experience for me in the theatre was, I think, that the villains were not sufficiently cartoonish. Pierce Brosnan as Bond is appropriately superficial, as is his Russian cohort (Robbie Coltrane). This year's Bond Girl (Denise Richards as a valley-girl nuclear physicist in short shorts and tight t-shirts) is risibly cartoonish. The villains, on the other hand, are tragic.

Sophie Marceau is the heartrendingly beautiful Electra King, the ultra-wealthy survivor of a terrorist kidnapping, a plight she escaped not through outside rescue attempts but by her own terrible efforts. Now, some years later, her father is assassinated and the family oil-pipeline is threatened by the same terrorist.

Carlyle plays the malefactor, a man who has taken a bullet in the head which is moving slowly through his brain, guiding him inexorably towards his premature death, and, as it goes, removing his abilities to connect with the external world. His sense of touch is gone. He feels no pain, and is therefore monstrously strong. He is, at the same time, wretchedly in love with his old hostage, and although he cannot smell her hair or feel her skin, his heart breaks for her. She, on the opposite side, owns a heart so thick with scar-tissue that she only knows how to give herself as a manipulative tactic, and can feel no tender emotion for anyone. Together, this team of unfeeling villains is so well-conjured as to make the cartoon-characters around them seem trivial and, frankly, difficult to bear.

This role, Renard, is a great triumph for Carlyle. He has transformed himself in subtle ways, both physically and vocally, and the depth of feeling communicated in his eyes is fascinating, whether he's caressing his beloved or the super-weapon which will end his life and bring about the dreams of his beloved. It's a case in which a fine performance outshines its vehicle, making the vehicle itself seem too shoddy a frame to hold it.

And there's a wonderful, old-fashioned, very Bondy theme song by Garbage.

outlander: no love inside the icehouse

2011-06-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

What kind of an incompetent asshole takes a sure thing like a movie about aliens vs. Vikings and comes up with dreck? I thought there was no way I was going to dislike this film; the Vikings alone give it all manner of leeway in my book. Throw in good actors (Ron Perlman, Sophia Myles, John Hurt, Jim Caviezel, also Jack Huston, an up-and-comer from, yes, Those Royal Hustons) and a dragon-like alien attacker, it's got the genre-crossing that makes my knees weak, it ought to have been a cake-walk, really, easy money, a sure thing. Any halfway decent effort and I'd have been eating from the palm of his hand.

"He" being Howard McCain, the fellow who wrote and directed this. The fellow at whose besmirched doorstep this mangy, halt and lame buck stops.

Man. I'm so tired of the way movies look these days. The same teal and orange palette. The washed-out lighting. The fight-scenes too fast to reveal any detail, designed only to smear across the top of it and communicate a vague sense of violence, rather than a real occurrence made out of real particulars. I hate the way the movies sound now, with the overweening, perpetual bombast-musik and the fist-and-weapon blows turned up to volume 12 to emphasize that it's all a fake, don't worry folks, don't have to take it seriously.

I'm so tired of the hackneyed scripts, the shallow moralizing, the cheap sentiment. Tired of incredible plot-turns, of story which grows not up from the world in which it's set and the people among whom it's set, but imposed from without by commercial demands. More shock here! Another explosion there! So the monsters were destroyed by fire before? Not anymore! Suddenly they can resist it. Will we tell you why? We will not! We are not interested in facts, only in effects!

I'm tired of lazy imitation. I'm a big fan of the homage, and I'm a big fan of remaking a thing that you love in a way that is personal to your own vision. This is not that. There's enough Lord of the Rings in here to keep reminding you how lazy and uncreative these filmmakers are (the alien has a fire-tail extraordinarily reminiscent of the Balrog's whip, for instance, and there's a character named Boromir, for God's sake, and that's just the tip of the Peter-Jackson-wannabe-iceberg), but there is no love inside this particular icehouse. Just a scrambling for money, a scrambling for easy success, and I'm tired of it.

If you want Vikings (and why wouldn't you?), watch Valhalla Rising or the 13th Warrior. Or even the Antoine Fuqua King Arthur, which is heavily flawed, but has on the plus-side Mads Mikkelsen as Tristram and Stellan Skarsgard in a wonderful performance as a Viking warlord, and an awesome full-bore battle atop the tentative ice of a frozen river.

last night's double feature: in the cut and footsteps in the dark

2011-06-22T11:35:00.000-07:00

In the Cut (2003. dir: Jane Campion) gets short shrift not for what it is, but for what it's not, which is Typical Meg Ryan Vehicle. Rather, it's a dark, somber, intelligent, and, above all, fearless film. Although directed by the astounding Campion, it might fit well into the ouevre of the less successful, less brilliant but still interesting Sally Potter. I've never given a Sally Potter film more than two stars on Netflix, but I always watch them once, and there are things from the Tango Lesson and Yes which stay strongly with me. In the Cut fits in as a darker third to these because it, too, is obsessed with telling truths (as opposed to spinning dreams) about feminine sexuality, using as its catalyst a smart, introspective woman's sexual fixation on a swarthy, ultra-macho guy. Meg Ryan, playing (possibly fatally to her career) against type, makes Franny into a fully credible portrait of a poet and teacher who has pulled away from the vicious traps of a love-life in the real world and replaced it with a rampant dream-life, only to be led back out of her temporary safety by the dark allure of a cop investigating a string of brutal murders, played by Mark Ruffalo with his usual courage and avoidance of bullshit.

Campion doesn't shrink from hard questions, or from showing us the terrible flaws cut and branded into the personalities of her two heroines, both the stronger, more self-contained Franny and her beloved half-sister, Pauline, played with all her vulnerability hanging out in that wonderful, vanity-less way by Jennifer Jason-Leigh. Both of these women are real, simultaneously damaged and strong in ways that women don't get to be in movies, not and remain the heroine. It's hard to watch sometimes, and certainly anyone looking for the dream-spinning which made Meg Ryan Movies into cash-cow-chick-flicks (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You Got Mail are all practically unwatchable in retrospect, movies stencilled from the thinnest sheet of cutesy and pasted together with spit and sugar-icing) is going to get sick to her stomach, never making it past the first third of the film.

A woman with a stronger palate, though, will find much substance as a reward for sticking with it. Even throwaway lines reveal ugly societal aspects of our commonplace attitudes towards sexuality in women. After handcuffed sex, the Ruffalo character (Malloy) tells her to find the key fast, he's "starting to feel like a chick." When Franny interrupts a string of faggot references to ask if all cops are homophobic, Malloy's partner asks in his most damning tone, "Are you one of those feminists?" I wish I could remember more; the script is packed with them.

Campion couldn't have cast any of the roles better. Both Nick Damici and Kevin Bacon are note-perfect, the former as Malloy's partner and the latter as a damaged one-night stand who cannot leave Franny alone and who totes around the sorriest-looking dog you'll ever see. There's a fantasy sequence that Campion uses to good effect, Franny's vision of the marriage-myth her mother used to live by: a story she told and re-told about the moment she met her future husband, and the manner in which he asked her to marry him. It's all distortion, and Franny knows it, but she still returns to it as you would to comfort food, even though she knows that her mother's life was ruined by the man. The insanity of longing for marriage and physical closeness with men even at the expense of happiness, health, and stability, a longing often installed like a central pillar in a woman's psyche from childhood, is examined in the most brutal, uncringing light, and the psychic punishments suffered by these women are mirrored in the dismemberments of the killer's victims, all given a diamond ring to wear before they are murdered.

Footsteps in the Dark (1941. dir: Lloyd Bacon) is a piece of cotton candy. Errol Flynn made it the same year he made his Custer film, and whereas he's the only reason to watch it, there are other, better ones to watch him in instead. It's a fluff-piece about a rich but happily-married dilletante who lives with his wife in her mother's mansion and enjoys a secret life as the author of scandalous mystery novels, and it's a role that someone other than Flynn really ought to have played. If Jimmy Stewart or William Powell assured us that he lied to his wife about his secret life because his love for her was so true and strong, we'd believe it. When Flynn says it, his innate rakishness makes a mockery of the words and implies something altogether seedier than the writing of mystery novels.

The joys of the film, slim as they are, lie in moments like watching his physical grace as he runs down a staircase, or his joie de vivre when he impersonates a Texan oil-tycoon in order to romance a murder suspect. Ralph Bellamy has a nice role as a babyfaced dentist, and Alan Hale, as always, shows up to play off Flynn in his light-hearted, avuncular way.

the reason i haven't been writing lately

2011-06-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

*SPOILER ALERT*

...is that I'm obsessed with Stargate Universe. I've got up to the beginning of season two, which I'll start as soon as I've written this hasty note, and I have two questions. First, do they ever explain how Chloe and Eli and Scott got dialed back onto Destiny after they were stranded in the last galaxy? Surely they do. Surely they must address that at some point. Did I miss it? I have an idea the answer has something to do with the intelligence of the ship itself; Destiny often seems like a quiet goddess subtly directing the lives of those upon her with Dr. Rush as her priest and mouthpiece. I'm still awaiting confirmation, however, and judging from how far afield were my guesses about who killed Rosie Larsen, I may be whole solar systems away from being right about this.

My other question is why do all the sci-fi series I love get cancelled after only one or two seasons? Firefly. The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Even my beloved, original Star Trek only got three seasons, although I am the first to admit that I have very little use for that last one ("the Way to Eden", anyone?). OK, granted, I didn't do my part with SGU, only discovering it now, after the axe had fallen. But surely it had a passionate fan-base? It must have done. It's a great show. I have not one word to say against Battlestar Galactica, also a very fine show, but it never grabbed me like this one, even though it covers similar ground (civilians and military stuck together on a ship, unable to return home, having to scramble for their lives). I think I like this one better because Galactica had young people and middle-aged people, but nobody my own age, whereas this one has the likes of Robert Carlyle and Lou Diamond Phillips, and its writing is every bit as adventuresome as the other.

The end of season 1.5 (remember in the old days, when seasons only had whole numbers?) is a crazed-edged cliffhanger. I was cursing like a sailor because I didn't have the next disc already on its way. The Lucian Alliance (who I don't really know anything about, since I've never watched any other Stargate show) have taken over the ship. Colonel Telford and the alliance leader just shot each other and are both apparently down for the count. TJ has been shot and things look bleak, if not for her, at least for her unborn child. Chloe is shot and bleeding out alone in a passageway that has no life support, and Eli is currently running towards a console in order to save the day. Greer and Scott are stuck in spacesuits on the surface of the ship, having made the repair but finding no way back in, since the invaders won't drop the force-field to allow their re-entry, and Dr. Rush has them running back to the other end of the ship towards their only, albeit dubious, chance of ingress. The bad guys have just ordered that civilians and military be separated, implying that they're going to slaughter the military.

The best part is the final shot: Colonel Young (Louis Ferreira), although battered, is standing bravely as his soldiers are herded in around him, ostensibly to be shot. He is very still and the last shot is from the ceiling. He looks up towards it, knowing that if Scott and Greer have not made it back inside by the next time the lights flicker, they will be dead. We have just seen them running clumsily in their gravity boots, then heard Brody, looking down at his console, mutter, "They're not going to make it." Then back to Young, his eyes locked upwards on the lights, ignoring the violent activity around him; he is an island of stillness. Then the lights flicker. Then the credits come up.

It's kind of a cheat, bringing in the Lucian Alliance at this late date. OK, they were the MacGuffin whose initial attack set off the whole series, but we've seen and heard nothing of them since then. Still, cheat or no, that doesn't mean I'm not on the edge of my seat waiting to see what happens. I'm not worried about Chloe; Chloe is teacher's pet; everybody loves Chloe, and she always comes through just fine. (Not my favorite character, Chloe.) But everyone else? Colonel Telford (Phillips) is a goner for sure, but his death warrant was as good as signed the first time he showed up at Mrs. Young's door. It's Hollywood's way of dealing out justice: after much badness, you make a u-turn to the good just in time to sacrifice your life while saving the bulk of the community. Rush (Carlyle), my favorite character, is like a cockroach; he'll make it through any calamity alive. I worry about TJ (Alaina Huffman) and Scott (Brian J. Smith) and especially the sensuous and conflicted Sgt. Greer (Jamil Walker Smith), an extraordinary character. If he goes, I go, and they may as well cancel the series.

Oh. Wait. Crap.

the conspirator: mothballs

2011-05-25T14:21:00.000-07:00

*SPOILERS, but nothing you won't find in a history book*

I leaned over to my boyfriend after seeing the preview for this and like a smartass said, "I guess the sun was so young then it hadn't learned how to shine properly." I'd always assumed the photographs back then were dim and mud-colored due to caveman camera technology, but director Robert Redford & Co would have us believe (or perhaps don't trust us to otherwise suspend our disbelief) that things looked that way in real life. This is my boyfriend's two cents: he says they filmed The Conspirator to look as it would have looked had there been movie cameras at the time of Lincoln's assassination. Whether it was a good idea or not, he says, they pulled it off swimmingly.

Alright; he's the expert. For the record, it was not a good idea. Instead of experiencing the world with the color and immediacy with which folk of the day would have experienced it, we are forced to walk through a museum piece, all dust and sepia tones, which acts as a sort of Brechtian distancing device to keep us from immersing ourselves too deeply into the story.

Fat chance of that, pal. What WAS a good idea was to tell the story of Mary Surratt. It's still a good idea, and someday, someone will tell it. This, on the other hand, is a message with the trappings of a movie stuffed around it to create a two-hour padding. The message is simple: even in wartime, even under the direst and most emotional of circumstances, everyone, even the guilty, deserves the dignity of a fair trial. Good, timely message. Redford feels passionately about it. My time would have been better spent if he'd gone on TV and said it once, then sent me a good book on Mary Surratt from which I could actually learn something.

After a short preamble to show us what a noble and effective soldier our hero was during the War, we plunge right into the evening of the assassination, seeing it from many viewpoints, many threads pulling together into the single tragedy. Even Americans don't always know the whole of it: that as well as Booth there were assassins dispersed simultaneously to kill both the Vice President and the Secretary of State in attempt to unravel the entire fabric of the government. The fellow assigned to the VP lost heart, skedaddled and got drunk. Lewis Powell, on the other hand, made an attack so vicious on William Seward that it was a wonder he survived. It's a fascinating story. There's a book called Manhunt that you won't be able to put down, it's so compelling. It begins in the same place as this movie, on the fateful evening, and follows up through Booth's run through the hinterlands and final showdown in the Garrett barn. I mention it in case you decide to watch this, because afterwards you'll have a million questions about what really happened. You come away from this movie feeling like you're only getting a few glimpses of the real story, that things crucial to your understanding are being obscured from you, perhaps deliberately. A film director is like a dictator, hopefully a benevolent one; when we step into the darkened cinema we are entering into a covenant with him, trusting that he will reveal everything we need to know so that the film will make sense as a full experience, even if that experience is only for entertainment purposes. When there's a message he wants delivered, as there is here, that covenant's importance is heightened: he is trying to change the way we think, and so has an obligation to lay the facts out plainly so that we can make up our minds. On this count, the tyrant Redford lets us down.

Poor Robin Wright as the beleaguered Mary gives us not a person but a plaster saint, pulling her face into a beatific, slightly pained mask, as if she hadn't so much created her character as purloined her from looking at paintings of the Virgin Mary and various martyred and anorexic saint-girls throughout the ages. Contrast this Mary Surratt with her speechless but fully alive counterpart in John Ford's Prisoner of Shark Island. That movie is about Dr. Mudd, but even in just glimpses we see a fuller woman than we ever do in Redford's bloodless, lifeless and stubborn-jawed soapbox harangue. I don't blame Wright; I blame Redford. Going in open-minded, one emerges with the uncomfortable notion that Surratt was guilty as charged but that Redford is not comfortable saying so, that he doesn't trust us to swallow his medicine unless he sugar-coats it with a suspicion of innocence and maternal saintliness. In the end, although her guilt is not important to his message, it certainly is to us, his frustrated audience. The long time he spends on the execution is wasted time, except insofar as the period details might be educational. Involving us emotionally in these deaths would depend on our giving a crap about the defendants, which in turn would depend on our having got to know them in some way, and we don't, not at all, not even Surratt. The bits of humanity we see of her are sphinxlike and inconclusive, and until we have made up our minds (which we never do, finally, until we go home from the cinema and crack open some books) about her actions and, more importantly, her intentions concerning the assassination attempt, we will not commit our emotions one way or the other.

It's an all-around ill-considered venture, filled to busting with great actors in supporting and cameo roles, and therefore redolent of great expectations sadly unfulfilled. The dinner-table conversation between Kevin Kline as the Secretary of War and Tom Wilkinson as the southern Senator Johnson, the only man who recognizes the dangers of sacrificing Surratt's civil rights to placate the ravening crowd, made me long for an altogether different film. Stephen Root delivers another knock-out in a long series of small roles made great through sheer mastery of his art, and Norman Reedus in a tiny role as the loathesome Lewis Powell is single-handedly worth the price of admission.

I'm a James McAvoy fan ever since watching the double-punch of his Dan Foster in the original, magnificent State of Play and his Joe Macbeth in the dazzling Macbeth portion of the appallingly ill-conceived series Shakespeare Re-told (it's not the stories which make those plays great. He stole those from all over. It was the writer's extraordinary insight into human psychology, as well as a certain facility he had with words). In the Conspirator, this badly-edited, badly-timed hodgepodge, McAvoy is the young lawyer roped into a terrible gig and wanders, lost but well-intentioned, reiterating his bewilderment as people ask him again and again why he's taken on this lose/lose case which will destroy his career and reputation regardless of outcome. The scriptwriter can't seem to think of anything else to talk about, and it makes for extraordinarily dull playing. My greatest moment of delight is in fact at the end, when we're told that this seemingly ill-fated, sad-sack character went on to become an early editor of the Washington Post, no doubt wreaking a great deal of havoc-like vengeance on the system which had so betrayed him in his idealistic youth.

the master in his youth: dirk bogarde and once a jolly swagman

2011-05-19T12:24:00.000-07:00

Apparently everyone but me knows that this title is the opening line from "Waltzing Matilda"; "swagman" is Australian slang for a hobo who wanders the Aussie bush. The movie is about Speedway motorcycle racing in the forties, a sport that originated in Australia and exerted a Nascar-type appeal over blue-collar English communities. The old, tired champion racer is Australian, although he doesn't speak with an accent (nor does his sister, who winds up marrying Bogarde's character), and he listens to the Australian anthem while shut up in a rest-home trying to recover from his career-ending injuries and resulting depression. That cleared up, the title still makes no sense, and, in fact, it was later changed to the more appropriate but truly awful Maniacs on Wheels.

This is a strange little film. Although it's British, it has one of those Hayes-Code-type internal wars going on: all the energy and excitement comes exclusively from the racing, with the rest of the world portrayed as grey, dull, and uninspired, a place to be escaped at all cost, but the pounding, reverberating moral to which the film keeps returning is something like, "Better to be miserable, broken, poverty-stricken and depressed than make a huge fortune from racing bikes." When the Bogarde character at the end bows to the moral and makes the decision to leave behind the one skill he has, the one thing in the world he does well (and he does it very well indeed), already having proven to himself and the world that he can find no other way to support himself much less the pending family he's about to father by returning to his estranged wife's arms, it feels like the most ridiculous, anti-rational decision in the world. Then, magnify the absurdity with the fact that the wife is perhaps the most astonishingly non-existent character I've ever seen take up more than a cameo's corner of space in a film. She recurs throughout, but her decisions never make a lick of sense. First she loves him, then she hates him, then she returns to him, then she leaves him,-- all well and good, humanity being the fickle and passionate thing that it is, except that the way it's played and the way it's written seem random, like William Burroughs' cut-up writings.

Characters and morals aside, the races are well-photographed, even incorporating POV shots from the bikes themselves, quite a feat at a time when cameras were huge, unwieldy beasts. There's a nice bit in the middle where Bogarde and Cyril Cusack spend a peaceful time on a naval ship in the midst of a war, woolgathering and watching clouds go by, and I was pulled along through the unfolding story by my own wonderment about whether it was ever going to make sense. A moment that stands out with particular horror is when our hero's mother takes him to the window to explain life to him, showing him girls and women caring tenderly for children, then showing him a group of boys fighting and tussling. This is what women do; that is what men do. Spine-chilling in its implications, and delivered up completely without irony: like a black-and-white jail cell that no one can escape.

All that said, my esteem for Bogarde grows in leaps the more I watch him, and I'm excited about these old things being scraped up out of some old vault and newly released for public consumption (Simba, Esther Waters, the Singer not the Song, So Long at the Fair, the Spanish Gardener). Watching this one feels very much like stepping back in time, into that post-war gloom that loured over England like a hunkered vulture until the Beatles single-handedly dispersed it and restored colour to the world. (Anyway, that's the history as it was taught to my American generation.)

last night's double feature: snow white: a tale of terror and the cabinet of dr caligari

2011-05-04T12:33:00.000-07:00

Fairy tales are meant to be dark. Scrub them up, Disney-fy them, they are sweet stories which buoy the desperate, everything-will-turn-out-OK optimism we try and foist on our kids. Even so, the only reason you still remember those Grimms' and Andersen's picture books from your earliest childhood are that baneful images from those stories got planted deep in your fertile child's mind.

There's a horse's head nailed to a gateway in "The Goose Girl", but it still sings to the princess. Cinderella's wicked stepsisters cut off their heels and toes trying to fit into that insidious slipper. "The Little Match Girl" details her final hallucinations as she freezes to death in the street. In "the Red Shoes", a girl cannot stop dancing until she convinces an executioner to chop off the feet to which the shoes in question have attached themselves like malevolent parasites. Even Disneyfied, Pinocchio and Geppetto still get swallowed by a damn whale, and that's pretty creepy. One of the things Disney did best (when I was a kid; maybe they still do) was to keep one very disturbing image in each movie to balance out all the sweet la-di-da and whistle-while-you-work. My mom remembers being scared to tears by the witch in Snow White. My personal scared-crapless nightmare came from the Banshee in the otherwise innocuous Darby O'Gill and the Little People. And, like JFK and John Lennon, everyone remembers where they were when Bambi's mom got killed.

All that is preamble as to why I looked forward so long to Snow White: a Tale of Terror, a television thing that came out in the nineties and only this past week showed up on Netflix. A horror film coaxed from a fairy tale is a fairy tale taken one step further in its original direction. I was genuinely excited when I heard that last year's Red Riding Hood was in the works, and genuinely bummed when I realized the intention was not to explore the sinister implications of the original tale, but to use it as a reboot of the Twilight dynamic and reap some more pocket change from adolescent girls.

In the end, this Snow White is a disappointment as well; it's a good story but badly told. The new twists and murky corners explored are intriguing, but the dialogue never rises above a pedestrian level. Sigourney Weaver pulls out all her magnificent stops in bringing to life the world's worst stepmother, and Sam Neill is creditable in his straight-man role as little Snow's father, well-meaning enough but always a step or two behind the ladies in their Electra-complex death-match. The "dwarves" have become miners, men scarred and bent by the class-struggles of the time until they dropped out to seek their fortunes digging in the earth. The "handsome prince" is a young, aristocratic doctor who turns out to be easy prey for the dark side, as anyone reading closely always suspects those handsome princes, with their implied ficklenesses and impetuosities, might be.

The sets and costumes are richly detailed and the castle glooms and shrinks into a claustrophobic prison as the queen cuts loose to run mad within it. The terrible mirror is an inexplicable but entirely believable character on its own, a force which wreaks havoc by reaching into the minds of those who peer into it. There are lovely, baleful visuals here as well. Sometimes, though, you'll find yourself fast-forwarding through the dialogue to reach them.

Caligari, on the other hand, is one of those classics which is so strange that it feels like walking through a dream. Every time I watch it I fall asleep and have to rewind to previous scenes, not because I'm bored but because there's something wonderfully hypnotic about it, and I always put it on late at night to encourage its vulpine grip on my subconscious. Those crazy, crooked sets! Like you're walking around in a dollhouse built out of cardboard by a maniac. Conrad Veidt's first close-up as he's waking, -- that face!-- and then again when he goes into a mad lust for the girl. That sinuous way he has of walking, slithering along the wall as if still half-asleep. The Kafka-esque convention that authority figures (policemen, the town clerk) sit on exaggeratedly high chairs, reconfirming the powerlessness that is at the heart of all the myriad insanities. It's a big slice of visionary genius, and, nearly a century after it was filmed, retains the power to blow your mind. There's a classic book written (From Caligari to Hitler by Siegfried Kracauer) which discusses at length its importance in any exploration of the collective German mindset which led to the weirdness of Hitler, so I won't belabor it, but it's difficult to watch Caligari or Mabuse without picturing that blackened fury twisting beneath the surface of history, preparing to erupt.

last night's double feature: SPY*S and Chloe

2011-04-29T13:23:00.000-07:00

S*P*Y*S: (1974. dir: Irvin Kershner) Whoa! So completely not funny! And they're trying so shamelessly to be so. Like the director is trying to make that (d?)evolutionary leap -- which will happen in the eighties with Airplane! -- into such devil-may-care shamelessness that you gotta laugh at the sheer silly nerve of the thing, but of course the world was not ready for that in 1974. American cinema, even the comedy, was still grounded in the dark muck of Vietnam and Watergate and the terrible assassinations of the sixties. That rich vein of seriousness gave the cinema a fertility and depth for which I'm often nostalgic; I remember it in the black-as-night comedies of Alan Arkin (Catch-22 is an underrated classic, and I remember Freebie and the Bean having a darkly brilliant sheen, although I was admittedly only ten when I saw it at the drive-in), and in that morally reprehensible, even possibly evil, but certainly genius Altman work, M*A*S*H.

S*P*Y*S is the Sutherland/Gould follow-up to that monster hit, and seems to prove that it wasn't the stars who made the thing great. In their defense, Gould, one of those actors whose talents would expire some decades before his career, had not at that point lost his edge, but it's wasted on a bad script which always goes for the obvious punch-line. Sutherland is cast in an oafish straight-man role which rubs against the natural grain of his many talents, and has been given not a single funny line.

There are potentially funny situations: the pair attack a rich, older spy in a men's room and he's frantically trying to get a pill onto his tongue, which they first take to be cyanide and fight to get away from him, then realize is digitalis for his heart condition and fight to get it back onto his tongue. Could have been funny, and wasn't. There's a bit at the beginning with Michael Petrovitch as a Russian gymnast hoping to defect and playing the English against the Americans as to who can offer him the best car, clothes, and women (Linda Lovelace or Miss Liverpool?). It has potential and, again, comes to little.

Later on, Joss Ackland and his cronies have captured Sutherland to find out what was on the inevitable microdot. They leave off torturing him to play instead on his patriotism, breaking into a ridiculously polished, heart-warming rendition of "America the Beautiful" which does indeed bring him to tears and makes him confess, a confession which they do not believe. It ought to have worked; it ought to have been funny. And it wasn't.

Et cetera, ad nauseam. Too bad.

Chloe: (2009. dir: Atom Egoyan) Sometimes he succeeds with brilliance that leaves you breathless, sometimes he fails with some brilliance, sometimes he just plain-out fails, but Egoyan is always, always interesting. Here is a director who never fudges or fakes, is always completely true to his own vision, and has the technical chops to carry it off. How you react to his films will depend largely on how open your own personal worldview is to rubbing up against his, which is strange and sometimes cantakerous, often depressing, and always interested in human truth at the expense of political correctness. He goes in close and personal to examine internal lives, sometimes with awesome results (the Sweet Hereafter, the overlooked and always surprising Exotica), and focuses on the twisting and often amoral choices we make to survive terrible pain, terrible loss.

In Chloe, Julianne Moore is a wealthy gynecologist with a beautiful husband whom everyone adores (Liam Neeson) and a rebellious but good-hearted teenaged son and a museum-house where nothing is ever out of place. She becomes convinced that her husband is cheating on her, the suspicion rising up mostly from her growing sense of alienation from both husband and son, a sense that what gives them joy are the parts of their lives which she cannot touch. After a chance meeting with a young prostitute (Amanda Seyfried in a stunning performance), she hires the girl to tempt her husband. In doing so, she reawakens her own sexuality (in the beginning, we hear her counselling a client that an orgasm is nothing mysterious, just a series of muscular contractions) through vicariously experiencing the girl's stories of the adulterous encounters.

Amanda Seyfried dazzles as Chloe, with her effortless combination of seduction and innocence, a real powerhouse. I loved this girl in Jennifer's Body and was sorry to have to forego Red Riding Hood (everyone has lines they will not cross) and not sorry at all to have missed Mamma Mia! but I will follow her in future. Julianne Moore throws all her myriad talents full-force into a difficult and rewarding role, and Liam Neeson's turn is nuanced and controlled, always pointed toward enhancing the performances of the actresses, to whom this film unequivocally belongs. Even when you can see where the twists are taking you, you will not guess them all. That's impossible in an Egoyan film, because he is so strongly bent on remaining true to his characters, and, at their best, those characters are deep and vast and proteanly human.

michael sarrazin: 1940-2011

2011-04-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, Michael Sarrazin was A-list. He worked a lot, and I sought him out. There was something about his persona that made him appealing to a child in ways that, say, James Coburn would never be. It wasn't just that his particular brand of handsome was so easily accessible (taller than average, with enormous, unflinching blue eyes and thick black hair, a manly cleft in his chin and the most sensuous mouth you'll ever see on a human of any gender), but also that he had a certain open, thoughtful way of listening which leant him an unthreatening and unpretentious, even a kindly air.

The only work of his which is still on the modern filmgoer's radar is They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, the kind of fin-de-'60s gritty, unrelenting, sometimes cruel downer which, for all its quality (it was directed by Sydney Pollack with a great cast. Gig Young won an Oscar for what he was best at: playing his own unique brand of truly chilling slimeball), is a tough one to endure unless you're feeling particularly psychically robust.

But whatever happened to Sometimes a Great Notion? This was considered an important movie in its day, -- it IS an important movie,-- but it's never been issued on DVD. *SOME SPOILERS AHEAD* Based on Ken Kesey's best book, directed by and starring Paul Newman (as well as Sarrazin, Henry Fonda, Lee Remick, Richard Jaeckel and a fantastic secondary cast), it jumps into the middle of a loggers' strike in Oregon and a cantankerous, rogue family of scabs led with roaring, dry-witted zeal by Fonda as the family patriarch. Aside from showcasing the best work I've ever seen from Remick (in the scene during which she almost reluctantly tells her story to Sarrazin, the returned prodigal brother, her choices are downright sublime), it provides Richard Jaeckel (3:10 to Yuma, Ulzana's Raid, the Dirty Dozen) with an intensely unique death-scene. Simultaneously witty and poignant, it is somehow --or, rather, therefore,-- one of the most powerfully enduring demises I've seen captured on film. I first watched this movie at the drive-in with my family (this was in 1971; I was seven), then again once on television with my father some time during the following decade. Still, after all this time, two moments from the film were burned into my mind as if I'd seen it night before last: Jaeckel's death and that final, wonderful, iconic image before the rolling of the credits. (I'm not going to give it away; you have to watch it for yourself.)

Revisiting it now (you can watch it on instant play at Netflix), I'm struck by how very capably Newman directs not just the film in its entirety but himself in it, a tough task; he's surrounded himself with the best actors and has the humility to bow to the ensemble. The only flaw I find is his tendency to use dissolves between scenes. It's jarring, probably because my subconscious associates that particular cinematic tactic with the summoning of nostalgia or sentiment, and one of the great strengths of Notion is that it is so unsentimentally a product of its time, with its low-key celebration of irony and subtle humor, its quiet revelry in anti-social behavior.

Sarrazin himself is weak in an early scene in which he drunkenly half-confronts his long-estranged older brother (Newman) through the mitigating presence of the brother's wife (Remick). He is at his best when he's listening, a thing which this actor does as well as any other ever has; his presence is strong and so he never feels passive. He also has a talent for underplaying which works well here: the first time the family takes him up to the worksite, they travel through an ugly, massive clear-cut and Sarrazin says with the perfect note of droll simplicity, "Neat work you guys do up here." This is a forgotten classic that needs to be revived.

There are others of his that I remember very well but to which I have no access: In Search of Gregory and the Reincarnation of Peter Proud are two that spring to mind. The first was a cryptic, existential Julie Christie movie that probably didn't age well beyond its time, but I'd appreciate the chance to see that for myself. The second was an early New Age thriller (what happens when the reincarnation of a murder victim begins exploring his past life?) that I thought was AMAZING when I was a kid, and, again, no doubt doesn't live up to my thrill of prepubescent enthusiasm, but how will I ever know?

Of note also is Journey to Shiloh, a really dreadful Civil War TV-movie about a band of Johnny Rebs heading off to join up and win the war. It's notable for two reasons: you see the issues from the Confederate point of view ("That buck slave is worth a thousand dollars. You think we're going to kill him?") and because the band of brothers consists of the young James Caan, Harrison Ford, Sarrazin, Jan-Michael Vincent, Don Stroud and Paul Petersen (remember the Donna Reed Show? No, me neither. Tough start, being a child actor, particularly from a hit show that's fallen so far afoul of the current zeitgeist that it is known only as a joke. To his credit, he's still working). Poor Jan-Michael Vincent, who looks about fifteen, bears up bravely under possibly the worst-written death-scene ever ("Are you still there? The candle went out!"). Ford gets to lurk in the background without an opportunity to embarrass himself, and Caan is so miscast and badly-coiffed as to invoke more sympathy than derision. Sarrazin comes off best as Caan's stalwart sidekick, somehow finding corners of silk purse in this particular sow's ear, particularly in his own, more dignified final moments.

Then there is the mendaciously named Frankenstein: the True Story, a "major television event" from my childhood. A big fan of all things Gothic, I was rapt in front of the set for every minute of it, and bemused to find that it had as little to do with the original book as the early Karloff films did. It did, however, veer off in interesting directions, and it was true in portraying the monster as an intelligent, romantic, and tragic figure. This was Sarrazin, whose beautiful visage decays throughout the film (at the hands of Hammer makeup artisan Roy Ashton) until he is monstrous to behold. He's acting with James Mason, David McCallum, the young and lovely Jane Seymour, and, interestingly, Leonard Whiting as the good doctor, in one of his rare filmed roles following his unforgettable Romeo in the Zefferelli Romeo and Juliet. Although arguably too long-winded and melodramatic, this Frankenstein has genuine twists and chills (the removal of the black ribbon!) and Sarrazin brings to it the soulful poetry of his presence.

Those words, "soulful" and "poetic", turn up in many of his obituaries, used by those trying to describe the unusual nature of his charisma. It wasn't just star power, but a certain quiet centeredness that he projected, a tone which served him well during the hippie times during which he came into the height of his career. Personally, I'm surprised at the melancholy his death has inspired in me. Certain actors, when treasured in one's youth, lend their own images and qualities toward the building of one's internal psychic structure. That is, their images become symbols upon which one's psyche can draw to express internal truths in dreams and visions and musings. Sarrazin was one such for me, and, as this particular melancholy is not an unpleasant sensation, I mean to sustain it by revisiting as many of his films as I can find.

the lincoln lawyer: the camera wielded as an obstacle

2011-04-06T13:08:00.000-07:00

The photographer was apparently drinking from a bad batch of wood alcohol, but aside from that unfortunate incident, the Lincoln Lawyer is a rollicking good story. It's gripping, almost always satisfying in its turns, and in the end I was heartily glad I had watched it.

Now are you ready for my rant? This is directed toward the cinematographer, Lukas Ettlin (whose last responsibility was Battle: Los Angeles, which speaks volumes). YOU DON'T COMMUNICATE A CHARACTER'S INTERNAL AGITATION BY MOVING THE CAMERA AROUND IN AN AGITATED MANNER. You communicate it by focusing the camera on a good actor and letting him communicate his internal state.

McConaughey is lovely in this! So are Marisa Tomei as the ex-wife, William H Macy as the sidekick, and every other damn actor in the cast. These are well-paid professionals who are very good at what they do. There is absolutely no reason for the DP (and, ultimately, director Brad Furman, at whose door this botched vision lies sprawled, naked, and oozing pus) to mistrust this cast so much he feels he has to do their job for them. He's showing off, that's all, and it obstructs the telling of the tale. Not fatally, because the story and the script and the actors are sufficiently compelling to overcome it.

It's not that this guy is addicted to the shaky cam. He uses stillness, too, generally from odd angles, with maybe the camera set just closer to a witness on the stand than what we're used to, and set at just a slightly lower angle, emphasizing an oddness. That's alright; it doesn't ruin things. Point is, though, that even when he's using stillness, you can hear him, smug behind the camera, thinking loudly, "And behold! I offer you stillness." To which you want to respond, "Get out of the goddamn way so I can watch the film!"

Do you remember that great, great scene in the Bad and the Beautiful when Lana Turner finally makes herself fully vulnerable to Kirk Douglas only to have her heart smashed in the most mortifyingly awful way? Then she flees to her car and starts to drive, and we watch her for the longest time, having her emotional breakdown while she's driving. Minnelli and his cameraman (the incomparable Robert Surtees) set up a fascinating shot: the camera dollies up to about where the passenger rear-view mirror would be, just barely looking up and back at Lana. Then, as her frenzy mounts, and as her driving becomes more dangerous, it rocks backward until we're watching her from just outside the backseat, then forward again, in smooth, surreptitious movement. It's unobtrusive, beautifully so, but nonetheless effective in communicating that something is terribly wrong and building to a tragedy. It heightens the emotional impact of Turner's scene without at all distracting from it.

And so, in conclusion, I say to this Ettlin fellow: watch some old movies. Learn from the masters. Stop showing off. And get out of my way when I'm trying to watch a damn movie.

That said, and my crankiness temporarily abated, watch the Lincoln Lawyer, regardless. It's got other things to offer. It's been a long time since I've seen a really satisfying courtroom drama. They used to do them rather well in the old days, and Furman seems to be referring back to the seventies, judging from his opening credits and the flat, metallic lighting he's chosen to illuminate his Los Angeles. There was only one plot-point that eluded me (how did Haller know that Corliss would have details about the previous murder? it's a small quibble, and no doubt will resolve itself on a second viewing) so I went back to the book for clarification. I didn't find it, but it did seem to me during my glance-through that this is one of those occasions on which the movie is more satisfying than the book. My impression of Connelly is that he's one of those authors, so prevalent today, who specialize in good stories without putting in the time to write them very well, and that's the perfect kind of author to adapt to the big screen.

last night's unintended double feature of monster movies: neither the sea nor the sand and iguana

2011-04-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

SPOILER ALERT

Neither the Sea nor the Sand: (1972. dir: Fred Burnley) I love these strange, low-budget British films from the seventies. You never know what you're going to get. The blurb I read made it sound giallo-ish (massively toned down, of course; we are Brits here, not Italians), with a woman perhaps going mad on one of those lovely, rocky coastlines, perhaps with a hint of the supernatural at work.

What I got was so much more! Anna (Susan Hampshire. If you are English, you remember her from a thousand and one telly appearances. She was my first Becky Sharp; I was a small child, and I did not find her charms sufficient to balance the villainous aspects of the character) is vacationing on Jersey in the dead of winter to escape her dead-end marriage. She meets the inevitable handsome, mysterious islander, Hugh (Michael Petrovitch), with whom she spends every last moment until time to go home. The sexual revolution seems not to have reached the Jersey shores yet, so the affair consists of banal conversations over campfires, tedious walks on the beach and visits to local tourist attractions. This all goes on for a very long time, interspersed with some darkly forboding talk about death and dead souls beneath the sea. When she at last decides to cast in her lot with him entirely they fall into bed and madly in love simultaneously, and their mutual joy is crossed only by Hugh's elder brother's horror at the match. (Frank Finlay plays the brother. Thankless role, but he's a peach.)

So far, so dull. To escape the brother's disapprobation, the lovers abscond to a different seashore, this one in Scotland, although it looks pretty much the same as the one in Jersey. While there, they (tediously) pledge their undying love and enjoy long frolics amongst the rocks (why are happy love affairs always so boring to watch?) until Anna's darkly magnificent lover Hugh falls dead on the beach.

And now we get the to the interesting bit. It looks like it's going to turn into a story about grieving, but then Hugh returns. Or, anyway, Hugh's body starts walking around in the middle of the night, following Anna everywhere, unable to look away from her. Normally, one would wonder at this point how much of this is happening only in Anna's head. That angle is disallowed by the script, which shows us objective viewpoints from allegedly normal people who see him, too. When she finally gets him home (a long, humdrum process, as death has robbed Hugh of any grace or facility in the use of his limbs and fingers, and he can no longer speak, but communicates with her telepathically), the brother hits the nail on the head when he posits that the sheer force of Anna's love has trapped Hugh's spirit in his now decaying body, and furthermore that this is folly which can only lead to calamity.

Perhaps I've said too much. The joy I had from the film lay in witnessing what vapid madness lay round the next bend, and now I'm afraid I've spoiled that for you. In any case, I won't tell you any more. Just that Michael Petrovitch is a lovely zombie, and kept reminding me of Conrad Veidt in Caligari.

AND MORE SPOILERS

Iguana: (1988. dir: Monte Hellman) Hellman, best known for the underground classics Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter as well as a heavily-lauded but little-seen duo of Jack Nicholson Existential Westerns (the Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind), returns in a different decade with the strangest offering of them all. Hellman films always explored the psychodynamics of interpersonal power, the slippery intricacies of dominance and submission, of who gets to be alpha dog and for how long and why beta dog rolls over to bare his belly willingly. This one takes those questions to the very utmost, to the point even at which the characters never come to life, remaining rather puppets animated only by the hand of the debate. Maybe it's the lack of a real star like Nicholson or Warren Oates which leaves this movie writhing unborn in its amniotic sac, but it's an interesting failure, nonetheless.

Everett McGill is the monster of the title, a harpooner on a whaling ship whose facial disfigurations lead him to be mistreated by his shipmates (and, we are led to understand, by humanity at large). He jumps ship and declares himself king of a deserted island. In the beginning, he is a worshipper of the Voudoun loa; the first shot of the film shows us the veve he has tattooed on his arm, and one of his early punishments involves being branded in the belly by a white-hot metal voodoo amulet. After sufficient disappointment, he topples his altar, scrapes the tattoo off his arm and declares himself sole god of his world. Then, any soul unlucky enough to wash up on his shores becomes shackled and mutilated and enslaved to his will, and they are surprisingly myriad. Included in his little enclave of unfortunates is a servant (played even more lacklusterly than usual by the generally lackluster Michael Madsen), an intellectual, a mute non-entity, an arrogant captain, and a beautiful seductress. They all submit so passively to the monster's tyranny that it is both depressingly realistic and deadly to the plot. There is rebellion, yes, but most of it half-hearted. The intellectual can only rebel with words; he has not the physical courage to take a physical risk. The arrogant captain eventually makes a stand, smashing his shackles and escaping, but is so physically exhausted by the effort that he is easily vanquished. The seductress, who has been well introduced to us as the smartest, most interesting character in the piece, foregoes her chance to rebel, seemingly out of her underground desire to be mastered and humiliated. (Ay, caramba. Did Sam Peckinpah direct this?)

In the end, it is strange enough to interest, and the colours of the thing are beautiful. The last shot is particularly gorgeous, with its quiet hymn sung over the top. But a story without living characters is a story destined to languish, gasping for breath on its particular beach, and this one does.

antichrist: the darkest fairy tale

2011-04-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

*SPOILER ALERT*

Antichrist: (2009. dir: Lars von Trier) Just because a thing is a work of genius doesn't mean you can't hate the bastard who made it. Often we are beguiled by genius. Other times, like right now, we want to say, "Congratulations on your cleverness, asshole," and throw rocks.

They used to say a mere human would turn to stone or die or run mad if he looked on a god manifest in his true form. That came into my mind while the end credits rolled. It's not an easy thing to watch, this movie, so compelling and magnetic, but with moments so dark that I felt like I'd been on the mountain and watched bad gods at war, and that I was lucky to escape intact with a few additional grey hairs.

That said, the most startling thing about Antichrist is its extraordinary beauty. It's shot on a Red camera; Red seems to be behind it every time I find a film beautiful these days. And this particular director, with whom I so heavily associate the dreaded shaky-cam, is the one, it turns out, who can most fully control his addiction to it, using stillness (and, more radically, slowness) to sculpt a film of intoxicating grace and fascination.

It's two films, really: a study of different shapes of grieving when a couple loses their child, and a fairy tale pitting the apollonian yang of the masculine against the yawning, chthonic, lovecraftian dark of the eternal feminine. What emerges from the fray is a thing made of thunder and primal anguish. My first thought, and it scared me, was that he has no fear of anything, von Trier, but on contemplation I decided it's the actors undergoing it who are the heroes of the hour. One hears the stories: performers driven half-mad by working with von Trier, some who sign on to do several films but drop out after the first from nervous exhaustion. As when watching porn, one assumes that as long as they're not bound and gagged they're making adult decisions to do the work. This in mind, I wonder if Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are not superhumans looking fondly back at us from one step further up the evolutionary ladder.

Once the couple ventures far into the woods to face their grieving, the fairy tale comes to life through wonderful elements: animal-helpers emerge to guide the man/boy using darkly awful images, and there is a womb-like crevice opening into the earth beneath an ancient, gnarled tree which becomes a terrible place of destruction and rebirth. Acorns pound the roof of the cabin like the hailstones conjured by witches, a constant reminder of the encroaching threat of the natural (ie: the feminine/satanic).

Its biggest flaw is that its violence, which is some of the most disturbing I've ever seen, arrives too suddenly. It is not without warning, certainly, but it is without a satisfactory build-up. In this respect alone a more traditional Hollywood style might have been useful, in which one cheats a little with just a splash of music here, combined in the editing room with a crafty close-up there, all communicating the darkness building inside the draconian She. Instead, her violence seems small and random from the beginning, and when she at last comes roaring out of the gate at full-bore wicked-witch, we do not feel that sense of deep horror (think Nicholson in the Shining) which emerges from having realized the full extent of the threat just before it breaks. The clues are there in the script (the thing with the shoes, which is very effective), but we don't get close enough to the woman to see her storm brewing. In fact, although we see Dafoe's face up close quite often during the course of the film, Gainsbourg remains an enigma most of the time, reflecting the side of the fence (rational apollonian v chthonic feminine) from which von Trier is watching the story unfold. The rational man is the boy caught in the dark fairy-tale jungle, at the mercy of the wicked witch.

Made by a lesser talent, it would have been insulting. Alright, it's still insulting, but a work of true greatness transcends the temporal human scales of political correctness. I can't recommend this movie, because once these images are inside your head, you'll never shake them out again, so be warned, and use caution before venturing into these woods. Only when you're feeling hardy and ready to approach the dark gods with the necessary humility, then, by all means, watch it, and godspeed to you.

st trinian's: wicked and often well-armed

2011-03-23T10:56:00.000-07:00

Removed from its context as a long-lived British cultural phenomenon, it's possible that Oliver Parker's 2007 St Trinian's makes little sense. This hellish girls' school began life in the comics of Ronald Searle just before WWII, and when he resumed them after the war (and his incarceration in a Japanese camp), the atmosphere darkened considerably. Five books of cartoons were followed by four films in the fifties and sixties arising from the Ealing tradition of comedy which drew heavily on panto and music-hall conventions. These were followed by a remake in 1980 (the Wildcats of St Trinian's), and, in 2007, this more recent addition to the ouevre. It stars Rupert Everett, stepping into the formidable heels of Alastair Sim as both the headmistress and her wastrel brother.

Wikipedia says of St. Trinian's, "Its pupils are wicked and often well-armed." As a general rule, the smaller the girl, the more dangerous she is; it is a pair of ten-year-old twins who are the school's weapons experts, or, as they are introduced, its "answer to the Sopranos." Older girls wrangle their schoolgirl costumes into slatternly streetwalker-wear. Gambling, drinking, smoking and drugs run rampant among all ages. (During a heist, one of the younger girls pulls out a fag and the head girl says, "You're only ten! Plus you're loaded down with volatile explosives.") Blinding and sometimes fatal bootleg vodka and other black-market wares are transported from the basement into the world by intermediary crook Flash Harry (here played by West Ham fan Russell Brand). Any amble through the halls will reveal girls being dropped from upper stairwells or immersed in fishtanks. The biology lab houses deadly biting ants and dangerous reptiles; the Spanish instructor teaches useful phrases like, "But these are not my suitcases. I have never seen this contraband before." As in any girls' school, there are cliques: first-years, emos, geeks, Posh Totties, Chavs. In the end, they all must work together to pull off an art-heist to save the school from bankruptcy.

Even for the uninitiated yank, there is an enjoyable ride here if you can relax into the bouncing spirit of the anarchy. The script is jam-packed full of inside jokes directed at Colin Firth (who plays the Minister of Education determined to make an example of the school), including an ill-fated dog called Mr. Darcy who loves to hump his leg. Although the girls indulge almost constantly in murderous games, nobody really dies (other than poor, doomed Mr. Darcy). The actors had a downright exorbitant amount of fun making this film, so much so that they all returned for a 2009 sequel, St Trinian's II: the Legend of Fritton's Gold, which adds David Tennant to the cast and has yet to swim the Atlantic and reach these shores.

And, in the end, there is something wonderfully satisfying about hearing a little towhead girl roar, "On my command, unleash hell!"

last night's double feature: tenderness and spirit of the beehive

2011-03-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes one stumbles upon synchronicity. I was loading the Spirit of the Beehive DVD when Tenderness fired up on Sundance and distracted me. In one movie, a girl witnesses a killer gently kissing his victim and becomes fixated upon the moment; in the other, a younger girl sees Frankenstein and fixates on the scene in which the monster kills a little girl, as if it holds the secret to finding her way into adulthood.

Tenderness: (2009. dir: John Polson) It's an atmospheric thriller: the suspense starts building straightaway and never lets up despite an unhurried pace. A killer is being released; a teenaged girl with a messed-up life seeks him out, associating him with the possibility of tenderness.

The tenderness of the title refers most obviously to a description of the killer's motive by Russell Crowe's police detective, a man determined to keep the boy from killing again. Having made a long study of it, he thinks the boy is addicted to the tenderness of the kill, the intimacy of sharing that last moment of breath. The siren call of tenderness, though, reaches far and wide beneath everything in this film, a thick vein of ore running just under the dirt.

In bookend narrations at the beginning and end, Crowe's character says (I paraphrase): "My wife always says there are two kinds of people: the ones who are looking for pleasure, and the ones who are running from pain." With two possible exceptions (the abusive stepfather-to-be, and Laura Dern as the boy's aunt, who seems healthier than everyone else but still lost and amazed at the anguish around her), even the characters who just duck on for a moment are all running from pain and, as a constant adjunct, seeking tenderness. Securing an ongoing source for-- not even love, which seems an impossible thing,-- just some tenderness, is the chthonic force behind nearly every decision made. There's a moment when a boy awkwardly approaches Sophie Traub's Lori at a carnival and offers to escort her around so that other boys don't hit on her. She cuts him coldly, but we recognize it as an echo of her own recent, heart-rending plea to the killer, with whom she is travelling: "Use me for whatever you want. Think of it as practice for when you find someone important." In fact, the movie is jam-packed full of moments of proferred tenderness, intimately captured by Tom Stern's unhurried camera, but I can't think of one which is experienced as such by two people simultaneously. Always the offer is either consciously rebuffed or goes unrecognized. Even Lori's boss, who we watch masturbating behind his desk while she expressionlessly lifts her shirt, looks on with a sort of melancholy longing as he lets her steal a CD.

You know from the beginning that not everyone is going to make it through to the end credits, but the story unfolds with gentle surprises, and the editing (by Lisa Zeno Churgin and Andrew Marcus) is spot-on, encouraging the space for introspection without letting the story lag. Even after having followed it with a classic like Beehive, this is the film I can't keep out of my head today.

The Spirit of the Beehive: (1973. dir: Victor Erice) This is what they call a visual "tone poem". It's gorgeous and filled with space and has no interest in spelling things out. Most commentaries will tell you that there are oblique, underground critiques here of Franco's regime, most prominently in the image of the family patriarch's experiment with a round beehive, which seems to inspire a mad chaos of fruitless activity amongst his bees.

All that is not the thrust, though, not the important part: Erice shows us his world through the eyes of two sisters, both very young. It is 1940. They live in a somewhat decrepit mansion in a tiny, isolated village in Spain with their mother, a remote and aging beauty who keeps for the most part aloof from her family and spends her time writing letters to a lover who is away at war, and their father, a keeper of bees and hunter of mushrooms, a man interested in the natural world around him but seemingly divorced from the larger world of humans.

There is a special showing of Frankenstein in town and Ana, the younger of the two girls, becomes obsessed with knowing why the monster killed the little girl. Her older sister says it's a trick: the monster did not kill the girl and the monster himself is not dead. She knows this because she has spoken to its spirit and knows where it lives. This knowledge unleashes something in Ana and she begins pursuing an intimacy with the monster's spirit. There is a strong suggestion that the pull toward understanding the monster is the evolutionary force which pulls us all out of childhood toward adulthood, particularly after she watches from the sidelines while her older sister's friends leap over a fire in a coming-of-age pagan May Day ritual.

The climactic episode with the meeting of the monster is a gorgeous, timeless thing, and the easy denouement is ambiguous but in a good way, in the way that childhood becoming prepubescence is an ambiguous process.

last night's double feature: dominique is dead and valerie and her week of wonders

2011-03-09T12:05:00.000-08:00

Dominique is Dead: (1980. dir: Michael Anderson) A few years after they collaborated on the laughable but nonetheless good-time Logan's Run, Michael Anderson teamed up again with Jenny Agutter, she of the ludicrously wooden acting style (to be fair, she's really at her worst in Logan's Run, as if she's just a teensy bit embarrassed). Dominique is a twisty-turny thriller from the "Is It Supernatural or Human Connivance?" realm, and it's packed full of cracking good British actors with little to do, alongside Cliff Robertson in the lead, whose natural stoicism works effectively against a hyperventilating script.

Jean Simmons is the eponymous Dominique. Her husband may or may not be trying to drive her to suicide, and her ghost may or may not later be trying to pay him back in kind. I stuck around to the end to find out, but Anderson really seems much more interested in playing around with Dario Argento's lighting kit than he is in telling a story, filling each night-time room with great splashes of primary colours through which the actors move as through a dream. I'm glad he had fun with that, and it's pretty to watch, -- although the film quality is so degraded that sometimes it looks like those Kodachrome snapshots from the sixties, where everything has bled into a mud of muted olives and oranges and very little else, and that's a shame, since it was mostly what this movie had to offer. Instead of growing tension, we get folks going up and down a shadowy staircase and back and forth through color-splashed hallways. In the end, although the writers did what they could to tie up all the ends, it still seems far-fetched in the way that Vast Government Conspiracies do (they can't keep a personal email bad-mouthing a foreign dignitary private, but the alien-dissecting lab under Roswell employing multiple scientists over the decades is still indeterminate?)

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: (1970. dir: Jaromil Jires) Now travel with me back in time one decade further, hop with me across the pond then trek inland a spell where we happen upon one fabulously weird surrealist piece of Czech hippie-vision. It's not your typical flower-power kind of hippie, though; it's the sallow-faced long-hair at the party who doses you with Purple Owsley then mindfucks you into taking your clothes off. You wouldn't call it a horror film; rather, it's a girl's coming-of-age story, complete with the darkness, horror and cursed foreboding which balance the promise of sensual joy. I don't know where this director came from or went, but this movie, crazy as it is, moves with a firm hand at its rudder, as if he knows exactly where it's going all the time, even when we-the-spectators don't know exactly where we are or have just been. Valerie herself moves like Alice or Red Riding Hood with trusting ease through the high strangeness that is her onslaught of pubescence: a world of vampires, a Were-Weasel who may or may not be her father, incest, lustful priests, repressed grandmothers, virgins cursed with marriage, marriage likened to the vampiric bond, and a chicken plague. It's got the groovy sensuality of hippie times, but the interwoven darkness saves it from feeling outdated and tired like most flower-child memorabilia from stateside.

some films from the thirties

2011-03-02T11:26:00.001-08:00

Son of Frankenstein: (1939. dir: Rowland V. Lee) This is a wonderful sequel! Why am I surprised? It's got Rathbone, Karloff and Lugosi: Rathbone is the titular, westernized son facing the infamy of returning to the spooky east to claim his inheritance, and inevitably succumbing to his dead father's obsession. Karloff is always superb, and Lugosi is in top form as the catalytic Ygor, looking like a sort of mutant son of Rasputin and the Wolfman, sporting pointy teeth and a broken neck. The tune he plays on his odd, homemade oboe to call the monster to do his bidding is mournfully eerie and the silence surrounding it is wonderful. There are big, strange, angular, Caligari-esque sets and extremes of chiaroscuro, and an inexplicable, boiling sulfur pit in the laboratory floor, always handy when you suspect there'll be monsters to destroy at some point.

Baby Face: (1933. dir: Alfred E. Green) It's one of the poster-children for Pre-Code Naughtiness: a young girl sleeps her way out of small-town poverty and across the country then into the upper echelons of big-city life. In her fifth year of speaking roles, Stanwyck is already a full-blown colossus. Look at the way she strolls down a street in Manhattan, straight off the boxcar floor and penniless, looking for all the world like royalty inspecting property she's about to buy. Already she can pull off even the most awful lines with aplomb. And a full eleven years before Double Indemnity, there's a lingering shot of her face while she listens to one of her lovers killing another in the next room, a shot every bit as magnificently enigmatic as the later, more celebrated one. This is also your chance to see John Wayne moping around as a lovesick office flunky wearing the boy-lipstick actors had to wear back then and looking pretty doggone silly. (If you want to see Gary Cooper looking silly in the boy-lipstick, check out his uncredited bit as a reporter in the 1927 Clara Bow monster-hit It.)

Night Nurse: (1931. dir: William Wellman) Another notorious pre-coder, this one is less concerned with telling a story than with letting us watch Stanwyck and Joan Blondell strip down to garters and slips multiple times as they climb in and out of their nursing gear. It's also got Gable from his pre-hero days as an SS-looking, black-clad, clean-shaven baddie who thinks nothing of socking Stanwyck across the jaw, although she's barely half his size. There's some simplistic suspense and unrealistic plot involving vulnerable kids and their nefarious parental figures, interesting because of the extreme depravity in which these rich no-gooders apparently live while their children quake fearfully in the arms of their nurse.

Night Must Fall: (1937. dir: Richard Thorpe) It's a great idea, but without the follow-through. According to IMDB, this was Thorpe's 107th full-length feature, including a disturbing number which had "g"s omitted from the titles (the Interferin' Gent, Roarin' Broncs, Trumpin' Trouble, to name just a few). The crucial thing he omitted from Night Must Fall was the sexual tension. Robert Montgomery is riveting, as he always is, as the smoothly ill-intentioned trickster who inveigles his way into the good graces of a clueless old lady (annoyingly written and annoyingly played by Dame May Whitty), but must somehow charm her more practical niece, played without her characteristic warmth and charm by Rosalind Russell. Smart as a whip, the niece at once suspects the intruder of being the sexual predator on the loose in the area, but can't bring herself to rat him out entirely. We assume this is because she's attracted to him, but since there is no chemistry between the two, her choices make little sense. Montgomery has summoned up a completely believable psychopath, a young man with charm and smarts who is constantly performing, constantly attentive to the reactions of others and adjusting his performance to suit. His sexual magnetism is not in question, although it is mired in that strange, impish androgyny which dead-ended Puers wield so consistently.

Suffering the back-drag of having been adapted from a play, the film never takes flight as it should, and Montgomery's performance is really the only thing to recommend it. It was remade in the swingin' sixties by Karel Reisz with the eternally un-charming Albert Finney as the psychopath, and I haven't brought myself to watch that one yet, although I'm certain that he's scary as hell, all subtlety has gone out the window, and there's sado-masochism a-plenty oozing up from beneath the tea-cozies.

last night's double feature: bonjour, tristesse and johnny eager

2011-02-23T14:32:00.000-08:00

My DVD player, my trusted companion for these many years, has gone the way of all things mortal. One day it hesitated to open its drawer; soon it was refusing entirely, as if it were terribly weary and needed to sleep. I stuck coins on its little metaphorical eyes and put it out for the vultures to strip.

So until the new one shows up, I'm digging through my stacks of old VHS tapes while my Netflix languish on the coffee table. My original idea was to watch Bonjour, Tristesse and Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane as a sort of coming-of-age evening, but Johnny Eager was too inviting and I couldn't pass it up.

*SPOILER ALERT*

I am far fonder of Bonjour, Tristesse than it deserves. Otto Preminger took a slim, cool, Electra-tinged and gallic hipster-novel and bloated it up to Hollywood size, saturating its colors, softening its sociopathic edges, pushing the very central sex at least out of the frame so that its constant pressure did not feel so very French. In fact, un-Frenching it sort of sums up Preminger's mode of operation.

The plot in a nutshell is this: the teenaged Cecile and her father are rich, beautiful, and live for fun along the French Riviera in the 1950s, using people for amusement and discarding them easily when they begin to bore or demand. When her dead mother's friend comes to marry her father and rearrange their lives, Cecile takes action, and tragedy ensues.

The very French Raymond who today would be played with lip-smacking gusto by Vincent Cassell is here presented with British charm and good humor by the very British David Niven, and the imposing, doomed, aging beauty Anne who ought to be played by Catherine Deneuve at age 47 is instead given to the unimpeachably British Deborah Kerr. There's something wonderfully earnest in the way Kerr listens to people onscreen which makes her palatable even when miscast, and of course Niven is always the soul of affability, important since his character is so shallow that in the wrong hands our sympathies might be lost entirely, and Niven never allows it.

The real centerpiece of course is Jean Seberg as Cecile, so ravishingly hip that if you saw her in a club today she'd STILL be the hippest girl in the room. My favorite part of the movie, in fact, is a b&w framing device Preminger uses to contrast the melancholy present with the vivacious and colorful flashbacks. Although Seberg's voiceover narration is wooden and uninspired, Preminger lets us gaze into her beautiful eyes for long stretches and follow her around Paris in the fifties while she deftly avoids emotional entanglement. My favorite bit is in a little underground dance club peopled by obvious bohemians (a young artist wearing the horizontally-striped shirt which was the stereotypical garb of the Bohemian Frenchman in Bugs Bunny cartoons, a lesbian dressed like Brando in the Wild One, et al). The painter and Cecile's more elegant escort begin fighting over her; without missing a beat, her face goes slack and she walks without a word into la chambre des dames to suffer her bad memories (which is what she does when she's alone) until they've sorted it out. My other favorite bit, also in the b&w frame, is when Cecile dances with her garcon-du-jour while Juliette Greco sings the cool, melancholy theme song. My OTHER favorite bit is the last shot, when Cecile finally shows us some genuine emotion. That's my favorite. We're building up to it, all film long, and the fascination of Seberg does not let us down.

In the end, it works for me despite the clenched-teeth, forced gaiety of the "fun" times, a fun which consists of gambling, eating out, drinking, and the occasional conga line; in short, a "fun" which is stripped of all truth or spontaneity and contrived by a scriptwriter under orders from a director that there's a big, epic party-scene needed and what can you come up with at short notice? It works in spite of clunky, cinemascope editing which lets the story lapse for long moments to show the epic scale of the set-pieces. It works against all odds because even when miscast, these actors know their chops. The awkward scene in which Anne overhears her lover betraying her, adeptly elided in the book and clumsily spelled out here, works because Kerr's face so easily and completely becomes the momentary embodiment of horror and shame.

Then there's Johnny Eager. Brilliantly written. Never predictable. Lana Turner is impossibly luscious, and, it turns out, not a bad hand in the way of acting, or movie-starring, anyway. Robert Taylor does what is demanded and carries it alright, and Van Heflin steals the damn picture with his sad-sack intellectual sidekick, a role for which he took home one of those rare well-deserved Oscars.

This is not your everyday gangster picture. It's not only the script, it's the cinematography, too: unobtrusive but stunning choices about where to put the camera, how to frame, what face to show and when. There are big hunks of conversation during which Heflin's face is far too fascinating to ignore even though he's not talking at all, and Harold Rosson knows it.

Johnny Eager is one for the ages. It's easily one of my favorite gangster pictures: this despite a certain uncomfortableness I suffer with Robert Taylor, which has to say something, since he's in virtually every scene. I don't hesitate to call it one of the greats.

glorious 39: bold choices come to little

2011-02-23T14:10:00.000-08:00

Glorious 39 is a strange, engaging, ultimately disappointing but ridiculously well-acted period-piece set in England during that last, golden summer before the war. I went in expecting one of those "Our Innocence is Lost; Our Ignorance was Bliss" nostalgia pieces, never thunder-striking but always worth a watch when brought to life by those marvellous British character actors. Instead, this turns out to be director/writer Stephen Poliakoff's well-polished stab at a historical thriller, along the lines of the Wyvern Mystery, in which the heroine feels absolutely loved and at home in the world and then something happens to pull the rug out and she winds up inhabiting a nightmare of doubt, wondering if she can trust anyone at all.

In the DVD extras, David Tennant describes Poliakoff as a British national treasure, which I think is rather generous; certainly two of the others I've seen of his (Close My Eyes and Perfect Strangers) are no great earthshaking pair. He does have a way of turning up the topsoil of British family-life in previous eras, particularly enjoying the company of the rich and landed, and presenting it in a palatable and often educational fashion. This time, he's exploring the idea that Neville Chamberlain's government was so certain England would lose a war with Germany that there was a campaign of intimidation and assassination against any poor sod who spoke out in favor of Churchill's bellicose plans. Although few of us today would scoff at the idea of a government acting cold-heartedly against its citizens (I'm speaking of Tories and Republicans, obviously) while justifying it as the means to an end, the thing as presented is pretty far-fetched. Poliakoff was apparently leaning so far towards the thriller aspect that he lost interest in logic.

The most chilling bit for me is when our heroine (Romola Garai) is detained at a roadblock without an identity card and the soldier explains with some po-faced Schadenfreude that Habeas Corpus has been suspended, and as soldiers they can now do what they like with whomever they please. The other effectively dread-inspiring moment is when the creepy young cousin warns her in hushed tones that her family doesn't love her. The grand pieces which are apparently meant to be the most chilling (at the eerie veterinarian's and at the diplomatic party) come off as forced and untrue, saved only by the (ridiculously) high quality of the acting. In fact, David Tennant gives such a magnificent turn that I resented his early exit. Bill Nighy is, as always, a complete master of all to which he turns his wonderful hand, and Hugh Bonneville and Eddie Redmayne hit just the right notes, without misstep. Poor Christopher Lee has the worst bit: he's part of an unfortunate framing device which culminates in one of the clumsiest pratfalls of an ending that I've ever had the bad luck to see.

It's too bad. Applying Hitchcock twists and darknesses to a historical piece is a grand idea. Casting all brilliant actors is another grand idea, and more folks ought to do it. Jeremy Northam as the aristocratic henchman of the evil government is perfect, and there's a wonderfully sinister shot in which he's eerily lit in the back of his car as the young folks watch him pull away, their instincts telling them he is a malevolent influence but their cheerful British common-sense arguing that the idea is rubbish. There's a stash of incriminating records disguised as foxtrots, cats stand in as mirror-images of those well-honed but often-quashed instincts, and every piece of furniture and prop is finely chosen and well placed. If only the story were better shaped. If only the plot turns were not so often forced and hard to swallow. If only the ending weren't an unpalatable cup of turgid tea.

All that said, all my complaints logged, I might still watch this again, just for the acting, and for the pleasure of living for another few hours in England before the War.

rowlands and cassavetes: a love song

2011-02-09T17:40:00.000-08:00

Cassavetes films are agonizing. I've always found them so. I watch them at a rate of about one every three years; it takes that long to absorb one properly, and that long to recover from the experience. They're not agonizing in the way that, say, a Lars von Trier is, or, God forbid, a Gaspar Noe; HIS films set out to be agonizing first and foremost. Cassavetes tortures us not for the sake of sadism but because he has a massive hunger for cutting into life until he finds the gristle of truth. His movies are shaped like nobody else's, incorporating an extraordinary unpredictability, because his first concern is to gaze without flinching at the painful parts of life until unexpected honesties unfold and drop like gifts into our laps. His actors use an improvisatory style and the editing is unusual, often cutting away in the middle of what we would expect to be a much longer scene once the prospect of new truths has drained away from it, or, as in the bar scene in Husbands, staying three times longer with a scene than any other director on the face of the planet would have done. It's excruciating, but, as with any Cassavetes film, by the end of it one feels as if one has had one's old skin peeled away to expose a shiny, new one emerging from beneath the wounds.

Rowlands and Cassavetes are the only couple I've ever fallen in love with. As an actor, I find him so captivating that the only way I can look away from his face is if she is onscreen with him, and then I forget to watch him at all. This began in 1982 when I showed up early for a double feature and accidentally caught the last half hour of Paul Mazursky's Tempest. I knew who they were, of course. I'd seen Rosemary's Baby many times, and she'd just been up for the Oscar for Gloria. But it was Tempest where I watched them interact as husband and wife, and in that last, strange bit of that strange, small movie I saw something in the chemistry between them that made me stay over and watch it in its entirety.

And it IS a strange movie, with moments of utter brilliance competing against others of dismal, horror-show kind of failure, but Gena and John (may I be so affectionate?) are nothing short of stunning together. The thing that's hard to get past, -- the reason it's not for all comers, even Cassavetes fans, -- is that it carries about it a distinct I-Love-New-York-Musical-Theatre pong, a grating thing. The other difficulty, and this is a corollary to the first, is that the clowns (most notably Raul Julia's Calibanos) seem to inhabit an exaggerated, absurd theatricality which only makes sense in a Musical Theatre context. In Julia's defense, after repeated viewings I can say he really put his back into finding the truth in the emotional transitions, and I think no one in the world could have made a truer stab at this impossible task than he did.

But then to the good: Tempest has scenes which rank among my favorite moments in all of cinema. When the architect Phillip Dimitrius (Cassavetes) quits his job after watching his doppelganger jump from the top of a building site. When he tells his wife (Rowlands) that he wants out, a scene which includes a wonderful, merciless rant about everything he hates ("I hate this cat. I hate its face, with those whiskers..."), a rant which might be funny if it wasn't so devastating, and which winds up in the conjuration of a storm, a beautiful moment. The painful, protracted bit in which Dimitrius destroys his wife's (admittedly annoying) musical theatre party by showing up drunk and making a scene; the great part comes after the guests are gone. He falls on his knees in mock apology and she walks right past him, pushing him away by the forehead. The first time I saw it I thought, "This is the first real marriage I've ever seen in a movie." Then there's the long endpiece, the Tango of Forgiveness, in which relations get sorted out if not tied up, and which escapes a tang of the maudlin through its own embrace of the ridiculous and through that perfect emotional tone which Cassavetes and Rowlands seem to find with such astonishing constancy and effortlessness in everything they do.

That's what Opening Night has: excruciating as it is, as the Rowlands character goes through her nervous breakdown very much in public, there's that ebullient end-scene in which the show finally goes on, and we watch the two of them, husband-and-wife actors playing estranged-lover actors playing troubled spouses, improvising in front of a full house and doing it with such warmth, familiarity and plain good fun that it brings the house down. It's a great film, and a spectacular performance by Rowlands.

I could go on, but I won't. Suffice to say that I will watch these two in anything. One day, when they've finally mastered the principles behind time-travel, I'll produce a Reality TV series in which we go back and plant a camera crew in the Cassavetes/Rowlands household, and that will be the only Reality TV show I ever watch.

finding neverland: madly subversive

2011-02-09T15:09:00.000-08:00

SPOILER ALERT

Finding Neverland is an apparently typical, child-friendly, utterly mainstream movie. It has quality performances (by old favorites Depp and Winslet and Radha Mitchell especially), pretty production values and heart-warming sentiment enough that folks emerge from it using words like "sweet" and "charming", and determining to bring the kids. And it is, indeed, all those things, except utterly mainstream. It is, rather, at its core, fascinatingly subversive.

Its story follows JM Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family, the sons of which inspired him to write his masterpiece, Peter Pan. In the film there are four boys, their father is dead from cancer, their mother slowly ailing towards early death while a romantic but unconsummated bond forms between her and the unhappily married Barrie. In truth, there were five boys, their father was very much alive and not pleased to be replaced in his brood's affection by the meddling Barrie. There was no romantic bond between Barrie and the mater; in fact, one of the boys in adulthood said he thought Barrie was completely asexual in every direction (see Birkin, below). In addition, once you've read the ultimate fates of these Lost Boys, "sweet" and "charming" become so overwhelmed by the louring darkness as to become inapplicable.

Andrew Birkin's book JM Barrie and the Lost Boys quotes Robert Boothby, later a Lord of the Realm and a friend at Eton of Michael's, who was Barrie's favorite of the boys: "It was an extraordinary relationship between them -- an unhealthy relationship. I don't mean homosexual, I mean in a mental sense. It was morbid, and it went beyond the bounds of ordinary affection. Barrie was always charming to me, but I thought there was something twisted about him... He was an unhealthy little man, Barrie; and when all is said and done, I think Michael and his brothers would have been better off living in poverty than with that odd, morbid little genius." Nico, the youngest of the clan, responds: "I am quite unable to admit that JMB's influence was 'unhealthy': oppressive maybe and over-constant..." In the end, only two of the boys survived into a peaceful old age. One died in the trenches of Flanders in WWI, a second threw himself under a subway train, and the golden Michael, whose classmates lauded him as touched with grace and genius, drowned at 21, another possible suicide.

None of that has anything to do with this movie, though, which sidesteps history almost entirely, as is Hollywood's wont and god-given right. Depp hits just the right levels as Barrie to deliver a man whose secret with children is that he treats them as equals, as ready to learn from them as teach them. The sentiment is underplayed and even the maternal death avoids the quagmire of the maudlin.

The extraordinary thing about it is its message, which is very plainly stated and reinforced throughout: that life is nasty, brutish, short and filled with pain, and the way to be happy is to retreat from reality into a world of dreams. If that sounds sweet, then you haven't thought it through. Every so often this philosophy will shape a brilliant mind which creates a Peter Pan; far more frequently you'll get opium addicts, full-time gamers, or anti-ambitious, layabout film critics. In America today, stillness and introversion are tolerated only on the understanding that these periods of gestation will lead to later flurries of activity which will in turn (and this is crucial) result in the acquisition of wealth. Dreaming for its own sake is still, more than a century past the Victorians, suspicious behaviour just this side of the criminal. Because Barrie is earning a living and the respect of his peers through his dreaming on paper, the message gets an implied sugar-coating, but it doesn't take much scratching to get through the veneer to a radical vision: retreat however you can, escape however you can, and spend your life in dreams.

centurion: titanic amongst the picts

2011-02-02T11:30:00.000-08:00

SPOILER ALERT

Centurion is a madly disappointing action film inspired by the disappearance of the legendary Ninth Spanish Legion, a powerful armed command originally led by Julius Caesar himself which disappeared from history, swallowed up without a trace, ostensibly in the wildlands of Britain early in the 2nd century.

The Ninth has an almost unbelievable legacy, beginning with a brilliant run in Gaul, Hispania and Africa, after which Caesar disbanded them into retirement in 46 BC. After his murder, though, Octavian recalled them to duty and they fought beside him against Antony and his Egyptian Queen at the Battle of Actium. Skip ahead seventy years, and the Emperor Claudius sends them north as part of his bid to invade Britain. There they suffer a bad defeat in 61 AD during Boudica's uprising but are still there building a fortress at York in 71. And here they will stay, in what has to be one of the longer and more depressing postings in military history, for half a century. The city as we know it today, in fact, was built with their fortress at its heart. Petergate was one of its main thoroughfares; York Minster is built on the spot where the massive Roman Headquarters squatted.

We know the Legion is no longer in existence by 161 because Marcus Aurelius ordered a sort of official inventory of the Roman military and our boys are nowhere listed. Evidence as to their mysterious end is scant, compelling and contradictory: some theorize the Ninth wound up in Judea or Persia, but the most alluring myth, the one which will not release its grip on our collective cultural imagination, is that the nemesis of the Ninth was Britain itself, with its gloomy climes, untamed Picts, and Gordian Knot of tangled forest and swamplands.

The mystery has inspired other filmmakers and writers. A few years ago the Ninth made an appearance in a loose and fantastical restructuring of events called the Last Legion: with a great cast (John Hannah, Colin Firth, Kevin McKidd) and an engaging plotline describing the Roman origins of King Arthur, it's quality fare for kids but has nothing really to do with history.

As for Centurion, director Neil Marshall wrote the script, and that's always a warning sign. It flashes me back like a bad acid trip to that debacle of badly-written, masturbatory self-indulgence called Titanic (I spit the word; I do not speak it). And, although nowhere near as bad (what could be?), this one suffers from a similar inherent structural deformity, the Titanic Malady, if you will, which sets in when there's nobody standing by to tell the director/writer that his script is no damn good.

In the closing credits, Marshall thanks Walter Hill and Xenopohon for inspiration, implying that he was trying to make something like the Warriors, a comic book movie that Hill made in 1979, and one which has aged remarkably well. It takes Xenophon's Anabasis, one of the great adventure stories of all time, and resets it in a sort of timeless New York in which rival gangs divide the city. One gang, caught far behind enemy lines after a peace-conference gone horribly wrong, has to fight and sneak its way back to safety in its own territory. The result is golden, a classic for all time. Marshall takes the same story: the remnants of the Ninth are caught in wild Pictish territory, without weapons or hope and pursued by vengeance-driven berserker Picts (including one gorgeous, mute, woad-covered, unstoppable warrior-girl who was raped and mutilated in her childhood by Romans. She is unstoppable, that is, until she is inevitably stopped in that misogynist, Beautiful-Girl-Killed-In-Lingering-Swoony-Embrace shot that Hollywood loves so passionately). It's an adventure/fantasy, and therefore not much is to be expected of it, but even by those lowered expectations, the promised adventure never manifests into anything much.

First off, the lighting is wrong: flat, metallic light that looks nothing like anything I've ever seen in Britain. The colours are wrong. The film is full of good, very good and wonderful actors, all of them playing nobodies. They each have qualities which delineate them, one from another, but only in the broadest strokes, because character has been sacrificed to action, a choice which is only valid when well-executed, and this one is not. Michael Fassbender, a man so talent-crammed that I was beginning to fear him as a sort of demigod, fails here because he's playing a non-character who stands at the epicenter of a story peopled exclusively by non-characters. There is one powerful performance: Dominic West's. He busts the screen wide open with sheer strength of charisma as the well-loved and ill-fated Roman General Titus Flavius Virilus. Once he's dead, there's nothing but chase scenes, not very well filmed, and plot "twists" (they've lifted the Butch Cassidy cliff-jump scene straight, even down to the "Who ARE those guys?" brand of wonderments), not anything ingenious. The ethics are simple and never tested (do we desert the fellow who's too wounded to swim? Whoa! He got shot by the bad guys in the nick of time, so we don't have to explore our own moral ambiguity!), the good guys being unequivocally good and the bad guys cold and heartless. The violence is unrealistic; the sound is pumped way up and the cuts are, as usual these days, too quick to allow the fighting to feel life-like, which seems to be the point.

Because this is an adolescent boy fantasy, there is the de rigeur Beautiful Woman Living As Witch And Outcast across whom they stumble in the course of their wanderings. I understand the appeal of the trope, but I begin to long for a witch who is old, or homely, or lesbian, not spending her life waiting for this man, or at least not wearing lip-gloss. It is never fully explained, either, how Quintus Dias (Fassbender) knows how to speak flawless Pictish, or how the witchy-Pict girl knows how to speak flawless Latin (although she claims it's due to the proximity of the Roman fort, she also claims she keeps up the witchy facade to keep the Romans away, and that it's always worked). Dias was captured by the Picts, but apparently only for a week or so before he escaped, and I doubt anyone took the time to teach him his letters while he was chained to the rack. This is the kind of detail that clues you in to the fact that it's an adolescent fantasy instead of a true stab at bringing a particular time and place to life (as in, say, Jeremiah Johnson, in which language barriers are respected).

Since the thing is filmed with good to wonderful actors, and since only a single stab at humour comes off, I have to lay the fault at the editor's doorstep, after the scriptwriter takes a second drubbing, that is. (The only joke I remember working is when they make it at last to the Romans and one of the non-character soldiers says, "THIS is Hadrian's great plan? A WALL?")

Still, not to worry. There's another film in the works: the Eagle, due out this year and based on the classic novel the Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe which began the resurgence of the Legion's popularity. It'll have Jamie Bell and Mark Strong and will focus on a son of a legionnaire trying to solve the mystery and find the Ninth's totemic bronze eagle.

things i've been watching: january 2011

2011-01-05T16:35:00.000-08:00

Valhalla Rising: (2009. dir: Nicolas Winding Refn) Gorgeous, slow, inscrutable, mesmerizing Viking movie about a one-eyed, invincible bad-ass who sees visions of the future. Early on someone asks him (rhetorically, since he does not speak), "Who are you?" At which I laughed and thought, "Viking Movie, One-Eyed Badassed Seer of Visions... He's Odin!" Turns out I was wrong. He's just your run-of-the-mill invincible, visionary warrior, which, granted, is rather wonderful if you're not expecting gods. That said, the film has so sober an air of its own importance that it feels (although I know from interviews it is not) like propoganda for Forn Sidr. When One-Eye makes his sacrifice in the end, it feels Arthurian, like the great hero is promising to return in Denmark's greatest hour of need.

I want to say the film is redolent of a Malickian nature-mysticism, but without Malick's joie-de-vivre and clarity of purpose. There's an immensity to it, however, built largely of silence and a thick, well-used soundscape. The music is a drum-heavy brand of doom-rock, and just right. The violence is well photographed, slow and unflinching but also unromanticized, not slicked-up as is the custom amongst unscrupulous editors these days. When One-Eye eviscerates a fellow, you can practically smell the meat, feel the steam as the hot innards hit the cool Northern air.

Mads Mikkelsen as One-Eye is, as always, a force of nature. He proved in King Arthur that he's one of those rare actors whose charisma communicates itself even in long shot. Now he's proved it communicates itself even when he's mute and sporting only one eye. Amazing man.

Fool's Gold: (2008. dir: Andy Tennant) There are three things a romantic comedy needs in order to engage properly: chemistry between its leads, believable but credibly overcome obstacles to their love, and a plotline (ie: the pursuit of the Earl Williams news-story in His Girl Friday) on which they can focus while they're falling in love, or rather while they're working out their differences, because in this genre love generally happens at first sight and often, as in this one, before the film begins.

Fool's Gold gets a bad rap, which flummoxes me. In this age overstuffed with shallow and unremarkable love stories, McConaughey and Hudson not only share an extraordinary chemistry, they also have in common a spot-on sense of comic timing and the kind of affable, un-vain carriage of their considerable physical charms which allows us to love rather than envy them. The script, although it often dives headlong into silliness, presents a fully credible emotional journey from personality-crossed young love into mature acceptance. The low comedy (and there is that) is carried off with a good-natured heartiness so that three-stooges moments (like when she borrows a golf club from an old man on a park bench with which to hit her lover/nemesis in the head) are actually funny instead of just absurd or offensive. My boyfriend was making dinner while I watched, and whenever I laughed he'd say what'd I miss? and I kept having to say, "It's all in the timing. It wouldn't be funny if I told it," and that's unquestionably a tribute to some damn fine acting and some damn fine editing. The other thing it has is the treasure-hunting story, a rollicking good one, one the writers obviously enjoyed writing.

Everyone likes Kate Hudson, and that's as it should be, but I don't quite understand why people as a rule don't like McConaughey. Look: Dazed and Confused, Lone Star, A Time To Kill, Frailty, Newton Boys, Reign of Fire, Tropic Thunder? That's an interesting resume. Sure, he's got some probable dogs in there (who's going to watch Failure to Launch to find out if it's actually as bad as they say? a braver human than I), but do me a favor and give the surfer-boy another chance, will you?

the Skeleton Key: (2005. dir: Iain Softley)

And speaking of Kate Hudson...

This is a reconsideration. I reviewed this movie already, back in 2008, one of the first on this blog, in fact, and I short-changed it. It moved too slowly for my taste then, but once you know the ending (a great ending), the second viewing is completely enjoyable, and the script is a very fine venture. Plus, the acting is first-tier among the foursome of leads (Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, Peter Sarsgaard, John Hurt), the atmosphere of Terrebonne Parish saturates the film until you can feel the sultry virtually coating your skin, and it's that rare beast, a hoodoo picture which has a genuine feel to the hoodoo. The sound of it is full and haunting: scratchy old blues and voodoo records, menacing thumpings and scratchings and thunderstorms. It's still a little slow, but it makes up for it in a thousand other ways.

twilight eclipse: bloodlust and milquetoast

2011-01-05T13:43:00.000-08:00

If you're looking for great cinema, or great story-telling, you don't look to Twilight: Eclipse. That's not what it's for.

Straight off the top: I'm obviously not of the demographic at which it was very specifically and, I might add, masterfully, aimed. As a piece of marketing to grab that romantic young girl, it is an admirable work of art and I sweep my hat off to it. Kristen Stewart in the lead is Everygirl: not pretty, but strangely engaging to look at. She never wears anything provocative or sexy, even when her friends do. All the beautiful boys fall madly in love with her, but it's HER they're loving, not any surface appearance. It very cleverly figures out a way to get her into the arms of both her vampire-love and her werewolf-love, once in the same tent, that is simultaneously innocent and exciting. Her vampire-love is so gallant that he will not sleep with her, even when she offers, although he makes it clear it is not from lack of passion.

Adolescent boys: if you want to know what an adolescent girl's perfect fantasy is, study this film. There's a lot of long, earnest conversation and long, soul-searching gazes, lots of churning, unfulfilled desires. Both her loves are simultaneously blood-lustingly dangerous and milquetoast safe, and both entirely focused on her. Indeed, her vampire-love seems to have no particular life when she's not in the room. He's got vampire roommates, I mean, but he seems to snap into focus only when she walks into view.

There is no tiresome delving into the social problems of modern teenagers. All exploration is into, around, and emerging from the heroine's somnambulistic romance-extraordinaire, as if the rest of the world existed only as adjunct and support to that single, all-important cathexis. In that sense, it reminds me a bit of an old Neil Jordan fantasy called the Company of Wolves, which was a strange, dreamlike amalgam of lycanthropic fairy tales, all taking place in the mind of a feverish girl sloughing off her girlish skin to step into womanhood. It was flawed (too slow and episodic and with one disastrous piece of casting), but in truly unique ways. Twilight, on the other hand, is admirable in that its flaws are only flaws if viewed from outside the intended perspective: that is, the perspective of the adolescent girl simultaneously eager to step into her womanhood and afraid of the gravity of the step.

(The down side is that girls learning how to live their loves from this mythology are going to be slammed hard up against some harsh realities when they find out that real boys are nothing like these polite super-boyfriends. But that's another problem for another generation, and I'm not even going to step into that morass. Anyway, when did Hollywood ever bother with such niceties as worrying about the psychological development of an audience?)

The mise-en-scene is suitably dark and brooding, with vast, rich landscapes (where is that? Someplace on the Washington coast?) and unconvincing but enjoyable CGI wolves. I watched it because the trailer showed that full-speed, howling battle-clash of a line of wolves smashing up against a line of vampires. I'm a sucker for a thing like that, and I enjoyed it, but the thing I enjoyed most was that someone, presumably a fully grown adult, is so wholly in touch with her inner teenager that she can write a thing like this from the heart, which I suppose is why it's so vastly successful.

What it is not, of course, is an action film, nor is it a horror film. It's one thing: a Girl-Fantasy, and if you look for anything else in it you will gnash your teeth in disappointment.

seven great sex scenes and one runner-up

2010-12-29T12:36:00.000-08:00

RUNNER-UP: Viggo Mortensen and Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder

It's not a sex scene, per se: more a series of post-coital cuddles, but so intimately shot as to feel utterly convincing. This remake of Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder is, incidentally, a vastly underrated thriller, with great work from all three leads (Michael Douglas is the mad-as-hell husband), also and especially from David Suchet as the investigating detective. In fact, if you can watch it with the alternate ending intact, it qualifies as a great film. In the theatrical version, it still ranks among the very good.

NUMBER SEVEN: Ashley Judd and Viggo Mortensen in the Passion of Darkly Noon

This is a hard one to find. Philip Ridley is one of those cinematic enigmas. He made an underground (deep, deep underground) splash with the Reflecting Skin in 1990, a movie as strange and dark and compelling as you would imagine once you know it begins with an exploding toad. He followed it five years later with Passion, in which a young man (Brendan Fraser) raised in repressive religious surroundings escapes from a murderous mob and takes refuge with the free-spirited Judd and her mute boyfriend (Mortensen). It's no less strange than Skin (someone could probably write a thesis on that floating shoe) but has a fuller sense of depth and wholeness. Early on, the extraordinarily sensuous pairing of Judd and Mortensen enjoys an extraordinarily sensuous night of bliss which easily makes the list.

NUMBER SIX: Jude Law and Rachel Weisz in Enemy at the Gates

It's the worst part of the siege of Stalingrad. Law is a sniper who has become a hero of the Soviet struggle against the Nazis. Weisz is a Jewish intellectual who has thrown her lot in with the snipers. They sleep huddled in their uniforms along stone hallways in the rubble that was once a great city. Madly in love but with no opportunity for privacy, the two make love half-clad, almost silent, and surrounded by their comrades.

NUMBER FIVE: Clooney and Lopez in Out of Sight

It can't be an accident that two of these seven movies listed were edited by Anne V Coates. Her use of lightning-cuts to move smoothly back and forth in time gives the encounter a more engaging shape and allows us intimately into the heads of the characters. Again, this isn't the full-monty-last-tango-in-paris kind of sex scene, kind of wrapping up just when they get horizontal, but it's fantastically sexy. The movie itself, which was correctly lauded as a small masterpiece of action cinema (and probably led directly to those Soderbergh/Clooney Oceans yawners) is at heart a love story, and a marvellously well-realized one.

NUMBER FOUR: Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance in Intimacy

This is not just one sex scene but several, each communicating a different set of dynamics, often without spoken explanation. It's an electrifying accomplishment for two actors, requiring what must have been a near-total lack of vanity and some awesome, uberhuman discipline of concentration.

NUMBER THREE: Diana Glenn and Alex O'Loughlin in the Oyster Farmer

The scene on the dock. You'll know it. It's got great camera-work.

NUMBER TWO: Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello in a History of Violence

The one on the staircase, not the one in the bed.

Cronenberg gives us an interesting contrast here. The movie follows the journey of a happy, apparently well-adjusted family from denial of their own darkness into a forced exploration of their joint personal shadow. The first sex scene, performed in their daughter's bedroom with Bello dressed in her old cheerleaders' outfit, is saccharinely embarrassing. Only later, once the trickster darkness has invaded their home in the shape of the husband's past, do they find a truer expression of passion.

AND THE BEST SEX SCENE EVER:

Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez in Unfaithful

There's not a boring one in it, but the best is the first, in which Lane's character thinks back on her encounter with her lover as she rides home on the train. Largely due to her near-perfect performance (she ought to have had her Oscar; it was stolen from her by a beautiful woman wearing a fake nose), and largely to some of the most stunning editing I've ever seen (again, by Anne V Coates), watching this in the cinema felt more like actually having sex than watching a movie. Even on DVD, the immediacy of the flesh is so tangible as to be nearly unbearable. Aside from all that, the whole film is breathtaking, a real stunner from that problematical Eminence Terrible Adrian Lyne.

merry christmas, mr lawrence: sleeping with the enemy

2010-12-22T17:46:00.000-08:00

This is no Christmas movie (its greatest flaw may be its title, along with its awkward freeze-frame ending). It is, rather, an extraordinary Japanese film from 1983 about British soldiers in a WWII Japanese POW camp. Written by director Nagisa Oshima but based on a novel by Laurens van der Post, it uses both Japanese and British actors and makes heavy use of both languages. Among other things, it is a study of two cultures at odds, and an examination of what defines the Perfect Warrior in each.

Oshima, a veteran of the mid-century Asian "New Wave", makes the bold decision to use not seasoned actors but renowned musicians in two of his three lead roles: David Bowie, who had by that time honed his chops both on film (most notably in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 the Man Who Fell to Earth) and Broadway (as the twisted John Merrick in the Elephant Man), is the charismatic prisoner Jack Celliers, and Japanese superstar Ryuichi Sakamoto is the haunted camp commandant, Captain Yonoi. Sakamoto takes on the difficult task of speaking the bulk of his lines in English: it seems he has learned them phonetically, and they find no easy egress. Each English word sounds painstakingly, even painfully, extracted, which might under different circumstances backfire, but in this case serves to lend a vulnerable boyishness as a sort of anguished backlighting to his beautiful, mask-like face.

I'd forgotten how unusual this movie is. I saw it for Bowie when I was a kid, but walked out of the theatre half in love with Tom Conti, who is bloody marvellous as the affable and canny Colonel Lawrence, a man who finds himself caught in the middle of no small drama due largely to his facility with the Japanese language but also to his considerable heart. Two scenes stand out as examples of breathtaking acting: in the first, he is condemned to die for the smuggling of a radio, a crime he did not commit and which nobody truly believes he committed. In the second, he tells an abortive story about a woman he knew in passing in Singapore, a story which he ends up not telling at all, but in a way as real as any moment I've ever seen onscreen. Conti made Reuben, Reuben the same year, for which he was Oscar-nominated, and that's too bad, because in retrospect I think this is both the better film and the more impressive performance. Except for a few forays onto the old Hollywood backlot (American Dreamer, the Quick and the Dead) he's mostly stayed across the pond to work in theatre and television (although I understand he's showing up in Julie Taymor's Tempest). And I do miss him.

Meanwhile, Sakamoto's magnificent score lends an otherworldly, ethereal air to the already surreal camp-life, an air which is accentuated in the editing-room by heavy use of slow fades to black and an unhurried pace. The camera-work is lovely and unobtrusive: one particular favorite is a slow zoom from the back of a very formal Japanese military courtroom towards Yonoi, one of its presiding officers, as he first lays eyes on the prisoner who will transform his life into something unrecognizable.

And there's another thing: the numinous sheen of Van der Post's wonderful thought process shines through the lovely space Oshima has opened up for it. The culmination of all these disparate, beautiful elements -- musical, philosophical, photographic, -- is in an important work of art. Like that classic novel you feel you should read, and put off, and when you delve in at last it winds up haunting you.

things i've been watching december 2010

2010-12-22T17:35:00.000-08:00

Whiteout: (2009. dir: Dominic Sena) It was a good idea. The personnel on a base in Antarctica are about to clear out for the winter when a body is found, and suddenly there's a murderer to be caught in the small margin before the first bad storm hits. The script, alas, is for the most part halt and lame. It's not a complete waste of space because the acting is so good: Kate Beckinsale, Tom Skerritt, Alex O'Loughlin and Columbus Short pull it up by its bootstraps into a watchable piece, but you'll be half an hour ahead of these slow-poke characters in solving the various bends of the mystery, and the climactic fight scene, fought in a blinding snowstorm, is ridiculously unsatisfying to watch. It's a pretty movie, though, with Aurora Australis and miles of glacial wasteland, not to mention both Beckinsale and O'Loughlin stripping down to their skivvies in gratuitous displays of fleshly pulchritude. One of my favorite things about it is that there are flirtations and attractions, but the usually de rigeur love story fails to manifest, which means that Beckinsale's character is allowed to be a strong, gorgeous woman and still stand alone. Bravo for that.

the Pumpkin Eater: (1964. dir: Jack Clayton) The bad thing about a Harold Pinter script, especially in those early days, is the length of time two people, usually husband and wife, spend avoiding one another's questions. It makes me long for a Lillian Hellman play, in which everyone says exactly what they mean all the time, but with no less toxin, acid and vitriol. The GREAT thing, however, about the old Pinter scripts is that random character who will show up in a single scene with a single monologue and steal the show. There's a beauty in this one, a sly, brutal speech delivered in a beauty parlor to -- or, rather, AT -- Anne Bancroft while she's trapped beneath a hair-dryer. Pinter also likes to give us a boorish brute who repeats a single, strange speech over and over (see Christopher Walken in the Comfort of Strangers and his obsession with his father's moustache): in this, it's the unredoubtable James Mason, having a great deal of vicious fun playing a weak, cuckolded bully. One of the great shots of the era has to be the crooked, extreme close-up of his face, or, rather, one eye and his snarling mouth, as he pours the acrimonious venom into our heroine's ear that he hopes will destroy her marriage.

It's a slow film. We spend a lot of time following Bancroft as she walks around in a fog of depression, revisiting the decisions which have led into her current fugue state. The intelligence of her acting makes it worth the effort. It feels a little outdated: these days it's hard to imagine a liberal, upper-middle-class, bohemian woman who's bourne seven children to three husbands, and the abortion issue, which at the time must have been shocking, inevitably feels overly-dramatic in a time when a generation of adults have grown up knowing it's a legal option. In any case, there are always the eternal problems as well (adultery, for instance, and keeping the romance in a house full of kids). These are unreservedly addressed by Pinter, a man who doesn't flinch from the squalid side of domestic bliss, and the ending has a resonance of truth to it. Family is, first and foremost and even when it seems like nothing else, a grounding influence.

Iron Man 2: (2010. dir: Jon Favreau) The joy of the first Iron Man movie was in spending time with Robert Downey Jr, an actor of such massive talent that he can speak a line which is simultaneously hilariously funny and achingly poignant, make it sound completely improvised, and do that over and over for an entire film. There are exactly two compelling characters in this sequel: the hero (Downey) and the villain (Mickey Rourke's full-blown, bigger-than-life, Russkie-talking bad-ass who we really want to get to know better and don't get the chance). Every other character in it is nothing but clutter. Strip them away, along with the subplots, the girl issues, the superhero issues, the government issues, strip it all down to just these two fellows... THEN you're talking some big possibilities for a fine action film. (And leave in the robot assistants. Although the one from the last movie was funnier.)

It's a nice ensemble that Favreau has assembled, and with one notable exception the fault for the yawner characters doesn't lie with the actors. The exception, horrifyingly, is Sam Rockwell, who seems to have stumbled past his expiration date as far as being funny is concerned and, like a teen idol doing revival shows in his fifties, become a mockery of his previous, genuinely funny self. I first was troubled by it in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but because only Alan Rickman was consistently funny there, I figured it was a directorial problem and let it go. Now I'm worried. Rockwell still makes the grade with dramatic roles (see Moon, for God's sake, if you haven't already), but I was mortified at how badly acted AND painfully unfunny his Justin Hammer was.

If you decide to watch Iron Man 2 anyway, in all its forlorn dilapidation, make sure you stay through the credits, as there's a potentially exciting development which shows up late. Of course, that happened last time, too, and look what we got.

what i've been watching november 2010

2010-11-24T17:21:00.000-08:00

Jonah Hex: (2010. dir: Jimmy Hayward) Jonah Hex, particularly as played by Josh Brolin, is a great, great character. I've got a soft spot for those borderland antiheroes, the liminal fellows who stride back and forth between hell and here then heaven and here, between life and afterlife and life again. John Constantine is a big one for me (from the books, I mean, although I'm here to tell you that against all the odds it turned out alright, Keanu Reeves playing the role). Stark from the Sandman Slim books is another, alongside sundry archangels and vampires, and now Jonah Hex.

Not that the movie is all that good. Throwing myself against the overwhelming tide, I'll go on record saying that I think comic books don't make great movies most of the time, and this is no exception. Still, I didn't regret these few hours. Hex has some good lines, and Brolin gives them the unencumbered deadpan he used to such advantage in No Country for Old Men. Like when he's going off to his final battle: he gives his horse to the stable-kid and says let him run free if I'm not back by morning, and the kid says does he have a name and Hex says, "Nnhn. Horse." Then he looks down at the dog who's been, um, dogging his steps since he saved it from a wrongful circus, and he says, "I don't know what to say to you," then he walks off to face his destiny.

John Malkovich is working a lot these days, and that's alright, but this is the kind of role I wish someone else had got. His INSTRUMENT, as they say in the biz, by which I mean his voice and his plasticity of facial expression, is not a particularly good one. And because his choices have become deadeningly familiar over the years, a thing has to be extraordinarily well-written or he's dishwater dull, which is a turn of phrase I wouldn't avoid in describing this one-dimensional villain. Michael Fassbender has all the charisma as his cruel Irish sidekick, and it feels like the story would have been better served had he played archnemesis to the inimitible Jonah.

In fact, it's too bad this was such a bomb and so it won't have a sequel, which might have been a very good thing. It's the movies like this one, with full, exciting but underused or badly-used worlds which ought to have sequels. Things like Pirates of the Caribbean and Jaws, they got done right the first time and sequels can only add weight until the whole gets dragged down from those original towering heights.

Nightmare Alley: (1947. dir: Edmund Goulding) *SPOILER ALERT* Dark, dark carnival noir about Tyrone Power's rise from studly carny to rich conman and his subsequent fall into geekdom, barely finding last-minute salvation in the steadfast love of a good woman. As in all noirs, he's got a choice between the smart, sexy, tough broad and the nice, pretty girl, and he generally chooses wrongly. It's an unrelenting film set in a brutal world, and it's got at least one shot that's a knockout: his face when he accepts his destiny as a geek, the thing he's always feared most.

Agora: (2009. dir: Alejandro Amenabar) *SPOILER ALERT* Hypatia (the always wonderful Rachel Weisz) is a teacher and scientist of some genius in 4th-century Egypt, in the days when everyone was a Roman whether they liked it or not. Unfortunately for the world, Constantine had made a canny decision in the previous century to embrace a crazy young religion peopled by zealots and troublemakers who worshipped a dead man on a cross, and the world is torn asunder by their fanaticisms.

Political "Message Movies" are tough. On the one hand, you want to make a movie that does some good in the world; on the other, movies are made to tell stories, and was it Sam Goldwyn who said if you want to send a message, call Western Union? He had a point. We The Audience resent your message, because it gets in the way of our suspension of disbelief, keeps demanding that we look at it. A character becomes a mouthpiece, manipulated, and the auteur's forearm can plainly be seen stuck into the back of the puppet.

Think of a message movie that you really loved, not one that you paid admiring lip-service to as you left the cinema, but one that engaged you so much you watched it over and over compulsively. It's not easy. There's On the Waterfront, which is carried into greatness by a tough, first-rate script and the young Brando's incredible charisma, the two combining to blind us to the controversy of its narcing-on-your-friends-is-OK message. The one that comes first to my mind is Peter Weir's anti-war film Gallipoli, a grand success because it sticks close to the characters, follows them through thick and thin, gives them priority and tells their story, which just happens to end badly courtesy of an infamous battle on a remote Turkish peninsula called Gallipoli during World War I. The message is delivered because it's secondary to the characters. Weir got it right, but he's a rare bird. In Agora, Amenabar pays scrupulous attention to visual historicity but his film exudes that falseness which rises from giving one's message precedence over one's story.

Aside from that, the details feel real, the acting is heartfelt; its vision is lovely, with the camera seeming to perform great swoops upward into the atmosphere to remind us that the world is far vaster than the problems of even a great community. The script feels strangely unintellectual for a movie about an intellectual. The story is utterly depressing, of course, even though they left out the clam-shells (seriously, don't ask), for which I am eternally grateful. The guy who gets to walk away the hero at the end is her Christian ex-slave who gives her an easy death. From a feminist perspective, the eroticism of the moment is certainly troubling, but it's hardly surprising, since this is not Hypatia as revealed from within but as seen and experienced from without, and always by men (there is no other speaking female character in the thing). When it was over, I didn't feel like I'd gotten to know her, in spite of all of Weisz's strong and good work; more damningly, I didn't feel like the script-writer knew her any better than I did.

the guiltiest pleasure stuffed into the back of the closet

2010-11-13T13:48:00.000-08:00

My friend Jeff likes to challenge people with what he calls "hypotheticals"... like: "Would you rather have everything you eat taste like chalk for the next seven years or lose a foot?" That kind of thing. Awhile back he set this before me: would I rather remain passionate about films but have truly hideous taste, or have fine taste but lose much of the passion?

It's the easiest he's ever posed, no question, because who'd give up the passion? In the end, it doesn't really matter if it's Roland Emmerich or Kurosawa or reruns of Lost In Space that get you up and jumping, as long as you're up and jumping. And, let's face it, even the most discerning critical mind has goofy blind spots. EVERYONE has a guilty love, a really incomprehensible crush on some bad film, a crush that can go on for a lifetime but generally stays shoved back into the dusty corners.

I once knew a guy, a sort of intellectual snob with a powerful fear of anything that smacked of metaphysics, who sent me home with his copy of Meet Joe Black, handing it over with the kind of serious look that says, "This film changed my life, so be careful what you say about it." I once knew a guy whose favorite film was the American remake of Cousin, Cousine, the one with Ted Danson and Isabella Rosellini. He watched it, he said, once a month and had for years, and planned to keep doing it. I've never seen it; I understand that it might be one of the forgotten greats, but you understand my skepticism. He was vague when I asked him why he loved it, and that's as it should be, because with the Incomprehensible Crush on the Mediocre Film, the real motive behind the love is so subjective as to be all but inexpressible. Something in the film reaches down and touches some important, little-touched place so deep inside us it rarely sees the rational light of the everyday world, and so watching the film becomes a sort of sacred ritual, a paying homage to that shadowed place.

Any reader who's been paying attention will know that my tombstone will never read SHE HAD VERY FINE TASTE, but if I was to dig down to the back of the closet and pull out the film (two films, actually... there was a sequel!) that I probably watch more frequently than any other, I'd come up with my old scratchy copies of the Young Guns movies.

Yup. I swear to God, there are so many things to love. First off, they're peopled by the likes of Terry O'Quinn, Viggo Mortensen, Terence Stamp, Robert Knepper, Jenny Wright, Leon Rippy, Scott Wilson, Jack Kehoe, Tracey Walter, Brian Keith, an absolute dream supporting cast. The Guns themselves are hit and miss: Kiefer Sutherland, for instance, ranges from wonderful to the truly execrable, but the joy of modern technology is that you fast-forward through, say, Sutherland's whole romance with the "China Doll" in the first film and enjoy instead the way he mounts a horse in the second, with that same kind of anti-gravitational ease that Kirk Douglas used in the War Wagon, or the way he lovingly puts away his book and takes up his gun in the first, wordlessly saying goodbye to his old life. Similarly, Lou Diamond Phillips weaves wildly back and forth between the sublime and the ridiculous. It's the nature, I suspect, of the Young Guns beast.

The first movie came out in 1988 and took in $44 million at the box office. The second one came a few years later and I assume took in even more, if only because the first one had terrible music and the second had a fantasy-provoking, epic score by Alan Silvestri and a whole CD full of gun ballads by...

Yes. Jon Bon Jovi. "Blaze of Glory" is unquestionably one of the great butt-rock ballads of all time. "Lord I never drew first / But I drew first blood / I'm the devil's son / Call me young gun." You think I got those lyrics online, but I didn't have to, because I own the CD. The liner notes fold out into a pouty poster of the old-style, long-haired JBJ. (And don't say my generation never gave you anything. We gave you BUTT-ROCK, my friend. Motley Crue. Warrant. Faster Pussycat. Guns 'n' Roses. Or you could look at it this way: we gave you butt-rock, and then we gave you Barack Obama to make up for it a little.)

The second movie is better than the first, and you don't have to watch the first to enjoy the second, but if you can survive the cringe-inducing bits (any mention of the word "pals", the aforementioned China Doll subplot, any talk of Doc's poetry, Chavez's jeremiad about the genocide of his people, any scene with Jack Palance in it, to mention just a few examples), there are things in the first that are quite wonderful. Emilio Estevez is supremely graceful in balancing the charm, fearlessness, loyalty, childish glee, selfishness and sudden violence of the psychopathic Billy, a boy who giggles over his murders and forms his Billy-the-Kid persona from bits he reads in the newspapers. It's in the second that the more mature Billy gets his Gun-Pointing Catchword: you know, like Arnold with "hasta la vista, baby," or Clint with "go ahead; make my day." Billy's, -- and it's wonderfully effective the way he speaks it, -- is "I'll make you famous."

As far as other Guns go, Alan Ruck gives a small, gentle, and textured performance as a farmer who loses his land and joins up with the gang to find some new lease on life. Years before he went to work for David Lynch, Balthasar Getty is lovely as a twitchy little orphan who finds a home amongst the outlaws until the lawmen cut short his wayward life, and Dermot Mulroney is no-questions, full-stop, hands-down brilliant in the first movie as Dirt-Faced Steve. In the context of a sort of Teen Idol sigh-fest (I confess, I confess, it is partly that), Mulroney gives as unabashedly an anti-glamorous performance as you can get, and it has not one weak moment. His face obscured by constant filth and his lip so stuffed with chaw his visage seems malformed, Dirt-Faced Steve is a simple-minded bigot with a heart of gold and Mulroney surpasses the quality of the script in creating him.

And the quality of both scripts is hit-and-miss, to say the least. In the space of five minutes the words veer between genius and dungheap. The simple poetry of a line like, "And I don't keep with whores no more. So ain't we both content?" as spoken by William Petersen (who gives a clean, salt-of-the-earth portrayal as Pat Garrett) is quickly undercut by an unintelligible speech by Jenny Wright as the madam Jane Greathouse. Not that I'm dissing Jenny Wright. Remember her? She was the irresistible bad girl in the World According to Garp and, most crucially, the winsome vampire in Kathryn Bigelow's brilliant Near Dark. She was one of the most interesting actresses of the '80s and her extreme pulchritude is exploited here in a Lady Godiva scene. She dropped out of the business not long after this, and I often wonder if it was partly because this role was a miserable experience, although that assumption is based entirely on her seeming helplessness in the face of this one incoherent speech and my embarrassment for her when she has to take off her clothes and get on that horse in front of a whole set full of humans. It's hard to call them sexist, though, these movies, because they so shamelessly exploit the heart-throb potential of their just-post-teenaged poster-boys as well. Emilio Estevez seems to have had one of those Kevin Costner clauses in his contract: the kind that says your bare ass is going to be displayed at least once per film.

In the end, I can't explain the ongoing appeal for me. A few years back when I was going through a bad time in life, these tapes were on constant rotation in my VCR. I'd come home from work, watch ten minutes, or an hour, and again the next day, until the double feature was done and I'd start it again. Is my psyche insisting that I make more room for outlaw energy to play in my mewed and Spartan existence? or am I merely the victim of extraordinarily canny executives with uncanny insight into my particular demographic? I can't in good conscience recommend these films, but, secretly, deep in my heart, I can't believe anyone could NOT love them as blindly as I do.

bright star: half in love with easeful death

2010-11-03T22:19:00.000-07:00

In fact, I dreamt last night that I went to see Bright Star, and today I thought what an easy dream that is to make true, so I did. Walking home afterward, a full moon, a gorgeous autumn night, there's me in my new long black coat, I felt like John Keats. It's a beauty, this film, a very simple love story. It doesn't have to reach for its obstacles (every great love story has obstacles), as they were there already, built into its very fabric, the most prosaic and concrete of difficulties: he had, as they said in those days, no fortune and no prospects, and therefore could not woo the girl. Then there was consumption, a short, troubled stay in Rome, and news of an early death.

Biopics are problematic, and biopics about the Romantics, enjoyable as they often are, are almost to a one filled with lies, albeit some of them beautiful. Julien Temple's Pandaemonium is one of the more interesting, in part because it's about Wordsworth and Coleridge instead of the usual Byron and Shelley, and because it has John Hannah and Linus Roache playing the poets. Temple helms an exquisitely visual take on the writing as well as the lives... Alas, he lies, too, like a rug he lies, most egregiously about Wordsworth's sister, who I think in life was not nearly so selfless, liberated, or intelligent as she is in Temple's version. All the other movies are about the bad Lord B and the mad Ariel, and at best they are made of rather wonderful lies instead of the pedestrian variety.

Keats is harder. Young as they sometimes went (Shelley at 29, drowned at sea, Byron at 36 of fever in Mussolonghi where he'd gone to fight for the Greeks), Keats went the fastest, fled from the world at 25, coughing up blood in Italy where funds raised from the English literary world had sent him, belatedly, as it turned out. Other than his poems, the most interesting thing in his life was his problematic, unconsummated love affair with Fanny Brawne. He and Coleridge left the most exquisite poems behind, I think, but who can compete with Byron and Shelley for sheer adventure in biography? They were rich and travelled, married and fell in love outside their marriages, chose dramatic and outlandish backdrops for their written works. Keats lived simply, poorly, travelled not at all until he was too sick to enjoy it, and did very little except to write extraordinarily well and get very bad reviews and little money in recompense.

This is one of those movies that makes you want to write, like Reds or Julia or the Whole Wide World. Sitting as the end credits rolled and the quiet voice of Ben Whishaw read selections from Keats' poems, that short, unfulfilled life seemed not at all wasted; the poems felt like the noblest way possible to spend a life.

in which i enjoy halloween at sinescope

2010-10-27T16:36:00.000-07:00

In honor of Samhain, the brilliant and wonderful Derek Hill has invited me write a horror post on He Watched By Night, the film portion of the Sinescope website. Come over to read it, and explore every cranny of this eclectic corner of the internet while you're there...

THIRTEEN HORROR CLASSICS (in no particular order):

Toby Dammit (1968)

Long before the dark-bellied whimsy of Lynch, before the Japanese brought to our awareness the ultra-creep potential lurking in images of little girls, there was Federico Fellini’s “Toby Dammit.” It is the final chapter of the swingin’ European triptych Spirits of the Dead, three short films loosely inspired by Poe stories. The Roger Vadim is inconsequential, the Louis Malle is interesting in a lurid way (Delon strip-n-whip with Bardot!), and the Fellini is a bounding little romp through a surrealist hell. Terence Stamp is the beautiful and disintegrating movie star decked out in Carnaby Street satin and lace, his smile a death’s-head, walking -- mostly doubled over in agony -- through the loving insanity that is Fellini’s Rome toward his inexorable death. Aside from delivering an image so uncanny that it’s burned forever into my mind, the film seems to me perhaps the truest psychological portrait of the absurdity of superstardom ever entrusted to celluloid.

Pulse (2001)

Pulse is not my favorite Kiyoshi Kurosawa film; that’s Bright Future. Despite its revenant, though, its ominous use of ambient noise and a strange plot involving toxic fish loosed into the waterways of Tokyo, Future’s optimistic, sometimes jaunty mood sets it uncomfortably apart from the horror genre. Pulse, though, is a worthy example of this director’s stunning oeuvre and contains some of his most compelling images. In Kurosawa’s world, murders and suicides occur not by individual design but in waves, in plagues and infestations (in Pulse, such an epidemic reaches its logical culmination in worldwide apocalypse). The dead are active among us, and no action of theirs is benevolent (with one wonderful exception in Bright Future) outside of a rare forgiveness (Retribution).

A man stands still in a dimly-lit room. Gradually, without obvious change of lighting or perspective, we become aware of a spectral presence behind him, its stance somehow off, crooked; the presence dawns on us, as it does on him, with the same slow horror. The ghost of a woman walks with long strides across a tiny room, grotesquely slowly, and she’s moving her arms wrong. A man meets his doppelganger and sets it on fire. There are unearthly stains on cement walls, and baleful pools of dark water on the ground. Kurosawa leans toward the police procedural, but it is the antithesis of CSI: there is no single murderer and no simple motive. Crime is both viral and supernaturally motivated, not in the possessed-by-the-ghost-of-a-serial-killer sense so beloved of Hollywood, but in the Jungian sense that we are all of us capable of all things, and even a reasonably good person living in the isolation dictated by our modern society is vulnerable to dark suggestion. Don’t stop with Pulse: watch also Cure, Seance, and Retribution.

Ravenous (1999)

A masterpiece, and the most exhilarating cannibal movie you’ll ever see. Anthropophagy in Old California is the metaphor for the greed and rapacity of the white man with his empire-building and his Manifest Destiny. The music is perfect, the casting is perfect, the script is an unpretentious gem. Director Antonia Bird steers the helm with a strong hand, and the thing can be grimly funny. Once you’ve seen it, TRY and forget Robert Carlyle’s manic fit in the snow outside the cave or Jeremy Davies’ anguished cry, “He was licking my wound!” Or the marvelous endgame, in which two men caught in a bear-trap are playing Whoever-Dies-First-Gets-Eaten.

Night of the Demon / Curse of the Demon (1957)

Wonderful old telling of the M.R. James story “The Casting of the Runes.” Niall MacGinnes is a Crowleyesque mage, equal parts aristocrat, buffoon and coldly effective demon-raiser; Dana Andrews is the skeptic who has to re-examine his Weltanschauung. Classily shot in deep, velvet b&w, its demon is controversial: while its emergence from the clouds is eerily magnificent, the close-up looks like what might have happened had Ed Wood designed a muppet. A great story, though, and an undeniably great film from director Jacques Tourneur.

The Leopard Man (1943)

A Spanish dancer walks down a threatening street playing castanets. A fortune-teller keeps drawing the Ace of Spades. A girl trapped in a cemetery watches, fascinated, as a tree-branch lowers menacingly to block out the moon. This is my choice to represent the truly unique body of work by producer Val Lewton, which deserves to be watched in its entirety: Cat People is the most famous, Isle of the Dead perhaps the best, but this one (directed by Jacques Tourneur) I love for its strong female characters, appealing dialogue, and really dazzling images. As in most Lewton films, there is nothing supernatural here (a cat has escaped, a murderer may be impersonating it), but the presence of Death is unnervingly tangible, throwing its dense shadow across everything.

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Four people -- a physicist, his wife, a mental medium, and a physical medium -- walk into a notoriously haunted house, a house which has killed and driven men insane. Richard Matheson has written an economical script from his own book, and director John Hough has conjured the house into life, made it a breathing and genuinely frightening character by means of ambient roars and indiscernible whispers, crooked long-shots, and creeping dollies. The four actors (Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowell, Clive Revill, and Gayle Hunnicutt) seethe and ham a bit, but you do when you’re fighting possession by an evil house. In fact, the film’s genius lies in its Britishness; that’s the dignified foundation from which it can run wild with impunity.

The Stepford Wives (1975)

While the sixties were turning into the seventies and women were sloughing off old roles to step tentatively into new, Ira Levin wrote two extraordinary potboilers, Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. Their heroines walk into a nightmare of complete isolation in which there is literally nobody they can trust, and anyone who believes them is powerless to help. This was no rehash of the old mothers’ nightmares or don’t-walk-alone cautionary tales that Hollywood was used to dishing up for women. This was a new brand of total nightmare for a new breed of total woman. Having grown up with the network television version of Bryan Forbes’s film, I was shocked to see the huge breasts on the Katherine Ross-bot at the end of the DVD. The anguish of her husband makes it scarier than if he were cold and conscienceless. These men aren’t inhuman. They do love their wives. Making the decision to replace them with obedient, boobalicious clones is not an easy one, but THEY ALL MAKE IT ANYWAY. I don’t know how it plays for men, but one of the most chilling moments in film history for me is when the heroine asks the replica-maker why they subrogate their wives and he says, “Because we can.” Nearly as chilling is the feminist consciousness-raising session which is highjacked by replicas who froth with manic joy about household cleansers.

Duel (1971)

Yes, it’s a monster movie. That truck is a monster, and if director Steven Spielberg were sitting here with us, he’d second the notion. My favorite bit, the bit that always gets the hair standing up on the nape, is when Dennis Weaver is at the side of the road thinking the danger is past, then he looks back and sees the truck lurking in the tunnel, rumbling, watching him. He thinks he must be imagining it, and then, as he looks, it TURNS ITS LIGHTS ON.

Angel Heart (1987)

Some of us remember a time when Mickey Rourke was heralded as the De Niro of his generation, and this is some of his best work. It’s after World War II and Rourke’s unkempt, charming PI who has “a thing about chickens” follows a missing persons case steeped in voodoo from New York to New Orleans. Under director Alan Parker’s unfailing guidance the sense of dread grows to unbearable levels. A haunting soundtrack and a hypnotic, repeating series of fragmentary flashbacks weave a mesmerizing spell, and if it weren’t for two badly miscalculated elements (the glowing eyes and the ham-fisted De Niro character), this might have been a perfect horror film.

The Dead Zone (1983)

Saying The Dead Zone is one of your favorite Cronenbergs is like saying Hanky Panky is your favorite The The record: the disciples cry apostasy and reach for the tar-bucket. Great directors have strong, sweeping vision and suffer obsessive returnings to specific themes and visual tropes, but the best prove their mastery by stepping easily outside their own shoes to make “normal” movies with ease. As my sixth-grade teacher said, Picasso had to conquer the rules before he could cast them off. Who might have predicted the Lynchiana to follow from the exquisitely melancholy The Elephant Man? Similarly, Cronenberg takes a peripatetic Stephen King work, pares it down into clean lines, then tells the story austerely, with simple elegance. It could not have been better shot, better edited, or better cast. Christopher Walken gives a great and subtle turn as a man who emerges from a coma with unnatural powers, and I defy you to watch The West Wing easily again after seeing Martin Sheen’s powermad senator Greg Stillson.

Prophecy (1995)

Who wouldn’t love to live in a Miltonian universe in which angels vie with men for the love of God, in which the heavens are perpetually rent by war between seraphim, where Christopher Walken is the ruthless archangel Gabriel and Viggo Mortensen is Lucifer himself? For two hours and two sequels, you can revel in the gnostic angst. This is the other side of Walken, dry-witted and unstoppably brutal, and there’s nothing fey about these angels, who are fierce and homicidal. Gabriel’s speech about the nature of the beast (“I’m an angel. I turn cities into salt. I kill first-borns while their mamas watch…”) is a piece of cinematic perfection. There are other adeptly macabre moments in Gregory Widen’s film: one in particular in which a little girl who carries the soul of a genocidal general inside her assesses the battle-worthiness of a stronghold. Elias Koteas, always the virtuoso, gives his doubting-thomas hero a complexity rare in the genre.

The Fool-Killer (1965)

Not a horror film, exactly, but what is it? Lovely in b&w, it’s a good one to watch while feverish or sleep-deprived for the full, dreamlike effect. Reminiscent of The Night of the Hunter, Servando Gonzalez's film follows a boy (Edward Albert) on his travels through post-Civil War America. He’s on the run and he hardly knows from what, but it’s embodied in his mind by the mythical demon of the title who may or may not be his mysterious traveling companion. There’s a pleasing Manly Wade Wellman quality to the world, and the camp-meeting scene, with its Dutch angles and fearsome Calvinist sermon, is something to behold.

The Passion of the Christ (2004)

The world of The Passion is dark and Manichean. Satan and her archons are everywhere in evidence and God is impossibly remote, embodied in the moon at the moment it is obscured by clouds or in a single drop of rain. Meanwhile, demons race out of nowhere and disappear just as fast. In Gethsemane, a gorgeous scene, the night in the garden is electric with dread and panic. The crowd jeering at the flagellation is nothing short of Boschian. Lucifer walks constantly among the masses, gloating and taunting. Judas harassed to death by demons in front of the maggot-ridden grin of a rotting cadaver is some kind of horror-film epiphany. You’d think director Mel Gibson had been working in the genre all his life. This is not a movie about love, God’s or otherwise; it’s about suffering, horror, the easy supremacy of evil, and mankind’s unending and continuous failure to rise to any level of goodness. The upbeat ending, if you can call it that, in which God takes matters into His own hands and the Christ rises up to the ominous sound of a martial drumbeat to go forth and make His war, is obligatory and unconvincing.

bad lieutenant port of call new orleans: redemption after the deluge

2010-09-15T20:23:00.000-07:00

SPOILER ALERT

I couldn't put off Bad Lieutenant forever. First, it's Herzog, then it's New Orleans; on top of that, I heard an intriguing thing about an iguana, and I couldn't shake it out of my mind.

We begin during the immediate aftermath of Katrina. The police force has disintegrated, along with much of the town. Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) and his partner (Val Kilmer, playing a guy who would very much like to be a badder cop than his partner but doesn't seem to have the flair for it, lacks the imagination or some other je-ne-sais-quoi) find a prisoner about to drown in a flooded holding cell. Initially inclined to lay bets on how long it will take him to submerge, an uncustomary impulse to do the right thing kicks in and McDonagh leaps into the water to save the man, an act which will simultaneously earn him promotion, decoration, and a painful and lifelong disability. For the rest of the film, he is a crooked man, in both soul and physique. He lumbers across it like a Frankenstein's monster, committing crimes large and small to support his habits, escape his pain, keep some semblance of control over a life spinning wildly out of control.

I began, as I always do, feeling uncomfortable with Cage. He is so strange, that guy. In this one he uses a phony voice. In physical terms, it seems like he's moved his voice down from his mask by consciously opening his throat; it sounds like he's trying to sound like a normal person and failing. Maybe that's the desired effect, because God knows his character is one of those thousands who spend (to paraphrase the immortal Camus) an extraordinary amount of energy chasing an elusive appearance of normalcy. I don't think so, though. More likely, that uber-weirdo Herzog took him aside and said (in clipped, sombre, carefully-chosen verbiage, with all "t"s over-enunciated), "I want you to sound like a different person. I want that your own mother, when she hears your voice, shall not recognize you as her son."

In the end, none of that matters. There's nobody in the world plays a particular brand of drug-addled psycho-crazy better than Cage. By the final frames, I was convinced that not only could no one else have played it, but that the mad, stoical, romantic visionary Herzog may have found his new perfect foil: this may be his new Klaus Kinski. No one else would have given that perfect spin to lines like, "You don't have a lucky crack-pipe?" and "Shoot him again. His soul is still dancing." And yes, we do, in fact, see the soul dancing. It dances gracefully and frantically, as if for its very existence. Herzog uses magical realism boldly, deals it with a sure hand and in ideal amounts: it is the device through which he simultaneously communicates the ongoing drug-haze blurring McDonagh's grasp and also the numinous possibilities of a shining spiritual super-reality overlapping the purely physical realm.

That's where the iguanas come in. And not just iguanas, but fish and reptiles of many stripe and color. A snake glides rather beautifully through the filthy flood waters. A crocodile lies dying in the middle of a road; its mate, or perhaps its child, unseen by the humans at the scene, watches it helplessly from the roadside. At his initial crime-scene, McDonagh finds a child's stangely compelling verse written for a beautiful red fish caught in a drinking glass, and it haunts him. The iguanas? these, my friend, you must experience for yourself.

One of the best things about being Werner Herzog, a thing which must make him cackle and rub his hands together with glee, is that you get actors of the quality of Michael Shannon and Brad Dourif in your secondary roles. Eva Mendes is perfect as McDonagh's gold-hearted whore-girlfriend, really stunning. My favorite part,--and I don't want to spoil it by saying too much,-- involves an old spoon and pirate treasure, and delivers a message of hope and the persistence of innocence which easily outweighs the corrosive immorality chewing at this world from the outside.

Who but Herzog would have thought such strange redemption would be possible in a place like New Orleans? Who but Herzog would have given us such Catholic themes, without more than a frame or two of Catholic imagery, in so very Catholic a town as New Orleans? In the end there is so much redemption that he gives us a fairy tale ending... and then he shows us how life goes on afterwards, after the words "happily ever after", life which is not easy.

The piling up of complications is ruthless, and perhaps only believable in the context of so corrupt and magical a city, and the ending is sublime: the fish. The silence. The laugh. Herzog's hand, in fact, is so sure at the helm, his pacing unhurried yet flawless, the music an exact vehicle for the story, neither more nor less, that it's a pleasure to watch it unfold. You can relax into it with the absolute certainty that you're resting in the hands of a master.

things i've been watching: august 2010

2010-08-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

Ghost Writer: (2010. dir: Roman Polanski) Another sly masterwork from that genius of claustrophobic paranoia, a man who can say more convincingly than most that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Ghost Writer fits right into the natural curve of his oeuvre alongside Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown, the Tenant, Bitter Moon and the Ninth Gate. Ewan MacGregor plays an unnamed hack hired to ghost the memoirs of a disgraced ex-Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) after the original ghostwriter dies under mysterious circumstances. As in most Polanski, the world into which the slightly naive protagonist steps is both unfathomably dark and deceptively attractive, with hidden depths just beyond his ability to plumb; and as in most Polanski, it feels from the first like a slow noose tightening around his doomed neck. Although the earlier films were more brilliant, Polanski has developed over the years a light, whimsical touch which makes the newer ones easier to enjoy, less entirely devastating. His storytelling is satiny smooth, without a wrinkle or blemish, without any flirting with the hackneyed or banal. Even when a plot-point seems obvious, he tells it from an unexpected angle or in an image that feels new.

Winter's Bone: (2010. dir: Debra Granik) It's based on a book by Daniel Woodrell, and it plays like a cross between a Kem Nunn story sans the surfing and Donna Tartt's the Little Friend. It's a small world in the wooded mountains of the modern-day Ozarks, a world bounded by poverty and drug-fueled paranoia, and Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) has to track her father down or lose the house he's signed over for his bond. Although everyone in the area seems to be vaguely related to everyone else, the code of silence among them takes precedence over blood-ties and she's in danger just by walking into a yard and asking a question. These actors, with a few cannily-chosen exceptions (Garret Dillahunt will forever be heartily welcome in my DVD player), have the leathery faces and worn-out voices of real people with hard lives, and there's no Hollywood lighting or makeup to interfere between the camera and the sense of realism.

And then there's John Hawkes, who is my hero now, after this. Like many, I noticed him first as Sol Starr in Deadwood although he'd been working for twenty years already by then. (I extolled his virtues to my mother, who's a big LOST-head, and she looked at me like I was a little tetched; so either Lost is so filled with brilliant performances that a genius like Hawkes' is just another pebble in the cinder-pit, or maybe he was uninspired by it. Despite the zealous testimony from the converted, I haven't got the faith and mustardseed to trudge through all the various seasons just to find the scattered gems from loved ones like Hawkes and Kiele Sanchez, Jeremy Davies and Terry O'Quinn. Maybe someday.) In any case, the naturalism of the world created in Winter's Bone is so entirely unimpeded that when Hawkes' character (a near-tragic bad-ass called Teardrop) walks to the back of his truck and takes out an axe in the middle of a parking lot where it can only be used for ill, the shock is far more frightening than had it been accompanied by suspenseful music and fancy camera-work. The ending, and Teardrop's last exit, is one of the great underplayed scenes of the decade.

The Last Days of Pompeii: (1935. dir: Ernest B. Schoedsack) Did you know that Vesuvius erupted to devastate Pompeii specifically because a fellow had a chance to to try and save Jesus' life and didn't? Yup, a direct result. Fellow called Marcus, used to be a gladiator until he lost a fight to Ward Bond and went into slave- and horse-trading instead. This feels like a silent DeMille epic that maybe got its budget slashed and sound accidentally added. Basil Rathbone shows us his Ponderous Thespian side as Pontius Pilate.

The Falcon Takes Over: (1942. dir: Irving Reis) One of my favorite moments in the history of literature is in Farewell, My Lovely when Moose Malloy steps out of the shadows and says to the girl he's been obsessively and ruthlessly tracking, "Hiya, baby. Long time no see." Moose is one of the great enigmatic characters of all time: big as a truck, just broken out of jail after having taken a fall for his boss, completely amoral in his relentless search for the beautiful showgirl who promised to wait for him, he leaves a trail of bodies behind him but never sways from true love for his elusive Velma.

For your wartime enjoyment, the studio has bowdlerized the great novel to make a comic vehicle for George Sanders, and almost all of the beauty and punch of it are gone. The one great thing that remains from the grand opus is that haunted, Ahab-esque quality that Ward Bond brings to his Moose Malloy. It's perfect casting, and George Sanders isn't actually bad as a sort of leering, playboy version of Philip Marlowe, but he's fighting a middlin' script and a good deal of cornpone. For my money, the 1975 Robert Mitchum/Charlotte Rampling remake, flawed as it is, remains the go-to version, with Mitchum's deadpan voiceovers and world-weary visage providing just the right stuff. The original (Murder, My Sweet) capsizes beneath the insurmountable weight of an uncharismatic Marlowe (Dick Powell?! Was he somebody's son-in-law or something?) and I'm flummoxed as to why this perfect story hasn't been remade for every generation, like Pride and Prejudice and Hamlet and Robin Hood.

more things i've been watching: july 2010

2010-07-31T13:22:00.000-07:00

Salt: (2010. dir: Phillip Noyce)
SPOILER ALERT
We all know there are two reasons to see summer blockbusters: either you're a 12-year-old boy or you have no air conditioning. Had this come out in the more reasonable month of April I never would have ventured out; that understood, it turns out to be far more enjoyable than I ever imagined. Had there been a man in the lead as initially planned, it'd have been a rehash of myriad things of old. With Jolie soaking up and dealing out the damage, it's intriguing. It turns out there's something oddly gratifying about watching a gorgeous, psychopathic woman (are all action heroes psychopaths these days? I suspect they are. Remember in the old West when you knew the good guy because he would never shoot a guy in the back? Huh. Bunch of wusses) peeling open a ferocious can of whoop-ass on a good portion of the male population. I HATE the Bourne Method of editing fight scenes (such fast cuts and dubious angles that one is forced to take it on faith that there's an actual fight in progress); in this context, however, when you have an eighty-pound woman taking on whole rooms full of armed and trained 200-lb gorillas, not seeing too much is a boon and helps you to take it all with the necessary load of, well, salt.

The thing this movie did right was to let us just far enough into the heroine's head that we know she truly loves her husband; further than that, it keeps us guessing. Jolie's got that great, stoical ice-face and she knows very well how to use it, when to emote and when to hold back. She gets the crap kicked out of her by the Koreans, the Russians AND the Americans, but she REEKS of toughness, takes it all as part of the job and gives out better than she gets. I love her line deliveries. I love it when she's got trapped by the Feds against a car, guns pointed at her from all sides, men encroaching, shouts that she should drop to the ground, and she says with a perfect blend of aplomb and stubborn petulance, "I didn't do anything wrong," and rolls into one of those perfect action-movie escapes that are just barely possible enough that even though nobody you or I have ever met could ever do it, we'll buy it now and then onscreen because we've gladly accepted our load of, well, salt.

There are absurd plot points, but not too many laws of physics get broken (as in, say, the Dark Knight movies), and the stunts look unrehearsed, by which I mean that when she's jumping from one moving truck to another it doesn't look easy, and, although I have no personal experience from which to draw, I'm fair certain it wouldn't be. The final scene is badly written (poor Chiwetel Ejiofor has taken on a thankless role; at least he's one of the few who doesn't get his ass kicked) and afterwards when the screen flashed to black and credits I was outraged. I felt like I'd only seen half a film. My boyfriend pointed out that it'd been two hours, and she'd killed all the bad guys and saved the world, and what else did I want? I guess that speaks well for it, the fact that I was ready to sit through another two hours, and speaks badly against it that it lacked the satisfactory denouement which would have sent me back into the heat of the day with a cathartic sense of time well spent.

the Charge of the Light Brigade: (1936. dir: Michael Curtiz) Ultimately unsuccessful but enjoyable historical/patriotic hash with some nice visuals (an Indian soiree communicated through exotic shadows against a wall, David Niven avoiding the moonlight to crawl out of a fortress unseen) and an easy, loping pace punctuated by exciting battles. But what it comes down to is this: Olivia de Havilland spurns the love of Errol Flynn for some milquetoast boy. And who can countenance such nonsense?

Sanjuro: (1962. dir: Akira Kurosawa) The great thing about having deprived oneself of the classics in one's youth is the chance to see them for the first time as an adult. The stream flowing with camellias! The night that Sanjuro kills a whole roomful of guards alone, like Old Boy in the parking garage basement. Toshiro Mifune is huge! Bigger than life. The humor! The characters! That last, awesome showdown: the silence. The stillness. The proximity. The sudden geyser of blood! Just awesome. Five stars; no qualms. Completely enjoyable in every respect.

Black Book: (2006.dir: Paul Verhoeven) Graceless and inadequate string of absurd coincidences and overt melodrama in Nazi-occupied Holland. It all LOOKS great, and Carice van Houten is very good as the Jewish flirt who uses smarts and looks to play both sides, resistance and invaders. In a bid to surprise us about who the bad guy is (well, the OTHER bad guy, besides all the SS), Verhoeven stretches his plot into incredible and, more importantly, unsatisfying shapes.

inception: three levels and philip k dick

2010-07-27T23:29:00.000-07:00

Straight off, my prejudice: I'm a Nolan fan from way back. The care he takes with detail, story and psychological exploration (Memento, Insomnia, the Prestige) seems fascinating to me and possibly unmatched among working directors.

WARNING: TONS OF SPOILERS AHEAD

Here's a basic summary of the plot: Cobb (DiCaprio) is a specialist in the art of entering a person's subconscious through their dreams to extract information. He does this for a living, but he's on the run from some vague, disgruntled ex-client and wants out. Extraction is not a feat which can be achieved alone; an extractor needs a team: he has a right-hand man (in this case, the lovely Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a dream-architect who builds the details of the dream-world, a chemist and a forger (who doesn't forge papers; rather, he morphs his appearance to impersonate someone else in the dream-world, perhaps an intimate of the subject's). Saito (the intriguing Ken Watanabe) hires Cobb not to extract but to implant an idea deep in a dreamer's mind: for vague but convincing ethical reasons, the son and heir (the wonderful Cillian Murphy) to a mega-billionaire (the underused Pete Postlethwaite) must be convinced to break up his father's empire. In return, Saito will give Cobb the one thing he truly desires: reunion with his children, from whom he has been banished since he was set up by his suicidal wife (Marion Cotillard, playing the same tense, neurotic beauty she did in Public Enemies) to look like he murdered her. In order to implant the idea, the team has to go three levels deep into the fellow's subconscious; in order to do THAT, they induce a group-dreaming using sedatives and a fancy machine, then in the dreamstate induce another, using sedatives and a fancy machine... you get the idea. Why do sedatives and machines work on a dream-level as they do in reality, when you and I both know that if you dream of sitting at a computer trying to work, the mouse and keyboard seem not hooked up and any words which appear are nothing like what you're trying to type, and if you swallow poison, chances are good you'll continue unharmed? That's a good question, and I'm glad you asked it. Let's put it on hold for a minute and come back to it. Also, notice how often I'm using the word "vague". It's important, and we'll come back to it.

A crucial thing to know about existence on these particular dream-levels is that if you are killed on a shallow level you wake up; if you are killed on, say, the third level down, your consciousness is lost and you spend a near-eternity wandering confused in the ramblings of your underconscious world, having forgotten that it is not reality. Another important thing to remember is that although the dream- architect is ostensibly the one who designs the world down to each detail (how? and how do the others manage to curb their own impulsively creative tendencies? well, it's vague), powerful emotional content buried in another person's subconscious can wreak havoc there, as Cobb's does, conjuring freight trains that barrel down the center of city streets and a dead wife who follows him from one dream to another specifically to louse up any plans he might have. Why is Cobb the only one whose subconscious wreaks any havoc? Yes, he's sicker than your average pup, but everyone's got submerged crap. Why doesn't anyone else's undealt-with psyche-stuff show up, even in small ways? That is a very good question, and I'm glad you asked it. We'll set it aside and come back to it later.

Meanwhile, through the unfolding of a visually stunning and ambitiously innovative story, the team navigates the three levels of non-reality while managing to solve Cobb's problems with his dead wife and successfully plant the idea which will, ostensibly, save the world. Then, they escape back into reality. Or do they?

I'm not being glib about this. This movie is a lot of fun. During a good half of it, granted, Nolan is wearing his Action-Guy hat and that makes me yawn some, but it's an old problem between us, a not-unheard-of dynamic between me and old Chris (I find Batman Begins a big snooze-fest, apart from the sound of Christian Bale's voice, which exercises some kind of eerie mystical power over me). But even in the Action Movie part lay things I loved: specifically, Gordon-Levitt's fistfights in zero gravity, which were delightful.

And let's dismiss right now all the moaning back and forth you'll hear about the Matrix: "it's a cheap rip-off; it's nowhere as good"... Whatever, dude. The only thing it's got in common with the Matrix is a mutual fascination with Philip K Dick and his exploration of the various levels of existence channeled through the medium of the action film. In fact, the movie it's most like is Shutter Island, since both tell the same story: a man, traumatized by the tragic loss of his family due to a devastating action by his wife, goes to intense psychological lengths in attempt to keep at bay the devastating truth and halt his own creeping sense of guilt. The rest is window-dressing.

My absolutely, no-question, full-on favorite thing about this film is the ambivalent ending. IS the top wobbling? WILL it fall? Has the word "reality" been stripped so clean of meaning by the time the top is set in motion that the question itself has no relevance? This is exactly why I love Christopher Nolan.

That said, I have a few beefs. A big one is aural. What's with the bombastic soundtrack almost constantly intruding? Had there been silence, or ambient noise... Think of the possibilities! The soundtrack of dreams! Think of the soundwork that Gus Van Sant has done in recent years (Last Days!) and imagine if Nolan had used something like that... a different tonal register for each different level of dream, perhaps? Ah! How eerie it might have been. Instead, he focuses (very well, very ably indeed, there is no question) on the visual, and the sound is tossed to the overweening composer guy, as it so often is these days in action films. It happens all the time, and every time I'm hugely disappointed. I tell you, hardly a day goes by that I don't long for the deep silences and natural sound of early-'70s cinema. Ou sont les neiges d'antan, you know?

My other big whinge is that the dream levels are far too stable. Yes, they can be manipulated by external forces (the lack of gravity when the van in another level in falling into the water) and by conscious choice (the dream-architect's job), but never once during the film did I think, "Yes! That's like in my dreams!", as I have in David Lynch works, for instance, or in that final episode of Buffy season four, when the scoobies are haunted in their dreams by the First Slayer. Personally, my dreams are constantly shifting. Even when I have a tentative grip of lucidity and consciously cause a change -- like making myself fly, for instance,-- the change never lasts, but turns into something new. The one constant is a shifting ground. If I try and read a book, the words shift in front of my eyes. If I'm waiting at a bus-stop and the thought occurs to me that I'm at the wrong corner, you can be damn sure the bus is about to pull up to a different corner and I'm going to be running after it. A single thought changes everything. Although I wholeheartedly subscribe to the notion that dreams are filled with messages from not only underconscious but superconscious and extra-conscious sources, the truest words I can use to sum up my dream-life are CONSTANT RANDOM SHIFTS. In short, my biggest disappointment about this movie was that I never believed I was exploring various dream-lives of various characters...

And that brings me nicely round to my main point, which is that I think (although I am open to discussion on the matter) that the only way the story ultimately makes sense is if it's ALL happening inside Cobb's head, from beginning to end, from before the opening shot, the whole shebang, the entirety of the enchilada. It reminds me of Alex Garland's novel Coma, a short book tracing the mental meanderings of a comatose guy, which were a chillingly convincing semi-circular interaction with memories, overheard snippets from the doctors and nurses by his bed, and hallucinations in which he is driven, sometimes desperately, towards a vague but important goal which is continually frustrated and confused. Maybe the story we're seeing is Cobb's and Cobb's alone. He is like a man in a coma, and we are stuck in the widening circles of his hallucinations, his memories and his strivings. Perhaps its apparent stability comes from the closed nature of the world; the dream is an endless loop, without hope of waking. My theory is that every person in Inception is a projection from Cobb's subconscious as he fights to find his way up to a reality which has retreated so far away that he might no longer recognize it if he saw it. The only piece of true memory we see is that blurry, slow-motion, recurring image of the kids playing with their faces averted from him.

Think about it. It explains why nobody else's subconscious projections matter: they have none, being Cobb's own projections. It explains why the physical laws of one level of reality apply on each deeper level of non-reality: because it's all the same level, really, all happening on the endless racetrack of Cobb's unstill mind. It explains the vagueness of so many of the plot-points: the details are not, at last, the point for the man who is desperately combing his own mental labyrinths for a lucrative escape route. And it explains the question at the end about whether we are, in fact, in reality. We are not. The escape is illusory; he is trapped, but perhaps it has ceased to matter. Perhaps he can find joy anyway.

Philip K Dick, master-philosopher and godfather of multiple levels of experienced reality, returned to a pattern of three basics in his works: the Seen, the Is, and the Ought. The Seen (in his novels, as well as in life itself) is always illusory, and must be stripped away in pieces before one finds the Is. Only when one comprehends the true Is can one begin to contemplate changes necessary to create the Ought. In Inception, eveything we see is illusion. The entire action of the movie is Cobb's ongoing attempt to strip the Seen away and find the Is. It's the only way I can convince the story to hold together properly, and it's too enjoyable a story to reject just because the ends are too slippery to stay tied.

what i've been watching: july 2010

2010-07-20T14:35:00.000-07:00

the Stendhal Syndrome: (1996. dir: Dario Argento) Is there a father in the world who's put his daughter through anything like what Dario does to Asia? It's almost beyond abuse. In this one, Asia plays an unconvincing policewoman trying to catch a rapist at the Uffizi and who, it turns out, suffers from the Stendhal Syndrome: a sort of aesthetic hysteria which causes her to be overwhelmed by the power of great art. The rapist (the redoubtable Thomas Kretschmann in an early but assured turn) uses her weakness to toy with her; on the plus side, it keeps him from killing her as he does his other victims. Argento films are never soft and cuddly, their roots firmly in the giallos from whence they sprang, but this one is very brutal indeed, featuring several cruel rapes and killings, including some moments of extreme ferocity by Asia herself. Although the story is weak and creaky at the hinges, Dario shows his masterful hand in structure and realization (he has another, less masterful hand, which turns up onscreen occasionally but thankfully not this time). The dreamlike quality of the first half gives the nightmare extra teeth by lulling the viewer into a trancelike state. Certainly it's not to be taken on if you're feeling at all sensitive. As I was switching off the TV, a sordid and inexplicable thought crossed my mind: that this was just the sort of movie a demon might use as a gateway if it had a notion to take up lodging in your soul.

the Burrowers: (2008. dir: JT Petty) There's an attack on a farmhouse; women go missing. A posse rides out, expecting to find them kidnapped by Indians, but life is not nearly so simple in this impressive horror/western amalgam, possibly inspired by Ravenous. It's not got the downright brilliance of that one, and its central metaphor is not as satisfying, but it's still a very fine horror film with wonderful production values: first-rate acting, dialogue and photography make up for its lapses in story and pacing. And then, at the end, Tom Waits sings an awesomely creepy "All the Pretty Horses" over the roll of credits.

Joan of Arc: (1948. dir: Victor Fleming) Hagiography can be so damned ponderous, don't you find? Although it's written partly by Maxwell Anderson, one of those playwrights (along with Eliot, Fry, Anouilh, et al) who masterminded the mid-20th century rage for historical drama written in poetry (if you can even imagine that such a thing ever happened), this has no poetry in it, nor does it have any moment of beauty or of truth, either in the historical or in the broader, all-encompassingly human sense. It was Fleming's last film and maybe he was exhausted. It plods lifelessly from one Disneyland-colored set-piece to another. Jose Ferrer is rather good as the spineless and amoral Dauphin; Fleming cuts out the character of Gilles de Rais entirely, probably not wanting to deal with the repercussions of having Bluebeard running around; Ingrid Bergman seems as uninspired as she is uninspiring. I watched it, naturally, because Ward Bond is in it, wildly miscast as a Frenchman. (If I wanted to show you a picture to illustrate the words "absolute opposite of Frenchman", I would show you a picture of Ward Bond.) Still, he has one thing going for him here: due to his years of strenuous training under Ford, he can carry off the most mouth-coatingly, gag-reflex-inducingly sentimental lines with aplomb.

Let me amend a previous statement: there is one moment of beauty in it, a late shot of Bergman's face while her voices are speaking. Therein may lie the key to the movie's dismal failure: focusing on the external events instead of showing us the gorgeous internal world of a girl who talks with gods.

Big Hand for the Little Lady: (1966. dir: Fielder Cook) I haven't looked it up, and I'm not going to waste time doing it, but I'd put good money on it that this was a play before it was a movie. You can tell because the dialogue is false and mostly filler, the exposition is stiff and delivered woodenly, and because the production style feels like musical theatre. Henry Fonda, Joanne Woodward, Kevin McCarthy, Burgess Meredith and Jason Robards all comport themselves well, but this is a fluff-piece, without weight and without any true enjoyment. It exists solely as a vehicle for its trick ending, a trick which also leaves me with a vaguely sour musical-theatre taste in my mouth: tastes like treacle, this, treacle and fluff.

the wolfman: alas, poor benicio

2010-07-03T08:47:00.000-07:00

SPOILER ALERT

It's easy to understand why they thought of Benicio Del Toro when they wanted to remake the Wolfman; he's got that wonderful sort of feral cast to his features. And the transitions into beastliness are indeed a joy to behold, as is watching the monster in action, with its great, loping, superfast run. There's a lovely climactic battle between father and son werewolves amidst the symbolic inferno of the blazing family manor-house, and Anthony Hopkins does a superb job of creating a whole new character, by which I mean something rather different from what we've seen from him before (which seems impossible, since we've all seen him in 5,000 different things) (and, now I think of it, it may be only a personal effect, as I made a decision to stop watching his films some time hence), communicating his character well through broad but interesting brushstrokes. Anthony Sher is on hand to play a petty tyrant of a doctor who gets his own alongside a whole uber-talented cast of British journeymen character actors (sort of equivalent to having the Wrecking Crew backing you up on your record back in the sixties), including that guy with the great face from American Werewolf in London, the dart-thrower who says, "You made me miss. I've never missed that board before." He, also, meets a bloody but photographically interesting fate.

This, however, is just one further illustration of the rule against mixing Yanks and Brits in a single cast. The subrule is that Brits can meld into an American cast, but the opposite is rarely true. Yes, it's been done, sometimes with some success, but you must take very great care, because acting is like football: the Brits do it better than we do. Anyway, there's a certain kind of acting that we do better, but that's not the kind in play in this movie. Benicio is a huge talent, one of our best, but his skills lie in underplaying, eccentric humour, and improvisational naturalism. Here, those skills lie pinned and squirming beneath the combined weight of a massively stodgy script and an overweening production design. He's playing a successful stage actor born in England but raised in America, and from his first line, which, unfortunately, is, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio...", it's apparent that he's in trouble: either out of his depth or in over his head, I'm uncertain which metaphor is apter.

The production design is a direct descendant from Coppola's Dracula, which is a film that I loved when I saw it the first time, completely abhorred when I saw it the second time, laughed at and enjoyed when I saw it again, et al, ad nauseam: the roller coaster never ends. Its flaws and achievements are all so bold that there is no tepid response possible, and it all depends much on one's sense of humour at the time of watching. Anyway, that one had an eerie sensuousness that was so over-the-top as to be occasionally magnificent (also it had Tom Waits eating flies; Coppola knows what we want), whereas this lacks anything so attention-grabbing. If anything, the sheer density of its arty atmosphere, that flag-waving, look-over-here insistence of it, makes you feel suspiciously like someone's trying to deflect your attention from the puniness of the storyline or possibly the dreariness of the dialogue.

Still, I am devoutly of the opinion that there can never be too many werewolf movies, and I applaud the effort to make the old-style, pre-Underworld, pre-Twilight, Lycanthropy-Is-A-Curse-Not-A-Form-Of-Sex-Appeal kind of howler.

some final thoughts on ward bond

2010-06-10T19:03:00.000-07:00

Alright, look: the parameters of the Bondfest have stretched way beyond what I cover in these posts. I've now seen sixty-eight Ward Bond films and two television appearances, all but seven of them watched (or happily re-watched) since I began the film festival four months ago. That includes movies like Chained, a little shipboard love story with Clark Gable and Joan Crawford from 1934 in which Bond has one scene, about five seconds long, as a ship's steward, and one line, and you see him only from the back with a tiny bit of profile, and if his physique and voice and movements were not so distinctive I'd never have known he was in it. The only one in which I haven't been able to find him is the Big House, a prison thing with the young Robert Montgomery (in a fabulous performance as a rich kid jailed for vehicular manslaughter who turns out to have a yellow streak a mile wide) and a burly Wallace Beery. I went back to IMDB and it says he plays Convict Holding Flowers, but I swear that's not Ward Bond. I'd put money on it.

I've seen so many that I no longer know what to write about them. He has become personal, sunk into my underconscious, so that he shows up now in my dreams. I had one the other night: I went to some sort of a hippie rally dressed in a flowing white skirt and blouse, and they slapped white paint across my face to mark me as one of theirs. Ward Bond was a soldier in civilian clothes, wearing the spectacles from Tall in the Saddle and with his hair greyed, but falsely-greyed, from a spray-can, like they do in theatre. He was wearing jeans and I remember thinking his ass and legs looked wrong, too skinny, undernourished.

After awhile your mind no longer experiences the films one at a time, but sorts them into bunches. Lately I've been seeing parallels. What are the chances that one man would be in two films about warring logging camps (Park Avenue Logger, Conflict) in the space of two years? Or there's Operation Pacific and Mr. Roberts, which share a nearly identical scene in which naval crews wreak havoc during their shore leave on a tropical island and it's all played for giggles, like it's fun and games when the white boys tear up your party and terrorize your girls.

There's 1938's Prison Break and the old Richard Barthelmess Heroes for Sale, both political statements: the first about how we as a society don't give ex-cons an even shake, the second about how we don't give reformed drug addicts an even shake. Bond just shows up for a few lines in a few scenes in the second one, as a railroad hobo called Red, and if you don't know the sound of his voice you'd think he wasn't in it. The movie itself is interesting, though. It begins with a great shot of soldiers pouring out of a WWI trench on a suicide mission, filmed from above. He gets greater play as the heavy in Prison Break, in which he's playing against Barton MacLane, an actor he'll be paired with in several films, including the Maltese Falcon and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

Sometimes he's playing the same role. There's Waterfront Lady and Slightly Dangerous, in which he plays the same dapper, loyal bodyguard tasked to stand guard over a beautiful woman for a rich guy. Slightly Dangerous, a lightweight Lana Turner Cinderella story with an even lighter-weight Robert Young as her leading man, has a good gag where Bond keeps taking Young out with a sock to the gut, but the third time Young is ready with a cutting-board stuffed inside his jacket. (Good times!) He's played a lot of morally shallow bullies; I've seen probably ten in the last month alone, and (despite the class differences) you can find similarities between Tim Dorson in Swamp Water and John Palmer Cass in Young Mr Lincoln, but Honey Bragg in Canyon Passage is unlike any other. There's not a false note in it. I love the time Bragg takes between his lines. Bond convinces us that he's both mentally slow and malevolently sly. The choices he makes in every conversation with Dana Andrews are absolutely true to character and full in ways that might be missed on a cursory viewing. It's possible that you have to watch a number of Bond films back-to-back to glean truly the extraordinary measure of its worth and beauty, this performance, but I'd have given him an Oscar for it, without hesitation.

Which brings me to another rather wonderful point: the way his fist-fighting technique alters from role to role. First, you have the class distinctions: is the boxer a gentleman or a hillbilly? Is he trained in the manly art of self-defence, or is his fighting style rough and self-invented? Gus "Knockout" Carrigan from Conflict might be an early version of John L Sullivan in Gentleman Jim, both heavily trained and hard-hitting but slower than their opponents. Wash Gibbs, the Duke's backwoods cousin from Shepherd of the Hills, is heavy but quick, Honey Bragg is unbelievably heavy-hitting but slow and lumbering, for all the world like the last of the dinosaurs. In the Long Gray Line, Captain Kohler is both highly-trained and very quick when he boxes against the untrained younger Tyrone Powers who will become his life-long protege. Then look at his two Mr Moto films (this is a series cashing in on the popularity of Charlie Chan in which Peter Lorre plays an unassuming Asian professor of criminology who travels the world solving crimes): heavyweight Biff Moran in Mr Moto's Gamble is a slick professional, while the wrestler Sailor Sam, in Mr Moto on Danger Island, is clumsy and slapdash.

Although he has as good a claim as anyone to being in a vaster number of important films than any other actor, part of that is sheer heft of resume. Certainly most of these films are not at all momentous, and many of the roles are tiny, like his hired-thug hockey-player in Times Square Lady, a Robert Taylor picture. He's got one murder, a few lines; extra points given for shirtlessness. Some of the films I'm fondest of are not what you'd call memorable except that Bond has a single good scene in them: as a Nazi bully in This Mortal Storm, a reluctant pilot in Made For Each Other (a depressing slice of marital bliss that not even Stewart and Lombard could make palatable), an unfortunate player in a poker game-turned-interrogation in the rollicking 1939 Western Dodge City.

But let's get back to Gentleman Jim, an Errol Flynn picture loosely based on the life of boxer Gentleman Jim Corbett. I'm no fan of biodrama. I don't like it these days when they at least make a stab at historical accuracy, and back then they didn't bother. You'd be forgiven for mistaking this for a Ford film because of the saccharine-sweet and feisty-cute Irish family. (One thing my Bondfest is doing for me is shortening my patience for that cute, hard-drinking, fighting Irish thing.) Bond gives one of his greatest turns as John L. Sullivan, though. This is one of those rare cases in which a role exists that really can only be played by a single person (like, for instance, the Viggo Mortensen role in Cronenberg's History of Violence). Someone else might have done the fighting and the braggodaccio, both of which he pulls off beautifully, but it's that last scene that's the killer: the one after he's lost his crown to Flynn's Corbett and he shows up alone and late and heavily bruised to the triumphal party and resigns his championship status in a very moving conversation. Another actor might have done it, of course, but not like this. Bond carries with him throughout the scene a numinous glow, the kind of thing you'd conjure up if you were playing a saint, a man who's just seen God on the road to Damascus, and the effect is breathtaking. In that single moment of space following their exchange, when Sullivan turns to leave and the crowd parts dumbly before him out of respect for this strange grace he's carrying, he does not see them at all, but pauses to put on his hat and walks out to face his future, a future empty now that his lifework is done; it's a heartbreaking thing. It's a perfect piece of film, and it's all Ward Bond. And, yes, I'd have given him a second Oscar, no question.

In any case, it has to end, my Bondfest, although I'm nowhere near the end of his CV. I've about exhausted Netflix, my local video store has liquidated all its old videos except for Oscar-winners (selfish, selfish bastards), and I can't keep buying movies off Ebay. TCM, it seems, shows some six to ten of his movies per month, so that'll keep me for a spell, but let's face it, it can't last. It has, however, been a gloriously fruitful animus projection. My God, the movies I've seen that I never would have otherwise. I've seen more Cagney, Crawford, Flynn, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews and Walter Brennan in the past months than in my previous life together. I thought I disliked Lana Turner and Joan Crawford and Robert Taylor. Jury's still out on all three counts but I know now that I like them more than I'd thought. Actors I'd never heard of, people like George O'Brien, Barton MacLane and Nat Pendleton are becoming old friends, all because of Ward.

I'm going to miss him, but the timing is right: it's time for World Cup 2010 to kick off, so I can't watch any movies for the next month, anyway. I'll be back here in July, once the football madness has ended. Meanwhile, come visit A Pretty Move if you'd like to follow the action and hysteria alongside us.

ward bond filmfest evening five: two completely insane john ford films

2010-05-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

The more Ford I watch, the more I get it that he's one strange cat. That clunky, unaccountably pedestrian sense of humor, particularly as it involves women, is just one element of it. (And it's not just Jane Darwell who gets repeatedly humbled. Maureen O'Hara must have been a really swell sport to put up with Coach so long. See for example the scene in the Long Gray Line where she finally offers herself up to Tyrone Power for a kiss. Ford gives her such awkward and unfunny comic business that it's no wonder she's come down to us as a second-rater. Nobody could pull that stuff off gracefully, not even a Glenda Jackson or Cate Blanchett.)

His romantic fixation on the armed forces, specifically focused on the familial clannishness of groups of men gathered around one paternal authority figure (Wayne's Spig Wead in Wings of Eagles, Powers' Marty Mahar in Long Gray Line, Robert Montgomery's Brickley in They Were Expendable, not to mention the similar dynamic in both the cavalry movies and the shape of his own little stable of actors and companions in life) bemuses me, but his work is so unified by this aspect of his vision that I can't fault it.

The way he throws himself headlong into unabashed sentimentality is both virtue and vice: it works like gangbusters when he balances it, as in the Searchers, with darkness, and cloys and gags until you feel like you're choking on treacle and lace doilies when he doesn't (Three Godfathers. Yes, there is death in it, but highly romanticized death, and it has not one character -- except an already-dead no-good brother-in-law -- who is not good-hearted, optimistic, and trustworthy. Which is not to say there is nothing worth seeing in the film. There is, if you can defend yourself successfully against the treacle and lace doilies).

I've seen some John Ford films that struck me as failures, some as brilliant failures, and others that are just downright brilliant, no caveats or addenda required. And now I can honestly say that I've seen two John Ford films that are unutterably, unequivocally insane.

The first is Salute!, an early comic tribute to the annual Army/Navy football game. The script, the gags, the acting and everything are so mannered and over-stylized that, even adjusting for an eighty-year shift in consciousness, nothing in it bears any resemblance at all to real life. Strike that: one thing in it feels like it came out of real life, and that's the very young John Wayne in his first speaking role. It's a small role, as Ward Bond's sidekick, of all things. Bond plays a tough upper-classman at the naval academy who bullies the younger boys... but not really; not in any way that makes any sense, anyhow.

The crazy stuff aside, though, it's sort of wonderful to see how easy and natural Duke is in front of the camera already, and that Bond has already formed more than just the rudiments of his own later persona. You wonder if this was a moment in time when it looked like Bond was being groomed to be the star, and Wayne might spend his career as second man through the door. Probably there was a moment like that, at least in Bond's mind, but even then you could see how much Ford liked looking at Wayne; he shows up in the background of every third group-shot.

Other than that, the football game is kind of fun, and George O'Brien is always easy to hang around with, but the rest of it is simultaneously insane and dull, like a schizophrenic in the corner reciting an endless Fibonacci sequence. Part of it, admittedly, is culture-shock: this is the first time I've seen Stepin Fetchit, which is a pail of cold water into the politically-correct face. He squires a goat around and has long, blandly horrifying comic routines, which I assume Ford thought were funny.

The other one, Tobacco Road, is not just divorced from reality, but entirely bughouse whacked. Not having read the book, I sat slack-jawed with wonder and confusion, wondering what the hell was going on, then ran to the library next day and I'm here to tell you what the movie left out: all the Southern Gothic, all the twisted darkness, all the death and most of the pornography (everything's gone except that famous shot of Gene Tierney, half-clad and seductively pushing herself through the dirt toward Ward Bond). Then it added a nice whitebread deus ex machina in the Dana Andrews character.

In the movie, nobody has facial deformities: Sister Bessie has lost her boneless shotgun-nose and Ellie May, instead of being frightfully ugly with her extreme wound-like hare-lip, looks like, well, Gene Tierney, for God's sake. The first scene in the film, when the Lesters steal the turnips away from Lov (Ward Bond), is crazy mad and makes no sense, since Ward Bond is strong enough to whip them all if he wants to. In the book it works because Ellie May has her way with him right there in the courtyard, with Ada and Grandma standing by to hit him over the head with boards if he tries to disengage, and that gives Jeeter the opportunity to steal the bag away. The writing is subtly pornographic and leaves one with the unsettling impression that Ellie May's brother Dude takes advantage of her prone nakedness there in the courtyard after everyone else has scattered. The movie, being all cleaned up, begins to suggest the seduction then leaves off with the three women fighting Lov into submission, which is the first wrong note in a long film full of unintentional discordance.

In the book, there's a lot of lust and savage hatred (everyone hates Grandma, who never speaks but skulks around the edges scavaging food when she can, and nobody really notices when she crawls away and dies) and some crack-brained theodical noodling, and it all culminates in big fiery death for the mater and pater. None of that is in the film. All the darkness is transmuted into madcap highjinks. Dude is constantly yelling, which kind of sticks your finger to the fast-forward button, and Sister Bessie is constantly singing hymns. There are a few laughs: Ada computing the number of her children in terms of "head" like cattle, Lov flipping the car over as an afterthought to belting Dude. The one thing the movie really has going for it is the photography. Ford uses layers of broken-down fences to give depth and texture to shots of the road and the homestead; he'll do a similar thing later in My Darling Clementine at the OK Corral. He also uses thick swirlings of autumn leaves for texture, and tilted camera angles to give us an appropriate sense of the off-kilter, and that's all gorgeous and satisfying.

But, ultimately, what is this movie aiming to be? A swan-song for the old South, or a burlesque sketch sending it up? It's never clear, and it works as neither. It feels like a meth-head fable without a moral, like the Beverly Hillbillies on crack. There is a disclaimer at the beginning suggesting it was based not so much on the book as on the Broadway production, which was wildly popular: to this day, Tobacco Road reigns as the second longest-running nonmusical in Broadway history. Reading the plot synopsis, though, the play still kept its darkness, its harelips and panicking underaged brides and terrible, wasteful deaths. It looks like the buck stops either with Ford or the studio in my search for whatever fellow squeezed the ugliness out of it and tried vainly to whip it into prettiness with a sugary coating. In an interview with the St Petersburg Times in 1940, Ford said, "We have no dirt in the picture. We've eliminated the horrible details and what we've got left is a nice dramatic story. It's a tear-jerker, with some comic relief. What we're aiming at is to have our customers sympathize with our people and not feel disgusted."

Aha. Nice dramatic story, my ass. Ford got this job because of his brilliance with handling the poor folks in the Grapes of Wrath, but anyone with hindsight can see how ill-suited he is for the project. He harbored a horror of the dysfunctional family, the wife/mother who is anything but loving and strong, the father who abdicates the role. This incestuous den of cannibals to whom blood-ties mean nothing short of a savage prison sentence would have given him nightmares. It's no wonder he came up with a wacky mess. I have a mental image of him with his dark glasses and navy cap and pipe, his face pinched and pruned with maiden-auntish distaste, trying to sop up all the generations of the Lesters' dirt and viciousness with one of those famous handkerchiefs he used to chew on, and to no avail.

things I've been watching: may 2010

2010-05-12T16:45:00.000-07:00

An Education: (2009. dir: Lone Scherfig) As per the hype, Carey Mulligan is indeed both skilled and adorable. The cast at large is highly satisfying. The appeal is not so much in the story, which is an old and simple one (young girl nearly throws away her future when swept away by an affable roue), but in the easy, charming way it's put together. Scherfig and his team manage to avoid those sucking fens of sentiment and cliche, realizing a place and time (suburban London in the early '60s) truly and without ostentation.

I was going to say that how you react to this movie depends on how you feel about Peter Sarsgaard, the rotter in question, and to a large extent I stick to that. If you don't like him, you won't like the movie. He's got the most difficult role because we never really get inside his head; we see him from the outside, through the eyes of others. On the other hand, I've always liked Sarsgaard; I'll go out of my way to see a movie if he's in it; and I think he's missed something crucial in this role. Having said that triggers a flag in my head and I go back to the last time I mentioned him in a post (reviewing In the Electric Mist) and by gum if I didn't say pretty close to the same thing about his performance in that. My reluctant conclusion is that he's one of those lazy actors who ignores the problem aspects of a character, glosses past them trusting charm and enigmatic smiles to carry him through instead of tackling and solving them, as, say, Glenda Jackson or Daniel Day-Lewis might do. It's not the worst thing that can be said about an actor. He's in good company. Henry Fonda comes to mind in that respect. More than once I've seen Fonda go kind of blank and stoical when a sticky corner of a character or a problem line presents itself (see, for instance, There Was a Crooked Man). And who doesn't still love Fonda? In any case, charming as he is, Sarsgaard is the potentially weak link in the cast. And, by God, I still like him.

Alfred Molina gets much of the buzz for his turn as The Father, and he is, as always, very good, but it's Rosamund Pike who turned my head as the decidedly unclever beauty dating the cad's business partner and best friend. Most actresses would play her lines for the laughs for which I think they were written, but she avoids that easy way. Every thick thing she says is completely frank, often tinged with that panic experienced by those who are highly intuitive about people but completely without intellectual prowess and who discomfitingly find themselves surrounded by clever people.

the China Syndrome: (1979. dir: James Bridges) Nuclear power scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. Driving past Hanford on the way home from Seattle used to give me a badassed case of the creeps. This is the place where the plutonium was manufactured for the bomb we threw at Nagasaki. The tower is fat and squat and has an evil dome like something Saruman would have built.

I remember seeing this movie at the drive-in. It's got an anti-nuclear message and Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas and it might have been self-righteous and awful except that it was made right at that cusp, just before the hideousness of the eighties was brought to bear on filmmaking, while there was still a use of quiet and verisimilitude. The instigating scene, in which there is a panic at the nuclear plant caused by a faulty gauge and secretly filmed by a team of news reporters there to do a fluff piece, is a wonderful thing. The combination of Jack Lemmon and Wilfrid Brimley is lovely. The suspense is allowed to build unforced by music or fancy camera nonsense, just through a decent script and some damn fine acting. There is some oversimplification, I assume for the sake of the drama, in which the nuclear muckymucks wear blacker than is perhaps believable hats, killing without conscience; or maybe I'm a little Pollyanna, I don't know. Anyway, good vs evil are suspiciously pat here, which brings us back to the first law of learning your history from Hollywood, which is: don't do it.

The best part is the directing: simple, straightforward, the telling of a story. I miss the seventies. I miss silence over rolling credits. I miss little things like Jane Fonda carrying a tortoise inside when she walks into her house, a tortoise that she never talks to or about, that never gets explained or addressed; you just know it's part of her life and that suggests that there are many parts of her life you know nothing about which suggests that her life stretches beyond the boundaries of the screen in all directions, which is never a bad thing in filmmaking, and doesn't happen enough anymore in these literal times.

Junior Bonner: (1972. dir: Sam Peckinpah) A peculiarly sweet and endearing ode to rodeo -- peculiarly sweet for Peckinpah, especially. Steve McQueen and Robert Preston make an easy and likable father-son team. I've never been a Preston fan -- he's a little too musical-theatre for me,-- but in this role as a hard-drinking, hard-riding, jovial storyteller of a man who always pleases his audience, it works. The really extraordinary part comes from Ida Lupino, though. Never in all my years have I seen a female character in any Peckinpah film given the opportunity for depth and sympathy that Lupino's is here, and she doesn't waste it. Plus (bonus!) there's Ben Johnson, always a good thing.

The Sun Also Rises: (1957. dir: Henry King) Picaresque Lost Generation ramble from bar to bar, drink to drink, diversion to diversion. No one ever writes or works at all, except bartenders and bullfighters. It reads better than it plays because the writer had a certain talent. Twenty years later or made in Europe, it'd've been edited more dynamically; as it stands, there's a dull, repeating sequence in which they walk into a bar, remove their wraps, order their drinks, over and over. Instead of pulling in and making it personal, the filmmakers pulled out and made it epic, which is sometimes pretty but mostly a bore. Tyrone Power is alright and Ava Gardner is gorgeous. The bullfighter is played by the very young Robert Evans, which is kind of a kick, but the only real attraction is Errol Flynn as an aging, drunken roue watching himself fade into impotency and unimportance but still able to laugh at himself. It's fascinating and true and unutterably sad, and I'd have given him an Oscar for it.