horror double feature: outcast and the wicker tree

Outcast: (2010. dir: Colm McCarthy) A fascinating story (with very good actors, including Kate Dickie and James Nesbitt) about a war of magicks between Irish gypsies in Edinburgh. It allows sufficient ambiguity to power the "alleg'ree", but you never feel the filmmakers are cheating by not knowing the answers to their own questions. It is set in a modern slum, a world of some ugliness emphasized both by the palette of browns and oranges used and by the abuse of the camera, which never, poor thing, gets set down to do its work properly. I suppose all the fancy camera-tricks were meant to flash up the low-budget aspects, and it's not the worst cinematography I've ever seen, but I'm taking up a collection to send this guy a tripod anyway.

Because of the strangeness of it, its boldness of story, that and the quality of the acting, I recommend it in spite of its flaws.

the Wicker Tree: (2011. dir: Robin Hardy) I was so looking forward to it, and it is so beyond dreadful. Looking back, who can put a finger exactly on what it was that made the original Wicker Man great? It is very nearly stuck in low-budget camp, and yet it survives as a true classic of horror filmmaking. This one is not fit to hold its elfen boots. This one is like some hippie renaissance faire gone awry. This one is crap.

Where is the tension? There is none. The first held us in its grip because our innocent wayfarer placed himself out of the best intentions in a place of increasing eeriness which began to tighten around him vice-like until he was crushed by it. This one places a pair of rather incredible innocents (a newly Born Again Texan couple: she is a famous country singer, recently shed of her previously sluttish image and now squeaky clean, he is a charming cowboy who still drinks without guilt but has sworn chastity until marriage) in a grim situation which we all understand from the outset, and the tension is supposed to come of watching them rise into the horror of comprehension, but it doesn't. The initial misstep is that they are there not to solve a crime but to bring souls to Jesus, a mission that is treated by both filmmaker and nouveau-Summerislanders (reset in the Scottish village of Tressock) with a sort of amused pity from the get-go, and so we are discouraged from relating to these already barely tenable lead characters.

Because we go in with pre-knowledge of its destination, the movie's best hope, really, is to charm us with the pleasure of the company of those natives, and this the script does not allow. The characters are loosely and blandly written, and so the gorey set-pieces do not touch us in that visceral place for which they are aiming. Honeysuckle Weeks's pale and thin hetaira is beggared in comparison with Britt Ekland and the dance which inspired a thousand wet-dreams, the plot is convoluted without being particularly interesting, Christopher Lee is in it for maybe thirty seconds (part of an inane flashback), and we, Hardy's Once-Hopeful Audience, are left adrift in an ever-expanding wake of disappointment.

maximilian schell-fest: evening two

*SPOILER ALERT BOTH MOVIES*

Topkapi: (1964. dir: Jules Dassin) I don't like heist films, generally, and I'm not wild about Carnaby Street camp. You put the two together and I wind up grinding my teeth all through the Italian Job, despite its many charms. Topkapi seduces even a hard-case like me because of its cast of well-defined misfits, led by the irresistible Melina Mercouri, and given poignancy by the comic subtleties of Peter Ustinov as a small-time crook over his head and out of his league in a plot to steal fabulous emeralds. Schell is the suave, unflappable brains behind the operation. It's a perfectly-timed romp with plenty of tension at the appropriate moments, as you might expect from the director of Rififi ... and then it's spoiled by its ending. This is one heist which ought to have been pulled off. The end feels like a cheat, and is further cheapened by the comic tag from the Turkish prison.

This film doesn't belong to Schell: it belongs to Mercouri and Ustinov. Still, after all the sober intensity of my Maximilian Schell film festival, it's nice at last to see him relaxed and enjoying himself.

the Young Lions: (1958. dir: Edward Dmytryk) Schell's first foray into Hollywood is a remarkably adroit one, but the film itself is one of those ridiculously self-indulgent epics, the kind that were edited with extra seconds on either end of each scene to show off the picturesque locales. It's also a big mush of comedy and drama, as personified by the casting of Dean Martin opposite Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. (Yes, I'm a sucker for Rio Bravo as much as the next guy, Dude included, but there's something about The Dean Martin Persona which does not translate past his generation; he comes across as slimy, unhealthy, mean-spirited, grotesquely charmless.) The first half of this endless movie traces three or four stupidly-written romances, the most awful being between Hope Lange's non-character and Clift's underdoggy soldier. Still, once you've fast-forwarded through all that, and also through Brando's "soulful" romance with a feisty Parisian gal, there are unforgettable pieces: namely, the scene in which the badly-wounded Schell asks Brando to visit his wife ("convince her that I am salvageable"), then the scene of the visit itself. Schell's Captain Hardenberg has been disfigured in a mine accident while sharing a motorbike ride in the desert with Brando, who escapes unscathed, and whom he suspects (rightly) of having been his treasured wife's lover.

The scene in which Brando's Lt Diestl visits him in hospital is a piece of unheimlich surrealism that will not leave my mind. Brando is all but speechless with guilt, and Schell, his head swollen and obscured by bandages, communicates his mania not just vocally but with those strange, long hands. It is the best written thing in the film, a scene in which this character, whom we have previously known only through Brando's eyes, manipulates him marvellously, convincing him to bring the weapon with which he will kill himself, an act of which Brando will not learn until he arrives in the broken-down shell of the wife's house in Berlin. This is the second best scene, and Brando's best, when he realizes with horror both the awful, destructive nature of the marriage and of his own destructive part in its drama.

an evening of maximilian schell

Cross of Iron: (1977. dir: Sam Peckinpah) Watching this film is like visiting the exact place in Quentin Tarantino's brain where Inglourious Basterds first took hold. Schell's Prussian, medal-obsessed Captain Stransky is one of those men who is so awful, so charmless and arrogant, that you'd leave the room if he walked into it. Schell gives him very exact and telling quirks and body language: the way he combs his hair, for instance, puts one oddly in mind of a serial killer. An under-achieving aristocrat stuck at the crumbling Eastern front where class means nothing, Stansky is fixated on cheating his way into obtaining the Iron Cross, as he is coward enough he will never earn it rightfully. In the final scenes, after a protracted and often near-fatal enmity with our Iron-Cross-wearing hero, Sergeant Steiner (James Coburn in another fruitful venture with Peckinpah), the story nearly flips out of its cynicism into a place of possible salvation, a surprise turn which Peckinpah dangles in front of us but never really has trouble resisting.

This is a very fine film in many respects, and its best scene is a tour-de-force for Schell and his Stansky: having gleaned that his lieutenant is gay, he coaxes the man and his young lover to confess it, then uses the knowledge for blackmail. It might have been the inspiration for that later scene in Basterds when Christoph Waltz's snakelike villain wheedles and wrenches the whereabouts of hidden Jews from a French villager. Although that later scene is more sublime and certainly more enjoyable, Schell's is so horrid in its unctuous manipulation that it is difficult to watch, impossible to look away from, and leaves one feeling soiled and skinless, as many of the best Peckinpah scenes do.



Julia: (1977. dir: Fred Zinnemann) I've loved this movie since I was a kid. It's well established now that Lillian Hellman made it up out of whole cloth and dressed it up, very effectively, as memoir. The book is good, and the movie is very, very good. It's one of the best edited films you'll ever see, and photographed to evoke flawlessly the atmosphere of the times. It's shaped like memory is shaped: moments from different years blend into one another apparently at random, as your life does, once it's stored in the brain. There may be an overuse of soft-focus (and I cringe at Jane Fonda's downturned inflections when finishing interrogatives, a pretention that only theatre students use); certainly there is some sentimental hogwash written into the script. (Absolutely it's hogwash that anyone who knew Lillian Hellman would want her looking after their child, and utter hogwash that she would break her heart looking for the little tyke.) Set historicity to one side, though: this is Lillian Hellman, a champion liar, and it's Hollywood Hellman, to boot. Look instead to the use of music as accent to the ominous, and use of distance and lightning-cut to suggest the fading or calling up of memory. These effects and more are masterfully used.

And here are great performances: not only Redgrave and Robards, and (inflections aside) Fonda, but Meryl Streep and Hal Holbrook and John Glover in secondary but memorable roles. And Maximilian Schell: this was the first time I saw him, and his performance was unlike anything I'd seen before. He is a resistance-fighter come to Paris at the behest of Hellman's friend Julia (Redgrave) to ask her help in smuggling money into Berlin. His manner is so singular that, when set beside the easy familiarity of Jane Fonda, he seemed almost totally unreadable to me in my youth. Now, many viewings later, it seems an unpretentious, straightforward portrayal, but looking closely I see the hallmarks of brilliance. In one moment Mr. Johann is the very soul of blandness; in the next, he is weirdly baleful. It is a perfect face for an undercover fighter, exactly controlled but with an underlay of anxiety tugging at the musculature. When he sits to eat, he clutches hold of his coat and eats quickly, his eyes never still, always checking the perimeter.

Sometimes it pays to watch a film first as a child: you can be fair certain that the things that stick with you, the strange things which remain in your memory, are the extraordinary ones, and Schell's performance, which might look lackluster at a first adult glance, is one of those extraordinary things.

ward bond would be 109

And in honor of his birthday on April 9th, TCM gave us twelve straight hours of hard-to-find selections from the vast, rich Golconda that was his oeuvre. Since I no longer have cable, I parked myself on my mom's couch to watch four films, all, delightfully, from 1936. I wanted to stay and watch Santa Fe Trail again, which doesn't have much Bond to it (or anything to do with the Santa Fe Trail, as I recall), but offers a lot else, including Errol Flynn and Van Heflin and Raymond Massey as John Brown. Alas, though, the way life is shaped, sometimes you have to do other things besides watching Ward Bond movies. It's a dirty jip, copper, but there it is.



*SPOILER ALERT*
Avenging Waters: (1936. dir: Spencer Gordon Bennett) These first two are old Ken Maynard westerns. This was back when cowboys were musical and wore insanely huge hats. My mom wandered in halfway through and said are those good guys or bad guys and I said look at the hats! The hats are white! Those guys are good! Yes, life was that simple once.

This poor plot has Texas-sized holes torn in it. Ward Bond is a not-very-smart but certainly evil cattle-baron hoist by his own petard when he dams the river to drive another rancher off his land, then a storm (sent by a vengeful god, I guess) takes out the dam and it floods Ward out. He jumps on the back of a horse, leaving the heroine to drown (she just stands there instead of running for the hills like a normal person, so maybe this was the vengeful god's way of cleaning out the gene pool). Luckily, white-hatted Ken Maynard is in town on his faithful white horse Tarzan, and so she lives, probably to slow the evolution of the race by procreating.

The worst part of this movie is the party-scene, an excuse for bad jokes and lots of musical ridiculousness. The best part is at the beginning, when the heroine is attacked by a mountain lion (a real mountain lion!), with no suspense-music or anything, just a nice build-up and attack, and Ken Maynard shoots the poor beast just in time but it spooks her horse which goes barrelling head-first off a cliff into the river, with Maynard on Tarzan right after it. I don't even want to think about how they did those stunts. Did those horses even survive? If I could watch it again, I'd put money on it that they didn't risk the real Tarzan. That horse had a stunt-horse on call, I'm sure of it.

There's another part where Maynard is being dragged by a horse, gesticulating madly in close-up while racing scenery is projected behind him, and he's rescued when Tarzan gallops abreast and somehow he mounts up and gets his leg free... Truly ridiculous. Yakima Canutt would have been red-faced and sputtering foul-mouthed curses.


Cattle Thief: (1936. dir: Spencer Gorden Bennett) Now, THIS one is worth watching. Maynard is not just the white-hatted hero riding Tarzan, he is also in disguise as a doltish wares-salesman. A double role! He wears a little mask when he rides out in his big white hat to do his good deeds.

Ward Bond has more interesting matter to chew on here as the evil ranch-manager trying to clean up at the expense of local cattlemen while his boss is temporarily incapacitated. And the stunts are far better: there's one of those great overtaking-the-runaway-wagon-at-full-gallop things that I love so much. There's also a silly scene in which cattle are stampeded in a bottle-neck, which John Wayne could have told you would result in a sort of meat-grinder effect, but these beeves emerge miraculously unscathed, no doubt due to the spotlessly good intentions of Ken Maynard and Tarzan in their ongoing quest to make the world just, fair, and safe.


The Man Who Lived Twice: (1936. dir: Harry Lachman) Ah, my favorite of the four! A nice stretch for Ralph Bellamy, who gets a doubling role as a hardened criminal who undergoes brain surgery to become a model citizen. It's well shot, too, with the action scenes done in quick, effective montage. If only the expository scenes were also done with such snappy aplomb, it'd be a very good film. As it is, it's a lot of fun, mostly because Ward Bond will steal your heart as a good-hearted, steadfast ex-boxer who is the criminal's stalwart sidekick.

Get a load of some dialogue:

Moll: What’d you do, swap your heart for a bowl of chicken salad?
Sidekick: Chicken salad ain’t bad.

If that kind of illogical sass appeals to you, you'll be won like I was.


Muss 'em Up: (1936. dir: Charles Vidor) A witty parlor-room whodunnit in the style of the Thin Man, although somewhat thinner on the charm and wit and very much thinner on the charisma. Decent as he is, Preston Foster is nobody's William Powell. That said, Vidor helms it well with decent comic timing and whoever wrote it had the chops to carry it without knocking off our collective socks. Bond has a small but recurring role as a hired goon who turns out to be neither the smartest nor the baddest hombre in the mansion.

triple feature: invasion, planet of the apes, creature from the black lagoon

Invasion: (2007. dir: Oliver Hirschbiegel) With vision and style, with both primary (Kidman, Northam, Craig) and secondary (Jeffrey Wright, Roger Rees, Celia Weston, Josef Sommer) casts impeccably chosen, this Body-Snatchers remake nearly succeeds. It stumbles and falls on three counts: too-fancy editing techniques, some credulity-stretching pieces of action (can a ten-year-old boy really jam a syringe full of adrenaline into his mother’s heart? I mean, could he physically do it? I’m asking), and a ham-fisted heaviness in treating the “alleg’ree” (as Jeremy Northam so charmingly calls it in one of the extras). Still, the palette is lovely, and there is a very creepy progression in which the city streets go from being loud and obnoxious to quiet and listening, peopled by humanoids posed with strange, still menace at bus-stops and news kiosks. You fool them by not emoting. (“You’re sweating,” a poker-faced cop tells Kidman quietly. “They don’t do that. They’ll know.”) There’s a chilling, early moment with two little boys playing video games on the front steps. One says, “Something’s wrong with my dad.” The other says, “Mine too,” and they never look up, just keep playing.

Also, the means of spreading the alien contagion is truly disgusting.



Planet of the Apes: (1968. dir: Franklin J. Schaffner) “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn, dirty ape.” Classic lines. Classic images. This one has them all; it's a work of true innovation. Now, in retrospect, the dialogue is a little clunky, the timing a little slow, the simian maquillage sadly dated, but who can look for flaws in an archetypal classic of this stature? I’m not going to give it away, in case you’ve had your head in the sand for the past forty years and have never watched it, but that final image is as stunning as they come, with no music over it, just the sounds of Heston’s jeremiad and the waves crashing up on shore.




*SPOILER ALERT*

Creature from the Black Lagoon: (1954. dir: Jack Arnold) It begins with God creating the universe, and a voiceover explaining how evolution is not incompatible with creationism. I’m serious! Then it launches into some of the Ed-Woodenest dialogue you ever heard, punctuated by native Amazonian red-shirts getting murdered by a guy in an awkward, rubbery, lizard-like suit. Then, about twenty minutes or so in, a beautiful thing starts to happen: underwater scenes which are so well-filmed that one finds oneself becoming enchanted. That same monster who’d looked so absurd out of water is graceful and lovely in it, and the scene in which Julia Adams goes for a swim and the monster falls in love, paralleling her in a gorgeous water-ballet, is a stunner. Later on, the underwater fight scenes are gripping, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t find it utterly tragic, in the end, when that lizard-man’s movements slowed, then stopped, and he began his final, graceful descent into the abyss from whence he’d emerged.

life as we know it and young adult: ballbreaking 101

Life As We Know It: (2010. dir: Greg Berlanti)
I have long been of the opinion that certain movies exert a malign influence on an audience. I suppose every demographic has its insidious examples, but it’s the girls in whom I’m most interested (since boys run the studios, I guess they can take care of their own), and so I notice when Hollywood slips a devil into a film to try and lull my demographic into unhealthy perspectives on life.

Sleepless in Seattle was one of the first offenders I noticed (I'm certain there had been many before which slipped worm-like into my subconscious and are probably still causing all manner of grief). You can’t call it evil, of course, but it’s a dangerous girl-fantasy in that it pushes forward an absurd but absurdly attractive paradigm in which finding your soul-mate is the hard part of a relationship; that once you make it to the top of the Empire State Building, the hard work is done and your relationship will be smooth sailing from there on out. It’s a dangerous message, but not deadly, since every girl in the world is going to find out it’s a crock of shit about four days after she first falls in love.

Now let’s look at Life As We Know It. Not a girl-fantasy so much as a woman-fantasy, it was obviously made for a specific demographic (women whose biological clocks are sounding, relatively new mothers, and with a wider and probably more dangerous reach into the set of women who are raising children and are unhappy in their spousal relationships). I call this kind of movie Ballbreaking 101, but The Stepford Husband Effect might be more to the point. These movies teach us, if we allow it, that as long as we are focused on those noble goals of Marriage and Child-rearing, then we are fully within our rights to ALTER our flawed male companion by any tactics necessary, whether it be through guilt, self-righteous carping, even violence, until he is sufficiently neutered to cause us no further trouble.

The basics are these: Messer (Josh Duhamel from the Transformers series) is the anti-romantic-hero. He is slovenly (symbolized by the baseball cap he wears constantly), sluttish, seducing women and casting them aside in the mornings with "I'll-call-you" lies, determined not to settle down (symbolized by his beloved motorcycle), and completely sexually irresistible to everyone except our heroine (Katherine Heigl as Holly), who is staunchly immune to his charms. Through a series of Hollywood plot-devices, the two of them inherit their best friends' baby and must move into their house and raise the child together.

But these two are archenemies, and, ultimately, either one must fall or one must change. Because this is a romcom, we know nobody will fall, and because it is a woman-fantasy, we know who will do the changing. Slowly and surely, Messer is stripped of everything he calls his own. Holly gets the baseball cap by letting the baby take a crap in it and using that as an excuse to throw it out. (Message to Holly: the bathroom floor is linoleum. Let the baby crap on the floor then clean it up.) She wrecks his motorcycle, tossing it beneath a bus to ensure that the damage is irreparable. When he gets a break in his career, an opportunity to direct a live sportscast, she refuses to take the kid and so his chance is ruined. Yes, OK, this last was his-job-or-her-job, so it's nice that she didn’t place more importance on his job than on her own, but the point is this whole movie is a Take-a-Sexy-Man-and-Change-Him-Into-Your-Lapdog thing. The worst part is that he lets it happen. In the paradigm of the film, he secretly knows, as the women in the audience gloatingly think they know, that her view is the true one, her feminine wisdom will triumph, for her goals are the noble ones.

My question is this: is this really the world-view we want to support? Is it really alright to enter into a relationship with an aim to reshape our partner from the ground up as if he's some sort of accessory to our (more important) lives? And what kind of a kid will this baby grow into, used as it is as a weapon in this ongoing war?

It is well acted, this incubus-film, and well-photographed, with one very effective shot at the end, where the camera snorkels out of the house as they're walking into their little girl's birthday party, backs up, flies over the house then backs away over the trees, a sort of "and they lived happily ever after" shot. Well done, and that's all part of the insidious nature of this devil-film.



Young Adult: (2011. dir: Jason Reitman)
And then there's Young Adult. This is the anti-Life As We Know It:

Matt: Buddy Slade has a life.
Mavis: No, Buddy Slade has a baby, and babies are boring.

Charlize Theron (Mavis) and Patton Oswalt (Matt) share a galvanic chemistry as the bitter-tongued duo who, it turns out, are perfectly matched once you dig beneath their mismatched skins, his body malformed after an ancient beating, her body perfect but her soul malformed by her own seemingly endless series of terrible personal choices.

Mavis is heavily damaged, living an empty life as the author of a vapid Young Adult series of novellas in a slovenly apartment with a neglected dog and a television constantly tuned to the Kardashian sisters. On finding out that her high school sweetheart has a newborn baby, she becomes obsessed with winning him back, thereby revivifying her lost youth, those years when she was seemingly unassailable. Her journey back to her hometown is a journey into hell, but thanks to Cody’s unflinching pen, a very funny journey into hell. These people have flaws and quirks, and, in Mavis' case, an almost pathological gracelessness (to her crippled friend: "Could you walk any slower?") and extremes of self-medication to fend off self-examination. They talk like real people talk, and are upon occasion deadly, seriously funny.

It's official; I'm now a Diablo Cody fan. I appreciated Juno's cleverness but in the end felt a little moist with it preciousness. Then there was Jennifer's Body, which I watched almost secretly, almost apologetically, expecting a sort of cataclysmic debacle, but I was happily surprised with it, its boldness, its strangeness, how it kept twisting my expectations with odd moments of truth.

And now this. This movie is such a relief. Sometimes watching Mavis' trainwreck approach to life is nearly unbearable, but Cody always gives a reprieve just at the last minute: a moment of long-overdue self-awareness or wry humour in the nick of time. And it's got a throwback-to-the-90s hipster soundtrack, crowded with Mats, Dino Jr, Cracker, Teenage Fanclub, a soundtrack Mavis uses to transport herself back into a past in which she remembers herself happy, whether she was or not.

This is a movie for those of us who got broken along the way but manage to go on living, regardless. In the end, although its ostensible message is that, reprehensible as your behaviour is, you don't really have to change as long as you keep running fast enough, that message is delivered with sufficiently ironic humour to twist itself back around into a question.

the swimming pool: the sex lives of the rich and gorgeous

Swimming Pool: (1969. dir: Jacques Deray) One of those overheated, madly sensuous European films from the sixties that fails only as often as its sexual tension fails, which is more often than it ought, since Alain Delon is ridiculously beautiful here, impossibly beautiful. In the protracted quiet of the film's opening moments, we close in on him while he sweats, motionless by the eponymous pool, burnished and lethargized with constant sun and sexual satisfaction and encroaching ennui. We hear a woman call his name and see his indifferent response; he is roused only for an enraged moment when she douses him with water before he falls back into his stupor. She emerges, and we see it is Romy Schneider, wearing an enigmatic smile and little else, and the ensuing make-out scene is one of the most sensuously filmed ever, with camera angles I can only call very French indeed. Delon's enthusiasm to get her top off in order to scratch her back properly, with its contrast to his previous inertia, is galvanic.

Schneider is very good in a nearly thankless role which involves a lot of Mona-Lisa-like suggestive smiling at both her lover and her obnoxious ex-lover (who comes to visit with his coltishly sexy MacGuffin of a virgin-daughter), smiles evocative of a supreme confidence in her sexual power. It is only towards the end, when the plot breaks through the almost silly thickness of constant libidinous energy and takes a more interesting turn that she, and indeed the movie itself, really begins to engage above the crotch level.

The trouble with these films, -- the kind of swinging film showing us the lifestyle of the sexually liberated rich and beautiful people, -- is that they tend towards a strange naivete, perhaps because they're designed for the leering, voyeuristic pleasure of those of us who don't engage in the lifestyle and therefore have little knowledge to draw on in judging their veracity (or perhaps because the lifestyle itself is based on some basic fallacy; I cannot speak to that, however, never having lived among the rich and beautiful except in the cinema). The truest part of it seemed to me that heaviness of boredom at the beginning, as if the life of this gorgeous couple was constructed around a wall of ennui punctuated by great ecstatic lunges of passion followed by ever-deeper plunges into a treacherous hogwallow of post-coital melancholy. Add to that what my boyfriend would call its coy "black-out" amorphousness (as in, "OK, so did they have sex after the black-out or not?"), and you get a lot of teasing with no clear answers.

Which is alright, it turns out, since in the end it's not the sex which matters; it's the sexual tension that is the force which propels the action. One of the film's flaws is that the script employs a Pinteresque avoidance of the central issue (which is always sex) in its conversation, but without Pinter's, you know, genius, so for example the dinner-scene during which the four child-adults are sitting around pointedly Not Talking About The Sex Which May Or May Not Have Happened During The Black-out is a little embarrassing, but in a way which seems true enough to life, so one forgives it, even as one is thinking rather wistfully of Pinter.

It's possible this film was trying to evoke Purple Noon, that grand gesture of boldly-colored French noir which cemented Delon's stardom in the first place, with its sun-soaked eroticism and twisted psychological darkness. It's not as good as that, but it's not bad. And Delon and Schneider are not just easy on the eyes; the mere act of watching them is in fact so pleasurable that it's nigh on impossible to look away.