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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Seriously, I mean it. Someone should remake this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

snow white and the huntsman: a portrait of female rage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sorcerer: the gods live in the details

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

last night's double feature: bernie and exit humanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

anonymous: pretty lies

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

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

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

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

POSTSCRIPT:

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

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

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

the skin i live in: permanent damage

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

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

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

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

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

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