things i've been watching: april edition

North Shore (1987. dir: William Phelps) You know the story: naive haolie survives wipeouts along with nosebleeds and "barney" taunts from locals, but charms the pretty native girl and hones his surfing talents under the tutelage of a reclusive master. Much of it is by-the-numbers (bad '80s pop and horrible neon pastel surf-gear), but it's got some fantastic footage (Mark Foo! Ken Bradshaw! Laird Hamilton!). You get to experience exactly what it's like to wipe out and get stuck in the caves beneath Pipeline, but also the rushing, ambient moment of green solitude when the tube curls over you and you are alone with the ocean. Gregory Harrison obviously loves playing the Mitch Yost/Big Kahuna character, an old-style board-shaper who teaches his charge that surfing is a thing to be done for itself, not for gain or adulation. So far so good, but then he sends the boy back to the mainland, to New YORK, for God's sake, to take advantage of a partial scholarship in design. Two problems with that: first off, you know how hard it is to find decent surfing in New York? It can be done, but the water's gonna be foul and the beaches dirty and crowded. And secondly, you know how hard it is to live in New York on a PARTIAL scholarship? You couldn't afford the gas money to get to the beach at all. Stay in Hawaii, son. Shape boards. Rise at dawn and catch waves. Live in a hut on the beach. Decorate it with seashells. WARNING: if you're not in love with surfing, there is absolutely no reason to watch this film.

Geronimo: an American Legend (1993. dir: Walter Hill) Gorgeous dip into frontier history, penned by crazy man John Milius and given the full studio whoopdeedoo in the wake of those monster hits Dances With Wolves and Last of the Mohicans. Wes Studi is spectacular, and the thing is full of fantastic moments by the likes of Scott Wilson and Stephen McHattie, both of whom have just one scene but fire their scraps of dialogue up into the realm of greatness, the realm of sublimity. Also, Jason Patric has a great bit where he pulls his horse down to use as a shield, then remounts it as it's rising back up. It probably sounds easier than it looks, and sure as hell it's harder to do than it looks. A million bucks says Patric's prouder of that stunt (you can tell it's him that does it) than anything else in the film. Kudos to the stunt-horse, as well. I tell you, there ought to be Horse Oscars.

Hell's Angels (1930. dir: Howard Hughes) It's always a little shocking to go back in time to when they were still inventing how movies would be made. There are moments in Hell's Angels when the acting is so bad, the dialogue so forced, the plot so melodramatic that it's downright embarrassing. But then, Hughes didn't give a crap about any of that. Look at the dogfights! It's the airplanes, man! It's still impressive, too, particularly the mid-film battle with the dirigible, which emerges from the clouds like a terrible god. The film renovation is strange, resulting in partial color for some scenes, brown or black and white for others, but the sassy, unmannered Jean Harlowe glows with the old flesh appeal in gowns so skimpy that when she says, "Do you mind if I slip into something more comfortable?" I crack up laughing.

Rowing With The Wind (1988. dir: Gonzalo Suares) Movies about what has come to be known as The Haunted Summer are problematic. Anyone who cares about the people involved (Byron and Percy and Mary Shelley and their circles) will know too much to enjoy a film full of falsehoods, which the films invariably are. Anyone who doesn't won't know enough to get the references and thereby become emotionally entangled. Every biodrama can go one of two ways: capture the forest at expense of the trees or get the trees just right but sacrifice the bigger picture. In Stoned, for instance, Stephen Woolley's love song to the early Rolling Stones, he made everybody nicer than they really were, but managed to get a piece of the forest pretty well. (Unfortunately, what he really wanted to make was a music video, or maybe a fashion shoot, but that's a whole other review.) Out of all the Haunted Summer movies, this is my favorite (although Ken Russell's Gothic has its own insane charm). Hugh Grant plays Byron very well; he's always at his best when playing a smart villain, and he's young enough here he hasn't yet fallen prey to his later twitch and stutter. The thing is gorgeously filmed on location from Lake Geneva to the Italian seashore. The Byron/Shelley "forest" gets better captured here than in any of the others, and the actors are better suited to their roles. It's filled with historical inaccuracies, but they're the Picasso kind (everyone learns it in sixth grade Art class. They show you a Picasso, you pipe up and say, that doesn't follow any of the rules, and what does teacher say? You have to learn the rules before you can break them). This guy knew the history, and rewrote it. Who can resist writing Mary's monster into reality, to account for the really staggering number of premature deaths that surround and infiltrate this circle? (Tim Powers perhaps approached it most brilliantly in the Stress of Her Regard, a great novel about a powerful and deadly muse. Why doesn't anyone ever make movies out of Tim Powers books?)

postscript: John From Cincinnati, continued

I finished the series today. This last disc has some lovely surfing, and some good time spent with good folks. I have sympathy for Dayton Callie and Paula Malcomson. Although their roles in JFC (a Hawaiian drug kingpin and a cafe-owner respectively) initially seem well-differentiated from their beloved Deadwood roles (Charlie Utter and Trixie), much of their dialogue and action might have been lifted straight from the previous show.

The finale also has a lot of "we-know-what-John-is-up-to-really-we-do" hemming and hawing from the writers which gets old fast. When you've got a supernatural strangeness in your plot (witness Lost or Twin Peaks or Carnivale), you've got to have a basic idea about how the ends are going to tie up. If you're just making it up from ep to ep, you're going to have a mess and a very unhappy viewing populace. I stopped watching Lost after the first season because I lost faith that the writers knew what they were doing (I've been told I was wrong about that, but I remain skeptical). I'd have to go back and watch Twin Peaks again to know if Lynch really had it under control, or if it was just so refreshingly strange for the times that we dug it in spite of its chaos. Carnivale took a truckload of faith, the whole first season being basically very enjoyable exposition, but it paid off in spades.

In this one, Milch lost me (or, rather, John the Angel did), but I'd have stuck around for further seasons anyway just to hang with the Yosts.

By the way, Milch's answer to his own big question, "Can a human find creative fulfillment if nobody is watching them while they do it?" seems to be "No. God only approves of those who place their work, themselves, and their families squarely in the marketplace for capitalist consumption. Also, God's pretty excited about using the Internet and visual media to do His Work these days."

ERRATUM: It's not set at Huntington at all, but Imperial Beach, further north, a place with "powerful fast beach-break peaks, consistent year round," according to my Buzzy Kerbox Wave-Finder. "Lots of room," it promises, but I can't believe there's as much room anywhere in California as you see in this show. Nary a fight for a wave or a disappointed scowl about an overpopulated coastline for the Yosts. But then, they can levitate and return from the dead, as well.

groms, fetch and hollows: john from cincinnati

For those of us who belong to the Deadwood faithful, it was a bad day when David Milch announced the show would not run for a fourth season. For those of us who love it (and there are worthy, intelligent humans who don't. I've met them, and come away puzzled and a little hurt by what, from my love-addled perspective, looks like willfully intransigent blindness), it was not just the color and variety of the characters or the violent fairground charms of the town itself that drew us back like a siren's song, but the poetry of the language, largely unequalled in its moments of sudden delight. You have to settle into town a piece before you can appreciate the hilarity of the lines: "Well, you are one entangled inebriate," or "Those who doubt me suck cock by choice," or (my favorite) "He's been picklin' his prick in the cunt-brine of another." You have to relax into Milch's callused palm before you can recognize as an act of unexpected kindness the moment when the brothel-keeper, at the culmination of a blowjob, says to the whore, "Spit it out. You don't have to swallow it."

Yeah, it all sounds sick and wrong, but that's only when it's out of context. IN context, it's sublime, which brings us back around to the day upon which David Milch announced to the world that he would be leaving the wooden sidewalks and mud streets of Deadwood for the swells and barrels off Huntington Beach. And I may be the only Milchhead in the world who heaved a sigh of relief and thought, "At last! A surfing show that will shred."

OK... I didn't think it... not in those words. But there aren't enough vicarious enjoyments for armchair surfers. Some great books and some good ones, a lot of documentaries, a few surf-dramas. For all its mediocrity, I love Point Break because it indulges in surf-exploration you don't get most places, from the zen of it to the nazi-punk of it. It's shameless. Anthony Keidis is a methed-up surf nazi! Keanu Reeves is a surfing FBI agent! Patrick Swayze is a bank-robbing Big Kahuna! "Look, Bodhi, people are dead. The ride is over." Awesome.

To make John From Cincinnati, Milch teamed up with Kem Nunn, who may be the god-template to which surf novelists will aspire for decades to come. With these fellows on board, I thought, it cannot help but please mightily.

And, to an extent, it does. I'm three discs into the four-disc season. So far there's not a lot of surfing, which is not great, but surfing footage I can get from docs. Most of the characters are compelling, most of the acting is well done, most of the dialogue is strange and engaging. It's got just the right touch of supernatural about it. The one problem I've got is with Mr. Eponymous there, this John from Cincannati fellow. He's an angel. Or maybe not. It could be argued. My own impression is that he's some kind of recording angel, as he spends most of his time repeating the thoughts and words of others. I can see how he seemed like a good idea for a central plot device initially, but it doesn't ultimately play. Maybe it's miscasting. Maybe the device never became human enough. Maybe I'm just tired of people talking to God (Wonderfalls, Joan of Arcadia) and getting angelic visits (Saving Grace, and that cloying daytime television thing with Della Reese in it). In any case, the climax of the last episode I saw was a communal dream sequence in which old John spews off a string of Finnegan's-Wakeianities while everyone eats barbecue. Included in the extras was David Milch onset, interpreting the speech line by line to the gathered cast. I watched about half a minute and turned it off. First, if the speech needs a bedside companion to guide us through it, it damn well better be as brilliant as Joyce (this is not). Secondly, the translation itself was, in a word, lame.

There is one interesting thing that Angel John does: he allows the characters a glimpse of God. It manifests as a moment of omniscience, pain, and terrible heat, and that seems to me a pretty decent stab at approximating a theophany.

The long and the short of it is that I'm headed right back for more. My sympathies are all wound up in the mutual destiny of the Yost family, three generations of brilliant surfers. One of the questions at the heart of the show is whether or not it is enough to do what you love in solitude, or must it be shared with others to be fully realized? That's one of my own favorite questions, and I'm hoping for a little redemption for Mitch (Bruce Greenwood) and Butchie (Brian Van Holt) and Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay).

In any case, the best way to prepare for the show is by falling in love with surfing. If you don't have actual access to the ocean, do it vicariously. Start off with Dan Duane's Caught Inside: a Surfer's Year on the California Coast, then try a Kem Nunn novel. Tapping the Source may be his best. Steven Kotler's West of Jesus is another good one on the surf memoir shelf, and Joy Nicholson's the Tribes of Palos Verdes melds fiction and memoir to good effect. There are a thousand documentaries; Riding Giants is one of the best, I think. Then dip into some of the great collections of surf literature: I recommend the Big Drop, edited by John Long, and Zero Break, edited by Matt Warshaw. At first it'll seem like a foreign language, but at some point, I guarantee it, you'll fall in love. And then you'll be ready.

i have dreams of a rose and falling down a long flight of stairs, or ten reasons i love the exorcist III

*warning: some spoilers ahead*

Stop comparing it to the original. Nothing's that good.

That said, I see your point. Here is copious cheese: witness the garden shears, the corny banter, the Theodicy-for-Dummies dialogue, the Christ statue that gasp! opens its eyes! These things and more are groan-inducing.

But come with me and I'll give you a tour through some of the very satisfying elements in this all-too-readily-dismissed sequel.

I. CRAFTSMANSHIP: William Peter Blatty directed and adapted the script from his own book, Legion. The directing is unexpectedly strong, the script curiously weak. I'll tell you what saves it: the cast (George C. Scott, Ed Flanders, Nancy Fish, Viveca Lindfors, Jason Miller, Nicol Willliamson, Brad Dourif, Scott Wilson, etc) and the grand visual style. My hat goes off to DP (Gerry Fisher) and editors (Todd Ramsay and Peter Lee Thompson) and sound editor (Richard L. Anderson). Like the story or not, the film is a thing of beauty.

II. THE AESTHETICS OF BLOOD: Blatty likes his blood to creep, not splatter. It creeps across floorboards, it creeps out from under doors and down the faces of statues. He uses the movement of blood as a pacing device: this film moves at a rate of creeping suspense made dynamic by the sparing use of sudden, violent cuts.

III. STILL-LIFE: He wields stillness like a weapon. There is a wonderful static shot from the head of the staircase (YOU know the staircase I mean) in which all is still but a single sheet of newspaper which blows in a frenzy all the way to the top. He likes to linger on Catholic things: a rosary falling into shadow, a confessional, the menacing impassivity of statues. He very much enjoys a series of beautifully-constructed still-lifes, and so do I.

IV. SILENCE: He appreciates the power of a sudden silence. In my favorite example, a bird inexplicably dies in mid-song.

V. ANGLES: Things get photographed from extreme angles, from crazy heights and depths, resulting in a world of grotesque gothic majesty.

VI. MY FAVORITE SUSPENSE SCENE: It's in the middle of the film, maybe five minutes long, done almost entirely in an extreme and static long-shot. It's late night at the hospital. You know the killer is going to strike, he's told you so, and it comes clear soon enough who his victim will be. A guard enters, exchanges pleasantries, leaves. Ice cracking in a glass makes a heart-stopping sound. A patient wakes and rages. Somebody goes to a vending machine and gets a drink. By the time the shock comes--suddenly, just a second's worth of shock--the suspense, as Willy Wonka once said, is terrible.

VII. THE DEPOT-OF-THE-DEAD DREAM SEQUENCE: What do these three humans have in common: Patrick Ewing, Fabio, and Samuel L. Jackson? They're all hanging out in the Depot-of-the-Dead, that's what, playing, respectively, the Angel of Death, an angel who looks like Fabio, and a cranky blind man who says, "The living are deaf."

VIII. THE INCOMPARABLE BRAD DOURIF: He's like an archetype. Sometimes nobody else will do, and this seems to me the quintessential role of his mid-career period (post-Flannery O'Connor, pre-Wormtongue/Deadwood). Someone from the X-Files must have thought so, too, because they lifted the whole plot-device and recast him in the same role. I love that the camera stays still and lets him act straight into the lens. The lines aren't great and a lesser actor would've embarrassed us, but Dourif is a pleasure to watch.

IX. THE ATMOSPHERE IN THE GEMINI KILLER'S CELL: It is the sort of change that was so well-realized in the first film (in the hallway everything's normal then you open the door to Regan's room and find yourself in hell). Blatty does it with lighting, and again, cold, but mostly it's done with sound: the quiet in the room has thickness, a density, accentuated by dripping water and low, ambient roars. The killer's voice is modulated, the speed and pitch distorted just enough to punch up the weirdness, not enough to distract.

X. THE EXORCISM SCENE: It's succinct, hallucinatory, and the two actors (Nicol Williamson and Jason Miller) are well-matched, neither heading too far into the scenery-chewing stratosphere. I appreciate that we never hear Father Morning (Williamson) speak prior to the scene except in prayer. My heart lurches every time Father Karras shouts, "Now! Bill! Do it now! Kill me now!"

IN SUMMATION: it's not a great film, but it is hypnotic, and the sound is gorgeous. It's had a bum rap for a lot of years, and it's time, in the wake of the sheer excrement Rennie Harlan gave us a few years back (for which he will occupy a special room in hell which I will happily decorate for him if given the chance) and the near-excrement we got from Paul Schrader after that, to shake the dust off the thing and give it another run. You think you're uncomfortable visiting grandma in her nursing home now? After this one, my friend, you'll have one paranoid eye clamped on the ceiling every time you walk through the door.

things i've been watching: march edition

the Orphanage: (2008, dir: Juan Antonio Bayona)
Produced by Guillermo del Toro, it's got Del-toro-philia all over it: the thick, viscous atmosphere and startlingly creepy images, as if it rose up from the same troubled sleep as the Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. It works best if you think of it as a night-time journey through the underworld or a fairy tale. It's got too much filler to be entirely successful as a horror film, but it'd be a good one to watch late at night whilst in the throes of a fever.

the Heart is a Lonely Hunter: (1968, dir: Robert Ellis Miller)
Alan Arkin is the single extraordinary thing in this paint-by-numbers soap opera about how people try to connect, fail, succeed, keep trying or give up. Miller was mostly a TV director, which may explain how you can squeeze a movie-of-the-week out of a Carson McCullers classic... or it may be that the novel's quality lies mostly in its prose and not in its story. There's some fun to be had in watching Stacy Keach back when he was fresh off the farm and still filled with youthful enthusiasm.

Malice: (1993, dir: Harold Becker)
Unpretentious, twisty little thriller that weaves two mysteries into a clear, suspenseful narrative with happily menacing results. It's an early Aaron Sorkin project, which may explain why plot-turns which in lesser hands would have been barely credible are so easy to swallow. I believe the word "Hitchcockian" was evoked in most reviews at the time, and it feels a little like a gleeful tribute to the master. Great cast. This was back at the beginning of that five-year period when there was a law that Bill Pullman had to be in absolutely everything and Nicole Kidman was still stubbornly proving that she had what it takes to be A-list. Plus it's got a single-scene star-turn from Anne Bancroft that'll knock your socks off.

the Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars and Motor-Kings: (1976, dir: John Badham)
Man, I loved this movie when I was a kid. I remember sitting in my bedroom weeping... yes! weeping!... when my mother wouldn't take me to the drive-in to see it a second time. It taught me things, like what would happen if you stuck a candy bar in a gas-tank, which I thought was fascinating. The politics of it are surprisingly tame,--a sign of the times, I suppose. In retrospect, I guess twelve is about the right age to see it, because as an adult the plot is simplistic and the humor embarrassingly puerile. No James Earl Jones performance ever gets old, though.