the ongoing christopher lee film festival

Pirates of Blood River: (1962. dir: John Gilling) How did I go so long without knowing that Hammer made pirate films? Christopher Lee and Oliver Reed are very stylish buccaneers, complete vis ze Frahnch ax-ahnt. The guy who played Zefram Cochrane in Star Trek (he invented the warp drive; you remember, in "Metamorphosis") is here, and so very tree-like that he makes Kerwin Matthews look downright dynamic. You can tell this village beset by wicked pirates is a Hammer Village because the puritanical Huguenot women in it wear delicious dresses showing off their tasty flesh. It's got Michael Ripper and other favorites from the Hammer stable, as well as all manner of nasty behaviour you'd expect from salty scalawags. It has a nicely doubled message about tyranny and the uprising of the downtrodden (a mirrored theme in a Hammer film! such complexity), and the piranha alone are worth the price of admission.




Horror Express: (1972. dir: Eugenio Martin) An ancient and deadly alien life-form thaws from a hunk of Manchurian ice on a train across the frozen steppes of Russia, and in the end there are zombies! Although this sports the ever-delightful team of Lee and Peter Cushing, it's Telly Savalas who steals the show with his late entry as an arrogant Russian soldier, roaring, "What the devil fears is a single honest cossack." And how about this exchange?

Savalas: Shoot whatever moves at that doorway.
Cushing: What if the monk's innocent?
Savalas: We got lots of innocent monks.

Cushing gets my favorite laugh, though. When the police investigator observes that since the alien can shape-shift he might be anyone, Cushing says, "Surely you know we're British!"

And that's not all. There's a groovy mad Russian starets and plenty of gruesome murders, and the scientists find images of dinosaurs and the earth from space recorded in the tissue of the alien's eyeballs. Try and resist THAT.




the Terror of the Tongs: (1961. dir: Anthony Bushell) Watching Lee in interviews, it becomes quickly apparent that he's proud (justifiably) of his dexterity with accents, and that he very much enjoys taking on characters of varying ethnicities. Now, of course, we blink and look away, embarrassed, when a white-skinned anglo darkens up, gets the eyes and moustache done up Fu Manchu (dons the "Yellow Peril drag", as Gary Giddins puts it in Warning Shadows), but 1961 was another galaxy, far, far away. Although this is not one of his Fu Manchu films (he made several), it's in the ballpark.

Hong Kong, 1910. The Tongs are an organization of killers ruled by Lee, who manages to invest even the cheesiest dialogue with importance. I have to say it: the older I get, the more I appreciate that (see review of Wrath of Khan). Any damn fool can make, say, Viola's "make me a willow cabin" speech in Twelfth Night sound wistfully lovely because it was written that way by a genius. It's committing successfully to those "I DRINK your milkshake!" tirades that might convince me to walk barefoot to Daniel Day-Lewis' house in Ireland just to leave his Oscar on his doorstep. And although Lee claims he once did an entire Dracula film without speaking a line because the dialogue as written was so awful, when he does commit, he commits all the way, and no holds are barred.





Hound of the Baskervilles: (1959. dir: Terence Fisher) Peter Cushing was brilliant. It's easy to forget because his choices were always clean and direct. I can remember being so enthralled by a line reading of Grand Moff Tarkin's ("Evacuate? In our moment of triumph?") that I used to mimic it in private, trying to figure out what it was that made it great. (I still don't know, but it is.) Right now he is my favorite Sherlock Holmes, although I have not yet seen Lee's or, to be fair, Robert Downey's. Cushing doesn't forego the rudeness and superiority of Holmes but is himself so personally likable that all is easily forgiven (as opposed to the insufferable pretentiousness of Jeremy Brett in the PBS series).

I consider this a Hammer masterpiece. It's got that richness of colour and atmosphere but they never overwhelm the telling of the story. It's got that mysterious Hammer flesh appeal, somehow seeming almost pornographic but when you go back and try to figure why you can't put your finger on it. The story is altered, but for the better. One of its great flaws has always been that Watson is required to carry too much of it, and, let's be frank: no one goes to Baker Street to spend time with Dr. Watson. In this version, Lee's Henry Baskerville is emphasized during that period of time when Holmes has absented himself, and Lee has the strength of presence to fill the lacuna. The other flaw is Holmes' ridiculous disguise, which has to fool even Watson, and never works on film; Fisher has cut it out, and it is not necessary to the plot. The other major change is in the rewriting of Miss Stapleton as a passionate major player, an alteration that might not work elsewhere but is absolutely perfect for a Hammer outing, and allows for Lee to get some macking in on a gorgeous woman, which he rarely gets to do on film.

Even the dog looks pretty demonic in his little mask. I give it four stars, easy.

morituri: those about to die

{According to Suetonius, MORITURI TE SALUTANT, "those about to die salute you," was the traditional greeting the troops gave Caesar.}

Hollywood loves war. War slips easily between those comfy old Hollywood sheets: good guys vs bad guys, lovers separated by circumstance, the tragedy of death intruding on youth, and, best of all, it lends itself to overblown visual displays. Then came the '60s, and a demand for the anti-war statement. Mostly Hollywood dealt with it by making its war films more cynical, or murking up the endings. Morituri, then, which emerged in 1965 from the hand of German actor and director Bernhard Wicki, goes a step further. One might have expected it out of Europe, but with big stars speaking English, it comes as a shock.

It begins squarely as a recognizable anti-Nazi movie. Brando is Robert Crain, a wealthy German sitting out the war comfortably in India with nothing but scorn for both sides, a cynical pacifist. Trevor Howard, in his inimitible role as Most British of the Brits (my favorite part of Inglorious Basterds was the Trevor Howard character, and that damned Quentin went and killed him off in the basement alongside my two OTHER favorite characters. But I digress), blackmails Brando into disguising himself as SS to infiltrate a Nazi freighter, his mission to disarm the scuttling charges so the precious rubber cargo can be salvaged by the Allies. Yul Brynner plays the ship's Captain Mueller, the Good Soldier Serving the Corrupt Master. He is a man whose reputation has come under a cloud because his conscience has been driving him to drink, and he assumes Brando is there to keep an eye on him.

It's the kind of role I love for Brando, a man who has to think on his feet, strong on purpose and forward movement, keeping him focused, keeping at bay that howlingly annoying tendency he's got to meander. Had he been young today, he'd have made a bundle in action films. He's got that action-hero je-ne-sais-quoi: graceful in motion, eye-catching in stillness. Brynner is at the peak of his powers, giving us a fearless leader of men whose compass has been sent spinning by a world gone mad. He's got a lovely, weary speech about "you young men who make the world breathless," by trying to rule it with brutality divorced from mercy.

So far, so good. In its first hour, it's rollicking good and filled with suspense and strong character development, shaping up to be my favorite Outsmart-the-Nazis film ever. And then, a little past halfway through, it opens up its trenchcoat, as it were, to display its true purpose.

The MacGuffin arrives in the shapely form of Janet Margolin as a young Jewess, transported on board with a group of captured Yanks. The first sign of trouble comes when she is used to make apparent the Captain's heart-of-gold cred, a completely unnecessary gesture, since we're already quite certain of his good, moral heart through a combination of his very fine performance and a more than adequate script. But here it is: Captain Mueller recognizes her as a Jewess when others have not (although the name on her passport is Esther Levy; not very bright Nazis, those), gives her a private cabin and a pledge of protection, perhaps even an opportunity to lose herself once they reach Bordeaux. But that is just the first sign of trouble.

>SPOILER ALERT<

Later on we learn that she has been gang-raped by Gestapo, and, later still, that in our own story she will offer herself up in a disturbing, Peckinpah-coy-eyed-victim way, for gang-rape by the cowardly Yanks in order to convince them to join Crain in his attempt to take over the ship. After that, she's brutally murdered by the Nazi second-in-command to make us hate him even more, but she has to die, because she is not a character, just an animated and doomed plot-device. I have a friend who boycotts movies that use rape as a plot-device, and this one takes some kind of hideous cake in that realm. The point is made: the Yanks are as bad as the Gestapo; no side is better than the other; in war, everyone sucks, reaching for a lowest common denominator. Still, in a script that has been as good as this one, the episode comes off as clumsy and leering and it is a relief, frankly, when she is dead and we can stop worrying about her.

It's such a disturbing interlude, and changes the tone so completely, that one has to reorient oneself entirely for the final battles, which are satisfyingly well-done as long as one is craning one's neck from the proper darkly cynical angle. It's so disturbing that it shed a star in my Netflix rating, even as it made the movie more twisted and complex. I have to admire its boldness, and far be it from me to deny that rapine happens fierce and frequent in wartime, but this one rang devilishly false. Why would sexually brutalizing a girl make soldiers change their minds, which had been firmly made up, about staying out of a battle which would risk their lives? Easy enough to have her then keep safe in their little dungeon. The logic is absurd, and because the crime is so awful, it points to some lurking evil in the heart of the filmmaker. Brrrr. I still shudder from its coldness, thinking on it.

And yet, three days on, the film is still lingering in my head. It's gorgeous in black and white. All those big brown eyes, of Brando and Brynner and Margolin, they're doubly arresting in black-and-white. It's beautifully shot by Conrad Hall with graceful, unobtrusive cameras which serve the story faithfully and make the most of that sometimes cramped shipboard world. The ending is written well and played well, and I think, God help me, that in spite of everything I may have to watch it again.

...and a christopher lee double feature

the Whip and the Body: (1965. dir: Mario Bava) Ah, those Italian horror-meisters! The intoxicating use of color, and of shadow as both color and pace-setting device! Absolutely mesmerizing. Since most of the film involves voluptuous Italian women creeping in nightgowns down gloomy castle hallways and skulking in tombs, you could set it to a Pink Floyd record and call it a slow-moving light-show. Somewhere I read that Christopher Lee considered this the best of his Italian films, and he's got to be right about that. Certainly he is at his bad-assed sexiest as the whip-wielding Heathcliff in this giallo-flavored Wuthering Heights set at the sensuous Italian seaside, with the beautiful Daliah Lavi as his fruitcake-nutty Catherine. People keep getting offed with daggers through the throat, there may or may not be muddy footprints leading up from the tomb, and a sadistic ghost may or may not be taking a horsewhip to the lovely Italian lady on a semi-regular basis. Too tame to be a true giallo, it's still one of the most sensuous horror films I've seen. If I had a dungeon, this would be showing in widescreen on continual rotation.


Horror Hotel: (1961. dir: John Llewellyn Moxey) In Europe, it was called City of the Dead, more dignified but misleading. Really it's a city of Satan-worshippers who've traded their souls for immortality, obviously a whole different thing. It's got no pretentions at all, this little b&w classic, and atmosphere to spare. The town is constantly swathed in thick blankets of fog; the Satanists need beautiful outsiders for their human sacrifices, and there you have your jumping-off point. Lee plays a college professor who feels rather keenly about the history of witchcraft, so much so that he sends his star pupil to do research in the old hometown. I wouldn't show it opposite Curse of the Demon, but I'd feel comfortable pairing it with Night of the Eagle or Carnival of Souls, and that's high praise for me.

psychomania: the frog in the chapel perilous

In the parlance of the film, my mind is blown.

It's 1973, and Australian director Don Sharp, Hammer veteran and helmsman of such mediocre childhood favorites as the remakes of 39 Steps and Four Feathers (why Beau Bridges? of all the actors in the world?), has given the world an undead biker gang which terrorizes the poor old English countryside.

We open with the groovy psychedelia (and I'm not saying that derogatorily: picture me saying all of the following with absolutely sincere appreciation) of mist over an English henge. A gang of leather-clad bikers in clumsy death's-head masks weaves amongst its liths to the strains of John Cameron's perfect electric soundtrack. In spite of names like Hatchet, Chopped Meat and Gash, we find as we get to know them that there's something naive about these miscreants. Yes, they get kicks by causing motoring accidents, but they also sing hippie songs and weave floral wreaths and their main idea of mayhem involves kicking over parking cones and knocking down grocery trolleys.

Their leader, Tom Latham (Nicky Henson), is the handsome scion of a wealthy family who also happen to be worshippers of Satan in the form of a frog. (Although, granted, they never say it's Satan. One assumes. It might just be a frog.) He lives with his old mum, played by the adorable Beryl Reid, who's about as scary as the tea-lady at Selfridge's or the Queen Mum. In the flashback where she's selling baby Tom to the frog-god, she even looks like the Queen Mum, with the doughy, delighted smile and even the little hat. Also in residence is George Sanders as the unflappable and ever-present butler who seems to be some sort of emissary between this world and the froggish.

Tom is obsessed with the idea of returning from the dead, and, as luck would have it, built into the grounds of the family mansion is a Secret Room, a sort of Chapel Perilous into which one ventures only when one is ready to Face One's True Self, and it is ominously suggested that this room had something to do with the disappearance of Tom's father many years prior. In fact, one of the film's early moments of brilliance is the pivotal scene of high camp strangeness in which Tom ventures into the room. Once he emerges, we're ready to bring on the zombies.

But is it a zombie movie? Not exactly. Whether the old-school, limb-dragging and moaning variety or the newfangled superfast and snarling type, zombies are generally understood to be revivified shells, with little or none of the human personality remaining. These revenants look, move, think, talk and dress exactly as they did before death, minus only the fear of reprisals for their mischiefs. I'd call it a "necromancy" film, except these undead are not revived by an outside source, but by their own unshakable will to return.

In any case, Tom suicides and returns from the dead then convinces most of his gang to do the same, all in the name of kicks! And considering this movie's ample body count, it retains a very posh British innocence. It has no blood at all, and the deaths are mostly suggested. If it sounds like I'm mocking, I'm not: its earnestness is self-mocking, its humour earnestly underplayed but certainly intended. As evidence, I submit the scene where the undead Tom and his sidekick Jane burst into the police station on their bikes and the copper behind the desk pauses in his outrage long enough to politely ask a girl if she'll shut the door behind her; also the various gleeful suicides the gang-members devise; and, let's face it, any bit involving a frog.

On the other hand, it's not glib. It has compelling set-pieces -- you might even say haunting: the hippie funeral in which the gang buries Tom sitting upright on his bike like a warrior of old on his steed, or Tom waltzing easily with his mum in their groovy (I'm sorry; there's no other word for it) parlor. Or the ending, which I could not describe, even if I wanted to, not and still do it justice.

The acting has got short shrift in various (may I say) short-sighted reviews over the years. Granted, some come off better than others. Sanders applies himself with ardent seriousness, and playing a convincing devil has always come easy as lying to him. Robert Hardy (who one day will give an irresistible turn as Sir John in the Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility) has a harder time in the thankless role of the investigating Chief Inspector, who mostly shows up as a foil for the mischievous undead. But the real attraction is Nicky Henson. He looks like one of those gorgeous, snaggletoothed, shaggy-headed footballers that England unloosed on the world in the late '60s, and nobody has ever looked better in leather pants. Also (bonus!), he's both well cast and theatrically trained.

masterclass in oaters: the big trail and wagon master

the Big Trail: (1930. dir: Raoul Walsh) This was going to be John Wayne's big breakout role; after four years of trying, he finally bagged the big lead in an important Western. But because John Ford had been grooming him for his own stable, the two were estranged over it and it would be another nine years before Ford teleported Wayne effortlessly into superstardom with that gorgeous introductory zoom-in shot in Stagecoach.

Wayne is just a kid in 1930, and so are the talkies. I got that same pleasant shudder watching the Big Trail that I got watching the Front Page, a sense that movie-making hasn't settled yet into its comfortable tropes, that the river is still shifting, the rules are still being written. It's closer to silent films than it is to, say, Gone With the Wind, complete with title cards and actors with woefully untrained voices. Somewhere in the middle of the thirties, some genius kid in some back room at a major studio developed some fabulous audio techniques, but not yet. "They're still using ribbon-mics," my very knowledgable boyfriend says, and whatever a ribbon-mic is, it's not particularly effective. Wayne's voice sounds high and strained, Marguerite Churchill in the female lead is all whining, and Tyrone Power Sr. (!) as the bad guy is so gruff as to be unintelligible much of the time.

Still, there's much upside. The hallmarks of Dukedom are already there in Wayne: the big, graceful walk, the drawl, the charm; he just hasn't relaxed into them yet. A handsome young Ward Bond is here, too, lurking in the background of the wagon-train. The wagons themselves are huge conestogas, realistic but probably too ungainly to suit Hollywood's purposes for long, and the Indians are real Indians! None of the painted Brooklyn Italians they'll start using in future years.

Much of the photography is downright stunning, like the quiet, breath-taking end-battle among the giant redwoods. Walsh shoots the film almost entirely in long or medium-long shot, giving it a solid ensemble feel, but leaving one yearning in the end for that greatest of all cinematic powers: the intimacy of the lingering close-up.






Wagon Master: (1950. dir: John Ford) Ford had a peculiar sense of humor. The old woman with the horn, for instance. Was that funny, ever, to anyone? It must've been to Ford because he keeps the gag going. Personally, I'd spend any amount of time with Ben Johnson and Ward Bond on the smallest pretext, but I'll tell you what I love best about this movie, reportedly Ford's favorite of his own works: the scene in the Navajo encampment, when the rapist is stripped and tied to the wagon wheel and lashed,-- the way he expresses the mounting tension through still shots of faces, silently, without background music. It may be the biggest reason I love him, that love he's got for interesting faces. That he lets his story get sidetracked sometimes just to explore a character who seems promising to him, or one he just flat-out likes spending time looking at. John Ford never had to discover the close-up; it's his truest medium of expression.

equus: heroic and perverse

Generally I avoid movies made from stage plays. The two arts are different in sly ways; you don't notice the enormities of the abyss between the two until you stand at its edge and peer down in. Branagh made history because he mastered a happy way to capture Shakespeare on film that was not static or stagebound, and did it brilliantly until he started getting a little wacky, possibly out of restlessness with his designated "New Olivier" role. Does anyone really want to watch a Love's Labour's Lost that's been musical-theatrized? for God's sake, man, why?

Peter Shaffer's Equus is an extraordinary play, demanding of its actors and requiring a sure-handed director with a strong vision; the movie is perhaps even more so. Watching it again after all these years (the play was written in '73, the film came out in '77, directed by Sidney Lumet), I was stunned to realize how ominously close it skates to being truly ludicrous, how chillingly effortless it would have been, with one simple lapse or moment of oversight, to have made of it an object of easy ridicule.

Any true Harry Potter fan can tell you the basic story. A terrible crime has been committed: an apparently normal boy has blinded six horses in a stable with a metal spike and is sent to a psychiatrist, in this case played by Richard Burton. Quibble as you will with Burton's oeuvre, he was a courageous chooser of roles, and that may be why his CV is littered with as many disasters as triumphs (Bluebeard, anyone? the Assassination of Trotsky? or how about the obvious: Exorcist II: the Heretic, which also emerged in 1977 and in which Burton plays a similar character, a priest examining the teenaged Regan. It boasts, too, the dadaism of James Earl Jones dressed in a locust outfit, and is therefore not to be missed). This is one of his triumphs: from his riveting opening speech to his riveting closing speech, he knows exactly when to underplay, exactly when to cry havoc and loose the dogs of war. He was, in fact, nominated for an Oscar, which went instead to Richard Dreyfuss for the Goodbye Girl. The past is another country; they do things differently there.

The actors are almost uniformly awe-inspiring: Eileen Atkins, always brilliant in her fearless, no-nonsense way, Colin Blakely, Harry Andrews, and Joan Plowright, of whom I am generally more suspicious, plays enough against the obvious in her maternal role that I relax and trust her. Even Jenny Agutter, with her terrible, thin, cracking voice (newly emerged from a successful career as a child actress in the Empire onto the American screen with her woodenly awful performance in Logan's Run but on her way to the utterly lovable camp of An American Werewolf in London) gives a suitably low-key and entirely credible turn as the girl who unwittingly sets off the bloodshed.

Peter Firth, in his mid-twenties at the time but somehow unfailingly convincing as a teenager, has the bulk of the project resting on his back. All the most difficult bits are his, from the nude climax to the child-flashback scene to the religious incantation, and even the comparatively easy parts are not really easy. The first time he walks into Dysart's (Burton's) office, his physical presence is astonishing, communicating tension so extreme he's shaking, all the while keeping his facial muscles consciously smoothed into a mask of placidity. His eyes are haunted, but in some strange, unobvious way. Truly like a boy in hell trying to convince the world he is untouched.

The heart of it, though, is the subject matter. For all our modern obsession with sex and pornography, for all the Live Nude and Semi-nude human figures you can see on most channels and in most movies, I can count on one hand the number of films that delve bravely into sexuality with any kind of truth, and this is one. I've heard it claimed the film is weak because it does not recognize the central metaphor of the boy's horse-worship is really about repressed homosexuality. That's too small, though, too small a part of the vaster realm of Eros from which the Equus-worship is really drawing. It speaks, and with startling courage, about sexuality in its largest sense, the way you experience it when you're young and it feels dark and huge and ineffable and more important than anything, as if that's where the answers lie, all of them, divine as well as prosaic. In everyone's youth there is a time of searching, consciously or not, for the gods, and it is conducted most often in the domain of sex. Equus is about sex as the root of worship, and it's an intense, almost devastating success.


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"What we do with the eros inside us, be it heroic or perverse, is our spiritual life." -- Ronald Rolheiser, Forgotten Among the Lilies
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As an addendum, the other movie I can think of offhand that digs down into the truth of eros is Intimacy (dir: Patrice Chereau, 2001). The plot description on IMDB begins, "A failed London musician meets once a week with a woman for a series of intense sexual encounters to get away from the realities of life...", and that was enough to keep me away from it for many years. At last I gave in on a night when I needed to watch Mark Rylance act but wasn't in the mood for Angels and Insects again. It took me several minutes to get past the credits, because it begins with a song so strange and beautiful that I played the opening several times just to hear it ("A Night In", it turns out, by Tindersticks). Then I watched the entire film twice through immediately, with that sense of seeing something unlike anything else I'd ever seen before. I have not gone back to watch it again, since the intensity of that viewing is enshrined in my memory with a sort of perfection, and I am loathe to displace it. Maybe it isn't as good as I remember. Maybe it was the exact proper moment for me to watch it, and that's why it was so affecting. The way each sexual encounter wordlessly communicated the states of the characters seemed marvelous, and Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance seemed both fearless and completely without vanity. The sex is not simulated, and the bodies are those of real people, not movie stars, -- although Rylance, admittedly, might have had a decent career in porn if he'd wanted it. It doesn't pretend to be about love, but it is about how the entanglement of limbs is not exclusive to the physical, since any true intensity carries with it emotional repercussions. That said, there is no Hollywood "message" here, no simple statement of purpose, no easy conclusion reached. It is an exploration into eros along a previously unmarked road, at least in the world of cinema.

I counted the days until I could see these

Sometimes you run across a line of type announcing a pending movie and it lodges like a sweet, whispered promise in your brain. There have been times I've been so excited about seeing a film that I've had dreams about it before it opens. I remember dark dreams about An Awfully Big Adventure, for instance, that were nothing like the film itself but helped to make that cinematic experience even stranger than it would have been anyway. (You think Hugh Grant never did anything special? You must -- MUST -- see his turn as the petty, vain tyrant in charge of a regional theatre in WWII England. The scene in which he gives the opening-of-rehearsal speech with the closing night's vomit still clinging to his face is a piece of wicked greatness in which both he and the film itself revel.)

Some eight months ago I saw a mention of a new James Marsters project about a little mining town in the old West and WHAT HAPPENS THERE WHEN THE ALIENS INVADE. Sure, it seems obvious now, but why hasn't it been done a million times before? This movie was made for me. Specifically for me, as if someone reached inside my head, had a rummage around, and said, "Hmm. Old West. Aliens invade. And... yeah, James Marsters. That's a go." Brilliant. A Syfy special. I wrote the release date on my calendar and literally counted the days.

High Plains Invaders. It showed in August. And, alright, it's not perfect, but I taped it and I watch little pieces of it periodically. Marsters is great. Something's happened to him in the past year. Ever since he and Joss Whedon together managed to tap into some archetypal brilliance to co-create the character of Spike in the Buffyverse, I've been following his work with mostly scowling disappointment. Shadow Puppets? PS I Love You? Smallville? Grrrrr. Don't make me cranky. But in the last year there's been Moonshot, less a record of the first Apollo moon landing than a tribute to it, but still well-made, and Marsters shines as Buzz Aldrin (consider that Aldrin was in his thirties at the time, Marsters is pushing fifty now). And now this lovely little genre-mixing alien invasion piece, in which he's earnest and low-key and hits not a wrong note, in spite of the many sand-traps possible when you're firing six-shooters at big metallic insects with only a mediocre script to bear you up. Maybe it's that these days he's not trying so hard, as he seemed to be upon emerging from his eight-year stint working in Joss-world. He seems to have relaxed into himself. He's finally reached that age, too, when his pulchritude, which used to be almost insanely extreme, has softened into an easy, rugged, aging handsomeness.

The piece has more to it than Marsters. Most of the cast, -- and I find this often in Syfy originals, -- is better than its script, and the production design is inspired: faded, sort of sepia and autumnal feeling, cold and muddy, like the old West ought to be. The aliens look like they came straight out of War of the Worlds, which works for me. Now, of course, somebody's making a big-screen cowboys vs. aliens film, entitled, in fact, Cowboys Vs Aliens, and it happily re-teams Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr of Iron Man success. I'm right there in the front of the line for that one, as well. My firmly held belief is that EVERYONE should make a movie about cowboys and aliens, as I am an easy mark, an absolute fool, for a crossed-genre piece.


Another film I've had stored at the top of my Netflix queue, madly tapping my fingers and chewing my nails while waiting for it to be released, is a little British thing called the Haunted Airman that I first read about in the Fortean Times. Again, I'm suckered in by the crossing of genres: this time a war story crossed with a ghost story. Tenuously (apparently) based on horror-master Dennis Wheatley's novel the Haunting of Toby Jugg, it's a quietly eerie BBC-sponsored piece about a wheelchair-bound RAF bomber going crazy in a creepy hospital. I suppose it got wide release only because Robert Pattison has achieved megastardom among a certain demographic (not mine. I've skipped over the whole TWILIGHT thing, much as I skipped over the whole HARRY POTTER thing, knowing full well that I'd have dug right in there full speed ahead were I thirty years younger). Not that it's not worth seeing, but, intriguing as it is, it's one of those pieces of film that makes you think, "OK, now I'm going to read the book to find out what REALLY happened." Which is what I'm going to do. Julian Sands does what he does best, playing an enigmatic, possibly evil doctor. The flashbacks of the bombings seem strangely low-budget for the BBC and never seem to come together to form a specific point. In sum: I'm glad they made it. I'm glad I watched it. I'll let you know how good it is once I've read the original material.


And the third movie I've been waiting for: the spanking new remake of the old John Wayne film the Angel and the Badman. Yep. There ain't no accountin' for it, but there it is. Not the greatest movie the Duke ever made, it's the story of a gunfighter who falls in love with a Quaker girl and manages to lay down his arms without getting gunned down by the bad guy only through the intervention of a deus ex machina (in this case, an interfering marshall who's been dogging his footsteps).

Now that I think of it, we're crossing genres again: it looks like a Western, but it's really a romance. The remake has Lou Diamond Phillips and Deborah Kara Unger (the husky-voiced she of Cronenberg's Crash), both of them satisfyingly matured in their talents, but I was not surprised to see that it was originally made for Hallmark. It's one of those rare Western chick-flicks, like Naomi Watts' the Outsider (which is more satisfying as a chick-flick, incidentally, and, strangely, also about a Quaker falling in love with a gunslinger while nursing him back to health after a gunshot. Guess us chicks dig that), and it's gorgeously shot using color filters so every scene is far prettier than it would have been in real life.

It stays largely faithful to the original except in the one sense that made the original worth watching: because it had John Wayne in it! And you gotta love the Duke. (Yes, hush, you really do. If you think you don't love John Wayne, then there are two possibilities at work: either you don't love him YET, or you really do love him and you just don't realize it yet. I spent many years scoffing at Wayne's woodenness and what I perceived as lack of dynamic range. It was while I was watching They Were Expendable, a very somber John Ford piece released just after the war about PT boats in the Philippines, that I realized Wayne's genius. In this very wooden, stilted piece, Wayne was a breath of fresh air, with his huge physical presence and grace and sheer glorious enthusiasm. After that, I went back and watched Stagecoach again and, by God, you just try to take your eyes off that man. Just try it, and then come back and tell me he has no movie-star genius. Watch the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. You got Jimmy Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, for God's sake! Andy Devine, Woody Strode, John Carradine, Strother Martin, Lee Van Cleef... Now look at the election scene in the saloon. The place is crowded with folks, all kinds of talking going on, much of it by Stewart and Marvin, no slouches when it comes to star-power. But who are you looking at? You're looking at the Duke, that's who, who's quietly sitting on the bar, doing little more than watching the proceedings. And, furthermore, you want to see a truly convincing portrayal of a macho man suffering heartbreak? Watch that scene, that terrible, lovely scene, in which Wayne drunkenly burns down his own house, the house he'd built for Vera Miles.)

And, yes, that's Luke Perry hiding half his face under that eye-patch.

the wrath of khan: subtlety is not an issue

To paraphrase some brilliant Brit writing in NME (he was speaking of Scott Walker at the time), there must be people in the world who don't love Ricardo Montalban in the Wrath of Khan, but what must their hearts be like?

It's not even a matter of liking; certain things surpass subjectivity. An old friend once told me he'd approached art criticism as if it was all subjective until the day his father overheard an Ornette Coleman record and said it was utter crap. In that moment, he suffered a revelation: sometimes the quality's there, and if you don't see it, it's due to a deficiency on your own part. A lack of effort, maybe, a cranky attitude towards that crazy post-modern music, or some misguided neural pathway etched into your brain.

Granted, a Ricardo Montalban performance inhabits a whole different stretch on the space-time continuum than an Ornette Coleman record, but let's call it like it is: a masterpiece is a masterpiece, and Khan is a masterpiece. Part of it is context: you don't want to cast some subtle, underplaying Trevor Howard opposite William Shatner, the Uberking of the Scene-Chewers. (You would, on the other hand, cast Christopher Plummer, that great eschewer of English subtlety who tosses himself full-force into the ham in Star Trek 6: the Undiscovered Country with his gleefully Shakespeare-barking Klingon, but that's another piece of brilliance for another day.) Montalban, I believe, is the only actor who ever balanced Shatner move for move. They are a perfect match -- but Montalban wins. The shameless magnificence of his outrageous choices and the impeccable smoothness of their execution combine to make it one of those rare and to-be-treasured performances that can be proudly ranked among the truly intrepid. Not only does he manage to speak lines like "From hell's heart I stab at thee," and "I'll chase him around the fires of perdition," with dignity, he speaks them like they're Shakespeare (yes, alright, Melville) and a goddamn privilege to pronounce. He is an inspiration to behold. Magnificence in action.

And, while there is unquestionably virtue and courage inherent in making oneself ridiculous, a thing from which Shatner never shies ("Kha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-n!"), Montalban transcends ridiculousness, grasps hold of his role with both muscled hands and elicits cheers, not laughter.

Every year when I go to the coast I take Star Trek 2: the Wrath of Khan and watch it right before I'm due to come home. I'm not certain why. It's one of those traditions that sprang up in that realm somewhere outside conscious choice. Although I love this movie, consider it one of the great B-films, I'm impatient with it, too. I tend to fast-forward through most of Chekov's scenes, for instance, unless he's sharing the screen with Khan (sorry, Chekov), and I also tend to look away from the screen when Kirstie Alley's on (yes, I understand that she's cute, but she's no Vulcan. Robin Curtis in the third and fourth films... Now THERE'S a Vulcan woman who would make T'Pau proud.) The sentimental hogwash subplot involving Ike Eisenmann makes me gnash my teeth, too, since he was a favorite child actor of mine in the old days (he did a series called the Fantastic Journey with Jared Martin and the original Witch Mountain movies; awesome) and I was glad to see him onscreen here and sorry to see him wasted.

Still, show me a love affair in which the Beloved has no flaws, and I'll show you a pale, wan reflection of true passion. I'm convinced that there's no Trekker in the world so devoted that he must own ALL the original six Star Trek movies. The first one and the fifth one can be skipped without compunction. The others, -- the Wrath of Khan, the Search for Spock, the Voyage Home, and the Undiscovered Country, -- should be dusted off and enjoyed in all their imperfect glories at least once a year. Make it so.

things i've been watching: august 2009

In the Loop: (2009. dir: Armando Iannucci) Seldom does one really laugh all the way through a comedy. With luck one gets two belly-laughs and a fistful of chuckles. Maybe people just aren't as funny as we used to be. Maybe we're just too bitter. Here's one for you: In the Loop, a -- not just scathingly. What's the word I want? -- a skin-flayingly funny, dark, endlessly smart, and completely depressing British comedy playing now at your local cinema. It has the opposite of the Obama Effect. If you are one of the millions who felt inspired to political involvement during his campaign, this film is the antidote. By the time you hit sunlight, you'll not only never want to have anything to do with politics, you'll never want to read a newspaper, vote in an election, or live in a country with any sort of government, or, indeed, other humans in it.

Peter Capaldi has a big honkin' hootenanny with his once-in-a-lifetime role as a foul-mouthed Scots bulldog of a Minister whose thankless task it is to see that Great Britain comes in line with the PM's decision to follow America into a bogus war in the Middle East. You start out laughing, and there are jokes hidden under jokes, with the improvised feel of a great ensemble cast. It's filmed handheld under true light; it looks and feels a lot like the original the Office. It's not that it ever gets unfunny, just its meanness thickens your blood until you at last resemble Bernard Hill in his first appearance as Theoden King in the Two Towers by the time you try to leave your seat. When the credits roll down, literally every character has either sold his soul, been morally degraded, humiliated, or resigned. Most don't get to choose from the list, but get two or three, even all four. My favorite of the many shining performances is from Zach Woods as Chad, a pathetic but wonderfully funny power-worshipping aide who switches his lovestruck allegiance from one power-player to another as they fall and rise, and never manages to catch anyone's attention, really.

See this movie, by all means, and then go out and get weasel-faced drunk and pray to all your various gods for Obama and the fate of this country.


the Fall: (2006. dir: Tarsem Singh) >SPOILER ALERT< Gorgeous and phantasmagoric period-piece set in the early days of Hollywood. A crippled and suicidal stuntman lies helpless in hospital and tells an epic tale to a little girl with a broken arm to try and coax her into stealing morphine for him. Most of the film is the story as we see it played out in her head and hear it narrated by him. When he speaks of an Indian, we know he means a Native American because he talks of wigwams, but she sees an eastern Indian whose wigwam looks like a Taj Mahal. The disjointedness is dreamlike and enchanting. Lee Pace as the stuntman is wonderfully, opiately sensuous in his hospital bed, and although it has a happy ending, there is a climactic scene that is so heartrending I felt my sorrow aching in the palms of my hands as I wept.




Duel in the Sun: (1946. dir: King Vidor) >SPOILER ALERT< I never much liked Jennifer Jones when I was a kid, but then I saw her in things like the Song of Bernadette and Portrait of Jennie. Had I seen her in this, I think she'd have been my hero. My mom remembers her aunt taking her to see this when it came out and it was so sexy and passionate it left an indelible mark on her. And it still is: one of those movies that pulled no punches, left no holds barred. It's filmed in deep, passionate colors all the way through, deep reds and striking greens and yellows. Jones plays Pearl Chavez, an embodiment of sensuality, destined to inspire the animal in those around her, a girl whose rational capacities have been so utterly neglected that she is led through life by emotion and her netherparts. She is sent to live with rich strangers, and among them, two opposite brothers: Joseph Cotten as the left-brain, moral voice, and Gregory Peck as the dark embodiment of animal passion, Pearl's great love and nemesis.

In these days of quirky underplaying, Jones' performance looks like a typhoon. With utter shamelessness she throws herself headlong into each emotion, pausing only long enough to fully embody each as it passes. Her face expresses lust and hatred with hypnotic totality, and I could listen all day to that voice, sultry to the point of indecency. When Joseph Cotten reaches out to offer her a good-girl future living with his nice wife and him, away from her bad-girl present with Gregory Peck, it sounds stultifyingly awful, and although Pearl wants to be a good girl, we know she never can tamp herself down to that drab level, and she responds to him with, "I wish I could die for you," because she can only live passionately or die, there is no third choice.

In addition to that last, magnificent scene in which the hater/lovers kill one another while simultaneously crawling desperately across the desert for one last kiss, other reasons to see it include a powerhouse turn by Walter Huston as the self-styled Sin-Killer, a Texas preacher who puts in a word with Pearl towards salvation but admits it's a long-shot, and Lillian Gish as the matriarch of the house. Now THERE'S a woman who knows how to play a death-scene.

the time traveler's wife and (500) days of summer: it's about love, baby

This is HG Wells on love: "I think that in every human mind, possibly from an extremely early age, there exists a continually growing and continually more subtle complex of expectation and hope; an aggregation of lovely and exciting thoughts; conceptions of encounter and reaction picked up from observation, descriptions, drama; reveries of sensuous delights and ecstasies; reveries of understanding and reciprocity; which I will call the Lover-Shadow... I think it is almost as essential in our lives as our self consciousness.
...When we make love, we are trying to make another human being concentrate for us as an impersonation or at least a symbol of the Lover-Shadow in our minds; and when we are in love it means that we have found in someone the presentation of the promise of some, at least, of the main qualities of our Lover-Shadow. The beloved person is for a time identified with the dream -- attains a vividness that captures the role, and seems to leave anything outside it unilluminated."

How you react to that passage will perhaps say something about your age, your gender, your self-image; most pertinently, it'll reveal where you land on the scale of Pragmatist to Romantic, and how you feel about your rating. Some folks are proud romantics, more are slightly sheepish and coy about it, and in most mixed-gender crowds it's hipper to scoff (at all things, but especially at love). That is not to say I think the romantics are right or the pragmatists are mere killjoys. (Any true romantic will tell you there's more anguish in it than joy. They will also tell you there's a razor-thin line between pleasure and pain, and that they've spent at least one summer listening to nothing but Joy Divison. Aptly enough, Joy Division is a theme shared by these two films: spot the references!) I do think that our modern-day notions of romance are forced, untrue, even cruel, and this is a perfect double-feature to use in the examination of the issue.

To begin with, the Time Traveler's Wife. It's got a splendid cast and a big-money look, and what better new slant to lay over the top of the old boy-meets-girl chestnut than a fellow who's shaken loose in time, who might turn up grey-haired for your wedding or post-pubescent when you're forty? There may be a metaphor in it for those damaged but well-meaning lovers among us who show up when they can but often forget to bring their inner selves with them. If so, that's more interesting than what most viewers will bring away, which is a fairly straightforward primer for the female of the species on everything we're supposed to obsess over from the youngest age to the oldest: romantic love and its relationship with destiny (because without destiny at its foundation, romantic love stands on very shaky little colt-hooves indeed), the Very Expensive Wedding and the conventional and mutually-fixated marriage lived in the always immaculate home and accompanied by the traditional, compulsive emotionality over breeding and child-rearing. The Wife works as some unspecified sort of artist, but that doesn't have much to do with her Life (that is to say, with The Husband); it's merely what she does. She keeps no servants, but somehow the house is always dauntingly immaculate, interestingly so, like those ideal living rooms you see in the most expensive but ecologically-correct catalogues for those rich people who were raised by hippies and don't want their houses to look like rich people's houses. How does she do it? or does he? We never see anyone wasting time cleaning, although a main bonding experience seems to be the mutual preparation of food in their very immaculate and interesting-looking kitchen. It's all shorthand, I expect, for Traditional Family Values and subliminal advertising for those expensive catalogues. Otherwise we'd see someone doing the occasional dish or getting annoyed that the garbage hadn't made it to the curb on time.

On the one hand, I dare you to look me in the eyes and say you do not love Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams in this movie, do not look forward with curiosity roused to the next leap in time (where will he find clothes? who will be waiting for him after his leap? and how does death, as it must, fit in?). On the other hand, the movie feels dangerous in the way that Sleepless in Seattle did all those years ago: impressionable girls are going to come away with a handful of irresistibly attractive notions that are not Romantic in the most soulful sense, but "romantic" in a cynical, wedding-industry way. And although its story is unequivocally engaging, its script is an obstacle on the road to any quality the film achieves: in its best moments it is pedestrian and obvious, buoyed up only by the talents involved and the strangeness built into the story itself. (My favorite moment is after Claire and Henry have had a life-changing fight. She gets a secret call in the night and sneaks out to pick up a younger version of Henry who has just time-traveled into the moment. He asks where his older self is, she tells him, "I wanted a little time away from him," and he says, "How's that working out for you?" in that low-key, Eric Bana way.) At the lowest point in their marriage, Claire rails that because she met him when she was eight and they had already been married several years from his perspective, she'd never been given a real choice, a fighting chance.

(500) Days has its focus pulled in on the destiny question as well but the debate is laid straight out on the table: Summer (Zooey Deschanel) doesn't believe in love, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a big old gooey and glum romantic who thinks he's found his soulmate. If Time Traveler dipped a little too liberally into that old paintpot marked "SENTIMENT. WARNING: TOXIC IF OVERUSED" and felt its wings dragged down near-fatally into muck, (500) Days flirts, but ultimately non-fatally, with over-cleverness. Part of what saves it is the quality of its pop culture satire, like the soda-pop-advertisement-ish music video that is our young hero's morning walk to work after his first night spent in Summer's arms, or the Bergman film he gets caught in once the relationship goes south. Again the cast is near-perfect and Levitt's charms and sex appeal win us over in a character that might have seemed irredeemable.

Those cynics among you who are NOT secret romantics will be annoyed to learn that the True Love vs Sheer Fantasy debate tips ultimately into the corner of the romantics, but only after a rather good and very funny examination of both sides. Tom works as a writer of greeting cards and ultimately recognizes that the business he is in is part of the problem, along with pop music and Hollywood (we are told early on that his ideas about love were gleaned from repeated early viewings of the Graduate on television. When he takes Summer to see it she leaves the cinema weeping uncontrollably). There's more than a little Annie Hall here, with its meta-fictional tactics, its quirky-girl heroine (poor Zooey. She didn't ask to be the archetype of eccentric muse girl, did she?), its fast-and-loose playing with time. On first viewing, it bears up surprisingly well beneath that weighty mantle.

Here's the final tally: all told, I cried only once, and then only a few tears (four or five, tops) during the Time Traveler's Wife despite repeated coaxings for a more prodigious outflow, and I frown upon its lack of introspection, but I laughed many times, sometimes loudly and long, during (500) Days, and I like its negative capability: it knows destiny isn't true, but it believes in it anyway. So that one wins.

public enemies: set the camera down and back away slowly

Sometimes I get excited about a movie and walk in the doors without noticing who directed it. This is a dangerous practice and I recommend it only for the strong-hearted. Who knows what dreck might be lurking behind an attractive poster? From the first shots, I ought to have known; the words MICHAEL MANN ought to have whispered themselves into my ear. In retrospect, it feels as if the director were standing in front of me, waving his arms around, shouting, "Don't look at the actors! Look at me instead!"

It's not dreck. It's a good story, and much of it is well-told; by some 50 minutes in, I was fully immersed. Here's the rub: it should not have taken that long. The story was good enough, the actors were good enough, I ought to have been immersed long before, if someone had, for God's sake, hogtied the camerman. Mr. Mann has joined my list of directors to whom I will send a tripod at Christmas with clear, easy-to-read instructions about how to use it. What's with all these ultra-ULTRA-close-up motion shots? Apparently Mann or his DP or his editor or SOME misguided sumbitch thought that was a clever way to introduce us to the characters, by showing us how massive his pores are as a piece of his face glides past the camera. Luckily, that stops after awhile. Maybe Mr. Mann (or his DP or his editor or whatever sumbitch sits at the desk where this particular buck stops) finally got engrossed in the story and in spite of himself just started letting himself tell it. Well done, Mr. Sumbitch. A belated realization, but better late than never.

This is not a film made by a director with vision, but a director with a longing to be visionary. He wants us to walk out of the theatre and say his technique is bold. OK, it's bold, and sometimes it works, but most times it detracts from all the things he did right, which are myriad. The period details, for one; I swear to God he Tardis-ed his cast back to the thirties to film this. The clothes, the cars, the apartments, the planes and motorcycles... details of both wealthy and poor seem right on. There's one scene where J Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup! hurray) is giving medals to "young crimefighters". Granted, it's just a snippet of a scene, but kids are the hardest folks to displace in time because they haven't yet got the seasoned actor's self-awareness about the personal marks and influences cultural imprinting has left upon them, and these little boys I swear to God seem like they came from my father's generation and never touched an ipod or cruised online porn.

In fact, I wish I had the casting directors (let me check IMDB... Avy Kaufman and Bonnie Timmermann, it says) here right now: hearty handshakes and big sloppy kisses all around. The faces these guys found! Look around the room at the mugs on the Feds, on the Texas ranger guys, on the gangsters... great, classic mugs. On top of that, the pretty boys from my generation (Crudup and Depp specifically, but also Stephen Dorff and others) have reached that halfway-to-ninety point at which life has carved some hardship into the prettiness, or stretched it some with years of dissolute luxuriousness, and they're starting to look interesting instead of perfect. Crudup is spot-on as the fast-talking, obsessed Hoover, and Christian Bale, with the toughest job as the low-key, practical and hard-working Melvin Purvis, pulls it off with his usual adeptness, making the nonsensational crimefighter as interesting to watch as any mobster. My favorite bit might be a phone conversation between Hoover and Purvis, in which Purvis is saying he needs Texas rangers to finish the job right and Hoover keeps snapping, "I can't hear you," and Purvis keeps repeating it, patiently and stubbornly, until Hoover hangs up and the next thing we see are Texas rangers disembarking from a train (led by Stephen Lang in a really wonderful small role. As we left the cinema my boyfriend said, "Do you think he had enough lines that we could give him Best Supporting Actor?" He didn't, and that's too bad).

Mann's an odd fellow; his choices are odd. Some of this is filmed on video, or the film is overtaxed into graininess, and those places seem random. There's a shootout at a resort deep in the woods at night which is hypnotically lit by bursts of machine-gun fire, and that's all gorgeous, but then they run out into the woods and the moon becomes a very bright and very shifting light-source. Things like that don't matter if they work, if you're engrossed in the story and don't notice them. I guess I wouldn't care so much except for this unsettling suspicion that they were deliberate: that instead of making a film about John Dillinger, he's made a film about Michael Mann making a film about John Dillinger, and that kind of feedback loop just makes my head hurt.

what i've been watching: june, part 2

In the Electric Mist: (2009. dir: Bertrand Tavernier) In the Philip Marlowe novels, Raymond Chandler managed to create a world in which the mass of humanity was darkly twisted and corrupt, where the apparently innocent were not innocent, where Marlowe retained a semblance of self-respect only by holding himself aloof and living strictly by a self-imposed code of honor. Although Marlowe himself often comes away from his adventures feeling unclean and depressed, we the readers do not; we are shielded from it by his stoicism and underplayed ironic humor, and most of all by the gorgeous poetry at the soul of him. This is all in tribute to Chandler, who was an undisputed master of his craft. His books never get old, and he, with Dashiell Hammett and a few others, spawned an industry that has erupted into monstrous proportions today.

Take, for example, James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels. I read a clutchful of these when I was early in the throes of my vigorous love affair with New Orleans. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead was easily my favorite because in it the stoical and sober-alcoholic veteran Robicheaux gets dosed with acid by Hollywood types and for the rest of the book has periodic, wonderful conversations with the ghost of a Confederate general who may or may not be a projection of his own best self. The Louisiana of the Robicheaux books is as dark and morally polluted as anything Marlowe or the Continental Op or even the easily detestable Mike Hammer ever faced, all tough men surviving in ethically slimy times.

French director Bertrand Tavernier has teleported the story into post-Katrina days and cast Tommy Lee Jones in the lead (I always saw Fred Ward, but the craggy face is the important thing, and Jones is no poor man's second). In fact, it sports an enviable cast, including Peter Sarsgaard, an actor I usually love but who is missing something in this role, some intangible but necessary thing. An almost unrecognisable Levon Helm (again, a man I love) is the Confederate general and the wonderful Kelly Macdonald gamely forces herself into the cramped little thankless role of a good-hearted but nonetheless tainted-by-Hollywood actress. In the end, in spite of the talent involved, there's something crucial lacking here. The awful seaminess of this world seems contrived and untrue, as it sometimes does, truth be told, in Burke's books. The characters are too often no thicker than two dimensions and all the acting skill in the world can't fix a story that's broken at its very foundation.



the Other Boleyn Girl: >SPOILER ALERT< This is a nasty tale of a heartless girl who seduces her sister's lover (while the sister is sequestered in confinement bearing his child, and at the behest of her very ambitious and possibly sociopathic family) using a dastardly yet effective tactic of ongoing titillation and withholding until he divorces his wife (meanwhile inventing Anglicanism) to marry her. Then, when the going gets rough, she sleeps with her own brother in a desperate bid to bear the needed heir to the throne, thereby condemning him to death alongside her, and nearly destroying her sister's life out of sheer petty selfishness.

An American film was also made from the same wildly popular piece of chick-lit which spawned this one, and I watched this British take first because the actors are top-notch: Jodhi May gives a manically spirited and eerily convincing performance as Anne Boleyn, and I always love Nastascha McElhone, even here in her non-role as watcher and Silent Wronged Woman. There's a lot of handheld camera and reality-TV private interviews in which the characters explain their motivations and feelings directly to us, and I suppose that's designed to make us feel right at home with these old Tudors, but instead it feels cheap. At the end we see the Tower today, tourists visiting the spot where Anne got her head chopped off, and that feels even cheaper.




My Dinner With Jimi: (2003. dir: Bill Fishman) Think of it as a morality tale for the fame-hungry: these are Howard Kaylen's remembrances of the most exciting days of his life, when the Turtles were touring England on "Happy Together" and hanging at the Speakeasy with the hippest of the hip, and yet the conversations are all as asanine and dull as you'll find in any high school cafeteria any day of the week. Moral lesson the second: all the hippest of the hip we come across (Mama Cass, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Graham Nash, Donovan, Brian Jones, the Beatles and Hendrix) are just as bored as everyone else, pursuing drugs and sex to fill the time until they can get back onstage again. Is this news to anyone? There are exactly two moments when this fatuous piece of flaccidity comes to life: the worst is when John Lennon (Brian Groh) unleashes a devastating barrage of unfunny wit against the Turtles' rhythm guitarist, inspiring him to put down his guitar and never play again for the rest of his life. The scene crackles with an electricity of mortifying cruelty and bears with it an awful pong of validity. The other is when we finally get into the booth with the spinach omelettes and the man we've been waiting for... And even then, it's not that he ever says anything profound, it just always feels like he's about to. And, frankly, Hendrix had so much damn charisma that it stretches across the years and out of the grave, and a guy playing him with enough truth (as Royale Watkins does here) is a thing you can't look away from, even when the dialogue is this grindingly tedious.

what i've been watching: june edition

Death Proof: (2007. dir: Quentin Tarantino) Kurt Russell deserves an Oscar just for the moxie it took to tackle this role. In fact, Stuntman Mike might, in another film, one that's interested in character, be very intriguing indeed. Death Proof is not that film. In fact, as a piece of cinema, I doubt that it rates highly on anyone's scale. As an homage to a cinematic era gone by, however, it's a little slice of genius. From that opening screen they used to show before all the drive-in movies to the editing glitches he inserts to mimic the hiccup between scenes that happened when they changed the reels and complete with old-film scratches, it's like stepping back in time. If only I had tinny old speakers to hang from my window-frame. He even caught the sound quality just right, although I don't know enough about the mechanics of audio to know why it seemed that way.

It's got the "id"-heavy plot that's short on sense but wallows in sordidness, which is very satisfyingly as it should be. Structurally, it's too loose and involves characters too adolescent to be truly engaging, but it's nonetheless got moments of utter, jaw-dropping fascination. My own favorite is the record-geek bit in the car as the doom-bound girls ride to their date with destiny, pleasantly drunk, all grooving to a perfect song and talking about Pete Townsend, oblivious to the autobeast hunkered and waiting, headlights off, just around the bend. Those early, creepy shots of Stuntman Mike's deathmobile at rest, too, are very effective, particularly when the girl goes out for a smoke and you can almost feel the car leering at her from its shadow in the rain.

It's too long, with a doubled plot, and the Tarantino-speak conversations between the girls don't have the zest and buoyancy of his best work, but it'll leave you feeling a little soiled (in a good way), just like those old bottom-of-the-barrel Russ Meyer double features did in the old days.


Dollhouse, the season wrap-up: (2009. creator: Joss Whedon) As promised in the wake of the initial disaster area of the first eps, I stuck with it through the end of the season. For those of you who didn't, it got good from the sixth through the ninth episodes ("Man in the Street", "Echoes", "Needs" and "Spy in the House of Love"), then put it on autocruise for the tenth ("Haunted"). The season enders ("Briar Rose" and "Omega") which apparently earned the show at least another season's reprieve from the chopping block from those mad headsmen at Fox, were wildly ambitious and very disappointing, largely due to one very important casting choice (I won't spoil it, but it's somebody we Joss-heads love playing a hithertofore unseen character we've been building up to all damn season long, and playing it underwhelmingly). In its favor, even the bad episodes have interesting things in them, and the best make good use of the unexpected in that wonderful old-time Joss way (like the revelation about Ben and Glory in the fifth season of Buffy, or Spike getting his soul back).


the New World (Massive Extendo-Version): (2005. dir: Terrence Malick) Even a devoted Luddite finds things about this new techno-age to cherish, and one of the best for me is that a movie can keep morphing long after its initial release. A few years ago I had a beautiful dream that Coppola would keep re-releasing Apocalypse, Now! every third year with a different shape and focus. It's possible that wasn't the best idea I've ever had, but here, in consolation, is another of my all-time favorites in a whopping new package. This ran 149 minutes at the theatre, the initial DVD was a petite 135, but all lovely things come to those who wait, and now we have the Big Monster Godzilla version, clocking in at a gorgeously self-indulgent two hours and 52 minutes. I accept, although I can't really wrap my mind around it, that even at its shortest it was too long for some folks' taste. However, for those to whom sensuality and the numinous are huffed up from the same feedbag, this new version is a three-hour retreat chock-full of spiritual rejuvenation.

It holds some surprises. Malick is notorious for shooting hours and days of an actor only to leave his entire performance on the cutting-room floor* (rumor has it that Viggo Mortenson, Martin Sheen, Bill Pullman, Gary Oldman, Lukas Haas and Mickey Rourke were all originally in the Thin Red Line). In this long version, Michael Greyeyes sees a great chunk of his role restored, and who knew Roger Rees was in it at all? Ben Chaplin, poor fellow, is still just a guy pulling an oar in a longboat, and we can only guess what his role originally entailed. The most important alteration is in Pocahontas' recovery from her grief over Captain Smith's supposed death at sea. In the old cut, we see her crazed with sorrow and then, apparently with the passing of time, she finds solace in good work and then John Rolfe casts his eyes on her and her salvation is complete. In this one, she is grief-stricken for a very long time and given up for hopeless by society. She decides to commit suicide but experiences a very beautiful and supremely Malickian moment of grace and her salvation rises up, crucially, not from the favors of John Rolfe, but from her own relationship with the divine. It seems so vital to the lifeblood of the story that I'm surprised Malick allowed it to be cut in the first place. No matter. It's back now, amid all manner of beauty else.

* Kills me that the cutting-room floor is only metaphorical now. I love to think of that little closet-like, windowless room with a pale, tireless person hunched over a Moviola and the floor crunchy with filmstrips.

star trek: it's all fun and games until somebody loses a planet

>SPOILER ALERT<

The first nightmare I ever had, or the first one I can remember, had Kirk and Spock in it. It involved the mixing of magic potions that looked like buckets of paint: the brown one was a healing salve and that was for Captain Kirk, the blue one was a toxin and that was for Mr. Spock. I, however, managed somehow to sit in the blue bucket and when I stood up and looked at my hands, three of my fingers were gone: two from the left hand, one from the right.

One of the many thousands of things my mother did right in raising us was that we watched the original Star Trek faithfully from the first episode to the last. I was two when it first aired, and I guess I slept through most of it, but by the third season I can remember a serious discussion between my older brother, my mother and me, about whether or not we'd be allowed to stay up for the new nine o'clock airtime on Friday nights to watch. (We were. She was and is a total champ.) I can very distinctly remember that first surreal time I saw Abe Lincoln sitting in the middle of space talking to Captain Kirk. I found the use of his word "negress" when addressing Lt Uhura slightly embarrassing although I couldn't place why. Apollo was the first Greek God I knew about because he's the only one who ever appeared in an episode. To this day I mistrust the Earps and suspect they were the worst of the bad guys at the OK Corral. You could say with some truth that everything I knew about life before the age of seventeen I learned from Star Trek, Shakespeare, or Hollywood.

Mr. Spock was my first great love, and remains one of the few fictional figures from my childhood who still resonates strongly in my underconscious as an adult. That's all prologue to the admission that I went into this new Star Trek with some trepidation, and emerged with wildly mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don't remember the last time I had so much fun sitting in a theatre. It had me from the first moments: that lovely, stoical Captain Robau (Faran Tahir) going to his death at Romulan hands, the woman in labor in the midst of deadly chaos while her husband sacrifices his life to save hundreds... I'm weeping just thinking about it. And after that, it gets downright delightful.

Here are some things I love: Simon Pegg is a brilliant Montgomery Scott, for one, and the Endorian Mud Flea vaccination scene between Bones (Karl Urban) and Kirk (Chris Pine) is hilarious. My sincerest gratitude and joy go out to Anton Yelchin and whoever wrote this script for turning Chekov into what he ought to have been all along. (Apparently this is the young man who plays Kyle Reese in the new Terminator movie, or "Kyle FRICKIN' Reese" as an outraged blogger put it in a recent rant. He seems an unlikely choice to carry the Michael Biehn sultriness, but after the perfection of his Chekov, I'll give the boy plenty of room to take his shot.) It's also exactly right, very satisfying, that Kirk gets the crap beat out of him again and again, like a repeating motif. It's the only possible counterweight to that young Kirk arrogance, and we wouldn't put up with him without it. The Lens-Flare-As-Futuristic-Aesthetic tactic is bold but works for me, and the Romulans are fantastic, with their ferociously antisocial look. I could gaze upon Eric Bana's mutated face for some hours and feel that my time was well-spent. There are fierce ice-bears! And crazy giant snow-lobsters! And how about Scottie's little sidekick, eh?

As with most fun, however, there's a downside. All credit to these guys for doing the research, learning the mythology, then creating a credible time disruption to explain the many changes they make. That said, I'm just not ready to live in a universe in which Vulcan has been destroyed and Spock and Uhura spend their time kissing. (Yes, you could argue that I've lived my whole life in a universe that didn't have Vulcan in it... but you'd be wrong.) It kills me that a whole generation of kids, maybe multiple generations, will grow up thinking that this alternate history is the true one, the important one, relegating the original, the Star Trek that thrives, a living universe inside my head, to the status of the passe, the mendacious, or, at best, the secondary. On the one hand, you have to admire any approach that brings this kind of vitality into what had become an inert franchise, but at what cost?

Consider Mr. Spock. The beautiful thing about Spock, one of the crucial factors which lift him above the meager ranks of Character and into the realm of the Archetype, is that he is, ultimately, the Man Alone. Because his Vulcan and human halves vie in neverending and always fascinating conflict, he walks alone, by choice and necessity. And as a direct result of it, he belongs to all of us. Any fantasy can be projected onto him; he can fit into almost any story; it's why so much slash fiction has been lovingly devoted to him over the years. He is a brilliant embodiment of the war between the left and right halves of the brain, that age-old moral dispute between making one's life-choices from the heart or from the mind. As such, he is a vital and never-aging animus projection whose ongoing drama offers lessons for anyone who uses the current homosapiens version of the bicameral brain.

This new Spock, I fear (very well played by Zachary Quinto, he of the impossibly kissable mouth... see above), will be reduced to the status of mere romantic hero. If he continues (in the inevitable sequels) on his current path favoring his human side over his Vulcan, Spock takes a step backward out of his previous greatness into a life of possible happiness, but little more. No doubt he will serve the Federation and Captain Kirk with loyalty and glittering hyperintelligence as before, but we as a people will have lost a hero of larger-than-life nobility, wisdom and self-sacrifice. At the risk of blaspheming, I'd like to submit into evidence the following example: remember the Last Temptation of Christ? The devil lets Willem Dafoe step down off the cross and live a happily married life with Barbara Hersey's Magdalene, and at the natural end of it he realizes with some horror that he has betrayed the very heart of what he was set on this earth to do, thrown aside his own greatness of purpose for some scant years of human contentment.

Call me alarmist, but I fear that our Spock is about to make a similar mistake.

in which the good guys win and all's right with the world

The week of panic and sleeplessness is done now. I've been waking up weary every day, not remembering my dreams, with only vaguely troubling recollections of nights poisoned by sisyphian tasks and trying to find my way through convoluted'd like to see them eating their left-brain, pragmatical, evil-wins-because-it-has-more-money words on a hefty Catalan platter today.

It's hard to say what did the trick, exactly. Man U hit the pitch all gangbusters and superpowered, controlling the game for the first ten minutes. Granted, Barca have a sort of tradition of starting slow, probing and exploring, finding their passing rhythm before making their first move, but in those first ten minutes I think Ronaldo created at least three chances for himself... all saved by my boys, of course. (The backline played tremendously yesterday. Sylvinho and Pique were downright heroes, and Carles Puyol is a damn superman, reining Ronaldo in over and over and getting continually battered for his troubles. I hope he's sitting today in a hot-tub full of supermodels. Certainly he's earned it.) And then somehow Cameroonian marvel Samuel Eto'o slipped up the touchline with the ball at his feet and tapped it past keeper Van der Sar into the net, ten minutes into the match, and I've never seen anything so quickly and finally turn an entire tide. It was like the parting of the Red Sea. Like all the life drained right out of Ferguson's men, and they were transformed in that one instant from a smoothly-oiled fighting machine into a pile of disengaged parts, still fighting, but without effect.



If you've never seen Barca play, you're missing a great pleasure. The footwork, the pace, the aesthetics of the passing... Andres Iniesta and Xavi Hernandez are like two halves of a single person when they move the ball between them up the pitch. Much of the greatness of Barca lies in its youth training, a school known as La Masia. Boys are trained early in the ways of Beautiful Football, and a great many of them stay with the team for many years, a rarity in these days of nomadic players following the siren call of their bank accounts. Both Iniesta and Xavi rose up out of this youth program, as did manager Pep Guardiola (seen flying, below), first goalkeeper Victor Valdes and superstar Argentine forward Lionel Messi, as well as more recent additions Sergi Busquets and Gerard Pique. Intrepid Captain Puyol has been a staunch Catalan for nearly his entire career.



But these are the giggly mutterings of the near-exhausted. I've got that same empty feeling I had after the marathon that was the World Cup, this time with a patina of happiness washed across it, but there's that melancholy, too. The season's over. I'll have nothing but World Cup qualifiers, never my favorite dish on the menu, for a good three months. Add to that the prospect of three more months of nothing but summer fare at the cinema (GI Joe?! Trans-frickin'-formers?!) and I'm at a loose end. I've been watching the first season of Alan Ball's True Blood, which I'm enjoying (cajun country, vampires, and all those stellar character actors that get work on HBO. What's not to like?), but I'm jonesing for an obsession. My immediate impulse is to go out and watch Star Trek again, see if I like it as well as I thought I did the first time, put off Terminator Salvation for a few more days, and hope that if I leave myself open and vulnerable, some god or other might show up in the form of a flash of brilliant inspiration. Here's hoping.