seven great sex scenes and one runner-up

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





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


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





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


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







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


NUMBER FIVE: Clooney and Lopez in Out of Sight



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


NUMBER FOUR: Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance in Intimacy



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


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





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


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



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

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


AND THE BEST SEX SCENE EVER:

Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez in Unfaithful





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

merry christmas, mr lawrence: sleeping with the enemy

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

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

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

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

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

things i've been watching december 2010

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



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

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


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

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

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

what i've been watching november 2010

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

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

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

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


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



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

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

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

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

the guiltiest pleasure stuffed into the back of the closet

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

bright star: half in love with easeful death

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

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

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

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

in which i enjoy halloween at sinescope

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


THIRTEEN HORROR CLASSICS (in no particular order):




Toby Dammit (1968)

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




Pulse (2001)

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

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




Ravenous (1999)

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




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

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




The Leopard Man (1943)

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




The Legend of Hell House (1973)

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




The Stepford Wives (1975)

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




Duel (1971)

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




Angel Heart (1987)

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




The Dead Zone (1983)

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




Prophecy (1995)

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




The Fool-Killer (1965)

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




The Passion of the Christ (2004)

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

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

SPOILER ALERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

things i've been watching: august 2010

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



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

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



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



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

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

more things i've been watching: july 2010

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

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

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



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



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



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

inception: three levels and philip k dick

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

WARNING: TONS OF SPOILERS AHEAD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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