and more that i've been watching

L'Avventura: (1960. dir: Michelangelo Antonioni) See it for some of the most gorgeous and mesmerizing photography ever, both in use of landscape and in love of the human face. A boatload of healthy, vital, rich and sun-soaked Italian people go for a cruise, and they are like a swarm of little kids: too restless and bored to do anything properly, to take a swim or have some sex or even argue well. One of them gets so bored and restless she disappears into the cosmos, just disintegrates without a trace, like those girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock who implode and vanish out of sheer sexual frustration.

On the surface, this is a movie about relations between the sexes, and I think it wants one hand in Fellini (the absurdity of the whore/crowd sequence) and the other, believe it or not, in Bergman. There's something sweet about watching these bronzed Italians trying to convey despair and being just too damn healthy to convince. You see Liv Ullmann or Max Von Sydow stony-faced on a rock in the North Sea, you see despair; you see Monica Vitti or Gabriele Ferzetti weeping on a similar (but warmer) rock in the Meditteranean, you feel like you're watching a kid with an emotion passing across him before, I don't know, a herd of cows or something distracts him and a wholly new emotion sweeps him away. There's probably a moral in it, and I suspect it is, "Don't fall in love with Italians unless you are one," but these people are so endearing it may be closer to, "Just be in love with your Italians while you're there and make sure to take your heart with you when you go home."

Anyway, the McGuffin is the missing girl, and the search goes on intermittently for some 18 hours or so of screen-time (fear not: I exaggerate), but she's easily forgotten and the time passes hypnotically because what you're looking at (both Vitti's face and the scenery) is so gorgeous. It's a lot like that other 18-hour existential Antonioni travelfest, the Passenger, which has that EXCELLENT long end-pan in which the camera moves slowly, slowly across the room, through the grille, and around the courtyard while Jack Nicholson sleeps his last sleep. I'd suggest you watch them as a double-feature, but that would be heartless: NOBODY has that kind of patience. Do watch them separately, though, when you're in a slow, still mood, and maybe complete this particular film-fest with Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, a film that really does achieve a measure of the narcotic, existential delving into Life and Death And Their Relations To Love in a way that L'Avventura I think wants to but can't because it's just not sufficiently sere and etiolated, not ready to give up living long enough to do it.



Bang the Drum Slowly: (1973. dir: John D. Hancock) I loved this movie when I was a kid, watched it anytime it was on TV, which was a lot. It lent itself well to the small screen because it felt like a movie-of-the-week, and I guess that's why I never thought to revisit it as an adult. Now that I do, who'd have thought it would be not just good but bordering on great? It's got the movie-of-the-week thing, sure... sentiment (baseball player with incurable disease and buddy who sticks by him through thick and thin), swelly music, low budget... but this is the one that every movie-of-the-week ever made WANTS to be, the supreme acme to which they aspire. This is the real mccoy upon which all the cliches which followed were modelled.

For a start, it's got a simplicity of story-telling. There are visual moments that break your heart: the slow-motion final play of the big game in which De Niro (yes! De Niro!) has flipped his catcher's mask off and is trying to find the foul ball while simultaneously fending off the sickness that's been threatening to fell him all day is a thing of beauty. It won't surprise anyone when I say that De Niro gives a brilliant performance, since this was just as he was gearing up to conquer the world, but the egolessness of it is astonishing, its lack of vanity, when you figure that he was young and hungry (Mean Streets came out this same year) and looking to make an impression on the world. The idea that this is the same man who'll show up in Godfather II in a single year is nuts. What did he do with all that charisma?! How do you turn a charisma like that on and off? And yet he does it. And it's not just De Niro. Michael Moriarty is riveting as the star pitcher who takes care of his friend, and if there were nothing else to recommend it, the movie would be worth watching for Vincent Gardenia in perhaps the role of his lifetime as their growling and bear-like coach.

random thoughts on hamlet as he shows up on film

I once set out to watch every filmed Hamlet available. I got through about five, I think, before I got distracted. It's an unending task, happily so, and it doesn't take long before you realize that every production, no matter how halt and lame (I'm looking at you, Ethan Hawke), will have one or two moments of revelation, ways of presenting a line or an action, a thing you've seen a hundred times before, but somehow until that moment never really saw. The Franco Zeferelli/Mel Gibson movie (of which I have seen only pieces) has Glenn Close offering an interesting and workable take on Gertrude by giving her an extraordinarily childlike nature. The Derek Jacobi production is lovely, and has a wonderful "Nymph, in thy orisons" moment when he realizes Ophelia is holding her prayer-book upside-down. Even that infamous Ethan Hawke version (in which he omits a crucial "from" from his "to be or not to be" speech, thereby implying that his metaphorical traveller to the undiscovered country steals its coastline and never gives it back) puts odd curves on things, like scenes played in a laundromat or using old footage of James Dean as inspiration for Hamlet's musings on playacting.

The Olivier film, a sort of diving board from which a whole subsequent generation of Hamlets leapt in various directions, ages surprisingly well. It's filmed with grace, a camera moving in long, easy pans around an airy castle from scene to scene, and I tend to forget (I suppose because of the hype) what a strange and compelling actor Olivier was, always carrying some terrible secret barely restrained beneath those heavy eyelids.

Whatever your opinion of Kenneth Branagh, radical reinterpretation while remaining true to the text is a thing he does better than anyone, and he does it without breaking a sweat. For example, there's a version available of Twelfth Night as done by Branagh's Renaissance Company, always a troubling comedy because of the cruelties wreaked on Malvolio by its supposedly sympathetic buffoon characters. This one has been refigured as a tragedy, or anyway what you might call a Melancholy, with the truly resplendent Anton Lesser as the clown Feste, a role that has been re-placed (without changing any dialogue, mind you) at the epicenter of the piece as its tragic and romantic hero. Once you've seen it, it seems not only remarkably effective but also obviously what Shakespeare meant all along.

The Big Kahuna Dramaturge at the theatre where I work said unequivocally that you'll never see an uncut Hamlet onstage; it's just too damn long. Branagh did it on film, though, in what is the new textbook version from the mid-'90s, giving us four hours' worth of some of the best Shakespeare you'll ever see. He keeps the forward momentum so strong through the first half that it doesn't seem long, then you're hooked by the second and so it still doesn't seem long. He tucks an intermission in between IV.iv and IV.v, way too late in the day for a theatrical production because no modern audience will sit that long (when I was a kid, I swear they did the plays without intermissions at all, and if you left the theatre they wouldn't let you back in), but it's the perfect break in the play. He leaves us with the "I do not know / Why yet I live to say, 'This thing's to do,'" speech, just as he's leaving Denmark, banished for England, and he runs into the Norwegian army on his way out. Branagh sets the tiny scene on an icy, waste expanse and has the camera pull back, back, into infinity as the speech goes on, until he's just a tiny black speck in a white landscape, shouting these words into the vastness of the sky. He's truly brilliant, this man. AND after seeing Richard Briers' Polonius -- a harsh, relentless, thinking Polonius, -- I will never return easily to the old dunderheaded approach.

A Scottish brogue is one of the sexier things on the planet, and I always harbored an idea that if some Scottish actor (John Hannah, say) were to speak the "what a piece of work is a man" speech softly into one's ear (particularly the "this majestical roof fretted with golden fire" bit), it might inspire a state of ecstatic nirvana profound enough that one might never return from it. You could say, then, that I ventured into the Tony Richardson Hamlet with some unreasonable expectations, since it has a Scot in the lead (Nicol Williamson). This one came out of the late sixties, when theatre (OK, the whole of Western Civilization) was experiencing earthquakes and tidal waves, destroying and reforming itself, and this piece seems to be from the very dark, post-Altamont sixties. You come away from Ophelia's mad scene (played by the ultrahip Marianne Faithfull) with a sense that everyone in the damn court has taken sexual advantage of her, including Laertes and Claudius. Williamson's Hamlet is the most neurotic you'll ever see, wild-eyed and crumpled, his high, nasal monotone (so much for the sexiness of the brogue) running roughshod across all that poetry as if he had no time for it.

You can get the Peter Brook Hamlet on Netflix, too, the 2002 production with Adrian Lester in the lead. Brook, one of a handful of Grand Theatrical Eminences Grises who redefined theatre at the hinge of the seventies, concentrates on graceful, minimalist staging, uses a multi-cultural stable of actors, and encourages his performers to avoid heavy characterization, focusing rather on speaking their lines with truth and simplicity. This can be quite beautiful in a Zen sort of way, but robs the play of much of its zest.

What you CAN'T get on Netflix is the David Tennant production from last year and oh! what I would give to have seen that onstage. They say that Tennant is now the most popular actor in all of England... mostly due to the good doctor, obviously, but across that pond I suspect folks actually take notice when an actor excels at Shakespeare.

A short list of the Dane on film:

Olivier, 1948
Philip Saville, starring Christopher Plummer, 1964
Gielgud & Bill Colleran, starring Richard Burton, 1964
Richardson, starring Nicol Williamson, 1969
David Giles, starring Ian McKellen, 1970
Celestino Coronada, starring Tony & David Meyer, 1976
Rodney Bennett, starring Derek Jacobi, 1980
Zefferelli, starring Mel Gibson, 1990
Kevin Kline, 1990
Branagh, 1996
Michael Almereyda, starring Ethan Hawke, 2000
Campbell Scott, 2000
Brook, starring Adrian Lester, 2002
Alexander Fodor, starring Wilson Belchambers, 2007

what i've been watching: february 2010

Body of Lies: (2008. dir: Ridley Scott) Five full-on stars for Mark Strong; a solid two-and-a-half for the rest of the movie. Without him, it's a decent enough espionage film, well enough acted, well enough put together, that it'd be worth not changing the channel if you ran across it on TV. Throw Mark Strong into the mix as the mysterious head of Jordanian Intelligence, and you have a thing worth seeking out. Earlier this year Strong was the Crowleyesque villain in Sherlock Holmes, but that was a mere two-dimensional foil, the type a man of his skills could play blindfolded and sitting on his hands. In this one, although Scott has given him less screen-time than compadres DiCaprio and Crowe, it's a role he can run with, make something of, and Scott has photographed him remarkably well while he's doing it.



Possessed: (1947. dir: Curtis Bernhardt) Histrionics and psychobabble ensue when Joan Crawford drives herself all the way through crazy and into a coma for the love of Van Heflin. Weirdly, I think this is the first time I've ever watched a full Crawford movie from end to end. Certainly it's the first time I ever saw that she was a little bit pretty: in the beginning she's got no makeup, or very little, and there are nice features there. Later on, when she climbs back into the red-scar-mouth and helmet-haired maquillage/suit of armour, she loses her appeal again, just looking nearsighted and strident. It's a tough role and it needs something extra, something I suspect Barbara Stanwyck might have given it, while Crawford reaches for the obvious choice with every moment.

Raymond Massey is solid and appropriately unassuming as the loyal husband, and it's once again an opportunity for me to marvel at just how great Van Heflin really was. You have only to imagine, say, Robert Taylor or Clark Gable in the role of David Sutton to realize the depth and breadth Heflin gives. Anyone else would've gone too nice, too conflicted, or too cruel in the continued rejection of Crawford's clingy and hysterical Louise Howell.

How about this for a bold position? The undeniable greatness of Spencer Tracy is much ballyhooed, and I'm not denying it, but I can't think of a Tracy role that Heflin couldn't have played as well or better, and I'm including my favorite, that masterful turn in Bad Day at Black Rock. Heflin would have given us a different Macreedy, but one, I suspect, every bit as fascinating. And could Tracy have done as much with Jeff Hartnett in Johnny Eager? or even Dan Evans in 3:10 to Yuma? I have doubts, but I'm willing to be talked out of them.




>SPOILER ALERT IN EFFECT<

the Man Who Wasn't There: (2001. dir: the Coen brothers) This is what happens when a director is addicted to making films but his creative well has run temporarily dry. Lugubrious and annoying, it's like a short story stretched into novel length. No, strike that: not even a short story. It's a series of ideas, some of them interesting, some not so much, as if somebody leafed through the notepad they keep in their shirt-pocket to scribble down passing notions and chose ten or twelve at random. "We'll use the Roswell thing, and I want to parody my daughter's piano teacher, and... I don't know... oh! that thing about how a barber going to the electric chair, how the last thing he'd be thinking of was the haircuts on the people watching." It has no suspense at all, which is odd, since there are murders for which major characters might easily go down. I believe we're meant to think that conventional suspense has been sacrificed in favor of a certain existential detachment, but that's a load of bull-honky. This was a purely technical exercise, and as such ought to have been left in the desk-drawer.

The only interest it holds at all is due entirely to the Coens' technical ability, that and the high quality of actor they attract. The black-and-white is gorgeous, deep velvet, and perfectly lit, and Billy Bob Thornton's craggy face is an ideal subject for it. The details of the lost era (small-town America in the fifties) are not so much realistic as heightened, and there is a strong internal cohesion to this created world. Tony Shalhoub and Richard Jenkins are stand-outs in their bit roles... and that's about all I can think of to recommend it.

torture, genius, and the witchfinder general

On a glib day I might describe Michael Reeves as the Ian Curtis of horror films. Young, hip, his works deep-stained with a startling pessimism, dead (probably accidentally) by his own hand at a staggeringly young age, leaving the merest nubbin of what might have grown into a career of some genius, he is swathed after all these many post-mortem years in a gothic mantle of possible greatness, tragically unrealized.

He made three films: She-Beast with Barbara Steele, the Sorcerers with Boris Karloff, and the Witchfinder General with Vincent Price, which is considered his masterpiece.

She-Beast employs a tongue-in-cheek, very dark humor, prescient of Sam Raimi. A Carnaby Street hipster-couple is lifted out of their element and placed in danger in Transylvania, which has fallen behind the Iron Curtain but still harbors demons and vampire-hunters. Its playfulness is heavy like concrete: the couple speak self-consciously clever lines, there are over-the-top visual gags (the most famous inolving a hammer and sickle) and a really dreadful Richard-Lester-esque chase scene involving a soviet-bloc version of Keystone Kops, apparently stuck in as an afterthought because the film as it stood was too short. The Sorcerers I have not yet seen, and am currently scrambling across intercontinental Ebay trying to get a copy that doesn't cost a week's pay, but it sounds like She-Beast 's attempts at lightness have vanished and its hard edges of violence and cynicism have darkened and lugubrified into a truly disturbing, low-budget stew of Peeping Tom and Being John Malkovich.

By the time you reach Witchfinder, the darkness becomes impenetrable. The whole film has exactly one moment of humor, a short interchange between the Witchfinder's torturer and Wilfrid Brambell (appropriately enough, Paul's Grandfather from Lester's Hard Day's Night) in which they barter over horses. The rest is a sort of fable using the English countryside in a manner that David Lynch would use American suburbia in Blue Velvet, as a thin facade of apparent loveliness which flips at a touch to reveal a hell, like Sartre's, which is made of other people. God, if there is one, is content to remain a distant watcher of trees growing, birds singing, and men preying like ravening beasts, one upon another. In those rare instances when the heroes get a break, it is followed hard upon by some greater hardship or horror.

Cromwell's revolution has split England and unleashed a sort of chaos through the land which might be used to the advantage of an unscrupulous character like Matthew Hopkins (played by Vincent Price, although Reeves disliked him and fought for Donald Pleasance in the role), soi-disant Witchfinder General, hanger of women and torturer of men. The story begins with Richard (Ian Ogilvy, an actor Reeves used in all his films), a good and honorable soldier fighting on the side of the rebels. He loves Sara (Hilary Dwyer), who lives in a quiet village with her uncle, a papist. When the villagers call the Witchfinder down on the uncle, Sara finds herself in a sort of nightmare into which Richard can only join later on, rather than quelling it, despite his increasingly obsessive attempts to obtain vengeance.

Although the limitations of his budget are apparent, Reeves manages striking moments of innovation: a late-night supper at a long table at which the characters are lit by three intense pools of light succeeds both as a striking visual metaphor of helplessness in the face of impending darkness and a most convincing picture of a pre-gasworks manor house. There's an early scene in which Richard's company is attacked by Royalist snipers and he's left to guard the horses while the rest go hunting. In a conspicuously original take, Reeves stays with Richard as he waits, surrounded by forest sounds punctuated by occasional shouts and gunfire, until the sense of complete isolation and ignorance starts to breed panic, and we as audience long for him to do anything, take any action, rather than keep waiting passively.

There are even hints of a Terrence Malick-ian nature mysticism... just hints, and whereas with Malick one feels that God and Nature and Man are all one vast thing, Reeves leaves us with the uncomfortable sense that while Nature and God are enjoying a pleasant coexistence, fallen-from-the-garden Man is stuck in a hell of his own making, occupying the same space but a whole different dimension. It is most evident in the scene where Hopkins' brutish assistant (or "witch-pricker", played by Robert Russell) has been shot and is stranded alone in the forest, a slug in his shoulder and Cromwellian troops searching for him. We watch him drift in and out of consciousness, and Reeves lets the camera drift into the sleepy rays of sun filtering down through the trees to suggest a lazy passage of time (and, at the same time, a lazy indifference on the part of the universe toward his plight) as he takes his own instrument of torture to his shoulder to dig the metal out, his screams juxtaposed against the pastoral beauty around him.

Witchfinder is best remembered for its darkly horrific ending, truly revolutionary in those days of the Hammer formula (evil is sexy and potent, but good wins and order is restored, at least until Dracula rises again), in which although the bad guy is ultimately taken down with brutal violence, both hero and heroine are so decimated by the ordeals they've endured that they can hardly be said to exist anymore. This was the same year as Night of the Living Dead, it's true, but that masterpiece is cut from such wholly original cloth as to be a sort of mutant prodigy. Witchfinder, with its period costumes and its horror icon, lulls you into a Hammer-film mindset then pulls the rug out.

After Witchfinder, Reeves was attached to several projects that never got past the planning stages. He was set to re-team with Price on the Oblong Box, but it was a project that proved problematic to the point of severe depression for him, and when it eventually did hit the screen, directed by Gordon Hessler (Scream and Scream Again, Murders in the Rue Morgue), it met with a tepid reception. In his last days, he was greenlighted instead by Granada Films to put All the Little Animals onto the screen, a book which was a fad hit in turn-of-the-'70s Britain (it finally made it onto film in 1999 as a pre-American Psycho Christian Bale vehicle, emerging to wildly divergent reviews). This was a project of the heart for him, one which might have lifted him out of the constrictions of his low-budget horror-film corner while leaving his darkness intact. And it is that unflinchingly thick, black-blooded and multi-dimensional darkness which, to this day, gives his small oeuvre its startling sense of importance.