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.