horrorfest evening seven: the Gewissengeist film

Allow me to call your attention to a favorite subgenre of the horror film by giving it a name: the Gewissengeist film. That's "conscience" and "ghost" strung together, and everything sounds more impressive in German.

This is how you make a Gewissengeist film (and I wish you would. The formula works very well indeed):

1. Take a handful of excellent character actors, British whenever possible.

2. Trap them in a confined place: a submarine, perhaps, or a bunker. Wartime is an opportune setting, with WWII crossing the finish line with a conspicuous first place lead over other wars, probably because Nazis are so easy to turn into evil ghosts and zombies whilst retaining that weird photogenicity. It need not, however, be wartime as long as...

3. ...there is some terrible threat of physical danger from without (ie: the enemy or a posse closing in) to offset the growing supernatural threat from within.

4. Wartime, however, also affords plenty of chances for good people to do bad things, which leads us to the instigating plot-point: some -- but generally not all -- of the characters have, usually prior to the action of the film, been involved in an atrocity or travesty of justice in which innocents were killed. The ensuing psychological tension combined with an eerie, furtive, supernatural presence propels the action into madness, chaos, and, for the lucky few, catharsis and new beginning.

5. The entity in question is real; it exists independently of the characters. In my favorite examples of the subgenre, it rarely takes direct action (as in Below). It lurks and hunkers, rather, like Banquo's ghost; it goads and directs, threatens or warns, messes with machinery and minds, but you never see it clearly and may never be certain in the end exactly what it is. In lazier hands, it becomes the usual macabre specialist in creative gore-dispersal which Hollywood assumes that we want.

6. Lastly, this supernatural force may or may not be directly connected with the crime committed. Sometimes it is, but more often the general premise seems to be that it's your bad conscience which lays you vulnerable to curses and other malevolence from beyond the grave.


Below (2002. dir: David Twohy) is the quintessence of Gewissengeist, and an overlooked stunner. The ensemble cast is splendid, and the tension builds relentlessly without sacrificing subtlety. It's got genuine scares, tense action sequences, a perfect story. The submarine lends itself beautifully to the claustrophobia necessary for the Gewissengeist film to work its dark magic. Bruce Greenwood is the captain who must pay for his crew's terrible mistake, Zach Galifianakis has a fine turn as a horror afficianado with theories about "the malediction", and Jason Flemyng may be the best actor around to fill those all-important but glamorless character-actor shoes.


The Bunker (2001. dir: Rob Green) is less successful but still fascinating. Nine Nazi soldiers are stuck in a bunker in the last days of the war, and the Yanks are encroaching. This particular bunker was built on grounds of ancient evil, and you know what that means: something's skulking in the tunnels. More crucially, seven of the nine share a terrible memory which preys on them to varying degrees. The best thing about it is the flashback to the atrocity. Done in heavy, saturated yellows and greens and in slightly slower motion, the sound-scheme is brilliant: all noises are muffled except gunshots, the heavy drone of insects, birdsong, and the terrible clicking of a camera shutter. Taken together, it's absolutely haunting. The race to the climax unfortunately opts for loudness and gore over substance, but it's still a pleasure to be trapped for an hour and a half with this solid group of actors. (Jason Flemyng again!)


Dead Birds (2004. dir: Alex Turner) is both unique and wildly unsettling. Set in Alabama during the Civil War, it begins with a brutal bank robbery and follows the ragtag group of miscreants to a cursed plantation house. Nobody is innocent in this one, and no one finds redemption. The cast is stellar (Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit, Isaiah Washington. Michael Shannon!) and the suspense'll keep you from sleeping soundly unless you wash your brain with a comedy before retiring.

POSTSCRIPT: As for Triangle, I'm going to amend my previous statement that it fits into Gewissengeist. Rather, I'm making up a new category for it: it's a Bardo film. It's all about conscience, to be sure, but no independent supernatural agent is necessarily involved, and really there's only one person whose guilt is being explored, so it's possible the whole thing is her mad, post-mortem rush through that liminal labyrinth of terrifying hallucinations and karmic feedback that the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the Bardo state.

Other examples of the genre, off the top of my head, might be Siesta, Jacob's Ladder, and even, arguably, Inception.

last night's double feature: inserts and the delicious little devil

SPOILER ALERT

Inserts: (1974. dir: John Bynum) I remember when this came out. I was already a Richard Dreyfuss fan from American Graffitti, but of course I never saw this; this was rated X, and I was ten. Even if I had found someone willing to sneak me into a drive-in, I wouldn't have gone, since it's about porn, and porn embarrassed the crap out of me when I was a kid.

Folks will tell you the reason this was a failure was because of the X-rating, but don't be fooled. It's a failure because it's a goddamn failure. And, man, I was so looking forward to it. I'll watch or read anything right now that deals with Hollywood during that transition between silents and talkies. (I'm on the prowl for a decent book about Thomas Ince, if you have any suggestions.) I'm chomping at the bit to see The Artist, but this is the sticks, and patience is a damn virtue, right? And this, my friend, is a piece of crap.

I'd call it a bad movie based on a bad stage play, since it's written like a bad stage play and it all gets shot in one stupid room, but according to IMDB it was written specifically to be filmed, which just goes to serve as a further sad example of that ongoing moral lesson about how directors should not be allowed to shoot their own scripts unless they're Woody Allen, and not always then.

There's some decent acting: Dreyfuss has a few inspired moments, but many of his choices are already (in retrospect, granted) starting to look like practiced shtick. Jessica Harper and Veronica Cartwright do some shining, the latter as a good-hearted, heroin-addicted has-been, the former as an ambitious starlet. Stephen Davies looks like he's acting for the nosebleeds at the Royal Opera House, and Bob Hoskins is utterly predictable all the way through, but so is the damned script. I made a game of it. "Now he's going to find the overdosed body," I'd say out loud. "Now that'll be Clark Gable at the door." "Now he's going to turn the lights out, and it'll be a really lame and ponderous metaphor for the lights going out on the entirety of his career, the entirety of his life." The one thing that kept me hanging on, the one thing that kept me watching, was the hope that the Dreyfuss character (they call him the washed-up Boy Wonder; he doesn't have a real name anymore, get it?) would talk some more about Wally Reid, whose death obviously impacted him with some force. I was disappointed. There's one monologue early on in which he describes the moment in which he found out about the death, but Bynum pulls the camera in slowly on him while he's speaking it, and he's cleaning his fingernails as he does, and it's all too damned precious for words. Bah! Humbug, I say.



the Delicious Little Devil: (1919. dir: Robert Z Leonard) Mae Murray was a sexy clown from the silents whose relaxed carriage and lack of vanity still invites affection. She began as a dancer and enjoyed immense stardom as a comedienne at Universal and MGM in those early days, reportedly earning as much as $10,000 a week (which is almost exactly a gazillion times what I make right now, nearly a full century later, thank you very much) then ending her days in penury after a bad marriage to a wicked prince and failing to make the leap into talkies. This is an impish comedy about a nice girl who's too vivacious to keep a hat-check job but has layabout relatives to support and so goes into disguise as a scarlet lady with a scandalous past in order to secure a job at a nightclub. Directed by Murray's third husband, it keeps a jovial pace and allows her the space to win us, with her Peacock Walk dance, for instance, or her manic preparations in her dressing room, or with her facial gestures alone. (My favorite is when she lets her eyes widen and her face go slack and presses her lips together so they disappear.) Her straight man is one heavily-powdered and very young Rudolpho De Valintine, a relaxed and good-natured foil as the rich boy who loves her in spite of her sins.

my miniature robert ryan film festival

SPOILER ALERT

Caught: (1949. dir: Max Ophuls) Ryan is fearsomely magnificent as Howard Hughes, shallowly disguised. Barbara Bel Geddes is the innocent gold-digger who has the misfortune to marry him, and James Mason is the do-gooder pediatrician who falls in love with her. Max Ophuls directs, and the way it's shot is the real star. The script is also very good, although it falls into some cliche by the end, a convenient heart attack and even more convenient miscarriage, all provided thanks to the Hays Code. Last I checked this wasn't domestically available on DVD, but it ought to be, both for Ryan's performance and for the stunning camera-work.


Act of Violence: (1948. dir: Fred Zinnemann) The sounds of this suspense thriller (about a threatened vengeance for a secret wartime offence) are the sounds of nightmare: Ryan's dragging foot as he walks around Van Heflin's darkened house while Heflin and Janet Leigh crouch, terrified, in the shadows, or the sound of Ryan's boat creaking as he rows out relentlessly after his prey. Otherwise, it's grotesquerie in suburbia: a parade of drunks at a convention is another nightmare image. The closing noose of tension, those slow-collapsing walls, reminds me of Odd Man Out: as if the Heflin character took the killshot when he first heard the Ryan character coming, and from there on it's one long, noirish descent into hell.


Escape to Burma: (1955. dir: Allan Dwan) A project unworthy of its stars, alas. I love Stanwyck and Ryan together; he's big enough to match her strength, and she's strong enough to match his presence. This is a movie full of set-pieces, though, instead of a movie about people: there's a jungle pavilion bit, bits with elephants, stolen rubies, a tiger hunt, native bandits. The plot itself is just a MacGuffin for a big, kind of faded, Technicolor extravaganza: the Ryan character is being pursued by the authorities for the murder of a royal prince. He finds his way to Stanwyck's teak-and-elephant plantation, where passion is inevitable. They don't have much to say to one another; nobody does. Characters spend a lot of time walking across enormous rooms to pour drinks without conversation to fill the space. They're just waiting for the next action sequence.

horrorfest evening six: the dunwich horror and triangle

SPOILER ALERT

the Dunwich Horror: (1970. dir: Daniel Haller) Trippy, '60s interpretation of the great Lovecraft story, one which is probably unfilmable as written, but catches so strong a hold on the imagination that it is, I trust, destined to be re-interpreted by moviemakers for all of eternity.

This time, the plot is dumbed down to include a ridiculously passive virgin-for-the-altar character (pity poor Sandra Dee), and the gargantuan and goatlike Wilbur Whateley is shrunken and humanized into a man who looks very much like a hipster version of Dean Stockwell. It has been re-set in 1970, relegating the "I look like Sandra Dee, I'm 27 and still lousy with virginity" idea to the slop-bucket of the utterly absurd. That said, there is still evidence of the true story squirming beneath the mountainous blasphemy of updates and rewrites, like the inclusion of that raucous flock of whippoorwills who hunker and wait to catch the souls of the dying as they leave their bodies.

In any case, the revelation for me was that psychedelia was a nice, low-budget way of expressing a Lovecraftian monster in those pre-CGI days. When the brave redshirt girl marches up and opens the fearsome, locked attic-chamber to release the beast, -- and, no, you won't find this scene in the Lovecraft story,-- she is overwhelmed by psychedelia. Consider the description of this monster in the original prose:

'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd in Heaven - that haff face on top..."

YOU try and film that without help from a computer.

Anyway, it's not a success, not by any standards, but it's an interesting failure, like a time-capsule from the Altamont era.




SPOILER ALERT

Triangle: (2009. dir: Christopher Smith) Ambitious Gewissengeist(*) horror outing by the director of Black Death, a man whose Christopher Nolan-ish, David Twohy-ish boldness in story and attention to detail attract me utterly. Flawed as it was, Black Death won me with its intrepid audacity (did I just say the same thing twice? consider it an attempt to emphasize the compliment). Triangle is more problematic, but equally bold, using both Time Vortex and Ghost Ship tropes, and using them rather well.

(The less you know about this film, the better, so stop reading now if you haven't seen it yet.)

A Time Vortex is a tricky thing, turning on a dime from suspense to Keystones Kops once you have more than a couple of versions of the same characters inhabiting the same space. Also, because it's plot-driven with an emphasis on action, an admirable attempt, the full dimensions of the characters have been sacrificed to favor pace and forward movement. Smith has made a crafty attempt to circumvent this flaw by casting extraordinarily well (would that all directors were so crafty), but the result is still not entirely effective. The other extremity of that particular stick is that once you know the ending, the "heroine's" maladroit and sometimes downright crazy-assed decisions become less inscrutable, but by that time certain skeptics in the audience may already have turned the channel.

*Gewissengeist: Conscience-Ghost

horrorfest evening five: two more classics

Island of Lost Souls: (1932. dir: Erle C. Kenton) I've never been completely sold on Laughton as an actor. He'll be going along subtly and smoothly, on his way to a great performance, then at a crucial moment he'll tip one right over the top, a wink to the audience, perhaps a bid to be loved and understood, I don't know, but I'm generally disappointed. In Island, he comes unutterably close to giving a seamless performance as the power-mad doctor hiding his sadism behind the objective mask of science. Although he gives us the odd wink, he also strides boldly toward that rare beast, the consummate turn.

It's a small masterpiece, this first of three Hollywood re-imaginings of HG Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau, and utterly chilling, even today. Unfettered by the circling-but-not-yet-landed Hays Code, the references to rape and violence are unconcealed and all the more unsettling because they are interspecific. Even if you've read the book or seen the later (and lesser) films, its twists are unexpected, and, clocking in on DVD at a svelte 70 minutes, it keeps to a good clip without sacrificing atmosphere, which it has to spare.




the Thing from Another World: (1951. dir: Christian Nyby, with possible input from producer Howard Hawks) Understated, jolly banter between easy-going, likable characters on an Arctic military base is interrupted by a crashed UFO and its blood-drinking Vegetable Man occupant. It's a true classic, this. You know in the Bad and the Beautiful when Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan have to make a B-picture about terrifying cat-men on a budget and hit on the brilliant idea that the way to make them terrifying is to make damn sure they're hardly seen? That's the key to this one, as well. Despite James Arness' imposing stature, he looks pretty silly in his carrot-man outfit, so we only see him in sudden, vicious glimpses, and it works like mad. This is a low-key movie with great moments: when the men trace the shape of the fallen ship below the ice and realize it's spherical, for instance, or in the end-recap from the reporter relaying his story back home, with his chilling refrain: "Watch the skies! Keep watching the skies." A gem of fifties paranoia to file alongside Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

the filmgazer referral service

If you liked the Third Man
the Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Odd Man Out

try the Man Between.




Once again it's Carol Reed filming amongst the broken shards of a postwar city, this time Berlin. Once again James Mason is a political fugitive, this time trying to free himself from the Cold War trap of the East and flee to the West. Reed has a stunning talent for communicating the cynical amorality which takes hold during difficult times, and Berlin as he films it feels like walking back into an unreproducible moment. Like Spy's Richard Burton, Mason's best brilliance lay in communicating the tumultuous inner life of a particular brand of cold, arch, cerebral character, and this is a very well-written example. That lovely, subtle irony at the end, which I won't give away, involving an ever-lurking boy on a bicycle, is heart-breaking.


If you liked Birth
Secretary
Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast

then try Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus



Leonard Shainberg, who directed that most unconventional love story, Secretary, turns his camera on another, equally unconventional, but for different reasons. Fur is the sweet, sensuous, visually compelling story about a fictional friendship which led Diane Arbus into her life's work. Critics thought it was over-sentimental and wallowed in its own strangeness, but it's well-acted, with strong chemistry between Nicole Kidman as Arbus and her fur-covered beloved played by Robert Downey Jr. The photography is both gorgeous and intimate, giving us that same feeling that Birth did of being simultaneously inside Kidman's head and just beside her, intimately and endlessly watching her reactions. As she's one of those rare actors whose face I could happily watch for a very long time, and as one of the main objectives of this film seems to be to hypnotize its audience into a sort of sensually opiate state (much as that old, strange Beauty and the Beast did), I thought it was well worth the time.

horrorfest evening four: cloverfield and i sell the dead

Cloverfield: (2008. dir: Matt Reeves) This is the kind of movie you point to when people ask why genre films are important. This, Attack the Block, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead. They are like snapshots of our cultural underbelly in a particular moment. If a historian from the future is researching the turbulence during the sixties over Civil Rights, he watches the newsreels and listens to the speeches, but then he must watch Night of the Living Dead as well. That's where he'll get the uncensored, chthonic rabidity of emotion which clawed its way up from beneath it. For the Red Scare, it's Body Snatchers. For the growing nuclear menace of the Cold War, War of the Worlds. For the terror of nuclear technology in general, possibly the Day the Earth Stood Still, or even the James Arness movie Them! in which he fights a whole population of giant ants, and which is surprisingly effective, even in adulthood. Point is, the straightforward media outlets will only tell you so much. Look to genre films to give voice to the irrational mutant weirdness which comes squalling alongside any major cultural shock.

Cloverfield is, on the surface, what would happen if Godzilla (not him exactly, but something very like him) attacked Manhattan today and we saw it not through the eyes of the scientists and military and people who have power to fight it, but through the eyes of the normal joe who can do nothing but gather his loved ones and flee. Really, though, it's about 9/11. The only direct reference is when a character amidst the unexplained chaos moans, "It's happening again," (which made me cry, incidentally) but it brought all those (still lingering, just buried) feelings back up from that decade-past day, all that raw fear and grief and channelled it into a more complete catharsis than any other I've managed to conjure in these ten years.

SPOILER ALERT

"Found footage" films are hard, because there are always one or two shots that you think, "OK, why are you still filming?" and it pulls you up out of the story. This has those, but they are few. (The worst is when the photographer gets it and the camera falls just right to show his dead body. It only happens in Hollywood, and it always makes me scowl.) To make up for it, there's a wonderful device at play: the footage we're watching has been taped over images of the romantic day the two leads spent earlier at Coney Island, and just as the tape runs out, the camera is pointing out over the ocean and if you look very closely you can see the alien's ship falling from the upper right hand corner of the frame into the sea. I bring it to your attention because it's so subtle that if I hadn't been alerted to it in advance, I would not have seen it, and it's a perfect detail.



I Sell the Dead: (2008. dir: Glenn McQuaid) There's just enough plot in it to fill a segment of Tales from the Crypt. The director spent most of his time getting the "look" of the film, which is a fashionable blend of sepia-edged Victorian and primary-colour-bright comic-book. He hired good actors, and then gave them nothing of interest to do. It's not funny, and not scary. The pace drags like hell, which would kill it dead even if the script was not already moribund.

It is rare that I will rate a movie one-star on Netflix. Even something ridiculously bad like the Curse of the Komodo gets two stars, because, although I didn't like it, it didn't do more or less than it pretended to. Its reach was short, but its unpretentious grasp complete, if you know what I mean. When I give a single star, it's because there is the potential for so much more than is realized that one leaves it with fists clenched in frustration and a bitter-tasting resentment toward the director. I Sell the Dead gets the one-star treatment. These actors were ripped off. Their time ought to be restored to them along with a suitably hangdog apology.

As luck would have it, though, for those of us who are keen to watch a rollicking comedy about grave-robbing, the Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis Burke and Hare is on its way to DVD even as we speak.

horrorfest evening three: a triple feature

Troll Hunter: (2010. dir: Andre Ovredal) I bet the more you know about troll-lore, the funnier it is, but it's impressive even to us uninitiated in the annals of trolldom, this "found-footage" mockumentary in which a student film-crew hooks up to travel through Norway with the official government Trollhunter. The trolls sound awesome and look great. The end is disappointing, but not enough to queer the ride. This is not a job for a Christian man, believe me.


the Grudge: (2004. dir: Takashi Shimizu) It's unfair, I know, to watch the English-language version before the original, but it's directed by the same fellow, right? And using gaijin actors there's an added "stranger in a strange land" level of isolation which can only add to the atmosphere of doom, right? It's a haunted house film, but it's got that tricksy Japanese thing where the ghost can follow you anywhere once it gloms onto you. Really this movie is just a series of cheap scares, although that is not to suggest that some of those scares are not very effective. The body count is crazily high, higher than the end of Hamlet, and Hamlet has four hours to build up to it. It's also unclear to me why some of the bodies vanish and others do not. Am I to understand that some have been spirited away to an infernal dimension of torture? It doesn't seem to matter to the filmmakers, as long as they get your adrenaline up and running. Not my favorite entry in Sarah Michelle Gellar's CV, who, since the Buffy salad-days, has had a few very-close-but-no-actual-cigar near-misses for me, namely the Return and Possession, this last an intriguing psychological thriller with an unbearably sexy Lee Pace which only lost me with its fudged ending.




*SPOILER ALERT*

Curse of the Komodo: (2004. dir: Jim Wynorski) Unfair, again, I know, to actually review a movie like this as if it were akin to other, real movies. The image above pretty much sums it up. The komodo is the result, of course, of a military experiment gone awry. The monster is utterly impervious to bullets, but these humans do nothing but shoot at it for two hours. Nobody even tries to justify it with some lame idea like, "Maybe if we get it in the mouth or eyes...?" It's the kind of movie in which the scientist's voluptuous daughter goes out to take a long and entirely gratuitous naked swim in a komodo-infested area. If the komodo slimes you with its saliva, you will sicken and die within hours, but before you die you will become a green-skinned zombie harboring murderous intent towards your fellow humans. (Just a warning.) In the end, the scientist who created it pulls a Sheriff Brody/Quint combo, allowing himself to be crunched while carrying a fistful of high explosive. See it for the naked swimming, if you want to.

valentino: an appreciation

When I was a kid I watched the Sheik to see what the fuss was about and came away unimpressed. I chalked the Valentino Thing up to adult weirdness, that inexplicable X-factor which causes apparently sane humans to pretend that yappy, rodent-like dogs are cute, or to spend good, hard-won money on things like pedicures. In fact, now that I've seen several of his films, it turns out his most famous role may be his least accessible to the modern audience, with its eye-popping lust and maniacal laughter.

I got curious about him again because someone in that TCM series called Moguls and Movie Stars was talking about Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and she said, "When Valentino stood up to do that tango he was nobody. By the time he sat down, he was a star." And it's absolutely true! His charisma is full-bore, no-holds-barred, straight out of the gate. Apocalypse wasn't his first film (in fact, it was his 22nd or so, if you count the ones in which he was only dancing), but it was his first starring vehicle, and his star-quality is there from the first shots. Even before he tangos, the way he smokes a cigarette reeks of sexual confidence. He smoked in all his films. He had a way with a cigarette. I'm fair certain a generation of young men probably died of lung cancer trying to capture that same je-ne-sais-quoi.

With all my newfound enthusiasm for the man, imagine my utter dismay when I finally got for my birthday a copy of David Thomsen's New Biographical Dictionary of Film only to find that he doesn't "get" Valentino, dismisses him as a "flimsy being" and "clearly...no actor". He "gets" the Duke (he'd better, or he's no expert), lauds him as a great star, rather than a great actor. So why not Valentino?

It takes some transition time, adjusting to these old movies, because silent film acting involves posing and extremes of expression which test our modern comfort-levels, but Valentino is amazingly naturalistic during much of Horsemen, and, indeed, throughout many of his films. By the time we get to Son of the Sheik, his swansong, he's less so, no doubt mirroring the feverish style of the original. But I swear: when he's kissing up the inside of Vilma Banky's arm, then the palm of her hand, you can feel it on your own skin. He has an immediacy of flesh appeal, a physical presence which broadcasts itself right off the screen in the way that Brando's did in Streetcar, a quality which would have made him a star in any era.



Despite the muscular virility he communicates onscreen, there is an androgyny about him and he was dogged in his day (and haunted on his untimely deathbed) by near-hysterical accusations of unmanliness. The only modern equivalent that comes to mind, and it is of only passing similarity, is the near-universal male puzzlement at the near-universal female swooning over Captain Jack Sparrow. It's hard to remember now, after the weary-inducing ennui of three mediocre sequels, but the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was a revelation of joy, and Johnny Depp was catapulted from "devastatingly handsome but strange character actor" to "Sexiest Man in the World" status overnight. And the guys didn't see it. I suspect there was not a female between twelve and eighty who did not get the annoyed query from spouse, boyfriend, or any other heterosexual male in her circle: "Really? But he's so EFFEMINATE." In these metrosexual-friendly days, a star can shrug off or even exult in such confusion, the stress of which was more troubling in those days of violently-enforced homogeneity.

He had the most wonderful hands, Valentino, and a dancer's grace in moving. In the very strange and occasionally magnificent Blood and Sand, there's a sadomasochistic relationship between him and dragon-woman dominatrix Nita Naldi. In the scene where she incites him to mad jealousy by flirting with a bandit, he moves with exaggerated machismo toward the bandit then folds into a sinuous, Nijinsky-esque "S" shape while she torments him. His body is extraordinarily communicative as well as athletic, and, seducer that he is, much of his charm rests on a James Dean boyishness: witness the way he looks after Gloria Swanson, hands in pockets, from the porch of the Swiss inn in Beyond the Rocks.

On the other hand, he could smoulder like nobody else. Although certainly nobody wants to be raped in the desert, every woman wants to look across a crowded room and see the man she forcefully desires smouldering with desire for her. Today, only Antonio Banderas comes close.



I love that the women in his films are rarely what you'd call pretty. Either they are striking but gorgon-like, like Swanson or Naldi, with her vast, soft expanse of back, --which I love!--, or they're pinched and ridiculous as in the Married Virgin and the Sheik, or just very ordinary looking, like Dorothy Dalton in Moran of the Lady Letty (a low-key favorite of mine). It makes him the lover of Everywoman. One of Krishna's greatest miracles was at Vrindavan when he made love to a thousand cowherd girls on the same night. I imagine that sitting in a cinema in 1926 watching Son of the Sheik was a little like that: one man making love simultaneously to entire cinemas filled with women, all across the land.

horrorfest evening two: classics i missed the first time around

Black Sunday: (1960. dir: Mario Bava) In that oppressively steamy hothouse that is Italian Horror, Black Sunday stands out as a somewhat restrained classic. Yes, it's got the unforgettable opening set-piece in which the Mask of Satan is nailed onto the squirming Barbara Steele's face with a single blow from a sort of sledgehammer. It's got the grossness of maggots and puddles of eye-jelly in a decomposing corpse. It takes Sam Raimi-esque glee in giving us a protracted look at an animated corpse-face melting in a fire. And, naturally, it's got Steele's heaving bosoms. I'm not saying it's exactly dignified. But Bava holds back, using all manner of polished technique to build a very fine atmosphere: wonderfully noir-lit black and white, tension-building slow pans followed by sparsely-used quick-cuts, Dutch and other strangely-angled shots. There's a lovely, dreamlike shot of a peasant girl watching a formidable carriage, which, in fact, is carrying Satan's emissary on an iniquitous deed, drive in ominous slow-motion through the night, and I especially enjoyed the effect of the erupting tombs.



Children of the Corn: (1984. dir: Fritz Kiersch) Where did I get it stuck in my craw that this was a classic of some kind and my horror-education was incomplete until I watched it? This movie is a piece of crap. Scarecrows have a certain amount of built-in eeriness. "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" is a very creepy concept. Children wielding scythes also enjoy a certain amount of fundamental creep-cred. But this is a piece of crap. Except for the kid playing the Big Bad (see above), you will never, not at your local grade school pageant, nowhere, find worse child-actors than in this film. The cutesy voiceover is godawful. The dialogue is terrible, and the people are all Stephen-King people, which means they're unbelievable and unlikable simultaneously.

Messengers 2: the Scarecrow is much scarier, with better images, better acting, great tension building. AND it's got Norman Reedus, whom I suspect is an unsung treasure. Go for that one; give this one a miss.



the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: (1974. dir: Tobe Hooper) I can't imagine, on the other hand, how I waited so long before watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. From the very beginning, from that long, static shot of the atrocity in the graveyard with the radio voiceover, then the guy rolling on the ground saying, "The things I've seen! I've seen things...", even then you can feel it's going to be an extraordinary ride, like some grotesque approaching.

It occurred to me that maybe the reason that this first Chainsaw was so great (as opposed to the many execrable sequels and remakes, one directed by Hooper himself) was partly the editing. Because some of those effects, like the slamming of the metal door after Leatherface first appears and kills the guy, that hair-raising noise with the eerie quiet afterward, or the exploration of the chicken/bone/feather room... And of course, its brilliant ending, with the gruesome chainsaw dance of frustration then cut to black... Those things might all have been magic from the editing room. I mean, once it had all been dredged up out of Tobe's id and perfectly filmed; give the guy his credit.

What a movie. How does one prepare for it? I was slack-jawed with awe as the end credits rolled. I can't even imagine watching that on the big screen when it came out. It must have been a mindfuck, a cinematic apocalypse straight out of left field. And notice, please, that I'm not even mentioning the dinner scene, which is so utterly brilliant and yet so very, very wrong in every conceivable way that I think one should not attempt to speak of it except in the vaguest, most Lovecraftian adjectives ("Noisome! Blasphemous! Necrophagous, charnel and miasmal. Nighted.")



Daughters of Darkness: (1971. dir: Harry Kumel) Not so much a horror film as an erotic mood-piece for those intimate, blood-sipping evenings in your dungeon. John Karlen, fresh off the set of Dark Shadows, is very good as the secretly twisted young honeymooner, and there's an entirely unforeseeable plot-turn which sets it at least a rung above other eurobabe horror erotica of the time. Delphine Seyrig is flawlessly stylish as the Countess Bathory, embodying a sort of hypno-opiate sensuousness of manner which may have been precursor to that wonderful, somnolent acting style in Cronenberg's Crash.

the first evening of my post-halloween horrorfest

Lake Mungo: (2008. dir: Joel Anderson) How's this for something new: a subtle and dignified docu-style horror film? Shot well, edited well, and extremely well-acted, it engages fully but only if approached without expectation. It communicates its horror without shocks or gore but through a slow, thickening sense of dread, a sense which appears to be dissipating towards the end into a cleansing redemption only to reverse itself with awful effectiveness.

A teenaged girl has drowned on a family picnic outing; after her burial, strange things begin happening around the house. This is a contemplation of mortality, of grieving, the nature of death, and how ultimately unknowable we all are, one to another, even to our most beloved. I found the ending to be quietly disquieting, and terrible in its implications.



Thirst: (2009. dir: Chan-Wook Park) A priest particularly inclined towards samaritanism is infected with vampire blood while volunteering for an experiment which might cure a deadly disease. It begins as a funny, sexy, visually pleasing and intelligent bloodsucker film. The longer it continues, the more it gets mired down in its own metaphors,-- a little too long and a little too earthbound for my taste,-- although it never loses its optical panache.



Attack the Block: (2011. dir: Joe Cornish) Accustomed to my London-Slum-Stories appearing in various shades of concrete and overcast greys, it took me awhile to get past Attack the Block's music-video palette. I'm glad I put out the effort, since wrapped inside it is a fresh, vivacious, well-written and unpretentious reworking of the old Alien Invasion motif. You know the one, in which an attack from outer space is used to comment on pertinent social issues: in this case, the plight of poor kids in London. (Those riots earlier in the year, they were part of Cornish's PR campaign, yeah? Bold.)

Man, this film was fun. I'm not overfond of over-the-top, self-conscious English humour (Simon Pegg, Steve Coogan, Russell Brand, etc); I prefer mine in the subtle and droll category, thank you. This one was droll and suspenseful, lighthearted and pointed, as summed up in the capstone image of the young hero dangling from an upper storey of his tenement by a tenuous grasp on a Union Jack. John Boyega is perfect (and will be dead sexy when he grows up) as the enigmatic Moses, the leader of a teenaged street gang, a gang fully believable in their decoction of innocence and burgeoning sociopathy. These are the Dead-End Kids of the modern world, and when aliens attack amidst the chaos of Mischief Night, it becomes Moses' night to fight his way into manhood. It is his initial decision to kill the invaders' outrider which brings down the wrath of its followers onto his neighborhood, and it is in his decision to take responsibility for his actions in which we find the meat of the drama.

See it now, before Hollywood resets it in South Central L.A. with its metaphors all overblown and hanging out of its baggy pants.

almost famous: almost perfect

There exists a small but important category of films which try to capture a moment, past but treasured, in the life of a music scene. Ken Russell is a frequent romper in this sandbox, his forays ranging from Tommy to the Music Lovers and beyond. A few of my favorites, off the top of my head, are 24 Hour Party People with its diligent and very funny portrayal of the Manchester scene, and Todd Haynes' flawed but enchanting (and homoerotically epic) Velvet Goldmine, which brings to life the vibrancy of those early Glam Rockers. Almost Famous is for those of us Americans who fell in love with music when it still came on vinyl, those of us who remember the magic of the gatefold and the inner sleeve and spent our Sunday evenings with one ear glued to a transistor radio while Casey Kasem announced the week's American Top Forty. Cameron Crowe will never again make a film anywhere near this good. How could he? It was the movie he was born to make,-- all the others are some kind of filler,-- and there's hardly anything wrong with it.

These days I am hard on Philip Seymour Hoffman. I would not, for example, have handed him a gold statue for his overweening, overmincing, truly annoying portrayal of Truman Capote. Not that Capote wasn't the Monarch of Overween and Overmince, but PSH made it look like a heavy and difficult task, whereas Capote always made it look easy. (So, incidentally, does Toby Jones in Infamous, released --or, rather, swallowed,-- by the studio at the same time as Seymour Hoffman's biopic.)

Still, I would without hesitation give him an Oscar for this, his Lester Bangs. Although he's got maybe thirty lines in the whole picture, his readings are both hilarious and heart-breaking, and keep wonderfully true to the man himself. Nostalgically, that means something to me, as there was a time when I, too, wanted to be Lester Bangs.

While I'm at it, let me wax on awhile about other performances. Kate Hudson did one thing wrong: the opening "stewardess" routine. It may be the way it's filmed; anyway, something rings untrue about it. In the context of a lesser performance, the glitch might have gone unnoticed, but in a two-hour tour-de-force during which it's the single false note, it stands out. I'd have given her an Oscar as well, sure, and Frances McDormand, too, who brings wit and depth and intensity to a potentially thankless role as the unhip mom.

This is my favorite thing Billy Crudup ever did, and I can't think of anything he's ever done badly. Has he given a bad performance, ever, in anything? And Jason Lee is perfect as the arrogant lead singer, because he's more than that, and less than that, all at once and without contradiction.

Almost Famous makes me want to fall in love with music again. From the opening scenes it captures that magical shibboleth music was, maybe still is, when you're young. Only back then, there was this mystical ritual after you got your long-awaited record home from the local record-store (which usually had a headshop upstairs): the stripping off of the thin plastic overwrap, the smell of the cover, open it up, look at the secrets of the gatefold. Slip the record out of its sleeve, feel the weight of promise as you glance at the lyrics. Slip the vinyl out, look it over. Is there a secret message scribbled anywhere? Once the Replacements wrote "We're sorry, Portland," in the lacuna at the end of the last song. We were all overjoyed when we found it. It was an apology in reference to their last drunken debauch at Satyricon, a legendary show during which Tommy stripped off his clothes (my friend Tres ended up with his green polyester houndstooth jacket, another friend got one leg of his green polyester houndstooth pants), and my co-worker Rebecca got to drum awhile because the whole thing was so drunk and disorderly. The apology was on the Don't Tell a Soul LP and they played at Roseland that tour. They were on their best behaviour, and it may have been their dullest live performance ever.

But I digress. THEN you put the record on, generally with headphones the first time. And if it was any good, if it was Zeppelin or Lou Reed or Pixies or fucking Jane's Addiction, it might change your perception of reality for good, like an acid trip does, flip all the switches in your brain the other way and then sometimes, if you're lucky, not all of them get switched back into normalcy, and you're looking at the world through the pane of a different window.

That's what Almost Famous is about. About the hypnotically numinous promise that rock and roll held out,-- holds out, I reckon; I'm just too old to see it anymore,-- and the inevitable disillusionment which comes crashing down in its place after the high is over. But the sweetness of the movie's nostalgia is not twee at all, and Crowe manages to give us an autobiographical piece that is funny and unpretentious and non-egotistical, a full-on piece of magic.

robert carlyle film festival: eragon

Stefen Fangmeier is an accomplished Visual Effects guy around Hollywood, and this is his maiden voyage in the director's chair. It is also a knock-kneed, by-the-numbers, teen-aimed fantasy that has not one iota of that visceral id-muscle which fuels Harry Potter or the Twilight series. It follows the Joseph Campbell playbook fairly carefully, charting a normal lad's journey into his destined True Love and True Work, both found in the same dragon. She is his Dragon; he is her Rider; this was Destined from Before Time. (The Dragon's egg will not hatch until it is in the presence of its Rider. Also, if the Rider dies, his Dragon will follow, but not necessarily the other way round.)

Observe the checklist: family (in the form of a very nice uncle played by Alun Armstrong in an entirely futile performance) gets offed early by evil forces trying to keep our hero from his fate: check. Beautiful anima-figure sets it all in motion by stealing the egg and casting it into our hero's path, then recurs to set our minds at rest that although his dragon is his soul-mate, he'll have an appropriate screen at which to project his libido: check. Gruff and wizened mentor arrives: check... in the form of Jeremy Irons, in a very fine albeit, again, wasted performance. Boy and Dragon have adventures, check, pursued by the evil minion (Carlyle) of the evil king (Malkovich, annoying as usual. Luckily, his screen-time is minimal, and he's usually playing off Carlyle, who makes up for his sucking-void lack of presence).

Carlyle is easily the best thing about this whole mess; he is the eerie warrior called Durza. Nearly impossible to kill, the look on his face when he takes an arrow through the forehead, a mix of ecstasy, triumph and Schadenfreude, is utterly chilling. That's the best moment. You can fast-forward to that, then turn it off afterwards. I'd tell you how it ends right now to save you the time, but the ending is so unextraordinary that it's gone completely out of my mind already.

johnny depp double feature: dead man and benny and joon

*SPOILER ALERTS; BOTH FILMS*

Dead Man is the only Jim Jarmusch movie I like. Like his others, it is overlong, slow, rambling, and suffers annoying descents into triteness of dialogue. Unlike the others, its mise-en-scene is sufficiently magnificent and its talent sufficiently compelling to raise it up into a sort of shambolic greatness. It doesn't hurt, also, that its story,--the slow journey of a man to his inevitable death,--has a sort of catharsis built into it.

When I call its mise-en-scene magnificent, I mean that the film is composed of near-perfect elements interwoven to create a world of essential integrity. It has interesting and well-chosen camera angles ably edited, sets filled with fascinating details photographed in eye-pleasing black and white, massively talented actors (Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott. Robert Mitchum!) who bring unusual heft to the usual raggediness that is a Jarmusch script. There's a story steeped enough in mythological symbology to give it a needed depth (also unusual for Jarmusch), a hypnotic one-guitar-with-reverb score by Neil Young, and the beautiful, plastic face of Johnny Depp. All of these elements entwine to pull off the feat, although it is just by a nose, just barely by a nose. A different editor, a different actor, if it was filmed in color,-- just one or two false moves, a few more unravelled edges, and it'd have been a goner.

It is, in a very real sense, a paen to Depp's astonishing beauty. We spend a good amount of time watching his William Blake, in close-up, dying. He may be dying from the first moment we meet him on the train from the east (as suggested by the alarmed comment of Crispin Glover's Fireman that Blake is headed for the end of the line); if not, he's certainly picked up his death-wound within the first half-hour. Think of it as a hipster translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There are demons and trials and trickster guardians and portals to be passed through. There's even one very funny scene I'd rank nigh onto brilliant: when he stumbles up to a campfire manned by Billy Bob Thornton, Jared Harris and Iggy Pop, a sort of ersatz family vaguely but disturbingly reminiscent of the one in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

With Jarmusch, relaxation into the flow is imperative. Once you start fidgeting and fighting it, you may as well turn it off, because it's never going to sell you if you don't buy it from the outset. Back in my university days, I'd have recommended you get a little baked before you sit down to Dead Man; relax and let the strangeness wash across you like a tide.



The only reasons to watch Benny and Joon, on the other hand, are either nostalgic or for canon-completism for any of four or five rising stars appearing in it, including William H. Macy and Oliver Platt. Its only real claim to importance is its placement in Depp's CV. Emerging two years before Dead Man and in the same year as the equally quirky but much darker Arizona Dreams and What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, it marks his cautious emergence as the world's strangest young leading man after his extreme anti-pop-idol rebellion of Edward Scissorhands.

Do they even make movies like this anymore? It was quite the industry in those days, as I recall: brightly-colored sentimental hogwash about mentally-challenged but generally adorable people whose love overcomes all obstacles. The genre was always (am I remembering this right?) marked by the musical montage: this one incorporates two or three full-length songs while the characters brood or walk around or go about their daily lives. Catchy songs, too, including that one-hit monster-wonder by the Proclaimers about walking five hundred miles, remember that? And a gorgeous Joe Cocker rendition of an old Blind Faith song, "Can't Find My Way Home," one of the saddest and most beautiful songs ever written.

It's inoffensive enough, with generally good acting (Julianne Moore, inspired as always, plus Aidan Quinn and Mary Stuart Masterson), and it follows the expected formula, providing the proper dosages of hope and heartbreak on its way to its happy ending. It's Depp's talent for underplaying that keeps this clear of The Sucking Fen of Treacly Emotional Manipulation. It's his underplaying which makes him great, which makes him interesting to watch even when he's overplaying (Jack Sparrow, anyone?), and although this should be classed among his juvenilia, it's a near-heroic effort to create a singularly memorable character.

Let me preface my final comment by saying that it's not particularly easy to warm my heart. Things like finding Tom Hanks on the top of the Empire State Building and pledging true love on the Titanic leave me not just cold but surly to boot. That understood, Benny and Joon is worth the watch for its climactic scene, in which Sam demonstrates his love by scaling the fortress wall to swing in front of Joon's hospital window. The music, the use of slow motion, and especially the Buster Keaton deadpan on Sam's face, make it one of the most truly effective heart-warmers I can remember.

fright night and the art of the superior remake

In the giddy aftermath of falling in love with the New World, I watched fourteen Colin Farrell films. I hated or actively disliked ten of those, although I sometimes found myself enjoying his performances whilst he swam against the bilgewater tide. My personal line on Farrell is that I prefer him playing comedy (In Bruges) or an everyman (Ondine, although I can't in good conscience endorse the film as a whole) as opposed to yuppie or studmuffin. That said, he's smokin' hot as the deadly power-vamp in Fright Night and I notice I don't particularly mind. He can also be very funny, which may be what makes all the difference. (When attacked with a crossbow by a man whose parents he killed years before: "You've got your mother's eyes. And your father's aim.") Add Anton Yelchin as the boy-next-door looking to find his way into manhood, throw in David Tennant (who may be one of my favorite humans on the planet, and I don't know why, exactly; that's the kind of sinewy charisma he commands) as a yellow-bellied vampire-slayer, and you've got yourself a party.

The original Fright Night emerged in the pre-Buffy, pre-Twilight eighties, and it marked a crucial moment in the history of the vampire film, bringing one taloned foot into comic banter and the other into modern teenage rite-of-passage. As such, we might do it homage as a big grandaddy to the vampire artform as we know and love it today. Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark is the greater film, no question, but perhaps FN made more difference, in the end.

In this remake, Buffy the Vampire Slayer magister Marti Noxon gives us a script which bows to the spirit of the original while making vast improvements. Gone is the tired "your girlfriend looks just like my first love before I was turned" plot-device. In this one, as an early victim points out, there is nothing soulful or romantic about the killer: "He's like a shark. He feeds then moves on." As such, he is an apt metaphor for a certain kind of predatory player who feeds on the sex and heartblood of his women before turning his gaze cruelly and inexorably away.

You could launch a successful TV series from this movie. It has much to recommend it, and veins of gold to be mined. I like that the "everyone thinks I'm crazy but I know that guy's a vampire" bit doesn't get too far over-stretched. By about the halfway point everyone important recognizes the monster as such, and from there on out it's all about how to get that stake angled properly through that chest-space. I like that it's extraordinarily difficult for the hero and heroine to kill even a newborn vampire, who, true to Buffy-roots, keeps up the wisecracking until the pointy end. I like that it's set in Vegas, grown-up Disneyland to drifters and nighthawks, a place where daytime can be easily circumvented. I like that a nightclub is openly recognized not as a place of safety in numbers, but of dangerous anonymity wherein the most awful crimes might be ignored in a crowd of lotus-eaters over-steeped in the opiates of their various pleasures. I like that there is a vast, implied mythology behind the vampires' history: we find out that Farrell's Jerry ("That's a terrible vampire name, Jerry.") comes of a particular and ancient Mediterranean strain of beast, one with proliclivities towards colony-living and slow-feeding on living victims over days or weeks. "Snackers," a character scorns.

The characters are likable, the end-battle is satisfying, the metaphors are appropriate. There are great images: the vampire-slayer stuck in his panic room with a writhing, undead arm, or Jerry coolly setting a cross aflame with a touch, then extinguishing it with a breath.

strong women acting well

Clash By Night: (1952. dir: Fritz Lang) The bad of it is that it's written by Clifford Odets; the good of it is that it's directed by Fritz Lang. Odets gives us one of his studies in drunkenness and misogyny and emotional crimes committed in the name of loneliness. Lang surprises us with breathtakingly unexpected shots, like when Robert Ryan stumbles into his close-up just as the wedding party roars up in the background.

Stanwyck is strong as an ox, the loveliest ox in the world. Ryan seems strangely miscast, as if he's having to geld himself in order to find his inner Odets. Then if you've ever had or raised a baby or been around one for longer than thirty seconds, the plot makes no sense because there's a cute little MacGuffin baby who exists solely as a plot device, rarely makes a sound and gets left on its own in an empty house for days and nights at a time while its parental units undergo their emotional turbulences. The good of it is that the baby seems adept at taking care of itself; the bad of it is that the ending of the film is heavily weakened by this absurdity. To compound the ho-hum factor of the ending, Stanwyck's connubial Hera instincts kick in very suddenly and inexplicably to dislodge a previously towering Aphrodite entelechy, and the final reconciliation scene is flat and unsatisfactory, reminding me of the ending of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Both authors wrote themselves into dead ends in which the only possible happy endings are imcompatible with their own cynical understandings of human nature.

Alongside Stanwyck there is the joy of watching the young Monroe before she'd been mewed up in her eventual Marilyn mould. In this one she plays a vivacious tomboy who likes to pick fights with her boyfriend so she can throw punches at him. She and Keith Andes as the boyfriend embody the anti-Odets health and vitality necessary for true happiness.



Don't Bother To Knock: (1952. dir: Roy Ward Baker) And speaking of Marilyn, anyone who thinks she couldn't act needs to see this low-key, small-cast little psychodrama. Richard Widmark is a playboy and a very young but already assured Anne Bancroft is the chanteuse who's broken with him not for lack of love but for lack of a foreseeable future. If that sounds cliche, you have to hear the way it's written: you've never heard it like this before. The script is a quiet dynamo. Monroe is a troubled girl recovering from a suicide attempt who gets a job babysitting and reverts back to more than a little crazy once she catches Widmark's eye. Although she's playing a sphinxlike character, and playing it well, there is never a moment when we do not know what she is feeling. Her choices are clear and plain, her grasp of the character complete. Each emotion barely touches her plastic features, grazing her face with its wings before it moves on to be followed by the mere suggestion of another. It's a lovely performance, and when the little girl is leaning out the window and Monroe says, "Don't fall," it's one of the scariest faces I've seen.




*WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD*

the Romantic Englishwoman: (1975. dir: Joseph Losey) When I was a kid I worshipped Glenda Jackson like a goddess; I'd have voted her into Parliament if I could've. This wasn't my favorite of her films, but I liked it, and I'm amazed, on watching it again, that it's not actually about the Glenda Jackson character at all. She's such a powerhouse actress that I only saw her, but it turns out the movie is really about the Michael Caine character, the cuckolded screenwriter who must fight through his baser instincts to play the noble husband, taking his wandering wife back and offering (although he never has to back it up) to try and rescue her doomed lover. It's a man's movie, for crying out loud. And all I remember are Jackson and the fantastically strong and wonderful Kate Nelligan in her three-scene role.

Helmut Berger as the young gigolo comes across more gay than androgynous, and there is no real electricity between Jackson and him. Oddly, it's not needed, as the important story is in her character finding her freedom, working through the boredom built into modern life, and she is so unfailingly intelligent that we know, even in moments when she seems fixated on him, that her obsession has little to do with any particular man, that he is a symbol, a barely tangible dream. That's why the last quarter of the film drops in quality, after the two run off together and try to form a life. At that point it becomes apparent that we are seeing the story as it is imagined in the mind of the screenwriter, who has no clue what his wife wants or is doing, really. When he steps in to save the day, it's ridiculous wish-fulfillment. By that time, the wife has become a non-character. And STILL she's brilliant to watch, because Jackson makes choices like nobody else ever has, and that's always riveting.

robert carlyle film festival: the beach

Back when I worked at the bookstore we used to hand-sell this book like mad. Smart hipsters would come in (this was Portland at century's turn) asking for a summer read and we'd head straight for Alex Garland. It's the story of a kid searching for adventure in Thailand, being given a map to a secret Shangri-la by a crazy man just before he offs himself, then taking a beautiful French girl and her boyfriend with him on a quest to find the place. This was Garland's first novel, he was still a kid, really, but his voice was already strong, his narrative well-structured, his hunger for philosophical inquiry ignited, his sensibility a little stranger and smarter than most, and he hadn't yet launched into wild-exploration mode as he did with Tesseract and Coma, worthy works but less readily accessible than the Beach, lacking in its buoyant, dangerous vivacity.

Then the movie came out, and we couldn't give the damn thing away.

I missed it in the cinema at the time, and now I wish I hadn't. It seems to me (from my far-off recollection) that it follows the letter of the novel rather exactly, while missing its spirit almost completely. The then-nascent Danny Boyle gives it the interestingly-skewed but lushly beautiful cinematography and flow of a music video, and when you're done, that's what it feels like you've seen.

That's too harsh, though. It has more to offer than I thought. Boyle is intrepid at the helm, albeit navigating down an ill-chosen canal; Tilda Swinton gives Sal, the island's Big Kahuna, a bold and cryptic turn which is entirely appropriate and delivers her with such lucid comportment that the character feels full and true despite limited screen-time. DiCaprio, on the other hand, misses plumbing that deep well of inner darkness the hero needs to plumb in order to carry the story.

All in all, the movie loses the book's creeping, Lord-of-the-Flies sense of menace and we wind up with a cadre of Euro-narcissists in their own private seaside resort, making it difficult to care about outcomes.

Robert Carlyle plays the catalytic trickster who calls himself Daffy Duck, takes a shine to the serious young hero (a hero more thoughtful in the book than the film, in which he seems less introspective than the plot requires) and leaves a map to paradise as a parting legacy before opening his veins in a squalid Bangkok bedsit. He has only one scene then a sort of reprise as a dream-character later, and brings to it all his psychotic intensity, which is considerable. Boyle lights him well in his early scene, eerily and strongly, because this instigating moment is crucial, and if we don't buy it, the movie is a goner.

But we do buy it, against the odds, since the script seems, well, daffily lightweight in its logic, having lost in translation the truth of yearning communicated in the novel. When Daffy speaks of the perfection of the beach, a perfection which has driven him somehow mad, the weight is in the delivery, not the words themselves. Carlyle has once again so thrown all his heft into his role that he drags the script up a notch with him through sheer torque and will-power.

His magic doesn't stretch far enough to save the film, of course, which is, however, not the catastrophe I was always led to believe. And sometimes even a bad movie leads to good things: in this case, the later fruitful pairing of Garland and Boyle in 28 Days Later and Sunshine.

last night's history of filmmaking double feature: shadow of the vampire and safe conduct

Shadow of the Vampire begins with a question that we've all asked ourselves at one time or another: what if Max Schreck wasn't an actor at all, but really was a vampire? Director E. Elias Merhige takes us onto the sets and locations of Nosferatu as FW Murnau (John Malkovich) creates the original classic vampire film with the help of a real vampire. It sounded like some kind of heaven to me, but there are really only two reasons to see it: to hang out on these German film sets in 1921, which feel marvelously real, and for Willem Dafoe's fantastic performance as Schreck. He's genuinely chilling, he's surprisingly funny, and sometimes both at once. Some of the supporting cast is inspired, like Cary Elwes as the cameraman/dispenser of pharmaceuticals, but Malkovich is, as usual, a little annoying most of the time. And the script makes very little sense, particularly in the final scene of madness when Schreck demands his promised tiend and a ridiculous battle ensues between heartless vampyr and heartless filmmaker.


Safe Conduct is funny and smart and very well-paced, which, at nearly three hours, it must be to survive, starting off at a fast clip and later mellowing so that we may spend more relaxed time with our hero (Jacques Gamblin). This is the life of a filmmaker in Paris under Nazi domination. Does one work with the Hun? or abandon one's craft for the duration? or secretly work against the oppressor from within his own system? The questions are hard, the caveats appended to any answer offered are troubling, and director Bertrand Tavernier doesn't shrink from the complexity of it, although he is also not averse to sprinkling a little sentimental fairy-dust, either.

It has Tim Piggott-Smith in it, always a good thing, in a wonderful late segment in which the hero, having spontaneously stolen some Nazi documents, finds himself bundled off to England by the French Resistance to convince the chummy, hard-nosed, tea-drinking Brits that he is no German spy trying to pass off false information. The best of it is that good and evil are not simple: every seemingly heroic act is going to rebound against somebody, either the perpetrator or an innocent, and the perpetrator must choose whether to confess his crime or watch an innocent suffer for it. It's beautifully filmed and the details feel true. It's a little pat, a little too well-tied-up, a little too much an encomium to France's Greatest Generation to feel completely satisfying, but for an exercise in tribute and sentiment it succeeds remarkably well.

must-see classic horror films

Don't Look Now: (1973. dir: Nicholas Roeg) I'd be hard-pressed to think of a bolder one. The bulk of it is set in Venice, and not the pretty, touristy Venice we're used to seeing: this is the Venice after the season ends. You can practically smell the standing water, feel the moisture in your bones. This film changed my life when I saw it as a kid; you might say it scarred me. It was the first time the Yeatsian concept that following one's destiny might not always be to one's benefit ever occurred to me, and I trusted life less after that. The movie employs an easy pace, a slow build-up to a powerful climax, and has one of the most realistic sex scenes ever filmed, between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, both at high points in both their respective charms and creative powers.


The Uninvited: (1944. dir: Lewis Allen) This old-fashioned ghost story (based on a surprisingly engaging and sometimes shiver-inducing book by Dorothy Macardle) stands apart from today's horror because its tone is is so heartily, healthily English. A brother and sister (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) rent a house on the Cornwall coast then have to delve into its past to try and exorcise its ghosts. They're the kind of children-of-Churchill, we-survived-the-Blitz English folk that used to show up frequently onscreen, and that gives the movie a hardy, chin-up-through-hard-times, wisecracking tone which blunts the force of any true horror, but inspiring pessimism was not the point of the genre then so much as coaxing up pleasant shivers, as this does. It also dishes up a well-written mystery. The b&w cinematography is deep-velvet gorgeous; it won an Oscar, in fact. I was lucky enough to see this the first time on the big screen in an arthouse somewhere, and it's truly one of the more seductive haunted houses you'll ever see, with its vast windows overlooking rocky cliffs and crashing waves and its spiral staircase which all pets avoid. A real stunner.


Black Christmas: (1974. dir: Bob Clark) Wow. Talk about seminal. How did I go so long without seeing this? It's one of the great grandaddies of the slasher genre. Girls in a sorority are plagued by (truly chilling, even after all these years) violent, anonymous phone calls, and Christmas break becomes an adventure in horror. These girls are not interchangable; you care about them and really, really don't want them to die. The red herrings are well-placed and well-developed, and the ending is utterly chilling.


The Innocents: (1961. dir: Jack Clayton) I do not hesitate to call this one of the best horror films of all time, and better than the book it's based on (Henry James' Turn of the Screw). The elements are consummate: the richness of its chiaroscuro, the jaw-dropping mastery in the conjuring of the invisible world and the all-important, unanswered question: is it psychological, or ghostly? The use of silences, as when the drone of insects suddenly stops. The eerily precocious way these child actors (the incomparable Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens from the Village of the Damned, aged eleven and twelve respectively) have about them, throwing long fingers of doubt across their apparent innocence. The ending is absolutely devastating every time I watch it. Full five stars, no question.


Dust Devil: (1992. dir: Richard Stanley) Ye gods. Flawed but fascinating. I think if Richard Stanley were to remake this every ten years, it would be the most fantastic experiment in filmmaking that the world has ever seen, but it HAS to be Richard Stanley, and he HAS to have full control over the project. Somebody with money and power, make it so. Meanwhile, in this original, "Director's-Cut" version, there are images which will stay seared into the fabric of my brain forever. The aftermath of the first murder, with our mythic antihero arranging the entire house into a gory but precise artwork of exact details in order to fulfill his ritual needs and prolong his life, for instance. And, again, when he falls in love with one of his potential victims, and the power of it manifests in far-off explosions and the skittering of objects across a table-top. It lacks unity, this film. I understand that its filming was problematic, the editing process more so, plagued with all manner of troubles, and you can feel it in the final product, but it's still a classic, deserving our continued attention.