last night's double feature: S*P*Y*S and Chloe

S*P*Y*S: (1974. dir: Irvin Kershner) Whoa! So completely not funny! And they're trying so shamelessly to be so. Like the director is trying to make that (d?)evolutionary leap -- which will happen in the eighties with Airplane! -- into such devil-may-care shamelessness that you gotta laugh at the sheer silly nerve of the thing, but of course the world was not ready for that in 1974. American cinema, even the comedy, was still grounded in the dark muck of Vietnam and Watergate and the terrible assassinations of the sixties. That rich vein of seriousness gave the cinema a fertility and depth for which I'm often nostalgic; I remember it in the black-as-night comedies of Alan Arkin (Catch-22 is an underrated classic, and I remember Freebie and the Bean having a darkly brilliant sheen, although I was admittedly only ten when I saw it at the drive-in), and in that morally reprehensible, even possibly evil, but certainly genius Altman work, M*A*S*H.

S*P*Y*S is the Sutherland/Gould follow-up to that monster hit, and seems to prove that it wasn't the stars who made the thing great. In their defense, Gould, one of those actors whose talents would expire some decades before his career, had not at that point lost his edge, but it's wasted on a bad script which always goes for the obvious punch-line. Sutherland is cast in an oafish straight-man role which rubs against the natural grain of his many talents, and has been given not a single funny line.

There are potentially funny situations: the pair attack a rich, older spy in a men's room and he's frantically trying to get a pill onto his tongue, which they first take to be cyanide and fight to get away from him, then realize is digitalis for his heart condition and fight to get it back onto his tongue. Could have been funny, and wasn't. There's a bit at the beginning with Michael Petrovitch as a Russian gymnast hoping to defect and playing the English against the Americans as to who can offer him the best car, clothes, and women (Linda Lovelace or Miss Liverpool?). It has potential and, again, comes to little.

Later on, Joss Ackland and his cronies have captured Sutherland to find out what was on the inevitable microdot. They leave off torturing him to play instead on his patriotism, breaking into a ridiculously polished, heart-warming rendition of "America the Beautiful" which does indeed bring him to tears and makes him confess, a confession which they do not believe. It ought to have worked; it ought to have been funny. And it wasn't.

Et cetera, ad nauseam. Too bad.



Chloe: (2009. dir: Atom Egoyan) Sometimes he succeeds with brilliance that leaves you breathless, sometimes he fails with some brilliance, sometimes he just plain-out fails, but Egoyan is always, always interesting. Here is a director who never fudges or fakes, is always completely true to his own vision, and has the technical chops to carry it off. How you react to his films will depend largely on how open your own personal worldview is to rubbing up against his, which is strange and sometimes cantakerous, often depressing, and always interested in human truth at the expense of political correctness. He goes in close and personal to examine internal lives, sometimes with awesome results (the Sweet Hereafter, the overlooked and always surprising Exotica), and focuses on the twisting and often amoral choices we make to survive terrible pain, terrible loss.

In Chloe, Julianne Moore is a wealthy gynecologist with a beautiful husband whom everyone adores (Liam Neeson) and a rebellious but good-hearted teenaged son and a museum-house where nothing is ever out of place. She becomes convinced that her husband is cheating on her, the suspicion rising up mostly from her growing sense of alienation from both husband and son, a sense that what gives them joy are the parts of their lives which she cannot touch. After a chance meeting with a young prostitute (Amanda Seyfried in a stunning performance), she hires the girl to tempt her husband. In doing so, she reawakens her own sexuality (in the beginning, we hear her counselling a client that an orgasm is nothing mysterious, just a series of muscular contractions) through vicariously experiencing the girl's stories of the adulterous encounters.

Amanda Seyfried dazzles as Chloe, with her effortless combination of seduction and innocence, a real powerhouse. I loved this girl in Jennifer's Body and was sorry to have to forego Red Riding Hood (everyone has lines they will not cross) and not sorry at all to have missed Mamma Mia! but I will follow her in future. Julianne Moore throws all her myriad talents full-force into a difficult and rewarding role, and Liam Neeson's turn is nuanced and controlled, always pointed toward enhancing the performances of the actresses, to whom this film unequivocally belongs. Even when you can see where the twists are taking you, you will not guess them all. That's impossible in an Egoyan film, because he is so strongly bent on remaining true to his characters, and, at their best, those characters are deep and vast and proteanly human.

michael sarrazin: 1940-2011

When I was a kid, Michael Sarrazin was A-list. He worked a lot, and I sought him out. There was something about his persona that made him appealing to a child in ways that, say, James Coburn would never be. It wasn't just that his particular brand of handsome was so easily accessible (taller than average, with enormous, unflinching blue eyes and thick black hair, a manly cleft in his chin and the most sensuous mouth you'll ever see on a human of any gender), but also that he had a certain open, thoughtful way of listening which leant him an unthreatening and unpretentious, even a kindly air.

The only work of his which is still on the modern filmgoer's radar is They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, the kind of fin-de-'60s gritty, unrelenting, sometimes cruel downer which, for all its quality (it was directed by Sydney Pollack with a great cast. Gig Young won an Oscar for what he was best at: playing his own unique brand of truly chilling slimeball), is a tough one to endure unless you're feeling particularly psychically robust.

But whatever happened to Sometimes a Great Notion? This was considered an important movie in its day, -- it IS an important movie,-- but it's never been issued on DVD. *SOME SPOILERS AHEAD* Based on Ken Kesey's best book, directed by and starring Paul Newman (as well as Sarrazin, Henry Fonda, Lee Remick, Richard Jaeckel and a fantastic secondary cast), it jumps into the middle of a loggers' strike in Oregon and a cantankerous, rogue family of scabs led with roaring, dry-witted zeal by Fonda as the family patriarch. Aside from showcasing the best work I've ever seen from Remick (in the scene during which she almost reluctantly tells her story to Sarrazin, the returned prodigal brother, her choices are downright sublime), it provides Richard Jaeckel (3:10 to Yuma, Ulzana's Raid, the Dirty Dozen) with an intensely unique death-scene. Simultaneously witty and poignant, it is somehow --or, rather, therefore,-- one of the most powerfully enduring demises I've seen captured on film. I first watched this movie at the drive-in with my family (this was in 1971; I was seven), then again once on television with my father some time during the following decade. Still, after all this time, two moments from the film were burned into my mind as if I'd seen it night before last: Jaeckel's death and that final, wonderful, iconic image before the rolling of the credits. (I'm not going to give it away; you have to watch it for yourself.)

Revisiting it now (you can watch it on instant play at Netflix), I'm struck by how very capably Newman directs not just the film in its entirety but himself in it, a tough task; he's surrounded himself with the best actors and has the humility to bow to the ensemble. The only flaw I find is his tendency to use dissolves between scenes. It's jarring, probably because my subconscious associates that particular cinematic tactic with the summoning of nostalgia or sentiment, and one of the great strengths of Notion is that it is so unsentimentally a product of its time, with its low-key celebration of irony and subtle humor, its quiet revelry in anti-social behavior.

Sarrazin himself is weak in an early scene in which he drunkenly half-confronts his long-estranged older brother (Newman) through the mitigating presence of the brother's wife (Remick). He is at his best when he's listening, a thing which this actor does as well as any other ever has; his presence is strong and so he never feels passive. He also has a talent for underplaying which works well here: the first time the family takes him up to the worksite, they travel through an ugly, massive clear-cut and Sarrazin says with the perfect note of droll simplicity, "Neat work you guys do up here." This is a forgotten classic that needs to be revived.

There are others of his that I remember very well but to which I have no access: In Search of Gregory and the Reincarnation of Peter Proud are two that spring to mind. The first was a cryptic, existential Julie Christie movie that probably didn't age well beyond its time, but I'd appreciate the chance to see that for myself. The second was an early New Age thriller (what happens when the reincarnation of a murder victim begins exploring his past life?) that I thought was AMAZING when I was a kid, and, again, no doubt doesn't live up to my thrill of prepubescent enthusiasm, but how will I ever know?

Of note also is Journey to Shiloh, a really dreadful Civil War TV-movie about a band of Johnny Rebs heading off to join up and win the war. It's notable for two reasons: you see the issues from the Confederate point of view ("That buck slave is worth a thousand dollars. You think we're going to kill him?") and because the band of brothers consists of the young James Caan, Harrison Ford, Sarrazin, Jan-Michael Vincent, Don Stroud and Paul Petersen (remember the Donna Reed Show? No, me neither. Tough start, being a child actor, particularly from a hit show that's fallen so far afoul of the current zeitgeist that it is known only as a joke. To his credit, he's still working). Poor Jan-Michael Vincent, who looks about fifteen, bears up bravely under possibly the worst-written death-scene ever ("Are you still there? The candle went out!"). Ford gets to lurk in the background without an opportunity to embarrass himself, and Caan is so miscast and badly-coiffed as to invoke more sympathy than derision. Sarrazin comes off best as Caan's stalwart sidekick, somehow finding corners of silk purse in this particular sow's ear, particularly in his own, more dignified final moments.

Then there is the mendaciously named Frankenstein: the True Story, a "major television event" from my childhood. A big fan of all things Gothic, I was rapt in front of the set for every minute of it, and bemused to find that it had as little to do with the original book as the early Karloff films did. It did, however, veer off in interesting directions, and it was true in portraying the monster as an intelligent, romantic, and tragic figure. This was Sarrazin, whose beautiful visage decays throughout the film (at the hands of Hammer makeup artisan Roy Ashton) until he is monstrous to behold. He's acting with James Mason, David McCallum, the young and lovely Jane Seymour, and, interestingly, Leonard Whiting as the good doctor, in one of his rare filmed roles following his unforgettable Romeo in the Zefferelli Romeo and Juliet. Although arguably too long-winded and melodramatic, this Frankenstein has genuine twists and chills (the removal of the black ribbon!) and Sarrazin brings to it the soulful poetry of his presence.

Those words, "soulful" and "poetic", turn up in many of his obituaries, used by those trying to describe the unusual nature of his charisma. It wasn't just star power, but a certain quiet centeredness that he projected, a tone which served him well during the hippie times during which he came into the height of his career. Personally, I'm surprised at the melancholy his death has inspired in me. Certain actors, when treasured in one's youth, lend their own images and qualities toward the building of one's internal psychic structure. That is, their images become symbols upon which one's psyche can draw to express internal truths in dreams and visions and musings. Sarrazin was one such for me, and, as this particular melancholy is not an unpleasant sensation, I mean to sustain it by revisiting as many of his films as I can find.

the lincoln lawyer: the camera wielded as an obstacle

The photographer was apparently drinking from a bad batch of wood alcohol, but aside from that unfortunate incident, the Lincoln Lawyer is a rollicking good story. It's gripping, almost always satisfying in its turns, and in the end I was heartily glad I had watched it.

Now are you ready for my rant? This is directed toward the cinematographer, Lukas Ettlin (whose last responsibility was Battle: Los Angeles, which speaks volumes). YOU DON'T COMMUNICATE A CHARACTER'S INTERNAL AGITATION BY MOVING THE CAMERA AROUND IN AN AGITATED MANNER. You communicate it by focusing the camera on a good actor and letting him communicate his internal state.

McConaughey is lovely in this! So are Marisa Tomei as the ex-wife, William H Macy as the sidekick, and every other damn actor in the cast. These are well-paid professionals who are very good at what they do. There is absolutely no reason for the DP (and, ultimately, director Brad Furman, at whose door this botched vision lies sprawled, naked, and oozing pus) to mistrust this cast so much he feels he has to do their job for them. He's showing off, that's all, and it obstructs the telling of the tale. Not fatally, because the story and the script and the actors are sufficiently compelling to overcome it.

It's not that this guy is addicted to the shaky cam. He uses stillness, too, generally from odd angles, with maybe the camera set just closer to a witness on the stand than what we're used to, and set at just a slightly lower angle, emphasizing an oddness. That's alright; it doesn't ruin things. Point is, though, that even when he's using stillness, you can hear him, smug behind the camera, thinking loudly, "And behold! I offer you stillness." To which you want to respond, "Get out of the goddamn way so I can watch the film!"

Do you remember that great, great scene in the Bad and the Beautiful when Lana Turner finally makes herself fully vulnerable to Kirk Douglas only to have her heart smashed in the most mortifyingly awful way? Then she flees to her car and starts to drive, and we watch her for the longest time, having her emotional breakdown while she's driving. Minnelli and his cameraman (the incomparable Robert Surtees) set up a fascinating shot: the camera dollies up to about where the passenger rear-view mirror would be, just barely looking up and back at Lana. Then, as her frenzy mounts, and as her driving becomes more dangerous, it rocks backward until we're watching her from just outside the backseat, then forward again, in smooth, surreptitious movement. It's unobtrusive, beautifully so, but nonetheless effective in communicating that something is terribly wrong and building to a tragedy. It heightens the emotional impact of Turner's scene without at all distracting from it.

And so, in conclusion, I say to this Ettlin fellow: watch some old movies. Learn from the masters. Stop showing off. And get out of my way when I'm trying to watch a damn movie.

That said, and my crankiness temporarily abated, watch the Lincoln Lawyer, regardless. It's got other things to offer. It's been a long time since I've seen a really satisfying courtroom drama. They used to do them rather well in the old days, and Furman seems to be referring back to the seventies, judging from his opening credits and the flat, metallic lighting he's chosen to illuminate his Los Angeles. There was only one plot-point that eluded me (how did Haller know that Corliss would have details about the previous murder? it's a small quibble, and no doubt will resolve itself on a second viewing) so I went back to the book for clarification. I didn't find it, but it did seem to me during my glance-through that this is one of those occasions on which the movie is more satisfying than the book. My impression of Connelly is that he's one of those authors, so prevalent today, who specialize in good stories without putting in the time to write them very well, and that's the perfect kind of author to adapt to the big screen.

last night's unintended double feature of monster movies: neither the sea nor the sand and iguana

SPOILER ALERT

Neither the Sea nor the Sand: (1972. dir: Fred Burnley) I love these strange, low-budget British films from the seventies. You never know what you're going to get. The blurb I read made it sound giallo-ish (massively toned down, of course; we are Brits here, not Italians), with a woman perhaps going mad on one of those lovely, rocky coastlines, perhaps with a hint of the supernatural at work.

What I got was so much more! Anna (Susan Hampshire. If you are English, you remember her from a thousand and one telly appearances. She was my first Becky Sharp; I was a small child, and I did not find her charms sufficient to balance the villainous aspects of the character) is vacationing on Jersey in the dead of winter to escape her dead-end marriage. She meets the inevitable handsome, mysterious islander, Hugh (Michael Petrovitch), with whom she spends every last moment until time to go home. The sexual revolution seems not to have reached the Jersey shores yet, so the affair consists of banal conversations over campfires, tedious walks on the beach and visits to local tourist attractions. This all goes on for a very long time, interspersed with some darkly forboding talk about death and dead souls beneath the sea. When she at last decides to cast in her lot with him entirely they fall into bed and madly in love simultaneously, and their mutual joy is crossed only by Hugh's elder brother's horror at the match. (Frank Finlay plays the brother. Thankless role, but he's a peach.)

So far, so dull. To escape the brother's disapprobation, the lovers abscond to a different seashore, this one in Scotland, although it looks pretty much the same as the one in Jersey. While there, they (tediously) pledge their undying love and enjoy long frolics amongst the rocks (why are happy love affairs always so boring to watch?) until Anna's darkly magnificent lover Hugh falls dead on the beach.

And now we get the to the interesting bit. It looks like it's going to turn into a story about grieving, but then Hugh returns. Or, anyway, Hugh's body starts walking around in the middle of the night, following Anna everywhere, unable to look away from her. Normally, one would wonder at this point how much of this is happening only in Anna's head. That angle is disallowed by the script, which shows us objective viewpoints from allegedly normal people who see him, too. When she finally gets him home (a long, humdrum process, as death has robbed Hugh of any grace or facility in the use of his limbs and fingers, and he can no longer speak, but communicates with her telepathically), the brother hits the nail on the head when he posits that the sheer force of Anna's love has trapped Hugh's spirit in his now decaying body, and furthermore that this is folly which can only lead to calamity.

Perhaps I've said too much. The joy I had from the film lay in witnessing what vapid madness lay round the next bend, and now I'm afraid I've spoiled that for you. In any case, I won't tell you any more. Just that Michael Petrovitch is a lovely zombie, and kept reminding me of Conrad Veidt in Caligari.




AND MORE SPOILERS

Iguana: (1988. dir: Monte Hellman) Hellman, best known for the underground classics Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter as well as a heavily-lauded but little-seen duo of Jack Nicholson Existential Westerns (the Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind), returns in a different decade with the strangest offering of them all. Hellman films always explored the psychodynamics of interpersonal power, the slippery intricacies of dominance and submission, of who gets to be alpha dog and for how long and why beta dog rolls over to bare his belly willingly. This one takes those questions to the very utmost, to the point even at which the characters never come to life, remaining rather puppets animated only by the hand of the debate. Maybe it's the lack of a real star like Nicholson or Warren Oates which leaves this movie writhing unborn in its amniotic sac, but it's an interesting failure, nonetheless.

Everett McGill is the monster of the title, a harpooner on a whaling ship whose facial disfigurations lead him to be mistreated by his shipmates (and, we are led to understand, by humanity at large). He jumps ship and declares himself king of a deserted island. In the beginning, he is a worshipper of the Voudoun loa; the first shot of the film shows us the veve he has tattooed on his arm, and one of his early punishments involves being branded in the belly by a white-hot metal voodoo amulet. After sufficient disappointment, he topples his altar, scrapes the tattoo off his arm and declares himself sole god of his world. Then, any soul unlucky enough to wash up on his shores becomes shackled and mutilated and enslaved to his will, and they are surprisingly myriad. Included in his little enclave of unfortunates is a servant (played even more lacklusterly than usual by the generally lackluster Michael Madsen), an intellectual, a mute non-entity, an arrogant captain, and a beautiful seductress. They all submit so passively to the monster's tyranny that it is both depressingly realistic and deadly to the plot. There is rebellion, yes, but most of it half-hearted. The intellectual can only rebel with words; he has not the physical courage to take a physical risk. The arrogant captain eventually makes a stand, smashing his shackles and escaping, but is so physically exhausted by the effort that he is easily vanquished. The seductress, who has been well introduced to us as the smartest, most interesting character in the piece, foregoes her chance to rebel, seemingly out of her underground desire to be mastered and humiliated. (Ay, caramba. Did Sam Peckinpah direct this?)

In the end, it is strange enough to interest, and the colours of the thing are beautiful. The last shot is particularly gorgeous, with its quiet hymn sung over the top. But a story without living characters is a story destined to languish, gasping for breath on its particular beach, and this one does.

antichrist: the darkest fairy tale

*SPOILER ALERT*

Antichrist: (2009. dir: Lars von Trier) Just because a thing is a work of genius doesn't mean you can't hate the bastard who made it. Often we are beguiled by genius. Other times, like right now, we want to say, "Congratulations on your cleverness, asshole," and throw rocks.

They used to say a mere human would turn to stone or die or run mad if he looked on a god manifest in his true form. That came into my mind while the end credits rolled. It's not an easy thing to watch, this movie, so compelling and magnetic, but with moments so dark that I felt like I'd been on the mountain and watched bad gods at war, and that I was lucky to escape intact with a few additional grey hairs.

That said, the most startling thing about Antichrist is its extraordinary beauty. It's shot on a Red camera; Red seems to be behind it every time I find a film beautiful these days. And this particular director, with whom I so heavily associate the dreaded shaky-cam, is the one, it turns out, who can most fully control his addiction to it, using stillness (and, more radically, slowness) to sculpt a film of intoxicating grace and fascination.

It's two films, really: a study of different shapes of grieving when a couple loses their child, and a fairy tale pitting the apollonian yang of the masculine against the yawning, chthonic, lovecraftian dark of the eternal feminine. What emerges from the fray is a thing made of thunder and primal anguish. My first thought, and it scared me, was that he has no fear of anything, von Trier, but on contemplation I decided it's the actors undergoing it who are the heroes of the hour. One hears the stories: performers driven half-mad by working with von Trier, some who sign on to do several films but drop out after the first from nervous exhaustion. As when watching porn, one assumes that as long as they're not bound and gagged they're making adult decisions to do the work. This in mind, I wonder if Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are not superhumans looking fondly back at us from one step further up the evolutionary ladder.

Once the couple ventures far into the woods to face their grieving, the fairy tale comes to life through wonderful elements: animal-helpers emerge to guide the man/boy using darkly awful images, and there is a womb-like crevice opening into the earth beneath an ancient, gnarled tree which becomes a terrible place of destruction and rebirth. Acorns pound the roof of the cabin like the hailstones conjured by witches, a constant reminder of the encroaching threat of the natural (ie: the feminine/satanic).

Its biggest flaw is that its violence, which is some of the most disturbing I've ever seen, arrives too suddenly. It is not without warning, certainly, but it is without a satisfactory build-up. In this respect alone a more traditional Hollywood style might have been useful, in which one cheats a little with just a splash of music here, combined in the editing room with a crafty close-up there, all communicating the darkness building inside the draconian She. Instead, her violence seems small and random from the beginning, and when she at last comes roaring out of the gate at full-bore wicked-witch, we do not feel that sense of deep horror (think Nicholson in the Shining) which emerges from having realized the full extent of the threat just before it breaks. The clues are there in the script (the thing with the shoes, which is very effective), but we don't get close enough to the woman to see her storm brewing. In fact, although we see Dafoe's face up close quite often during the course of the film, Gainsbourg remains an enigma most of the time, reflecting the side of the fence (rational apollonian v chthonic feminine) from which von Trier is watching the story unfold. The rational man is the boy caught in the dark fairy-tale jungle, at the mercy of the wicked witch.

Made by a lesser talent, it would have been insulting. Alright, it's still insulting, but a work of true greatness transcends the temporal human scales of political correctness. I can't recommend this movie, because once these images are inside your head, you'll never shake them out again, so be warned, and use caution before venturing into these woods. Only when you're feeling hardy and ready to approach the dark gods with the necessary humility, then, by all means, watch it, and godspeed to you.