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.