performance of the week

Sybille Schmitz in Carl Dreyer's Vampyr

From naturalistic despair to truly unnerving animal grimace in a moment, she is stunning as the vampire's helpless victim who can do nothing as she feels her soul slipping away.

Schmitz was highly regarded in German cinema. You can watch her on Netflix in the Nazi propaganda film Titanic, in which the fault of the disaster is laid firmly at the door of "Britain's endless quest for profit." Regardless, the film was ultimately banned by Goebbels, who felt the panic of the crowd scenes as the ship was going down might lower the morale of dem Volke. (The filming was so troubled that its initial director was not just fired, but hanged.)

After the War, Schmitz was shunned by the film community for her Nazi collaboration, and she slipped into a shadow-existence of drugs and despair, inspiring Fassbinder's classic Veronika Voss.

twentynine palms: only for the hardy

Twentynine Palms: (2003. dir: Bruno Dumont) When you read the member reviews on Netflix, you find reactions ranging from disdainful annoyance to sputtering fury. My favorite is by a fellow who is fiercely insulted by a scene in which the characters walk up to a Dairy Queen, order ice cream, and, without asking what flavor they want, the girl brings them soft-serve vanilla cones, which they eat, then they walk away without paying. This man sputters: how could this condescending French director be so uneducated in American ways to think such a thing possible? To which I reply: you watched this movie, and THAT'S what you come away offended by?

Good God, there's so much. How about the vaguely disturbing scene in which David (there are only two characters, really, David and Katya, lovers and fighters: they have sex and they fight, have sex and fight, living in a sort of heremetically sealed cocoon of mutual rage and eroticism while the outside world rarely bumps up against them) is casually masturbating while he watches a Jerry Springer show in which a man is publicly confessing to his wife that he raped their daughter? In my world, that rates higher on the offensive scale than soft-serve vanilla. And, alright, once you've seen the ending, how can you focus your horror on anything else?

If you can watch it without knowing the end, you should. Here is the basic plot: two lovers on a road-trip. Ostensibly, David is scouting locations for a film amongst the Joshua Trees, but we never actually see him taking any notes or photographs or even paying much attention to maps. It seems a much more existential outing than that. Good enough: two lovers in the desert. Sort of Zabriskie Point or the Passenger, or Valley Obscured by Clouds. There is fucking and fighting, back and forth, so realistically drawn that you can't really look away. (Who among us has not had or witnessed that first fight, which begins with one person asking, "What are you thinking?" and the other replying, "Nothing"?) The lineaments of passion, with its darker reaches into the realms of mutual loathing, are continually and tirelessly explored by Dumont. It might get boring except that one has a creeping sense that something awful is bound to happen.

When it does come, it seems brutally random until you realize that actually Dumont has given us a very thorough build-up to his schrecklich climax. From the outset, every exchange with the outside world, even the most glancing, even just ordering food, winds up with some vague threat towards the couple. At a Chinese restaurant, the waitress is angry because they order so little. At the Dairy Queen, there is a marine in uniform hunched with whispered menace over his table. They discuss him, fight about him, and go back to their roadside motel to have sex. Crossing a street, they are furiously berated by a man screaming from the passenger side of a car for their jaywalking. When they stop outside a lonely house in the desert to befriend the dogs, the very stillness of the house feels portentous; you keep thinking get moving! get moving! get back in your car. On the one occasion when Katya is fed up and leaves on foot, she ducks behind a parked truck, inexplicably terrified, every time a car passes.

Don't watch it if you're feeling sensitive. Don't force it on friends or lovers. It's a trial by fire, this movie, one that I found worth the effort (in spite of its Frenchness, a thing which usually leaves me growling), but it does leave terrible images behind it, grafted onto your brain.

boondock saints: big shameless boy movie

(1999. dir: Troy Duffy) Yup. It's the biggest, smoothest, most utterly shameless Boy Movie I ever saw. It's got verve, style, panache, joie de vivre, good actors, a stupid plot, bad dialogue, all the bigotry and misogyny and jokey homophobia you expect from Boy Movies, all fashioned to fit tightly around the silliest scenes of violence you'll ever witness. The director, god love him, has vision. There's a steady, graceful hand (Adam Kane's) at the camera. Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus are fabulous. Willem Dafoe has a gleefully good time as the faggoty FBI guy in charge of the investigation, and Ron Jeremy is downright inspired as a mob slimeball who suffers a visit from Nemesis.

I think we can all agree that Quentin Tarantino has provided both magnificent wonderment and equal trouble for the cinephile at large: a good "rule of thumb" (see this movie for a bad scene explaining that phrase) might be that like Hemingway before him, nobody but Tarantino should try to write like Tarantino. Despite the considerable quality of these actors, most of the attempts at humor clunk to the floor in an embarrassing fashion. There's way too much yelling, and not one ounce, not one single whisper of subtlety anywhere. It has, however, got a nice, inventive, Tarantino-inspired playing-with-time structure, in which we see the lead-up to each massacre, then skip to the cops trying to piece together the events, and that works well.

But make no mistake: these are not "crimes" or "shootings", they are all, without exception, bloody massacres done self-righteously by these "angelic" boys suffering an utter certainty that God (they are good Catholic boys) is on their side, and that those they choose to slay are Bad. They do not discriminate between killer mafiosos and just some poor schlubs jerking off in porno booths: all are evil by their own infallible judgments, and so deserving of immediate and gruesome murder. (An interesting side-note: amiable as these two brothers are when they're not murdering folks, and as gorgeous as they are, thoughtfully stripping off their kits so that we can enjoy their musculatures, they seem to be completely asexual, even anti-sexual, which makes the film's fixation on homosexuality rife with implication. I'm sure these guys fixed that in the sequel, as some of their homophobic friends must have pointed out the obvious.) I'm not one to try and foist a uniform sense of ethics on film-makers, but just this week some kid took an automatic weapon into a mall upstate, and only yesterday another kid committed probably the most sickening mass shooting ever, at a grade school, for chrissake, and so can we please, please have some intelligent semblance of ethics in our filmmaking? Not forced by a new Hays Code, but can we all just grow up a little? take some personal responsibility?

(Now I've had my rant, let me say I firmly believe that ultimately the buck stops with the boy in question. We all go through crap trying to grow up, and most of us, no matter how many video games or movies or Black Sabbath records we have, never pick up the AK-47. The responsibility lies not with film-makers, but with the human holding the gun. And with the Republicans who allowed him to get it with such ease and facility. That allowed, can we all put our heads together and figure out ways to inspire the youth of America without intoxicating them with the adrenaline rush of the kill?)

I thought I might watch Overnight, the documentary about this director's bumpy rise and ignominious crash, but the idea of spending time with this guy without the ameliorating, intercessory influence of Flanery and Reedus is just too exhausting.

a boxer, biker bandits, and a really twisted murderer

Body and Soul: (1947. dir: Robert Rosson) A pretty good boxing picture is dragged up into the pantheon of greatness by the dizzying brilliance of James Wong Howe's relentless photography. That, and one of John Garfield's best performances. Howe's noir night-times are like nothing else, his day-times nearly as good, and that final boxing match is a dazzler.

Lone Hero: (2002. dir: Ken Sanzel) Why do I love this movie? Is it because you get to watch a tourist-trap destroyed by nasty outlaws? (Yes, I live in a tourist town; am I carrying secret angst?) Is it just that Robert Forster gives another of his incomparable performances? What is it about that guy? Does he inspire writers to create brilliant characters, or does he have a brilliant agent who roots them out for him, or is he just so good that he takes a middlin' character and elevates it into greatness with his dry wit and wry delivery?

This is the story of an aging kid suspended between youth and adulthood, working a kind of interesting but pretty much nowhere job recreating gunfights in one of those touristy old West towns like Virginia City or Tombstone or Jacksonville Oregon, with wooden sidewalks and a little train that scoots through town while tinny music plays and a girl in a hoop-skirt and bonnet points out places of historical interest. The "kid" is played by Sean Patrick Flanery, who you think you know, right? but who is transformed by this DP (David Pelletier), filmed so that he is the most sensuous creature in the world, which he may be, but I have yet to find him so in the few of his other films I've seen. Then there's Lou Diamond Phillips, about perfect as a psychopathic cop-killing biker, and Robert Forster as (you guessed it) the toughest gun-toting libertarian in this tiny Montana town. When a gang of outlaws on motorcycles ride in, John (Flanery) stands up to its leader, bringing down the wrath of the bad guys.

The dialogue is clever, the story moves at a good clip, there's gunplay a-plenty, and, although it follows the basic formula, you're never sure exactly how it's going to achieve the expected ends. There's some great music, including a raucous rendition of "Streets of Laredo" by the Headstones, and a lot of surprisingly effective good humor. In short, you go in expecting little to nothing, and you come out the other side with two hours of good entertainment, and I guess that's why I love it.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Perfume: (2006. dir: Tom Tykwer) It was a book first, and an enormous hit among my generation when we were still enjoying our morose and often noir-clad salad days. It was often said that, popular as it was, it could never translate onto the screen, as the story happens inside the head of one of the most enigmatic and laconic anti-heroes ever written, and its chosen vehicle, the sense of smell, can just barely be translated through words, and how does one do it through images instead?

I read somewhere that this was Kurt Cobain's favorite novel, and I believe it, because it's the ultimate Rock Star book. Here is the Artist as Sociopath. Hardly aware of the wake of destruction he leaves in his quest for perfection in his art (in this case, the serial murders of beautiful women whose essences he distills to design the perfect perfume), this anti-hero achieves the long-fought perfection, the world falls in love with his art and therefore with him. Then, of course, he must suffer the terrible loneliness of being Apart and Unable to Love, and is eventually, out of love, devoured by his fans.

This is the kind of book for which you ache with passion when you are seventeen and obsessed with Baudelaire and Rimbaud; it's a story for angstful teenagers. If you bring an adult sensibility to the table, it will probably spoil the feast unless you garnish liberally with vast doses of irony.

The film itself is no doubt as well done as it can be. Ben Whishaw is a young maestro, correct in every detail, showing us never too much or too little. The production values are gorgeous and smooth. The script relies overly on narration, but that, considering the source material, was probably inevitable. The early suspense is effective, and the story only loses its grip into absurdity in the last twenty minutes or so.

spies, assassins, and a half-breed renegade

the Bourne Legacy: (2012. dir: Tony Gilroy) The chase scene at the climax is so long and repetitive as to be a real snoozer, which is a downright shame, since the rest of it is surprisingly good: well-acted, intelligently written, with quiet, unspoken chemistry between the leads and a lot of suspense.

the Eiger Sanction: (1975. dir: Clint Eastwood) Clint Eastwood's entry into the '70s assassin/spy genre, an exalted field including Three Days of the Condor, the Eye of the Needle, the Eagle Has Landed, and Day of the Jackal. Laughably misogynist, clumsily written, clunkily paced, it lacks both the gravitas and grace necessary to fit in well with its compadres. The middle chunk was filmed in Monument Valley, which is why we watched it, but those scenes are no better filmed than the too-darkly-lit-without-being-noirishly-cool indoor scenes. The spy story makes no sense at all, and the adventure story is so slow by our current standards as to play as a leisurely amble. And yet, somehow, there is some kind of ungainly charm about it. (To give it its due, the second unit shots from the helicopter are very good, and George Kennedy gives an enthusiastic performance.)

Something about Eastwood as a director: when he is off his game, as he often is and as he is here, there is a feeling that the story is badly told only because his impatience to tell it outweighed his attention to detail (like a well-written script, well-lighted scenes, dynamic pacing, etc), and so we tend, against all common sense and standard operating procedure, to forgive him. For the love of god, why do we do it? Our madness must stop.

Navajo Joe: (1966. dir: Sergio Corbucci) This is the only spaghetti western I’ve ever seen in which the hero is sexy. (In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of one in which anyone at all is sexy.) (OK, other than Claudia Cardinale; you got me there.) Burt Reynolds, --young, athletic, straight off the gridiron,-- is smoldering hot as a half-breed (everyone in this film who is not weak is half-breed: hero, heroine, and villain) wreaking vengeance on a bloodthirsty band of outlaws in recompense for the murder of his entire village.

The action launches right in sans preamble, and although the lines (and, god knows, the dubbing) are generally cumbersome and sometimes risible, it’s still an evolving art (this is 1966) and Sergio Corbucci (Django, the Great Silence)finds some good moments playing with camera angles and letting his hero lurk omnisciently. It’s got all the de rigeur bits: there's one where Navajo Joe (who has his own, really ridiculous theme song with his name sung over and over, while the rest of the music is the kind of Morricone you expect and desire) throws down his weapon to save the heroine, and you're wondering why until you realize it’s because it's time for the requisite now-we-kick-the-shit-out-of-you scene. Awesome stuff.

truth and fiction at the ok corral part 2

(...in which I continue my quest to snuffle out the occasional historical fact from the mass of Hollywood hocum and bunk that's been spun around the West's most famous and enduring shoot-out.)


Gunfight at the OK Corral: (1957. dir: John Sturges again!) Burt Lancaster is Wyatt Earp, only he walks like a dancer and smiles too much. Or maybe it's not that he smiles too much, but that his face is far too lyrical to belong to the stoical Earp. Kirk Douglas is Doc Holliday, and dazzlingly tony in those fancy waistcoats. In fact, the one great good thing about this version is the easy chemistry between its two leads; when one or the other is missing from the screen, the story lags.

This one starts way before Tombstone, back in Dodge, with Wyatt Earp co-marshalling with Bat Masterson. Even so, he's already following Ike Clanton and Johnny Ringo, notorious rustlers, set up as a sort of nemesis-duo for him and Holliday (Ringo even steals Big-Nose Kate in this one), which of course is all fluff and padding, but plays well enough. This is, however, the one time you'll see Big-Nose Kate with an actually sizable nose (Jo Van Vleet!) and she and Holliday enjoy a trashy, tempestuous, completely dysfunctional relationship, a supposition which probably keeps some truck with non-fiction.

The lady gambler (Rhonda Fleming as Earp's entirely fictional love interest; he would have been involved with his laudanum-addicted common-law wife Mattie Blaylock at that time) is badly written and nothing but a maddening diversion. Maybe she's trying to be Feathers (Rio Bravo will be another few years down the line), but poor Feathers needs a better writer (apparently Leon Uris has some trouble writing for the ladies) and certainly a more fascinating actress before she makes her long-awaited entrance into this world. Another annoyance is that poker, as in so many films, is portrayed as a game won not occasionally or dishonestly, but with unebbing continuity if one lives, as Holliday does, within the graces of the appropriate gods. By his own testimony, his secret is not caring about losing his money or his life, and so he never loses.

Also annoying is the Donna Reed Show squeak of cleanliness exuded by the Earp clan, who were in reality as often running, living in, and arrested in brothels as they were working as lawmen. One of the more compelling things about the Wyatt Earp legend is that he is equal parts criminal and lawman, and it seems almost a random historical hiccup that he is remembered in his star-sporting and law-abiding persona. Reading about the Earp clan, you get a strong impression that they went where the money was, and weren't particular about what tasks might be demanded or what company might be kept.

It is the slaying of young Jimmy Earp, as in the Ford movie, which sets off the killing, although in real life he was the oldest brother and a saloon-keeper in Tombstone. He was not present at the OK Corral, left Tombstone with his brother Morgan's body and died of natural causes in his eighties in California.

As usual, the shootout itself is a big sackful of highly photogenic lies. Johnny Ringo is there (he wasn't), the invitation has been sent in advance for a specific hour (it wasn't), and it is Billy Clanton, not Ike, who stumbles into Fly's Photographic Studio and is there picked off by Holliday (he wasn't). Frank McLaury, hiding in a wagon, fires the first shot at Ike Clanton's urging (in reality, all participants were out in the open, maybe ten feet apart), and the only words we hear are Doc saying, "Hit the dirt!" when in fact it was Virgil who started things off by demanding the cowboys disarm. (Interestingly, Virgil was carrying a walking stick, which you don't see often at a shoot-out. He'd taken it from Doc Holliday after giving him instead the shotgun to carry.) This cinematic shootout is a massive endeavour of choreographed running and tumbling and hunkering behind things, a fiery climax that continues for several minutes longer than its original did.

The verdict: see it for Douglas and Lancaster, but don't expect to learn from it.

robert carlyle film festival: the last enemy

Welcome to an Orwellian dystopia. It’s not the future so much as an alternate present: Britain in the post-7/7 era (that’s post-9/11 if you’re American) has embraced a total relinquishing of privacy in return for the government’s promise of safety. No longer can you make the simplest monetary transaction, nor even enter a public building, without a state-issued ID card. Bands of riot-gear-sporting cops can stop you on the least pretext to run you through the system. Retinal scans are mandatory if you want to fly, and sensitive government areas are guarded by fingerprint-readers. Amidst this milieu of barely-civilized paranoia, an inexplicable plague has erupted among a group of recently vaccinated refugees, a well-loved British doctor who worked with them has been mysteriously killed, and his widow unites with his estranged brother to try and solve the mystery, their own footsteps often dogged by encroaching doom as well.

Having been watching Carlyle in glancing pieces of American television, I conclude he’s been diluting the brogue in recent years, which is too bad. At full tilt, a Scottish brogue is not just the sexiest way of speaking but wonderfully expressive: complete with roars and deep-throated trills, explosive stops and a full use of real vocal resonance, it’s enormously exciting after a lifetime of the flat, tiny sound originating from the very front of the face that we Americans tend to favor. Certainly it’s one of the best parts of this particular series, listening to Carlyle speak. His performance as a sphinx-like bad-ass is thoughtful and still, communicating utter confidence and easy menace. Good as Benedict Cumberbatch is (and this is, I assure you, the role that won him Sherlock Holmes: already he is fully at home as a socially graceless but brilliant and compulsive-obsessive scientist), the real joy is in witnessing Carlyle’s enigmatic and entirely fearless character unfold, then fold back up, then unfold again.

The rest (equal parts cautionary tale about sacrificing our privacies to Big Brother and childlike fascination with the power allowed once one does enjoy access to total information all the time) is not without merit, not badly written, not badly acted, but ultimately not entirely satisfying. There is a website which will elucidate the absurdities of the technologies vaunted in the series, and it runs maybe an episode too long… although my dissatisfaction may be due to watching these things in two-night chunks instead of spread in a leisurely fashion across a month as was intended. There are twists toward the end, some of them more gratifying than others, but the final scenes of the Cumberbatch character I found very lyrically melancholy indeed.