spring breakers: swinishness in neon pastels

(2013. dir: Harmony Korine) I know we're supposed to assume there's a metric ton of ironic humor here, but that doesn't mean you're going to laugh.

Questions of morality aside, can we all agree there's something creepy about a guy whose life-work involves surrounding himself with kids and convincing them to strip off and party for the camera? The Message of the Film seems to be that "Spring Break Forever, Bitches" is an ultimately unsatisfying motto by which to live. Korine uses it as a rough equivalent for (and therefore a condemnation of) the American Dream, but mostly he just wants to show us two hours of an unrated version of MTV's Spring Break. And it all feels (creepily) like just an excuse for him to exist at the epicenter of a big, naked party.

The movie starts out as a sort of girl-bonding thing, while the four chicas are getting pumped up to go to Florida, and terrorising diners in a local greasy spoon to get the money for it, but once Franco steps onboard, he hijacks the project. In a good way, I mean, because he's a good actor. The downside is that he's one of maybe two in the cast who can improvise effectively for longer than five words at a time, and the bulk of the film is improvised. The result is a lot of deadly dull dialogue, and Korine repeats this dialogue (his sound design is like a party dub remix, get it? It's Spring Break, y'all!) over the tops of subsequent scenes, sometimes several times and for no good reason, dialogue which was, and let me repeat this for emphasis, truly dull the first time around. Apparently some of these actresses were once innocent kid-actors: hence, irony. I didn't recognize them, so I don't know about that, but that's an outmoded trick. Remember Lisa Bonet? She was a Cosby kid until Angel Heart. Miley Cyrus, anyone? Justin Timberlake? Christina Aguilera? Most of the famous innocents veer wildly into the dark and dirty zone, because how else do you grow up? It's the only way to wash away the pong of the mawkish goo.

The important point is that unless you're particularly interested in youthful hedonism, or want to jack off, "Girls Gone Wild" can be simultaneously boring and depressing. He's got an interesting visual sense, Korine (albeit annoyingly pastel. I get it: we're in Florida. Flamingos and Margaritaville and Miami Vice. It's still annoying), and his ASS is downright SAVED by whoever is editing the thing (Douglas Crise. Good work, dude. Without you, nobody would have paid this movie any mind at all), but it's all built up out of endless, mindless set-pieces: "OK, everyone get in the pool and fire off your guns." "OK, everyone do coke off this naked chick's torso," or my actual favorite: "OK, all the girls get into your bikinis and pink ski masks, bring out your baddest-assed weaponry and gather around the piano by the pool, where Franco is going to sing a Britney Spears song." But, mostly, it's "OK, everyone jump up and down and holler and pour beer over each other as salaciously as possible. It'll be so fucking awesome."

By the film's end, all the girls have decided, --ridiculously, in two cases,-- that "being a good person is the most important thing, mom," and they all want to forget the trail of spent weaponry and dead bodies and go home to the old pink-curtained bedroom with the teddy bears on the bed. What?! It's got to be ironic, because it can't be anything else, but it just reads as a clumsy way to finish a film he didn't know how to finish.

To those of us who are long in the tooth, youthful hedonism feels slightly embarrassing, maybe indicative of a lack of imagination. It is of course possible that this perspective makes it impossible for me to relax into the spirit of the thing, but what I come away with is this: a story that is not interesting, pallid dialogue, a too-obvious message, unfunny humor, and unengaging characters.

That said, my co-worker and I have been having a good time today randomly punctuating conversations with a soft and sinuous, "Spraaang Breeaaak!" like the ones that Franco gives.

the human face when its mind is being changed

That's part of a quote from David Thomson, a fellow with whom I have issues, but not on this matter: he says it is the best special effect in all of cinema, the human face. If you look hard at your favorite film moments, you'll find that most of them pull their vitality from the expression on a human face as it reacts to something. The moment when Indiana Jones pulls the gun on the guy with the swirling sword would be nothing at all if it weren't for the look he gives afterward, the look and the shake of the head. In the Sixth Sense, there's Bruce Willis when the ring rolls away from his wife's hand. Cary Grant when he sees the portrait in an Affair to Remember. Maybe even Luke Skywalker while he loses a hand but gains a father.

One of my favorite sequences in cinema (although the film is strange, with extremes of high and low) is in Jonathan Glazer's Birth, when Nicole Kidman's character is sitting at the ... what? it's either the opera, the symphony, or a ballet. I think it's the symphony. Anyway, the camera is unmoving, trained on her face as she sits in the audience watching this highfalutin' performance whilst inwardly suffering terrible emotional upheavals. And Glazer lets us watch her wonderful face during this emotional earthquake for over a minute. It's a magnificent thing.

Kidman, in fact, is one of my favorites in this respect. I can think off-hand of at least two moments in other films in which an unspoken emotion just barely grazes her face, so quickly that no other character sees it, but it communicates an emotional tonnage to us. In To Die For (a truly great film which would have lodged Gus Van Sant among the best directors of his day even if he had never followed it up with anything else), there is a scene in which her ambitious weather-girl is looking to make contacts at a conference, and a sleazy, pompous elder in the field (George Segal, perfectly cast) convinces her that sleeping with him is her best way forward. The dark disgust on her face, mingled with a sort of fierce compliance, is stunningly good. (But Kidman is stunning all the way through this movie. She really already had a firm hand on her craft, even at that early stage.) More recently, in the less successful the Paperboy she has a similar moment: she has been putting all her energy into stoking up a long-distance sexual fire with John Cusack's behind-bars sociopath. Once he's released and storms into her house and locks her roommate outside, the shadow which passes across her face as she realizes the good part, the fantasy part, is over and now there is only the devil to be paid his due, is another perfect moment.

So here are a few of my favorites, moments when a subtle emotion crossing a well-trained face inspires subterranean tremors across the breadth of a film.

Christopher Walken in Skylark: The barn is burning down and everything they own with it, this in the midst of a terrible drought. He is stoical, his wife is crying on his shoulder, there is nothing left to do but watch it burn. We see the flames reflected in his eyes and on the skin of his face. He allows himself a single moment of emotion, a slight twitch of the head and momentary glance to the side, communicating rebellion against the unfeeling gods who could allow the catastrophe, yet simultaneously a sense that he would expect such from life.

Michael Fassbender at the end of Shame: There are marvellous bookends to the film, scenes on the tube. In the first, he is flirting wordlessly with a married woman. He tries, with a strange ferocity, to follow her off the train but loses her in the crowd. The mirror-scene at the end is on the same train, he is spent and exhausted and shattered after all he has been through, and there is the same married woman, unchanged, ready to flirt some more. The look on Fassbender's face is one of the most stunning things I've ever seen on film.

Christian Bale in Flowers of War: He was fine in this, it was a fine movie, with the perhaps inevitable flaws. (It's such a dark episode in history, the treatment of women during the Japanese occupation of China, it must be nigh on impossible to avoid plunging into melodrama and sentimentalizing, and it does, it does plunge.) Bale does a creditable job during his drunken antics and with the more toned-down heroics, but his one really shining moment comes unexpectedly: the courtesans come to him to say that two of their party have escaped back to the cathouse to fetch supplies (guitar strings and earrings). Bale's character is in love with the chief courtesan, but his moments of courage are few and far between, and death is rampant outside the gates. He takes a conflicted moment before he says, "And you want me to go find them?", and in that moment his face reflects a shifting series of thought and emotion which I think is unique to him and a wonderful conveyance of truth; I think no other actor would have chosen it, and it is utterly perfect.

Bale in 3:10 to Yuma: I still haven't seen the Fighter. It's not that I doubt its worth, and it's not that I think I'll find Bale undeserving of his Oscar; it's that I dislike Oscar's tendency to be seduced by histrionics instead of subtleties. Me, I'd have given Oscar to Bale for this old Western. There's one scene in particular, when he's readying to go on a dangerous mission, arguing with his wife as he does, speaking in hushed tones so the rest of the posse in the parlor will not hear his humiliation that she no longer respects him as a man. It's heart-rending, and only one of many moments of subtlety that are, I suspect, more impressive than all the blood and thunder of Dickie Eklund.

Walken in 7 Psychopaths: You could pick any of thirty or forty movies, really, and I could probably find a superlative Walken moment. This one's got the scene at the hospital. The Walken psychopath knows that the Woody Harrelson psychopath has just brutally killed his wife, and is looking for him. He sits down opposite the killer in the hospital waiting room, and stares at him until the Harrelson psychopath starts to make awkward conversation. Watch Walken's face, through this entire exchange. The changes that happen in his eyes. He is a god walking around among men.

romans in britain, a siren from the deep, an irish misstep

the Eagle (2010. dir: Kevin MacDonald) OK, this is more like it. The script is not great, but the story is a good one. The Ninth Spanish Legion is STILL missing, still swallowed up in the wilds of northern Britain during the Dark Ages, but this time it's the son of the vanished standard-bearer who traces his father's steps to regain the Bronze Eagle and his family's tarnished honour. It's still not perfect, but it's a vast improvement on Centurion. There's an interesting use of accents: the native Britons sound British, the Romans speak American. I'm not sure I like it, but it works better than trying to teach your yank-actors new pronunciations.

It's got a great cast, with Jamie Bell, Channing Tatum and Mark Strong, and I have to love Kevin Macdonald. Not only is he Emeric Pressburger's grandson, but he learned his chops making documentaries, and indeed made some of the best I've ever seen, including One Day in September, which ranks easily in my top three.

Ondine: (2009. dir: Neil Jordan) Here's an example of that rara avis, a romantic fantasy for men. Colin Farrell successfully combats its mawkish nature (a sad-sack fisherman with a wheelchair-bound, smart-as-a-whip little girl, a bitter ex-wife, and an impossibly beautiful girl swept from the sea into his net) with quickly spoken, no-nonsense line readings. A fairy tale set in the midst of the real world, it does not exactly work, although its heart is in a near-enough vicinity that it conjures a nice melancholy.

The end sequence is particularly unconvincing, and shot in a muddy, over-creative fashion which tells me that Jordan didn't quite believe in it, either. Much as I appreciate a Sigur Ros song acting as the hinge upon which an entire plot turns, the happy ending struck me as simplistic and the final image like something out of a wedding magazine, like they're trying to sell you something.

the Guard: (2011. dir: John Michael McDonagh) A first offering from Martin McDonagh's brother, sort of a poor man's McDonagh. Brendan Gleeson is lovely as always, but the Production Designer ran mad and amuck all over the film, so that everybody lives and works in aesthetically-wild sets instead of in real homes and offices. The pace plods, and it's not funny enough by half to satisfy.

Here's the best bit, the only one that made me laugh:

A: I didn't know you had gays in the IRA.
B: It's the only way we can infiltrate MI5.

Now I've given the funny bit away, you can watch something else instead.

further thoughts on the lone ranger

Alright. Having now watched the thing three times within the space of a week, I have to conclude that most of the world is crazy for disrespecting it. This movie is a piece of joy. The more you watch it, the more you will laugh.

I believe there are certain films, --Heaven's Gate and John Carter and Cleopatra come to mind, and I think Apocalypse, Now! narrowly averted the same fate,-- which are doomed even before they hit the screens because of scandal, usually concerning a shamelessly, ridiculously huge budget, or because someone involved has pissed off someone in power, someone who gleefully sets off a media feeding-frenzy until you cannot say you liked the film unless you are willing to risk the self-righteous disdain of everyone on the bandwagon. In the case of the Lone Ranger, the bandwagon is enormous, and I don't understand it. Where do you find old-fashioned, beautifully-choreographed physical comedy like this, threaded through a darkness of story so dense that the comedy is the only hope? Nowhere, recently, unless it resides in Martin McDonagh films (In Bruges, 7 Psychopaths), but that comedy is sharp wit honed by its proximity to darkness. This is Buster Keaton, making his determined way, one pratfall at a time, through the barbarism of the white man's genocide, a mass horror self-validated by greed for land and silver. It is a phenomenon symbolized by Tonto's "wendigo", a pale-faced monster with a taste for human flesh.

"Wendigo" is not a Comanche concept (Tonto is a Comanche, or began as one), but has been appropriated from the Algonquian peoples, possibly the widest-travelled of all Native American nations. (Folks quibble that as such, he would not have known the myth, but recall that Tonto is telling this story in his extreme old age, after much presumed travelling with the circus in which we find him. You hear things over the years. You meet folks, even descendants of the Algonquians. And, frankly, if you're quibbling about things like this, or the bird on his head, you're looking at the whole damn film from the wrong angle, with your feet wedged in the concrete of Modern Reality. This is an unabashed fantasy, delightfully so. Think of it like a drug trip, only it's a humor trip instead, and let yourself relax into the wonder of it.) The Wendigo has been used before as a disturbingly apt metaphor for the white man's bloodbath incursions into the West; see, for instance, Antonia Bird's brilliant Ravenous. (No, seriously, I mean it: go and see it right now.)

The more I watch this movie, the more I love it. Even Helena Bonham-Carter's enthusiasm for her relatively thankless role has softened me toward the role itself. When her eyes fill with tears, mine do, too. And when I turn my mind back to all the ludicrously repetitous, over-loud, over-long and just plain bad climactic action sequences I've had to sit through in the last few years, this one, I swear to God, makes me want to stand up and cheer. You will never see one better choreographed, or better filmed. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, in recent years touches it. You have to go back to studio days, maybe even to silent days, when they cared about grace in front of the camera.

OK, I've said my piece. Go and see it. If you don't much like it the first time, see it again. Once you let your guard down, you'll be seduced into laughter.

lone ranger: magical non-realism

(2013. dir: Gore Verbinski) As Marguerite Churchill pointed out in 1936's scare-propaganda piece Legion of Terror, only a coward hides behind a mask to do his violence. Unless, Tonto would add, one cannot trust the men in power. All authority figures in this particular white men's Old West, from the military (embodied in a Custeresque officer well-played by Barry Pepper) to the more prominent villains to the apparently affable politician (played, as always, to perfection by that Master of his Craft Stephen Root), the men in power are all corruptible, and therefore corrupted.

It's not fair to compare it to Pirates of the Caribbean, I know, so I'll do it quickly then move on. Alright, this is no Pirates (as, indeed, nor were the last three installments in the Pirates franchise), and the wonderful moments here coalesce into vastly good entertainment without reaching the swaggering magnificence of that first film. But that was an enchanted moment, never to be repeated. It's possible that the backbone of that film (aka: the Disneyland ride, a piece of awe and wonder in anyone's childhood) was a uniquely valuable touchstone to which the story could return whenever it needed inspiration, whereas the old Lone Ranger stories are possibly impossibly outdated, or perhaps just not sufficiently focused to inspire the perfect story.

But magic there is, of a slightly variant stripe. As in Pirates, the musical score is a powerful one, and well used. The Rossini overture (the Lone Ranger Theme Song) is touched upon once early, then left for the Grand Finale, where it is used to rousing success. I admit there are a few early stunts which are straight out Captain Jack Sparrow's playbook, but it doesn't matter. There's joie de vivre here, not cheap cadging. And in this troubling era of soul-withering overkill in climactic action sequences (Avengers, and Superman, and Jason Bourne, I'm glaring at all of you right now), this climactic scene is so filled with joy and crazy inventiveness that it actually gets better, and funnier, the more times you watch it.

Many anachronistic pieces of the Lone Ranger story are explained away as the whim of a crazy man: Tonto, actually, who is a Comanche touched in the head by a tragedy from his childhood. It works very well, Tonto being a sort of half-crazed clown-warrior on a mission, talking to horses and watching the natural world skew itself out of balance from the white man's Manifest Destiny: here we have a world in which horses stand in trees and rabbits have become fearsome cannibals. All of the whimsical and near-supernatural bits, which together comprise the bulk of this movie's delight, are made possible by a framing device in which an ancient Tonto, part of an Old West sideshow, tells his story to a boy. The frame clunks some, but it allows Verbinski and company to enjoy a wonderful amount of freedom in time, spending just a moment here on the bank robbery before jumping forward to a battle or back to a piece of exposition.

As expected, Depp is the shining star of the piece, adroitly exercising his ongoing druthers for the Buster-Keatonesque, that strange and deadpan physical humor. The unique and incomparable Helena Bonham-Carter is wasted in a cartoon role (it is suggested that the bad guy ate her leg; now she sports from her hip a Rose-McGowan-inspired-ivory-encased rifle instead. What?!). Tom Wilkinson as the aristocrat-villain is given very little room in which to play; William Fichtner as the heart-eating mega-villain has some better luck with his screen-time. James Badge Dale excels in his secondary turn as the Right Brother. Armie Hammer is the tenderfoot lawyer learning the hard way how to be a superhero, and he brings heart and humor along with his imposing physical presence and amiable good looks. Monument Valley is there like an old friend, maybe a half of it green-screened, but a good chunk of it was filmed onsite (you can tell by the haze in the background. There's always a haze over Monument Valley, as far as I could tell). Another nice touch is the use of the timepiece as a central metaphor for the white man's tyrannical view of reality. Whenever the bad white men want to bribe someone into subservience, they are offered a silver or gold watch as their Judas Gift. (Lone Ranger: "Who would trade a watch for a handful of birdseed?" Tonto: "A bird cannot tell time, Kimosabe.")

And what about the possible backlash (possible? inevitable. You just know those Professors of Native American Studies have been sharpening their quills since the first trailers emerged) to Depp's non-traditional garb and presentation? Objections are rendered moot by a simple factor: that every anomaly in Tonto's get-up is explained by the moment of crisis which formed him, -- the crow, the broken watch, the everlasting war-paint. And is not the way to sidestep political correctness to make a character a unique individual? A thing which the filmmakers have most certainly done.

There's magic in this story, for all its faults. It's like a fairy tale, in which magic and the mundane intersect to create a world of unpredictable delight. My boyfriend's son thought that the movie's ambition was too large, and robbed it of otherwise-possible success: that it tried to be more than one film at a time, and the two films were at war, one with the other. I give it credit for taking on a stretch of legend which is a serious minefield of possible offense, then leaping those barricades of political correctness which drain the lifeblood from so many characters these days (particularly in theatre: modern theatre is entering a sort of zombiehood in which characters refuse to spring to life, being forced to utter self-righteous platitudes instead of speaking true. But I digress.) And when I saw it the second time, with my expectations lowered to a reasonable level, I enjoyed it twice as much. Verbinski is wonderful at filming action, making it clear, and making it funny at the same time, or sometimes poignant, as when the Comaches ("We are already ghosts,") make their courageous, end-battle descent down the hillside toward the Gatling guns of the white man.

robert carlyle film festival: formula 51

(2001. dir: Ronny Yu) It's interesting that a film starring Samuel L Jackson (in a kilt, no less) and Robert Carlyle (both at the height of their respective hotnesses), Sean Pertwee, Rhys Ifans (who is dreadful, shouting constantly as British comics do when they can't grasp hold of anything funny in the script) and Emily Mortimer would fail to ignite into anything interesting. Granted, at this time the Lock-Stock-Snatch-etc Tarantino-offshoot, which sprang to life in the late nineties and wore thin any quality it initially had pretty quickly, and of which movement this is a hanger-on, was well onto its downhill slope.

It is also interesting that Carlyle has at least twice (here and in an infamous episode of Cracker dealing with the Hillsborough disaster) played a fanatical Liverpool fan. Alright, I find it interesting because I am a Liverpool fan, and because Carlyle, a Glaswegian, I believe actually follows Rangers.

For all the charisma and thoughtful acting onscreen, the script never lights up, the attempts at humor fail (although, to be fair, these actors carry sufficient dignity to walk past such ignominies unscathed), and the plot turns are unbelievable in so mundane a fashion that one can't be blamed for not caring.

Granted, I am not of the appropriate demographic. Two things I have never understood: shit-based humor, and why it's funny to take a gorgeous car (in this case a stunning, Liverpool-red Jaguar) and slowly decimate it through daredevil behaviour.

I don't get those things, but if you think they're funny, you might watch this movie. Jackson and Carlyle are both fully committed, and, as we all know, those two at full commitment level can be like a force of nature. Emily Mortimer is a powerhouse on her own, thoughtful and sexy, although her character delineation (unassailable assassin. "She never misses," Carlyle's character says. Also she seems to have no trouble kicking the shit out of skinheads in spite of wearing miniskirt and heels, slipping undetected to and from crime scenes while carrying enormous weapons, and seemingly accessing unending amounts of capital while simultaneously living indentured to a drug-lord for unspecified debts) is la-la land absurd.

In parting, let me lay before you one of the searing questions of modern pop culture: why does Samuel Jackson so rarely get laid onscreen, colossus of sexual charisma that he is? The first time it occurred to me was during the Long Kiss Goodnight. Why exactly did the Geena Davis character not have sex with him? Is it because her husband directed the movie? I see it scribbled here in my notes for Shaft, as well: why is Hollywood threatened by this man's sexuality?

not fade away: old scrapbooks

Not Fade Away: (2012. dir: David Chase) It's too bad: this might have been a great film. Seriously, it missed greatness, weirdly, by a small margin, but in such a way that it nearly missed being even good.

You can't call it low-budget; the music alone must have cost a millon bucks. It's astonishing: classic Stones, classic Beatles, and my favorite Sex Pistols track, where they're messing around in the studio and play "Roadrunner" ("Oy! Do we know any other fucking people's songs that we could do?"). It was a labor of love for someone, for Chase, I assume, who was a drummer in his youth before he cast himself into film school. It feels like someone's memories. Like looking through old scrapbooks.

The interesting thing is that he does not fall into the trap of telling a straight, narrative story. He lets it fall in pieces, rather, and, as in life, this means some ends never get tied up. Once the girlfriend's sister gets hauled off to the loony bin, we never see her again, not because the filmmaker forgot her, but because her life-line veered away from our hero's and how many people are frequent in your life for awhile then vanish and you think, years later, hey, whatever happened to...?

The movie starts on an English train, back when English people lived in black and white, where Keith Richards runs into his old mate Michael Jagger and they start talking American records. It's a meeting that's gone down in history, and from there, we switch to America and the origins of a less well-fated band. John Magaro is the suburban boy coming into his sex appeal just as Jagger is making it possible for a skinny boy with spots to pull the gorgeous birds, and his acting is subtle and endearing. He's the kid who doesn't trust the world's reactions, so plays everything close to his vest, afraid to react when the girl of his dreams makes an obvious pass, trying to smother his spontaneous smile when a music bigwig praises his songwriting. It's an underplaying that makes sense and pulls us in close, and he has the kind of naturally expressive face (huge eyes, easily flushing complexion) that communicates even when he's fighting against the communication.

Because it plays like a series of real memories, the characters rarely have the opportunity to engage us entirely, although the acting is good. The girlfriend, sympathetically played by Bella Heathcote, is alleged to have groupie tendencies, but seems so earnestly devoted to the hero that this judgment never quite rings true. This is symptomatic of the major flaw here: as when listening to someone tell their life story, it comes out in a jumble of bits which don't always make sense because of the necessary lacunae carved by missing information. It is certainly possible that the sluttishness of a sexually active girl largely existed only in the heads of the boys around her, and because this was not primarily her story being told, we never know for certain. It does matter, though, as the ending (if you can call it that. As in life, inconclusiveness rules the day) hinges upon the question.

James Gandolfini is about perfect as the second-generation Italian-American father frustrated and bewildered by the direction the world is taking ("You look like you just got off at Ellis Island," is the criticism he throws at his shaggy-haired, cuban-heeled, rock-singer son), and the scene in which he sits late at night watching the "Bali Ha'i" song from South Pacific, having forgone his final chance for happiness for the sake of familial duty, is truly heartbreaking. Chase is great with this kind of thing: no dialogue, letting the pictures and the music and the actors bring the emotion.

The camera gets to play, as well: on a lost night in Los Angeles after a party gone awry, our hero hitchhikes down an alien and forlorn street while the camera circles around him twice to show the threatening emptiness of the town, both metaphorical and otherwise, the approaching car, and, when it stops, the scary people inside. The framing device of the little sister writing the story in essay form doesn't really work, and her dance at the end is cornball embarrassing, but when you're making bold choices, you don't fall soft, and your ass hurts afterwards for awhile.

I am loathe to label it a failure, though, because it has so much life in it, and so much energy and heart, and it's still ringing around inside my head. If it is a failure, it's a fascinating one.

brynner, schwarzenegger, belmondo

Catlow: (1971. dir: Sam Wanamaker) Two unnerving things about this Western: Yul Brynner is all smiley and happy-go-lucky, which is a nice change for him, but kind of creepy for the rest of us, and post-Spock Leonard Nimoy has a naked fight scene. It's funny how some actors do one thing extraordinarily well, and nothing else fires up right. Call them Idiots Savants, I guess. I'm talking about Nimoy, of course, who singlehandedly created one of the great archetypes of the modern age and has embodied him flawlessly for going on half a century now, but as far as I can tell has never enjoyed the least success in bringing another character to life. (OK, there's one: the sly Comanche in Tate. He has one five-minute scene, not even that long, and it's a brilliant scene, I bought the whole series on DVD just so I could watch the one scene repeatedly, but that's it. He made quite a career playing television Indians prior to Spock, both the noble stoic and the treacherous types, but Tate got the best of it.)

Richard Crenna has some fun here, too, but the women are uniformly dreadful and insultingly used.

Predator: (1987. dir: John McTiernan) Something falls out of the sky into a jungle on earth. Then a bunch of uberstuds (including two state governors: Schwarzenegger and Ventura, and, interestingly, Shane Black, who would go on to an illustrious career in directing) emerge from a helicopter under the watchful eye of E.G. Marshall (uberstud gris). There is the usual establishment of battle-cred through moronic banter, generally pointed towards accusing one another of homosexuality, apparently a source of endless amusement among American soldiers.

Merging two monster genres, the Arnold action-film and the sci-fi blockbuster, turned out to be a windfall for some lucky bastard in Hollywood. The result doesn't age well, but it's still interesting as a historical oddity.

Mississippi Mermaid: (1969. dir: Francois Truffaut) Cornell Woolrich is a spell-binding storyteller, and Waltz into Darkness had me biting my nails as I read it. So why is it impossible to film? My first disappointment was the execrable Banderas/Jolie Original Sin from 2001, utter dreck, and now this? Truffaut, Deneuve and Belmondo, and STILL no love? They never stick to the book, for one thing, these directors who think they can do Woolrich one better. This one has the added disadvantage of being about beautiful and disconnected French people, and who can conjure feelings for the likes of such? Toss in the stupid title, and you get no more than a pained grimace from me.

One lovely thing is that Truffaut allows the story to unfold without excess verbiage or exposition. For example, when the Belmondo character has tracked the object of his obsession down to her hotel, we are not told how. He is a man obsessed, and we buy it without asking how.

Other than that, I say read the book instead.

three grisaille classics

A Cottage on Dartmoor: (1929. dir: Anthony Asquith) An astonishingly adept silent film from Britain. The story is nothing exceptional: boy falls in love with coworker, she falls for another, he is obsessed and tries to kill his rival, vows vengeance as he's taken into custody, escapes and shows up at their doorstep. It's the means of the telling which will take your breath away: Anthony Asquith moves effortlessly through time, using very few title cards, and we go right along with him. The only weakness is at the cinema: the segment during the Harold Lloyd short is too long and too randomly edited to build the intended suspense. Gorgeous framing and photography, almost German in its dark moodiness. The lead (Uno Henning) is handsome like Fassbender or Olivier, a little femme, maybe, but charismatic and intense and with a wonderful expressiveness.

Night Train: (1959. dir: Jerzy Kawalerowicz) A muddy print, and hard to find the subtitles, but this is a stunning film from Poland during a time when Polish cinema was coming into its own. The camerawork is extraordinary, like black-and-white Cassavetes, and in the same year that his first, Shadows, was ushered into the world. Since the bulk of the action takes place in the claustrophobia of sleeping cars and lurching train corridors, the cinematography is doubly impressive. Something unexpected, like a shot of the sweat stains beneath the doctor's arms, secretly communicates to us, underneath an ominous and continual overlay of menace. And the sound! The seething quiet of the sanguinary mob towards the end is uncanny, unforgettable, and the giddy camaraderie in the aftermath of the chase feels chillingly authentic.

It all works together: the slavic faces. The cool, hipster jazz. The underlying suggestion of political subversion. Leon Niemczyk is inscrutable, or just scrutable enough, in the stoical lead character, to keep us guessing and caring at the same time.

Green for Danger: (1946. dir: Sidney Gilliat) Marvellous wartime whodunnit from the fellows who wrote the Lady Vanishes. Trevor Howard and Allistair Sim lead a cracking good cast in a low-key murder mystery set in hospital whilst doodlebugs fall on the English countryside. Sim enjoys himself very much as the whimsical, chuckling detective with the mourdant sense of humour. Blitz-time England feels true to life, and the clues unfold at just the right pace. Although the suspects number only six, their motives are strong and believable enough to keep you guessing until the end. Filmed in lovely, warm black and white.