some very short reviews

The Monk: (2011. dir Dominik Moll) Only Vincent Cassel could play this role. It's why they waited these two centuries to make the film(*). Only he has the intensity which can slide credibly from inspired holiness into depravity with the twitch of a few muscles.

This is a slow and lyrical translation of one of the original Gothic novels. It was the author's visit to Geneva and his reading from the book which inspired both Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein and her husband's circle of friends in their dark musings during what has come down to us as The Haunted Summer of 1816.

* Addendum: It turns out that Franco Nero played the role in 1972 in Greece and Paul McGann in England in 1990. Until this moment I never heard of either one, so I'll get back to you when I find them.

Kiss of the Damned: (2013. dir: Xan Cassavetes) Cassavetes is a director to watch. This one is so gorgeous, so stylish and smooth, so flawless both visually and aurally, that you almost forget it's wrapped around one of the most pedestrian scripts ever written about vampires, a genre not renowned for its erudition.

It owes a great deal to Daughters of Darkness, possibly a nod to Argento as well.

Sex, Lies and Death (Sexo, Mentiras y Muertos)(2011. dir: Ramiro Meneses) Strangers on a Train transported into some bizarro Latin soap opera world where all women are lesbians, and all lesbians are smokin' hot and dress like street hookers. A truly strange endeavour, but not particularly interesting beyond any titillation it might afford.

Avalanche Express: (1979. dir: Mark Robson) This was Robert Shaw's last movie, and what a stinker. It's badly shot, badly edited, and it uses ugly colors. The dubbing is horrible: this is Robert Shaw without Robert Shaw's voice, and it's mortifying. Partway in, I thought they were going to pull a Seagal/Russell Executive Decision on us, getting rid of the ostensible hero prematurely, but it was a fake-out. The movie would have been far more interesting had they done it.

In fact, the most interesting thing about it may be Joe Namath in a secondary role. Wrap your mind around that.

a classic study in misogyny, a failed noir, a ridley scott trainwreck

Carnal Knowledge: (1971. dir: Mike Nichols) At last I see it! Brilliantly shot, brilliantly edited, this is one of those early pieces of genius by the wunderkind, whip-smart team of Mike Nichols and Sam O'Steen. The subject matter is tough and controversial, but it's not misogynist; its study is misogyny, rather, and the psychology of misogyny among thinking men, a whole different ball of wax. M*A*S*H (the movie, from the same era) is far and away more woman-hating than this. This, in fact, has such fully human women in it (even Rita Moreno's prostitute, who has only one brief but very important scene) that the only hatred in it comes from the characters, not at all from the film-makers, which makes all the difference.

All my life I have suffered under a delusion that Candice Bergen was wooden and stilted in this, her tenth film but arguably her first important one, and I am delighted to find that completely unfounded. She is wonderfully vulnerable and true and unguarded while playing a stoical, thoughtful, slightly wooden co-ed. There's a unique and unparalleled scene in a bar where the camera stays firm on her face while Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel are making her laugh uncontrollably, a fabulous, extended shot which tells us more about why they both fall in love with her than any amount of exposition would. Her performance is overshadowed by Ann-Margret's Oscar-nominee as a woman cursed with extreme sex appeal and, of course, by Nicholson, because who could compete with him back then, back when he actually cared and worked hard?

The ending might feel a little like a cheat, but really I think that's just our surprise that the Nicholson character, who seems so fully alive, fights so successfully against becoming a fully-grown adult that in the end we are a little disappointed that he is, ultimately, shallow.

SPOILER ALERT

Blue Gardenia: (1953. dir: Fritz Lang) The more I see of the fifties, the more awful they seem. It was a good idea: a gynocentric noir about a nice girl who takes a date with a cad in a moment of weakness after her heart is broken by her absent soldier beau. She wakes up hungover amidst shattered glass to find the cad (Raymond Burr) has been murdered and everyone, including herself, assumes she is the killer.

It's familiar Lang territory, but the societal bindings within which women had to live in the American fifties were so constrictive that he is given no room to explore or move around when the protagonist is no longer male. Edward G Robinson can suffer romantic weakness over Joan Bennett (Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street) and we are fascinated to watch him flail in his trap because he has freedom to make choices, usually bad ones, even as the walls close in more tightly around him. Anne Baxter, restricted to good girl behavior, can only sit quietly, panic, and eventually lay herself meekly at the feet of the man (Richard Conte as the amoral and undeserving reporter who becomes fascinated with her) whom she trusts will save her. It's not very interesting, and it's not Baxter's fault.

Conte solves the mystery with a ridiculous piece of good fortune (the only clue is a record which was playing during the murder. He goes to the record store where it was bought, et voila! the murderess is the clerk), Baxter and Conte "fall in love" without any interesting dialogue or chemistry, and it's all a frustrating dozer except as a symptomatic study of the hideousness of that decade in this country.

Prometheus: (2011. dir: Ridley Scott) It's a general rule that any time you hear someone say, "The special effects were great!" about any movie, you can bank on it that the rest of it sucked. (This all-encompassing truth was revealed to me when the fourth Star Wars came out and that's all anyone could say about it. To this day I have not seen that lame piece of marketing, nor will I, despite having had some kind of spiritual awakening during the first one when I was thirteen.)

So, with that understanding between us, let me say that the special effects in Prometheus were great! If you disregard the fact that special effects should exist to enhance the telling of a story, and not to draw attention to themselves. Is somebody ashamed of their screenplay, perhaps?

It's loud and it's gross, as opposed to scary and real, which is what the first Alien movie was, remember that classic? Still scary, after all these years. And, much as I hate The-Director-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, in its sequel, Aliens, the soldiers knew how to explore a cave, unlike these folks, who aren't really scientists and soldiers, they just play them on TV, and not very well. Charlize Theron (whom I adore) is largely wasted; Kate Dickie is completely so. Idris Elba manages to shine some in a secondary role as the rough and tumble captain, as, of course, does Fassbender, who is a god among men, and those two are easily the best things about the film. In fact, had they spent all their time following David the Robot (Fassbender), the movie might have been as interesting as the trailer they put out in advance of the film in which David introduces us to his world. Ah, the clarity of hindsight.

And, OK, why do you cast Guy Pearce and then bury him in old-age makeup, which always looks false, if you're never going to make him young again? This thing is packed with stars and up-and-comers, and it doesn't help. The shocks are gross-outs, not scares. Mostly you get a lot of pseudo-rape imagery alongside a metric ton of bodily fluids. The best part, easily, is in the beginning, when we're just hanging out with David.

It's Scott's fault. Over and over, he sacrifices the old-fashioned but still worthy pursuit of the Making of Sense to Grand Guignol. In some cinematic pursuits, that works. In this one, the word trainwreck comes to mind.

manassas, a sweaty courtroom, and an ancient, pissed-off shaman

Gods and Generals: (2003. dir: Ronald Maxwell) This is somebody's favorite movie, I'm sure of it, someone for whom the War Between the States is as real today as it was 150 years ago, and I respect that. Most of us, though, will find it overlong and a little tedious, employing too liberal a dosage of swelly music. It can be summarized as somber, earnest speechifying by very good actors, punctuated by protracted (and probably very accurate) battle re-enactments. You can find here all your favorite quotes by all your favorite Civil War heroes (Robert E Lee pausing long enough to say the thing about it being well that war is so terrible, or, my favorite, Stonewall Jackson's dying words about crossing over the river and resting beneath the shade of the trees.) Nobody can argue with the performances, though, and the over-serious, thoughtful and sentimental way of speaking, although strange to our ears, rings true for the time. This is Stonewall's story, mostly, and when Stephen Lang (an actor who never stops amazing me) takes off his hat and starts to pray aloud, it is as genuinely stirring as it is alien to our modern cynicisms.

Civil War enthusiasts will want to hang on every moment, but most of us benefit from keeping the fast-forward button close to hand. If you speed through the first five seconds of every scene, generally a long, establishing shot, a sweeping pan of the next battlefield or an extended view of a crowded parlor with a young lady playing piano, and then again some through the thicks of the battles, you can cut this epic back by a much-needed half-hour.

A Time To Kill: (1996. dir: Joel Schumacher) Self-righteous claptrap intertwined with sentimental hogwash, but every now and then they get a moment just right and it almost sends a shiver down your spine.

Much as I hate to admit it, this failure does not rest at Joel Schumacher's door (like all his myriad other failures): he did his part just right. It's old-fashioned in its presentation, old-fashioned in a good way, perfect for the story, which is courtroom melodrama in which the villains are heinous and the heroes are spotless. (Patrick McGoohan is a piece of perfection as the judge.) It's the script that's mostly the loser. With its repetition of charged emotional exchanges, it put me in mind of soap opera, like when they have to re-live the heated conversation they had last week for any viewers who missed last week's ep. The characters are shallow, and only a top-notch cast, clear down the line to the smallest supporting roles, gives it the leg-up to make it watchable.

Schumacher creates a world we can experience with all our senses: this is a South where you can feel the heat, smell the sweat, you can taste the sensuality between the leads. The colors are saturated so it feels like an old-time movie, and the editing goes right along with that, never drawing attention to itself. Seriously, though, Grisham (or whoever) should be ashamed of himself, writing soppy, melodramatic dialogue like this.

the Manitou: (1978. dir: William Girdler) Ah, the cheeseball horror films of the seventies. This has something in common with the Fury, the Car, the Brood (although none of the best things), and it wants to have something in common with the Exorcist, but you can't say that with a straight face. The thing it has most in common with, in fact, is the original Star Trek series. It has Michael Ansara (Kang from "Day of the Dove"), the big-assed lizard from "Arena", an overblown score by Lalo Schifrin that could easily have whumped up over the top of Captain Kirk overacting, and the same set-builder, as far as I can tell. When the "manitou" (a 400-year-old spirit of a powerful medicine man) is about to erupt (from the neck of a randomly-chosen woman) into the world, the whole floor of the hospital goes ice-cold, and it looks way more like Star Trek than the Exorcist, with all the cheap badness that suggests (ie: styrofoam icicles instead of seeing people's breaths).

This is about the epitome of an MST2K movie, and should be approached as such. I think Susan Strasberg got cast because of a strange facial anomaly: when she screams, it appears that her mouth is larger than the rest of her face. And that's as good a reason as any for a movie like this.