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.
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