last night's double feature: out of the furnace and the covenant

*SPOILER ALERT*

Out of the Furnace: (2013. dir: Scott Cooper) This revamp of the Deerhunter has smooth editing and an even smoother sound design, sanding off those rough edges for an easy watch. Instead of Walken, we've got Casey Affleck, just back from his fourth tour in Iraq, and instead of Russian Roulette, we've got bare-knuckle fighting in the Appalachians. It's a northern industrial town where the mill, the only viable employer, will be closing, and life is hard. You all know how I feel about Christian Bale's mad skills, so I won't go on about how good he is in this, especially that last scene, where he's crouched down and watching, implacable but not cold, not at all, as his prey stumbles away across the field and his hunter approaches from behind. The cast is very good, and Christian Bale is so fucking good, and Woody Harrelson can be disturbingly villainous (Bale: "You got a problem with me?" Harrelson: "I got a problem with everyone").

Problematic and shaggy-edged as is the Deerhunter's greatness, the greatness is there, and much of it lies in those long, shambolic, raggy-assed gaps and awkward pauses and too-long scenes and no-musical-filler quiet places which only happened in the '70s. Now, here, everything is lovely and smoothed over with gorgeous music and silky edits. It makes it easier to watch, no question, and prettier, no question, but the greatness gets left out of the mix.

the Covenant: (2006. dir: Renny Harlin) It must have come from a graphic novel, because it's got that "deep backstory, shallow forestory" fault those generally share.

First, the good part: the production design is flawless, setting us in the middle of a completely integrated world, the rich-kid boarding school chiselled out of the same cold, decaying grandeur from which the central conflict itself rises. Even the dorm they live in feels like the old servant-quarters of a long-abandoned castle. Harlin emphasizes the effect with his camera-work, often encroaching from vast heights, and using close-up to good effect.

The crux of the matter, though, is that the story might have been interesting, but wasn't: the five old witchy families of Salem have escaped further persecution by swearing they will keep their magicks secret, magicks which pass down solely to the first-born male of each generation, coming into full strut on his eighteenth birthday. The other catch is that using the magicks is addictive, and will age the boy prematurely if he does not practice moderation, which is not the general forte of most eighteen-year-old boys.

As I say, it might have been interesting, and wasn't. The characters are interchangeable and rouse neither empathy nor interest. Harlin's main intent seems to have been to cater to the power-daydreams of high-schoolers. There is much beefcake eye-candy on display, the relationships are shallow and simplistic, the action scenes perfunctory, the supernatural stuff unimpressive CGI. He does not care to make these shallow rich kids real for us; they are dream-images, and so we never care, either.

cat people: sex, death and repression

*SPOILER ALERT*

It's impossible to examine the body of Paul Schrader's work without touching on his early Calvinism. It is everywhere, manifest most fully in the intensity of sex and the strange and violent shapes into which it draws us, and in the effects of repression, and the strange and violent shapes into which THAT draws us. Think of Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Mishima, and now think of Cat People, which may, in fact, be the most emblematic of this central pillar of his oeuvre.

Yes, I saw it at the theatre when I was a teenager, of COURSE I did; I was uncomfortable with the Malcolm McDowell character's lack of subtlety and Schrader's unflinching over-reliance on both the coltish nubility of Nastassja Kinski and Annette O'Toole's girl-next-door hotness. In retrospect, the bold choices, although a good half fall flat, are refreshing for their sheer outrageousness.

The basis is this: in unspecified Olden Times, through nebulous means (we are told one story, but shown another), humans and great cats joined to form a new species, the genes of which pass down through a family line. The line is physiogenetically protected by the crazy but effective proposition that if a cat-human has sex with a regular human, the cat-human will change into his/her cat-self and cannot regain human shape until it has killed. This ensures a sort of ongoing Pharaonic dynasty of sister-brother couplings along with lots of partially-eaten, post-coital corpses.

New Orleans is a perfect setting for such hyper-Gothic strangeness, and Ruby Dee is marvellous in her tignon-sporting, Marie-Laveauish, Priestess-of-the-Cat-God role. (The best line in the piece may be her parting advice to the just-burgeoning cat-girl: "Go and pretend the world is as men think it is.") As opposed to the unique Val Lewton original, this version uses real cats: gorgeous, sensuous black panthers (for that select clique of us for whom Passion in the Desert was made). It also has a heartily good supporting cast, led by the never-disappointing O'Toole and Ed Begley Jr, the two of whom provide a benchmark of good-spirited, normal-life, robust haleness away from which the dour, vampiric power-sex can blossom and spread like a poisonous vine.

The photography and editing veer so wildly between sinuous sylishness and utter banality as to inspire a mild seasickness. Likewise, Kinski seems at first awkward and uncomfortably exposed before the camera, but in the end it seems it was her character, clumsily pretending "that the world is as men think it is," because as she grows to accept her malkin nature, she is increasingly magnetic to its (and our) gaze. Look at this wonderful, weird moment: her human boyfriend (John Heard) has taken her to his cabin on the bayou to court her. She refuses his sexual advances, but in the night rises and, after looking hungrily on him, walks naked into the swampland to chase and kill a rabbit. We cut back to Heard, wakened by his screen-door shutting. He switches on the lantern and she, naked and bloodied, smashes it, screaming, "Don't look at me!"

And here is another: after she has allowed him to make love to her, she watches her body, wondering if the change will come, then walks into the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror. I feel fairly comfortable in speaking for my entire gender in generalizing that most of us do this after losing our virginities. What's different is the next moment: she reaches down and finds blood between her legs, instinctively paints it across her mouth, then, realizing what she has done, wipes it guiltily away. This is all to say that, when released from the more pedestrian sections of the film, Kinski is fascinating, and not just in her much-vaunted sex appeal. She communicates a darkness and vulnerablity which together suggest a numinous, dark-goddess force trying to emerge from beneath centuries of repression. I'm not suggesting Cat People is a feminist tract, certainly; I remember even in my youth wincing inwardly at the final scenes of her sacrifice and his domination. Still, almost in spite of the script, there are strong women here, not just Kinski but O'Toole as well, in a time (the eighties) when women's power onscreen was faltering (OK, when is it not?) and trying to find new footing.

Although it's got the typical '80s synth-soundtrack going on, there's also a haunting theme song by David Bowie, which Giorgio Moroder uses as a pulsating underscore throughout to mesmerizing effect.

sexism run amuck: prime cut and 800 bullets

Prime Cut: (1972. dir: Michael Ritchie) What a pile of prurient, woman-hating horseshit, and the damnable part is that it's so infuriatingly badly written. Who knew that Sissy Spacek could be this stupefyingly bad? She was young, yes, but she was young in Badlands and nailed that one into the ground, so I have to look to the director to place the blame. This is the guy who made the Candidate, so he's not without skills, but, wow. Look at Spacek in those early scenes: she is fully, breathtakingly dreadful, all wide-eyed, cartoonish naievete with a pragmatic overlay of fuck-me. Then again, listen to those godawful lines she has to speak, and who could carry off such bullhonky? This is malicious, misogynist fantasy, from beginning to end, possibly funded by vegans, since you also see enough of the wrong side of livestock turning into food to make you give up meat and dairy products forever.

I'm going to mull this over some more: it's the early seventies, and it's Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman and Sissy Spacek. How do you even manage to make a screenful of crap out of those particular raw materials? This movie has one thing on its mind, and that's to SHOCK and TITILLATE you, just like all the millions of over-the-top serial-killer things we have to wade through today. Back then, in those more "innocent" times, white slavery (of WHITE American girls, IN America!) could be played for viripotent arousal while wrapped in the thinnest veneer of moral indignation.

The plot is absurd; the lines are bad. I have nothing good to say about this. Although there is one scene where a car gets chewed up by farm machinery, absolutely decimated, and I understand some twelve-year-old boys enjoy that sort of thing.

800 Bullets: (2002. dir: Alex de la Iglesia) An aging stuntman who once doubled for Clint Eastwood runs a ramshackle, Old West tourist attraction in Almeria, Spain, home landscape for many of the classic Spaghetti Westerns. Haunted by his drunkenness on the day his son was crushed beneath horses whilst performing the Yakima-Canutt-stagecoach trick, his ghosts are magnified when his young grandson shows up.

This movie left me with the same uncomfortable sadness I had when I finally read Cannery Row, which I'd romanticized for many years: that its gist boiled down to men only existing happily when left to tinker and gallavant alone and in packs, but unfettered by women, who always spoil the fun, unless they're prostitutes, in which case they may still try and spoil the fun, but because the relationship is bounded and defined by an exchange of money for services, the man can walk out the door at any moment without repercussion. Unlike the Steinbeck, here the implication that these men are still boys and avoiding adulthood is not entirely shunted aside, but the Peter Pan life is glorified, made shiny with quirks and humour. In this movie, the actual hard work of raising the grandson was done by women, a feat not given its due. There are two sympathetic women in the piece: one is the madam, whose job is to listen without judgment while providing booze and beautiful girls for consumption, the other a beautiful whore whose job is to smile while she makes her fake tits bounce, gleefully initiating the little boy into their joys. These are the fantasy women. Any woman who is hardened with cares or responsibilities or a job in the non-fantasy realm is reviled, as the abandoned mother and grandmother are, even as they provide the money for the careless men's lifestyle.

Misfit men who don't belong anywhere else gather in the tumbleweed ghost-town, telling stories about having done Raquel Welch and enjoying topless conga-lines of whores. When a woman intrudes with an actual request for adult behavior, she is disregarded and shouted down. Sancho Gracia is very good as the abuelito in question, but the plot makes little sense, and the manic fun these man-children have is patently ephemeral (he makes the whore promise not to tell that he cannot fuck her) and thieved from others (most of it charged to the boy's mother's credit card), and most of the glory days so obscured by lies that even the true, good parts are blurred and uncertain (he's been saying so long that Clint Eastwood is his friend, the only proof being a phone number scribbled on a bar napkin, that he even doubts it himself).

The climax depends on despicable, black-hat behaviour from the Suits and Power-Bitches, the opposite of these romanticized slackers and users, and ventures far, far into lalaland. De la Iglesia doesn't have much stake in the real world, though, and, in the end, his only interest is in giving the man-children a romp around the corral.