in a valley of violence: the man with a name and a dog for a girl

(2016. dir: Ti West) If the directors from the Nouvelle Vague were the first generation of self-reflexive filmmakers, that is, to make films inspired by a lifetime of cinephilia, at least they used their own lives and experiences as grist for their mills. The American generation who are the grand old men now, --Spielberg, Lucas, --were the first to make movies entirely based on other movies, as if they grew up imprisoned within the confines of movie-houses and it is here, in this generation, in which life and movies become blurred. As years pass, the two become the same thing. The most obvious example today is Tarantino, who gives the sense that his personal memories are all earmarked by films: he'll remember being seven years old not because of where he sat in grade school or the pinata at his birthday party, but because that was the year he stayed up late and snuck into the living room to watch "Naked and the Dead" on his parents' black and white TV set. (I made that up, but it might as well be true, right?)

My point is this: I try to like Ti West. I do. I've given him every opportunity to win me. House of the Devil was cute, OK, it was zingy, but it was a nostalgia trip, with ultimately very little life of its own. Although I liked the Innkeepers and didn't dislike the Sacrament, I don't recall much about them, either. I think "very little life of its own" might so far be a key phrase in summing up West's work to date. And, like House of the Devil, West is back to movie tributes: this time, to the Spaghetti Western. I am not at all opposed to those: Sam Raimi's the Quick and the Dead sits on my shelf as a wonderfully flawed, recurring pleasure. West's Valley, on the other hand, has some inspired moments, but they are connected by long passages of filler, some of it so damn cute you want to puke, much of it anachronistically modern, most of it very badly written indeed.

Ethan Hawke (who is absolutely the best of the two or three things that were good about the Magnificent Seven remake) is the cheroot-smoking, stoical Man With No Name, although, disappointingly, his name this time is Paul. He travels with two girl-companions: his horse, Lady, and his dog, Abby, with whom he carries on an endless, one-sided conversation, only becoming stoical in the presence of humans. See what I mean? It's a cute idea, but it doesn't carry well. When we first meet them, they are, by Paul's description, starving and water-deprived and dirty, although he looks suspiciously healthy and clean, always the first warning sign that you're watching a faux-Spaghetti instead of the real McCoy. He is hailed by a man in trouble, a drunken criminal of a preacher, horribly written but gamely played by Burn Gorman. This is the Eli Wallach character. There's your second warning sign.

*SPOILER ALERT:* Once Paul's showed us his alpha-male cred by effortlessly stripping the treacherous preacher of his bullets and his water, he leads his girls into a town built on malevolence and cowardice. A recalcitrant hero, he's the fellow to set it straight on its true path. Call him John Wick of the West: today's movie-men are less likely to be motivated by love of humans than by vengeance for their pets. In fact, Abby the Dog is well established many times over as the love of Paul's life. The bad guy calls her his "wife", and the girl who will be his love-interest, when she first meets Abby, says, "We look exactly alike!" (The love interest is, by the way, sixteen years old, to Hawkes', what, fifty? The logic seems to be that since she's not a virgin, since she's already been debauched as a child, it's OK to "Woody Allen" her. Join me, please, in puking.) From them on, you know Abby is a goner; she has to die so Paul can move on to a human relationship (with a sixteen-year-old girl! Ewwwwwwww).

The other thing about Abby is that she's the dog from the Artist. Not literally, I mean; that dog was French, but she may as well be. She performs all manner of stupid dog-tricks, from rolling herself up in a blanket on command to covering her eyes with her paw to indicate a hackneyed emotional response to Paul's words. The only decent joke in the movie is that every time someone asks if Abby does tricks, Paul intones deadpan, "She bites." And she does, she's a killer guard dog (except, naturally, when it really matters), but she saves her adorableness solely for the eyes of her true mate.

The obligatory scenes are here, but often elided. In a true Spaghetti Western, the hero always gets the crap beaten out of him by the villains; it's from his pain and humiliation that he rouses up his own internal "murdering ministers", the dark rage which fuels the second half of the picture, the vengeance part. In this (*SPOILER ALERT AGAIN*), they take him by surprise (he's taken with ridiculous ease; if he was watching, Clint Eastwood would flip the TV off in that moment) and throw him off a rocky ledge, never checking that he's dead. I want you to read that again. They don't put a bullet in him, or a knife's blade, both of which are close to hand. They don't hang him from a tree, or even beat him up much. They just push him over a rock at night then head home for a pint. If he hadn't turned off the TV before, Clint Eastwood is definitely flipped over to the Weather Channel at this point, because when Paul rises in the morning from his rocky, rattlesnakey bed, he's FINE. Barely a scrape on him, but mad as hell.

I have to take my hat off to West's obligatory flashback scene, achieved with the greatest economy using a couple of flashlights to illuminate glimpses of a night-time Indian massacre. West went out of his way to avoid wasting our time with inessentials here, then threw us to the dogs in that respect for most of the rest of the movie. There's a bright spot, sure, in Toby Huss as one of the townsmen; that actor continues to be a downright inspiring presence even in the smallest roles (watch the Invitation. For God's sake, man, watch it!). John Travolta has the Kurt Russell/Sam Shepard role here, the one-legged town marshal, one of the few characters that is written in shades of grey. He does well initially, then stumbles as the plot grows shriller and the script drowns in sad little puddles of its own mediocrity. And the guy who plays the town bully, --I'm not even going to dignify him by looking up his name,-- he takes a scriptful of badly-written lines and masticates then over-masticates until you're done with him, absolutely done, by the end of his first damn scene. When will they learn that even in a Western, every villain should have one good, redemptive quality, as every hero should have a convincing darkness?

Believe it or not, it's possible that this movie passes the Bechdel test. It's got two women in it, young sisters running an inn. They're both named and they speak to one another; I'd have to watch it a second time to make sure they speak of something besides men. Still, even if they do, the way they interrelate is cartoonish, slapsticky, kind of awful. These days in Westerns, women are often given a "you go, sister" nod in what you might call the Grace Kelly Moment, when the noblest of the downtrodden females gets to step up with an uncharacteristic shotgun and deliver the coup de grace when it looks like The Chief Scurvy Varmint might have our hero on the ropes. (He doesn't, really, ever. There's always kind of a winking assurance that the filmmaker is just letting the ladies have some fun here, letting them feel important, when really Ethan or Denzel or whomever would play through his bloody wounds and kill the fellow just fine on his own, thank you.) This has one of those. It's not satisfying. And when the 16-year-old girl embraces the older man (who has abandoned a beloved wife and daughter of the girl's same age), although it never becomes overtly sexual, West is still winking at us, letting us walk out of the cinema with no doubt that Paul will come to his senses, overcome his nagging scruples, and bed the girl. Because he is the red-blooded alpha-male, and, apparently, that gives him the right to Woody-Allen to his heart's content without our negative judgment.

ADDENDUM ON ANTOINE FUQUA'S THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN REMAKE: It's not interesting enough to warrant its own review. It feels like it was assembled by committee: the whole is not good, and most of the parts are just serviceable. Granted, it was a tough assignment, since it was already done, not just right, but just about perfectly, TWICE, once in America, before that in Japan. So these guys did the right thing in making changes, but, alas, the wrong ones. In the Sturges film, each of the Magnificents has a definite character, you can describe each one not just by the actor who played him, but the vanities, fears, and aspirations which drive them. In this one, you've got the Comanche, the Mexican Bandido, the Mountain Man, the Asian. They're types or ethnic symbols, and nobody bothers to write them actual characters. Even Denzel-As-Yul-Brynner and Chris-Pratt-As-Steve-McQueen are not written well enough to register.

Only one character, Ethan Hawkes', inspired somebody to write well. He's the Cajun called Goodnight Robicheaux, an amalgam of Lee (Robert Vaughn) and Harry (Brad Dexter) from the earlier film, and he not only has been given some wonderful lines (when his cowardice kicks in, he tells his friend that he dreamt the owl called his name), but Hawke communicates his conflict beautifully and often wordlessly.

The other good part is Vincent D'Onofrio as the mountain man: his voice squeaks and his gestures are twitchy and awkward, a thoroughly convincing portrayal of someone who's spent very little of life in human company. Again, nobody bothered to write a decent role for him, so he has nothing of interest to do with his hard work, but you've got to give him credit for holding up his end.

the belated, truncated halloweenfest: let's scare jessica to death

(1971. dir: John D. Hancock) The turning of the sixties into the seventies gave us a fascinating moment in horror cinema: Woman v. The World. Highlighted by Rosemary's Baby and the Stepford Wives, Let's Scare Jessica to Death is another in a series in which an ordinary woman finds her everyday world transformed in eerie, almost imperceptible increments, until it seems like a malevolent conspiracy and she cannot tell whom she can trust. In fact, in these films, she can trust no one. Even those who sincerely want to help her are powerless to do it, and the husband who seems at first benign and well-meaning always fails her colossally before the end. The question at the heart of the mounting tension is always this: am I crazy, or is the world conspiring against me?

Let's Scare Jessica to Death is a significant entry in the category for a few reasons. First, maternity is never mentioned. Even in the Stepford Wives, mostly concerned with connubial matters, there is a sense that our heroine might escape but is held back by thought of her children. A movie like this one about a couple trying to piece their marriage back together after a crisis in which children or the prospect of parenthood never comes up is a treasurable oddity. The other lovely factor is Zohra Lampert in the lead. Her performance, which we view largely in close-up, is mesmerizing. The director wants us inside her head, keeps us there throughout, where we hear audible voices, voices which only she and we hear, and which may or may not be her hallucinations.

And,in fact, we are left in the end with an uncertainty. Those other two classic movies leave us in no doubt as to the breadth of the evil mesh closing around our heroine, but this one is different. From the title, we go in with the assumption that we know something: someone is trying to drive the woman back into the madhouse. By the closing credits, we're not so sure. Which things we've seen are real, and which are hallucinations? Is there a conspiracy? The scars on all the locals are an eerie touch. Why are they all bandaged and wounded? ARE there vampires?

You could call it a lost classic, rounding out a trilogy with those other, unforgettable two. It was a movement rising directly up out of the feminist uprising, giving expression to the new uncertainty and angst in the feminine subconscious as we relinquished our "safer" roles and moved out into the places of greater potential power in the world. It may, in fact, be time for a new wave of such films, as American women woke on November 9th to find our country had banded together overnight to declare us second-class citizens, not only unworthy to make our own reproductive decisions, but unworthy even of basic human respect, as amply demonstrated by our sociopath-elect and his contempt for our gender. Our government, for the next four years, will be defining "human" as white, heterosexual males with, preferably, at least one million dollars in the bank and a cupboard full of guns. Because horror is always the bellwether, the genre in which the black bile and dread spew first from the collective underconscious, this might be a useful path. Although we often see women as the brutalized protagonists in modern horror, we tend today towards the physically tough, ridiculously resilient and resourceful grlz, leaving those of us who are normal women, with no super-strengths and no instinct for fighting or gun-play, without proper mirrors.

belated and truncated halloweenfest: a double feature of christmas grue

A Christmas Horror Story: (2015. dir: Steve Hoban, Grant Harvey, Brett Sullivan) Revisiting the classic "anthology" format, here's a foursome of holiday chillers bound together by a shared locale and a drunken DJ playing a Christmas music marathon as all hell breaks loose outside. William Shatner is wonderfully droll as the the DJ, and the performance values are high all around. There's a troll changeling, wickedly funny zombie-elves, the ghost of a mistreated convent girl, and it all culminates in a showdown between Santa Claus and Krampus. Or does it?

Krampus: (2015. dir: Michael Dougherty) Viewing this before and after the election are two very different experiences. When it came out, Krampus was a well-executed, twisted moral-fable fashioned from the darkest humor and exaggerated versions of every American's modern experience of the holiday. Mobs draw blood and show no mercy for the privilege of paying too much for products which will be stuffed into a closet and forgotten the day after Christmas. People you dislike crowd into your home and criticize your way of living, and you let them do it, because they're "family". The cynical and ruthless bully those dreamers who have not given up hope, and once the bullies have won, once we have all given into ennui and despair, that's the invitation to Krampus, and Santa Claus stays home that year. Toys turn into monsters: teddy bears grow jagged teeth, tree-top angels morph into translucent harpies, gingerbread men lure children onto hooks and into chains, and you don't even want to know about the jack-in-the-box.

Now, post-election, this movie leaves a newfound chill, a hideous reminder of how hellishly low we have sunk. It is, believe me, exactly the Christmas movie deserved by a people so fucked up and cynical they'll elect the embodiment of self-serving, capitalist pig-dog evil into the highest seat of power.

Keep the fire burning hot in the hearth, kids. Krampus is coming.

the belated, truncated halloweenfest: the devil's pass

(2013. dir: Renny Harlin) Sucker that I am for horror films inspired by True Fortean Incidents, the most interesting aspect of a Fortean Incident is its inexplicable nature, and movies, perhaps necessarily, strip away that layer, rarely providing anything more interesting in its place.

This one rises from the mass death in the Dyatlov Pass in 1959. It starts out as the Blair Witch Project, almost weirdly so, becomes a video game later on when the characters are exploring the underground bunker, and ends with a cheap trick. Along the way, it references the Philadelphia Experiment and the Mothman Prophecies, but doesn't shed any particular new light on the mysterious story of the dead hikers (except for one moment when they realize the "strange orange lights" that were reported in the sky the night of the calamity may have been flares sent up in desperation).

This is a "found footage" movie which cheats, just a little, just at the end. A group of American hipsters are retracing the dead Soviets' steps (although when the main girl claims to be a student at U of O but says it's in YOO-jeen AW-rygun, you know for a fact she's never been anywhere near the place), and the acting is, at any rate, better than the script. I tend to enjoy some things about Harlin's work. The best thing about this one is the easy rapport amongst the hipsters before the hellishness breaks loose, but that's a mighty weak peg to hang a thumbs-up on.

the belated, truncated halloweenfest: i, madman

(1989. dir: Tibor Takacs): And, for a change of pace, toss on I, Madman, a good-hearted, unpretentious slasher film built around beloved 80's-diva Jenny Wright as a girl who works in a used bookstore and finds herself menaced by characters in the dark fictions she reads. None of it makes much sense, but it doesn't matter, because the details are so engaging: an avalanche of misplaced books acting as a dream-quicksand obstacle, seamless travels from life into fiction and back again, twisting staircases and flashing neon. It's also bookended by the Art and Dotty Todd rendition of "Chanson d'Amour", a truly great song which evokes in detail an entire, lost era in one bouncy, repeating chorus: absolutely brilliant.

the belated, truncated halloweenfest: deliver us from evil

(2014. dir: Scott Derrickson) A return to form for the Catholic Horror genre. As has become de rigeur in the past twenty years, the Catholic priest is allowed to wear a white hat only if he is a) sexy and fit, b) fully indulgent in harmless sins, such as smoking and drinking too much, c) obviously lustful after beautiful women, and, most importantly, if he d) fell into his calling only after "real life" so devastatingly disillusioned him as to drive him into it. This priest, played sexily by Edgar Ramirez, doesn't even wear the collar, working, as he puts it, "under cover", allowing hot chicks to hit on him in bars.

It's an exorcism film, and a good one, delivering some genuine frights and three-dimensional characters (including one obvious red-shirt who I really, really didn't want to die). Eric Bana gives his usual greatness as a tough New York cop with a talent for sensing the supernatural. Among other dark delights, the movie offers a sly joke about the instinctive association we make between cats and devils.

the belated, truncated halloweenfest: alone in the dark

(1982. dir: Jack Sholder) An overlooked classic from the eighties, it's a slasher movie, a home invasion film, a lunatics-escaped-from-the-asylum story. It's got a satirical message to deliver about the violence of society, and, although it's a little heavy-handed, its wry sensibility and near-flawless cast sees it through.

A blackout frees the most dangerous lunatics (termed "voyagers" by sensimilla-smoking head-shrink Donald Pleasence, uncomfortable with the connotations of "psychopath", a man whose laissez-faire approach leads him to allow matches on request to a pyromaniac) from an asylum and they target the family of a new doctor, convinced that he has murdered his predecessor, whom they respected. Imagine the joy of an underplayed (!) menace by looney-in-chief Jack Palance, truly glorious, or the infectious glee of Martin Landau's butcher-knife-brandishing preacher roaring, "Vengeance is mine, saieth the Lord!" It's got all the tropes, the punished-by-death teenaged-babysitter sex, gruesome murders by crossbow, cleaver, and baseball bat, and a creepy, neon-lit dream sequence to open the festivities.

It doesn't shirk the blood, guts, rising tension, or jump-scares, enjoying itself thoroughly the entire way.

horror triple feature: devil, plus one, enter nowhere

Devil: (2010, dir: John Erick Dowdle) This is an M. Night Shyamalan story from beginning to twist-end, just directed by someone else, and it fucks up and loses me in the exact same way that Signs did: with the cut-and-dried theophany, the indisputably straightforward workings of God in the lives of men.

Divine Grace is never cut-and-dried, never indisputable, not to the eyes of humans. It may be that His works make all kinds of perfect, symmetrical sense from the god's eye-view, but we can only see the limited pieces set in front of us, and from the vantage-point of the groundlings, Divine Grace always looks partial, or sloppy, or half-baked, or maybe like an accident. One human might have an epiphany, might, for one short moment, be able to encompass the fullness of a Divine Act, but it will rub so contrary to the grain of everyday human existence that even keeping hold of the memory of it will require a stubborn contrivance of faith and courage.

And that's why M. Night bugs me. Theodicy is not simple, and this guy tries to tell us it is, and that the evil which God "allows" is all for our own good.

Plus One: (2013. dir: Dennis Iliades) A meteorite strike causes a wrinkle effect in time and a Harmony Korine party of hedonist kids find themselves partying with their doppelgangers from moments prior. What might have been an interesting idea turns out to be a post-adolescent masturbatory power-fantasy when the main guy uses the anomaly to win back the girl who dumped him and then murder her other self. The girls shed their clothes at the drop of a hat and the smartest of them spends the evening making out with herself. Too bad.

Enter Nowhere: (2011. dir: Jack Heller) It begins as "No Exit" for three lost souls trapped in a cabin in the middle of an unfamiliar forest, then turns into something more interesting before the end. When it all comes out in the wash, it’s a moral fable about how the secret to living a good and healthy life is to be raised by the woman who gave birth to you: accept no substitutes! The acting is solid enough, including Scott Eastwood (yes, he looks just like his dad only handsome) as the audience surrogate. No gore, no chills, just a strange, twisty storyline that, although ultimately unsatisfying, is enough to keep you watching.

the female gaze: the invitation and strangerland

the Invitation: (2015. dir: Karyn Kusama) An extraordinary film which, if you look at the plot, might be classed as a psychological thriller, but it dredges up the kind of heavy loathing and dread that the best horror does. The acting is first-class (including excellent use of my two favorite actors from Carnivale, Toby Huss and John Carroll Lynch). A group of old friends gathers for a dinner party after a few years apart instigated by a tragedy, and these actors really do feel like old friends. It's set in a mansion in the Hollywood hills, and although the house itself doesn't feel like a character as in your haunted house films, the view from the terrace and the winding road up and away from the hoi-polloi makes L.A. feel like an integral, living part of the story. Kusama knows just when to take us up close into our main character's haunted head (Logan Marshall-Green, revealing a star talent) and when to come back into the world of tense laughter and conversation. This is a director who knows exactly what she's doing.

The ending gave me shivers, down my spine and along my arms.

Seriously, it's such a good movie it works on your mind for days after.

Strangerland (2015. dir: Kim Farrant) Bleak, fascinating movie about a disconsolate emotional winter fallen across a family (husband and wife sleep in separate rooms, the son walks all night and never sleeps) as the teenaged daughter's powerful onslaught of sexuality wreaks havoc. When both kids go missing during a dust-storm, Catherine (Nicole Kidman) begins to feel the weight of her own long-lost sexual power during the frantic search. Hugo Weaving is lovely as a small-town cop, and there's something about the Australian outback, something more than bleak or wild, something that feels mythical. Characters refer to the Rainbow Serpent, the water-bringer associated with menstruation and so with the protection of women. When Catherine asks an aboriginal elder-woman about it, the woman says, "Children go lost here. It's something in the land."

Since Farrant's interest lies with the sexuality of the girl and the woman, the shape of the story goes awry of our usual expectations. It looks like it's set to be a mystery, then a thriller, and a strong sense of dread builds, but all the mysteries (as in life!) are not solved, and it's Catherine's internal journey that is followed to a point of catharsis. It's a movie more akin to Picnic at Hanging Rock in that sense, a movie unconcerned with cut-and-dried answers.

Joseph Fiennes is probably miscast as the strong but befuddled father. His hugely expressive eyes, a boon in many roles, play against him here, and someone more quintessentially Australian might have been a better fit. Think of a young Bryan Brown, that jagged chunk of Aussie masculinity, and how devastating it would have been at the end to see him break down in cathartic tears with his wife. Whereas Fiennes always kind of looks like he's about to cry, doesn't he?

the female gaze: by the sea and the private lives of pippa lee

By the Sea: (2015. dir: Angelina Jolie Pitt) In what appears vaguely to be the 1970s, two beautiful people, married 14 years, languish at a secluded Maltese resort by the sea. She (Jolie) wilts gracefully across divans and sloths around on deck chairs; he goes down to the local, chats up the folks, tries to write, drinks himself into sloppy rudeness only to be forgiven by the generous old man who runs the joint. We can see their marriage is dissolving in icy distance, and there is some allusion to a past crisis which cannot be discussed. One of the great strengths of the piece, in fact, is that we don't know the nature of the crisis until late in the day. The film would have been all the better had it been left a mystery indefinitely, since the instigating event is not, ultimately, important, just the emotional and psychological fall-out from it, and naming it makes commonplace and simple what might have remained a tentacled monster of vast and Lovecraftian proportion.

Jolie captures well the strangeness of marriage, and how cataclysmic abysses can open between two people who know one another too well, an estrangement seemingly against both partner's wills, seeming to have an avalanche life of its own, gaining weight and matter as it gains speed. Mostly, though, the pace here is so unfailingly languid, and the clinching moment, the fulcrum upon which the climax turns, depends on so second-perfect an accidental encounter, that it feels forced and writerly.

*SPOILER ALERT*: In the end, we are told that her "tragedy" is that she is barren, but it is simple for us to see, although the characters never do, that her true tragedy is a lack of vocation. She thinks herself into dire maelstroms because she has no purposive action, no direction for her energies. We are told she was once a dancer. When asked why she stopped, she acidly says, "I got old." When he (Pitt) holds forth about the good old times to the tavern-keeper, he recalls himself having been once a great writer, and she a dancer with a great body; whether she had talent is not of value enough to mention. Like Scott with Zelda, he will own all the genius in the family, and she, like Zelda, finds herself a dancer whose access to the stage has been stripped away by the prejudice of the world against a woman aging.

Mostly, though, it's beautiful to look at, with great cars and perfect, groovy songs, reminiscent of a certain mid-20th-c. European ouevre.

the Private Lives of Pippa Lee: (2009. dir: Rebecca Miller) Miller directs her own script, and communicates truths about womanhood and the subtleties of the roles we play: how much of it is chosen, how much decreed for us? Maria Bello is startlingly good as the speed-freak mom, Robin Wright shines in the lead, a tougher, subtler role, as a woman whose tamped-down energies are pushing volcanically to the surface without her permission. Alan Arkin does that wonderful Alan Arkin thing, bringing his ever-spry intelligence to every line. Winona Ryder takes some furious glee in milking her own crazy-girl image, and Keanu Reeves shows up as the magical animus figure who cannot lie, and will save the day in the end.

It's a good movie, don't get me wrong. The characters are shifting and complex, Miller's interest in the main character, a rich, New York housewife, is true and unflagging and keeps our own interest piqued. Here's an idea, though: how about a movie in which a woman busts out of her old life, and DOESN'T have Keanu Reeves waiting to drive her away into the Mojave? Where's the movie about the woman who loses or gives up everything, then faces a life of solitude and the challenge of living it creatively? Where's the updated version of the Ellen Burstyn character in Grand Isle? And remember My Brilliant Career? Female audiences were unsettled by the Judy Davis character's decision to choose creative solitude over domestic servitude in marriage to the man she loved -- this was set at the turn of the twentieth century, mind, so there was no birth control. Had she married her man, she'd have given up her writing to launder nappies and, yes, have some glorious sex, but she would be giving over the tiller, surrendering her autonomy, and STILL the women of 1979 were threatened by her decision. Here it is, thirty years later, and Pippa Lee still can't just drive off into the desert by herself; even today, it's considered too hard and selfish a choice for a woman to make.

But, really, how difficult would it be to drive off into the desert with Keanu freaking Reeves? Does she really need a stockpile of courage to make that choice? In a sense, unless he is just symbolic of her own internal masculine side, how is it not its own cop-out, switching dependence on one man for another?

recent russell crowe double feature: the water diviner and a winter's tale

the Water Diviner: (2014. dir: Russell Crowe) Directing yourself is never easy, and Crowe does his best to avoid problems by keeping his performance simple and straightforward. The story is mixed: the interesting part tells the flip-side of the Gallipoli story, a deep scar in Australian history, an ill-conceived WWI campaign in which 36,000 ANZAC troops were lost or wounded. If you're American, you learned about it from the Peter Weir movie. If you're Australian, I assume it's ingrained in you as cultural heritage from earliest youth. This story looks at it from the Turkish angle, beginning in a trench where soldiers are preparing to die, but it's a trick, a mirror image of Weir's trench in which the Australians are pinning their photographs and final letters to the shorings before they run to their deaths: this time, it's the Turks doing the same thing, but when they reach the crest of the hill, they find the enemy has retreated.

It's the story of a farmer, a sensitive autodidact and preternaturally gifted water-dowser, who has lost all three sons on the Turkish peninsula and his wife as a later casualty of the same battle. In deference to her last wishes, he travels to Turkey to find the bodies of his sons and bring them home.

The story incorporates magical realism, as when he "intuits" the final moments of his boys as he walks across the ground which drank their blood, this without the film actually committing to a vision of reality in which there is an invisible dimension. The suggestion is, rather disturbingly, that this farmer loves his children more fully and successfully than us mere mortals do, and that's why he's able to follow their long-buried traces, while the rest of us are plagued by unanswered questions when we lose our own loved ones. The visuals are heightened into hyper-reality, as well: when he reaches Istanbul, the scarlets and yellows are saturated to an extreme, as if everything has been carved out of saffron and turmeric.

Most of the movie's flaws and saccharine sentimentality (there's an adorable Turkish urchin who has two jobs: to provide a conduit through which his ridiculously gorgeous mother falls in love with our aging, unprepossessing hero, and to administer the emotional blackmail that underhandedly plucks at our heartstrings) might be forgiven when weighed against the good (the bits about war feel fully and well done), except for the unforgivable love story. There is good acting in this movie (Yilmaz Erdogan, particularly, as the Turkish officer, and Ryan Corr as the eldest son), but not, alas, by Olga Kurylenko, whose character, in her defense, may be unplayable as written.

She is a Turkish war-widow who accepts that her dead husband's brother has the right to wallop her, and yet is a Strong and Independent Woman, as trademarked by Hollywood. There is probably a bridge between the two extremes, but Kurylenko and Crowe either could not find it, or failed to communicate it if they did. Crowe takes cliched shortcuts in mapping the Woody Allen-flavored romance (Crowe was 5O at the time, Kurylenko 34, and she looks younger than that, upping the ick-factor): syrupy music over a candlelit supper, at which my boyfriend wryly pointed out that if she were really a widow at the close of World War I, she wouldn't waste a hundred candles on a single supper, even if she had a hundred candles. The amorous brother-in-law who begins as an obstacle magically vanishes by the end, and with him any cultural obstacles, like, say, that the Turkish men, who are still at war against Britain, would kill our hero and probably her as well for sleeping with the enemy rather than allow the romance. You have to figure that even if our hero managed to spirit his lady-love and her absurdly cuddlesome son back to Australia, the union would still be villified by his own people in their postbellum xenophobia, and is this Strong and Independent(TM) Muslim woman going to be happy in the Australian bush? Yikes. Not likely. A happy ending, as someone wise once pointed out, is a story that's not finished yet. This one, though, just feels forced and false.

a Winter's Tale: (2014. dir: Akiva Goldsman) Ah, true love, true love. Always predestined, immediately recognizable, instantly cleansing away the flaws and sins of those who find it. The altar at which Hollywood worships.

This is a New Age fairy tale, lifted soggily above a slough of saccharine hogwash and held there, barely, by good performances and some lush photography. Its theology is dunderheaded, because in Hollywood, the only way to experience God is through true romance or parental love. The only third option is disinterested samaritanism, but Hollywood is uncomfortable with it and tends to make those folks into angelic figures.

It's long and slow, but Russell Crowe has some fun finding the tics and nuances of his villainous demon, and the only performance that falls flat, interestingly, is from Will Smith, who is an entirely unconvincing Lucifer, possibly because he can't help exuding so powerful a nice-guy charisma.

I do dig it at the end, when the bad guy turns into ice. Nice effect.

1971 australian double feature: wake in fright and walkabout

Wake in Fright: (1971. dir: Ted Kotcheff) As much a classic of Aussie cinema as Picnic at Hanging Rock or Breaker Morant, Wake in Fright chronicles the Christmas holiday of a school-teacher trapped in the bleakest part of the outback in a sort of indentured servitude. En route to Sydney to visit his surfer-girlfriend, he becomes trapped by circumstance, peer pressure, and bad choices in a mining town ("the Yabba!" the locals call it with enthusiasm), and undergoes a mounting nightmare made of drink, sweat, dirt, blood, and vomit. It's infamous for the gruesome and protracted, real-life footage of a kangaroo massacre at its center, fully as disturbing as it sounds, which is further grotesquified by a mano-a-mano between a badly wounded 'roo and a drunk-as-fuck muscleman. The whole thing, the whole movie, the word "disturbing" doesn't begin to cover it. Kotcheff is an American who went on to direct First Blood, among others, and it may be the outsider's look at a foreign culture that heightens the weirdness into a sort of barely controlled hysteria.

It's like one of Polanski's early psychological horror films, the Tenant or Repulsion, in which you feel like you're standing too close to someone, watching while they go insane. This school-teacher (Gary Bond) starts out the day a proper fellow, complete with posh BBC accent and Carnaby Street good looks, who dreams of shipping out to England and cultivates artsy pretensions. Once he's trapped in The Yabba (and it is one of the most nightmarish moments I can remember, when he steps out the back of the lorry to realize that he is, indeed, trapped, as in a sort of Purgatory, just as the driver hands him a rifle), the movie maps a descent into alcohol-frenzy. Watching these men at their berserk, rampaging play is a high-pitched nightmare, one without end, a sort of tornado skipping across the landscape and demolishing everything it touches, some things immediately, others more slowly, like the women trapped amongst them.

*SPOILER ALERT* Here's the clincher, though: it's not a horror film, because of the ending. You watch this guy go all the way down into madness, through suicide and out the other side, and, in the end, he walks back to the same school-house, dressed in the same clothes, and when his landlord asks how his holiday was, he says, through gritted teeth but with some gusto, "The best." And that's when you realize what you've been watching: an Englishman suffering a gruesome transmogrification into an Australian. You've been watching a sort of shamanic initiation, in which he's ritually eviscerated in a frenzy of bacchic idiocy, and when he's strong enough to survive it, he returns to walk the earth as a roo-killing, two-fisted Aussie, disburdened of his previous dreams and pretensions.

Walkabout: (1971. dir: Nicolas Roeg) ...and this, the darling of international arthouses at the end of the swingingest decade, bears odd similarity to its more provocative brother of the same year. It's another outsider's view of the outback, Roeg's vision evoking an incandescent beauty and vibrant thrum of life from within the apparent wasteland. Its instigating incident involves an Englishman driven mad by the same landscape, trying to murder his children before turning his gun on himself, and the children embark on an initiatory "walkabout", saved by an aboriginal boy who takes them under his wing. In this one, however, the transformation is resisted in the end, the children returning to the suffocating harness of "Englishness" (which Roeg points up as grotesque through use of radio broadcasts and cross-cut juxtapositioning of "natural" vs "white" ways of life), only to think back on it wistfully as a transient moment of freedom.

Partly because of Roeg's extreme stylings, it's a film much more trapped in the moment of its making than Wake in Fright, whose nightmare traverses boundaries. This is, at heart, a hippie vision, part of the Rousseau, back-to-nature movement of the time, embodied, perhaps a little leeringly, in retrospect, in Jenny Agutter's 17-year-old nakedness. The film's most striking scenes involve the Aborigines: the boy's final courtship dance, or when a nomadic community comes across the burnt-out car and uses it as a plaything, the white man's decaying body stretched gruesomely in the trees nearby, ignored.

the female gaze: proof and good dick

Proof: (1991. dir: Jocelyn Moorhouse) It's a strange movie, and well worth watching. A blind man (Hugo Weaving) deifies truth, photographing his world so others will verify through their eyes what he has experienced through his other senses. He endures a dysfunctional (like, Eugene O'Neill levels of dysfunction) relationship with his housekeeper (Genevieve Picot), who is in love with him and spurned at every show of vulnerability. "I know she wants me," he explains, "and as long as she can't have me, she won't pity me." In punishment, she silently leaves ashtrays and coat-stands where he will trip over them and uses his beloved dog as a pawn in their power-games. Their lives are bounded in circles of longing, fear, and cruelty, until he meets an amiable and ingenuous dishwasher (Russell Crowe), whose friendship catalyzes growth, disruption, and endgame.

If it's the nineties, it barely is. Everything except the digital camera looks like the eighties, including an ill-judged musical montage of photographs and perky music designed to communicate to us the first night our two heroes bond. Mostly, it's an interesting portrait of how spurned love can lead to petty cruelties and power trips, and how impossible it is to learn trust, except to relax into it as a necessary part of existing amongst other humans. Moorhouse communicates beautifully the sensual experience that is the blind man's world, the acting is very good, and Russell Crowe is impossibly young and charismatic.

photo courtesy of Fanzone50 (http://fanzone50.com/Hugo/Proof2.html)

Good Dick: (2008. dir: Marianna Palka) This movie reminds me of two things: first, the Ballad of Tam Lin, in which a woman whose lover has fallen under a fair-folk enchantment must cling fast to him as he turns into all manner of creature and thing, and, in succeeding, the enchantment is broken and he is again hers. The second is a dream I had in my twenties, in which the guy I was seeing at the time tried to walk across a room and touch me, and I had to execute a complex series of dance-steps to freeze him. It worked, but each time I did it he'd be frozen for a shorter period, and the dance-steps took just as long, so it was inevitable that soon enough he was going to succeed in his approach. I woke up in a cold sweat before he did.

Palka has written and directed a bold character study in which an unassuming and well-intentioned video-store clerk stalks, lies to, and manipulates a woman who rents porn at his store until he insinuates himself into her life, then loves her in subservience, withstanding her violent torrents of abuse, until she takes charge of fixing her damaged life and in doing so finds the power to love him back. You've got to admire the guts of it: Palka doesn't so much defy the (sometimes, let's be honest, increasingly fascistic) boundaries of Political Correctness, she ignores them completely in her search for emotional truth, crossing over and back without seeming to notice.

It looks and feels exactly like what you think "quirky indie film" should look and feel like: short scenes, indeterminate time passages, indie-rock transitions, pauses and medium-shot to emphasize emotional distance, eccentric conversation between a group of male friends. It's hard to believe this is her first film, and that she directed herself in the lead. She avoids that fall into loss of perspective and vanity to which 99% of novice self-directors succumb. And, somehow, despite the dark subject matter, Palka and her co-star Jason Ritter manage to infuse the piece with a sweetness which prevails in the end.

exodus gods and kings: a superfluity of crocodiles, and not enough snakes

(2014. dir: Ridley Scott) You know what I miss about Biblical epics? Technicolor. That immersive, saturated, ultra-bright color of the Ten Commandments that made the blues and reds of Pharoah's palace so sumptuous you could feel the silk against your own skin. When the Nile ran red with the blood of the Hebrew God's plague, it was red like fire-trucks, like finger-paints. When the Plague of the Firstborn crept down from the sky in a green haze, it was greener than seaweed, greener than Kermit the Frog, and the thing itself, with its eerie, distant screams, its smears of lamb's-blood, it was the most eldritch night-scene ever.

In Ridley Scott's version, we begin with a mediocre script, filmed largely in earth-tones, and we get bumped along from one mediocre set-piece to the next without ever growing to care about any of the humans involved. There's a long Hollywood tradition, sure, of jumbling American and English accents together (Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Dame Judith Anderson opposite Edward G. Robinson and Vincent Price? Seriously? But, in retrospect, how do you not love it?), sticking in one "exotic" actor (Yul Brynner amongst the Wonder Bread), and calling it Egypt. Scott sticks with that (Christian Bale, Ben Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Tara Fitzgerald), and hopes that Joel Edgerton manages to look exotic enough to obscure his Aussie origins. (He doesn't. A blue-eyed pharaoh?)

The night scenes are teal and orange. The most interesting one involves the burning bush, which is all very blue, very LED, and Moses himself is buried in mud with only his face emerging, a fascinating idea, but then Scott brings God out in the figure of a little boy, and again we're lost. In the old days, they knew when to respect the source material. Yeah, MGM gave God a cheesy, pretentious voice, but they stuck with His original lines, which a lot of folks know by heart because they read the Book. And when you're writing lines for God, you better by gum have a vast talent, my friend. This God-Child just sounds like a Hollywood hack scribbled some things down on a napkin.

My own biggest disappointment in this failure involves the dearth of snake-life. Where are the serpents? That's one of my favorite things in the Bible, when Moses turns a staff into a serpent then Pharoah's thaumaturges replicate the "trick". I always thought it said something particular that was never again so particularly addressed, something about the ascension of man's cleverness obscuring the world's numinous nature. Scott just leaves it out. And, in this version, the Nile turns red because crocodiles run mad and kill everything? Well, alright, but isn't the point kind of that God turns it red because He can turn it red? In other words, shouldn't we be addressing questions of Faith?

Walter Chaw has written such a brilliant review of Hail, Caesar! over at Film Freak Central that it may be the last word on its subject, and it's relevant here in that he points to it being a movie about Faith. How is it that the Coen Brothers manage to explore the issue of Faith more compellingly in a tribute to the golden age of Hollywood than anyone else can with an actual Biblical epic? It may have something to do with our current problems with zealotry and terrorism, or there may be another factor at play. Michael Gebert addresses the idea in his Encyclopedia of Movie Awards while speaking of Hammer Films: "There's a nice Ph.D. thesis to be written on the subject of why horror films hint more effectively at the mystery of faith than Hollywood's lumbering Bible soaps... Why Peter Cushing's faith is so much more convincing than Charlton Heston's."

stephen mchattie double feature from another era

the People Next Door: (1970. dir: David Greene) This was originally a "CBS Playhouse" production, refilmed as a television movie two years later with the same director and a few people from the cast. It's an examination of a generational war, with its focus on drug use (mom and dad deplore acid and pot while partaking thoughtlessly of sleeping pills, diet pills, cigarettes, alcohol). McHattie is the hippie son who plays in a groovy rock band. Hal Holbrook and Chloris Leachman (as the couple next door whose clean-cut son turns out to be the dastardly pusher-man) give such lovely, nuanced performances that they make leads Eli Wallach and Julie Harris look clumsy and hamfisted. McHattie, of course, already feels practised and relaxed in his charismatic intensity.

It's a morality tale from an era that feels far more distant than it is, and it's interesting from an anthropological view.

Search for the Gods: (1975. dir: Jud Taylor) Seventies teledramas have an unmistakable flavor all their own. The production values are uniformly awful, the scripts are generally as bad (this was the era in which M*A*S*H was considered great TV. Try and watch it now, I dare you), and in those days actors were either in the movies or on television: you didn't do both. You chose, or you got stuck, and switching was rare. That changed in the eighties when Hollywood started mining the soaps and sitcoms for its next generation of stars (Meg Ryan, Julianne Moore, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Demi Moore), but this was before that particular flood.

This is a pilot that never found a home, and it gives Kurt Russell top billing because he was at that awkward stage between the Disney Wunderkind of the '60s and his beloved reinvention as Snake Plisskin. It's McHattie who plays the true lead, though, in this pre-Shirley-MacLaine delving into what would ten years later be called New Age spirituality in New Mexico. Castaneda is the Great Father whose shadow hangs benignly over the proceedings; Journey to Ixtlan is lovingly brandished in more than one scene. There is hushed talk of visits from ancient astronauts. A rich-guy villain sits in London, forever obscured in shadow, trying to track down and procure "by any means" the nine sections of an ancient, broken amulet ("medallion", I think they keep calling it). Willie Longfellow (McHattie) is a young spiritual searcher, escaping the expectations of his wealthy upbringing amongst the Boston Brahmins, who stumbles into a piece of the puzzle by jumping into the fray when an old Indian is attacked. Ralph Bellamy is the congenial artificates-expert who digs up the information McHattie needs to decipher his puzzle-piece. There is, wonderfully, a ten-minute peyote trip, in which Longfellow proves himself worthy (to a god called "Willow Lane", the "Night-Spirit, the Power of the Smoke").

There's also a lot of rappelling, verbal sparring over the fair Indian maiden, soaking in natural hot-springs while contemplating Native American genesis stories, dynamiting heedlessly into ancient tombs and, of course, killing the bad guys, sometimes after protracted and sadly dated car chases through the desert. And, yet, who can resist it? I wish they'd made a whole season.

the female gaze: a triple feature

Strange Days: (1995. dir: Kathryn Bigelow) Bigelow worked her way up in a boy's medium by making boy movies. I love Point Break because it's shameless and exhilarating and because Lori Petty plays the love interest, no conventional beauty, but slim and athletic, like she might really be a great surfer. Near Dark arrived pre-Buffy, pre-Twilight, when vampire films were still boy territory, but this one had a muscular, unsentimental vision, including Jenette Goldstein as a sexual but completely unkittenish badassed vampire-matriarch.

Strange Days is a now-outdated take on virtual reality, and so incorporates the whole gamut of boy-gamer buttons: girl on girl porn, rape snuff, anarchist revolution, violent crime. It's misogynist in that way that Spike Lee films often are: the chicks are all about getting naked and dressing for men, but there are also very strong women to leaven the effect. Angela Bassett gets to play one of those, although she still has to don the obligatory sex-kitten drag for the climactic scenes. (You know that bumper sticker that reads, "Ginger did everything Fred did, only backwards and in high heels"? Nowadays femme-heroes have to do everything Jason Statham does, except in five-inch stilettos and body-clenching micro-minis.) Juliette Lewis, on the other hand, plays an entirely thankless role as a heartless sexbot who only comes to life when she's onstage singing (and I assume Lewis took the role for that, as she obviously has a talent for it).

So that seems to be the way to be the first woman to win a directing Oscar: make your films all aggressively androcentric.

Ask Me Anything: (2014. dir: Allison Burnett) In the first hour you think it’s a vapid, snarky tribute to heartless, mindless, teenaged narcissism, with Britt Robertson spending a lot of time running around in her underwear. In the middle, it begins to morph, and, as it does, you realize it has been heading that way all along. The self-obsessed, sexually addicted girl at its center at last begins to examine her own motives. The ending is both inconclusive and interesting, but all questions, across the board, are left unanswered. Robert Patrick has a talent for making unpleasant characters more palatable, and he does so here as the paternal slob who talks dirty, never moves from the couch, disses wives both present and past, and may or may not hold responsibility for his daughter’s fucked-up-ness. It's a troubling thing that not one of the male characters seems to act with the girl’s best interests in mind. Even the saintly bookseller has a Christian agenda to peddle. In the end, the most obviously self-interested of the men, her professor-lover, comes off best because he's the least hypocritical.

This seems to have been marketed as a sort of teen comedy, which it absolutely is not. By the final frames, it's hard to say what it is. Our unstable heroine has seemed to fade at the edges, slowly, until she vanishes entirely.

Aloft : (2015. dir: Claudia Llosa) Strange and ethereal picture about faith-healing and a parent/child rift of cataclysmic proportion. Because it approaches its strange subjects from odd angles, it is worth watching, and Cillian Murphy as usual never puts a foot wrong. The feel of it is improvisational and handheld, but Jennifer Connolly, in a dream role, seems to equate serious acting with avoiding everyone's eyes, including ours, the camera. In fact, Melanie Laurent (as the journalist who searches out the grown son to reunite him with his estranged mater) does some of the same, so I'm wondering if this director takes a sidelong approach to realism which results in a tamping-down of vitality in her actors.

The best moment, my favorite moment, is at the end, when Connolly makes the bold choice Not To Cry. It's perfect, and indicative of a wonderful strength.

the female gaze: a pair of aussie road movies

Cactus: (2008. dir: Jasmine Yuen Carrucan) Kathryn-Bigelow-style, Carrucan makes her debut in the director's chair helming an all-out boy-movie, one she wrote herself, and doing it well. She launches us straight into the action: we're in an alley, close behind a half-naked man being forced at gunpoint, panting and wordless, into a car. The car is great, an old red Torino, probably from the '70s, and we spend the bulk of the film inside it as kidnapper drives hostage across Australia to a vague delivery point. Carrucan started behind the camera (Kill Bill, the Last Samurai) and you can see it. This camera has a great way of dollying up behind the car in the beginning, then, toward the end, as the action fades into denouement, we dolly back out from the two men, one broken, the other perhaps reborn. It leaves a wonderful sense of having been allowed a short glimpse, by unseen gods, possibly as a moral fable.

Still, true to the feeling of those old gearhead existentialist films from the turn of the '70s, although we come to know something about both men, we never get a strong hold on details, as that would be superfluous in an absurd, Camusian universe. We never really meet the wife and daughter of the kidnapper, although we see them in his haunted visions. Although both men are driven toward simple, opposing goals (one to make the delivery, the other to escape it), there is a feeling of Godot in the proceedings, as if the endless stretch of road were wound in a tight circle and the notion of progress was a trick from the subconscious, like God is, or mercy.

And just as the two men, these two opposites, are finally about to meet in understanding, Nemesis, not Fate, steps in to make the clinching decision.

the Rover: (2014. dir: David Michod) On the other hand, the universe of the Rover makes cold, logical, ruthless sense. In this mesmeric, post-apocalyptic dream, the choices you make have consequences; the consequences just don't always come from the outside. A man in this world might easily be his own worst enemy, his inner conflict bringing a plague down on the heads of all around him until he clears himself with his own, internal gods.

It's not directed by a woman, but the DP is the Argentine Natasha Braier (cinematographer for 2007's extraordinary In the City of Sylvia), and it's largely due to her that this one is great as it is. It makes the whole of Australia look like the scrubbiest part of the Mojave, the part you fly past on the Bakersfield-Barstow Highway, but there's beauty in the way the camera looks at it. This "post-collapse" world has a cohesion to it. Things are crumbling uniformly, guns are more plentiful than food, and you pay for everything with American dollars. Shelters are jerry-rigged and fortified, women are scarce, men are losing their souls. Braier's camera is both steady and unobtrusive, and the way it lingers, unwavering, allows for brilliance from these actors. You knew Guy Pearce was going to be brilliant, right? and he is; the revelation is Robert Pattinson, utterly heartbreaking as the twitchy, watchful man-child, Rey.

spotlight: sometimes oscar goes home with nobody's favorite

(2015. dir: Tom McCarthy) We've made a tramp of him over the years, Oscar. Instead of mounting the mantelpiece of the year's best movie, the one that will be the classic, remembered and treasured down through the ages, he goes home with the safe guy (Crash), or the guy who made the most clamorous din (James Freakin' Cameron, anyone?) or the guy who took a stab at something that nobody wants to look at too closely, and so everyone pats him on the back and murmurs, "nicely done, take Oscar," while looking, embarrassed, away.

So remind me: why did this win? Because journalist-as-workingman's-hero movies have a long and beloved tradition? Because pedophilia tolerated from the seat of centuries-old power is, let's face it, nobody's idea of a good thing? Maybe I'd allow it in a year of fair-to-middlin' offerings, but there are at least five movies from 2015 I'd have Oscar-ified before this one. Hell, I'd have sent the statue home with JJ Abrams' Star Wars first.

If you're going in looking for All the President's Men (and yes, yes, I confess it, I was), you're going to suffer mad disappointment. It's got none of the dynamic chemistry between leads, none of the suspense, none of that lovely, dark paranoia which takes over the last half hour. None of the powerhouse performances, no Hoffman, Redford, Robards. Remember how in that old beauty even the tiny roles were filled by wonderful actors? Jane Alexander, Lindsay Crouse, Ned Beatty, Valerie Curtin, Robert Walden, Martin Balsam, Allyn McLerie, Hal Holbrook.

Alright, enough nostalgia for beautiful things past. And nothing against the actors here. It is, very consciously, an ensemble piece, in which no single human shines particularly brightly. The fact that Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams were nominated for Oscars reflects how little imagination the Academy has, how ready it is to fill in the blanks on the ballot with decent but unexceptional performances. (Although I do respect the way Ruffalo makes small but true changes in his manner and physique and presentation for each new role. And if I hadn't known that was Liev Schreiber, I think I wouldn't have guessed it was Liev Schreiber. And I do love Stanley Tucci, and how wonderful was it to see Billy Crudup again? As he ages, and his ridiculous level of prettiness morphs into something more interesting, that weird energy, which was always there but obscured by pulchritude, shines through more fully. No wonder he never plays leads anymore. He's so fascinating to watch, it might be exhausting if he were the center of a film.)

But back to the frustrations. The script is nowhere. At no time does anyone say anything extraordinary. It's all, front to back, exposition, with a scattered aside or two when the journalists voice their creeped-out opinions about the bad guys, but even those are uninspired in wording. And there is no dynamic tension. The thing is edited, it seems quite consciously, to move forward at an unchangingly steady clip, avoiding both emotional highs and lows. This may have been done to represent the constancy of a reporter's plodding but thorough work-pace, but it does nothing to promote gripping drama. The camera, my boyfriend pointed out, has a tendency to pull back away from the group as they're recognizing a breakthrough, instead of encroaching. It's a subconscious thing, right? You pull the camera in, the brain says, "This is important; I should watch closely." You pull out, it says, "The crucial part is done. Oh, look at those pretty windows." It's as if director, screenwriter, cameraman, and editor conspired to keep us from investing too emotionally in the story. And, congratulations, guys, it sure worked with me.

The one good thing I can say about the telling of this story, and this is fairly huge, I admit: it never descended entirely into Good vs Evil. It somehow resisted that usual Hollywood, Easy-Street route of giving All Catholics the black hats or even All Reporters big, shiny, white stetsons. Maybe that's why it got its Oscar, for toeing a delicate line with a touch of grace and care and bonhomie.

All the same, I'll lay odds it'll never get a second viewing in my living room. And Star Wars I may watch a good fifty times or so, if I have the leisure.

jane got a gun: it ought to have been a woman's movie

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2015. dir: Gavin O'Connor) The question you ask yourself almost constantly during this uninspired oater is in how many crucial ways it might have differed had Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk about Kevin, Morvern Callar) directed it, as was originally planned. The visuals would have been less traditionally pretty, there might have been longer pauses and silences, and we hopefully would have got inside the head of Jane (Natalie Portman) instead of viewing her story in a general way through the eyes of her men. (Portman's best moment, when she reacts to the news that her daughter has been murdered, is devastatingly good, but we watch it at a double remove: in flashback, and through the eyes of her future husband.) The bad guys might have owned some heft, instead of being villainous cardboard cut-outs painted in broad streaks of jet black-heartedness.

Starting with a lame-assed title, the script feels like a draft-horse compiled piecemeal by committee, sometimes plodding gamely, often barely limping so that you cringe at its agonizing hobbledness, never reaching a full canter. Everything is a revelation to everyone, like in a soap opera. Although her old fiance has lived for at least two years in the same swath of prairie, it is news to her that he tracked her halfway across the country after his release from Andersonville, as if she'd assumed they ended up so close by accident.

Swelly strings poison the score and Jane becomes the usual, ass-kicking bad girl we so often see today, but only when her traditional role is evoked: she fills her bad guy full of lead when he dares to keep her child's whereabouts from her. As in many mediocre Westerns, gunshot injuries taken by good guys tend to heal rapidly and without ill effect (she's gut-shot, a terrible wound to take, but in the next scene there's no sign of repercussion). The small details are wrong (when Joel Edgerton's Dan is shaming her over her lack of prowess firing a pistol, she proves her worth with a hunting rifle by destroying the handle of the firewood-chopping ax. In real life, that ax is worth something, and you don't use it for target practice when you can use a hunk of firewood just as easily). The ending is awful and one assumes Ramsay would have kept no truck with it: Jane and her long-estranged true love, now reconciled, head off into that Manifest Destiny called California with their pair of sweet-faced daughters (one of whom has been raised in a whorehouse but is seemingly still virgin and undamaged), a ready-made nuclear family, rich with bags of gold from bounties on the heads of the cretinous dogs they overcame in their own private war, and now ready to live the American Dream.

I do like that Edgerton is so homely. It's nice that homely men get to play romantic leads. I have a dream that one day homely women will be able to play leads, too, like they do sometimes in English movies. When they need a homely woman in Hollywood, they cast Hilary Swank and stick a pair of spectacles on her perfectly-chiselled face.

swerve: australian desert noir

(2011. dir: Craig Lahiff) Swerve opens with a static, aerial shot of a three-tined, forked road, announcing its theme: one's Ineluctable Destiny. Why destiny, and not, say, the vagaries of fortune, which a three-tined road might easily connote? Something in the unblinking, unflinching way the camera stays put upon the image, and the unthinking, reckless way the tiny, dark car speeds forward along it, not toward the forks, but to the convergence.

We spend the next several minutes wordlessly with three separate drivers, all mad to reach some unknown destination, all headed straight for one another. Colin (David Lyons) we meet nursing his broken car at the roadside next to a sign gleefully advertising "the Neverest Hotel". The first words we hear are his: "give me a break," he mutters as he futzes with the radio, and that could be written on his tombstone. He's our hapless hero, not passive or weak, but a man absurdly, wonderfully honest in a dark, Faustian world. The second driver is speeding away from a violent drug deal with a suitcase full of colorful Australian money, and the third is Gina (Emma Booth), our femme fatale, going someplace fast, a place which never gets any more specific than "away from here".

One of the best things about this movie is that we never do settle just how fatale our femme is. Certainly she's out for herself, clever to a point of deviousness, used to bartering her sexuality for survival, battered to a point from which she can slip easily into a cold, near-sociopath state when forced into a corner. She's obviously not always telling the truth, but you can see she is when she looks sidelong at one of Colin's accusatory questions and says, "You won't believe me no matter what I say." Maybe this is what defines a femme fatale: a woman who trusts money over love and divorces her heart from her sexuality, using her charms as currency. Ultimately, perhaps, a woman who cannot trust a man, even our hero, whom we, from our privileged catbird seats, know without doubt is worth the extra effort. In the usual, noirish tradition, she's got a problematic husband (Jason Clarke as a corrupt cop and a wife-beater) and, once the instigating car-crash is done, there's that noir-necessary suitcase full of money to be chased and recovered and batted about, followed with shark-like tenacity by a cold-blooded assassin.

The most wonderful thing, and it is marvellous, is how Lahiff so often gives us unvoiced images to tell the story: a bathing suit abandoned at the bottom of a pool, a banknote used as a coaster and soaked with beer. It all ends with a return to the Neverest Hotel bar, and the barman telling that old tale about the Ineluctablity of Fate: the one about the guy who meets Death in Baghdad and runs away to Samara to avoid her. (Spoiler: it doesn't work.)

the female gaze: a sofia coppola double feature

the Virgin Suicides: (1999) *SPOILER ALERT* Right out of the gate, Coppola gives us a film so perfect, so gorgeous and hypnotic, so evocative of difficult truths about the darkness of adolescence, that if she were Harper Lee, everyone would say that Truman Capote wrote it. It's like Huston with the Maltese Falcon: the skills and mastery, and, more dumbfoundingly, the self-assurance, are already there on the maiden voyage.

In fact, this may be her best film to date. In subsequent ventures, she keeps hold of the skills, the imaginative and varying use of technique, the great framing, the inspired casting, a flair for period detail, the flawless choice of music, but she loses the strong backbone found in a great story. This is the only one sprung from a strong novel (by Jeffrey Eugenides), and she's translated it brilliantly into her own vernacular. In her following ventures, the stories will be more fluid, drawn from biography (Marie Antoinette) or from current events (the Bling Ring). Even Lost in Translation, so beloved by many, sees any greatness emerge not from strength of story but from the chemistry between Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, between Johansson and Coppola, and between Coppola and Tokyo.

The Virgin Suicides brings to life a sleepy suburb in a late '70s summer, the lazy, mesmeric soundtrack slapping up against an impending sense of doom symbolized by the sickness of the trees in every yard, and the felling notices posted to them. The mystery at the film's heart, the crippling malaise which pulls the girls to their deaths, is never addressed outright, as the boys who grew up obsessing over it never figured it out themselves. Coppola gives us glimpses enough, though: the oldest sister tossing off a comment about being "raffled off" among the football players as Homecoming dates, the youngest sister counting the number of species declared extinct in the year. After the "stone fox" Lux (Kirsten Dunst) is courted, seduced, and abandoned by the school's heartthrob-stoner Trip (Josh Hartnett), she becomes addicted to rousing male desire. The boys who idolize these girls, including Trip, interviewed as an adult in rehab (Michael Pare), use the memory of them to keep alive a dream of romance, whereas the girls themselves have discovered the rot of impossibility at its core.

Marie Antoinette: (2006) Coppola has a strong vision, along with the confidence and technical prowess to display it rather wonderfully before us. That vision, as communicated here, seems to be about how much fun it is shopping, partying, giggling and gossiping with one's girlfriends, and gleaning affection from ugly little lap-dogs when it can't be found from one's husband or in one's surroundings.

As the movie continues, at its own, assured pace, the question seems to become a phenomenological one: what really is worth one's effort? All the agony Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst again) undergoes to master the absurd niceties of the French court and to bear the requisite children, and yet we are in the privileged position of knowing that all her successes will come to nothing. What, then, is worthwhile? She eventually achieves the affection and sex she wants from her husband, finds sexual passion with a Swedish soldier, and some simple contentment in amateur theatricals and on her own miniature farm. Her passion results in nothing but memory, her girl-friendships come across as ultimately shallow and worth very little, and even her final, noble gestures, like standing by her husband when she might still bolt for safety, or bowing before the slavering mob, they both seem, in the end, without much merit beyond the symbolic.

So Coppola isn't giving us a clear answer, unless it's that the journey is the point, and the destination always death, one way or another. Truth be told, she seems to lavish the most attention on the buying of shoes and wearing of fineries, as if that is where her heart really lies.

She has such magnificent abilities, in other words, and apparently no story worth telling.

safe haven: they got the ghost thing wrong

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2013. dir: Lasse Hallstrom) Welcome to Nicholas Sparks' world, where destiny guides wounded soul-mates across untold miles to find guaranteed and unadulterated bliss gazing into one another's eyes. Where dead folks walk around in corporeal bodies to act as guardian angels, bringing the recalcitrant (because I've been so hurt before!) lovers together.

(OK, answer me this: if you found out that your good friend and confidante was actually your new lover's dead wife... first of all, did it seem strange to you that nobody else ever saw her but you? How is it you never actually mentioned your new best friend to your lover or anyone else in the tiny, tiny fishing village in which you now live where everyone knows everyone? But, OK, let's say you didn't, and now you get to the point where the truth is revealed: your best friend is, indeed, the beloved, dead wife of your new love. Do you, as they do in Nicholas Sparks world, say, "Ah, the universe is working in total harmony to guide me into new love and happiness! Sunshine and roses all around." Or is it more likely you'd be like, "Holy FUCK! DEAD people are WALKING AROUND. I could have reached out and touched her. She sat in my freaking KITCHEN, man. I'm going to scrub everything with antiseptic. Maybe I should hang rosaries? Does that only help if you're Catholic?" Seriously, if you had verbal and continuing intercourse with a dead person, it would change everything about the way you lived. It would pull the rug out from beneath so many certainties that we hold to be self-evident that you would no longer be able to live in the world in the same glib, unthinking way we take for granted. Plus, everyone would decide you're crazy, because that's just easier than having to rethink one's entire paradigm. So no sunshine and roses for you, Petunia.

Along those lines, look at this: you've finally escaped your abusive husband, a man so fixated on tracking you down and reclaiming you that he destroyed his life to do it. You escaped him by turning his own gun against him and watching him bleed out on the dock in front of your new boyfriend's waterfront home. Once the universe has provided incontrovertible proof that the human personality survives death, proof in the form of an ex-wife so driven by love for her family that she could not let go the mortal coil until she saw them safely fitted with an appropriate help-meet, how are you ever going to sleep again, waiting for that ex-husband to come back? If love drives a ghost to solid actions on the physical plane, what will grasping, compulsive hatred do? How are you ever going to look in a mirror again without dreading to see his veangeful grin over your shoulder? I believe I can say with some certainty that your nights of peaceful sleeping are over.)

The ghost business (which obviously Sparks didn't think through properly) aside, the big shock here is that this romantic claptrap is actually pretty good, if you can withstand the hogwasheries that crush the truth from almost any Hollywood romance. Hallstrom has a handle on it, using music and editing to particular advantage. The leads are good enough company (I'm always surprised that Josh Duhamel is as good as he is, I guess because he always makes movies I could care less about), and there's a tense subplot that keeps the thing moving. In fact, the two best things about it are the way Hallstrom tricks us, in a good way, into thinking the she-hero's back-story is different than it actually is, and the reveal is ultimately very satisfying. The other thing is David Lyons' outstanding performance as an obsessed cop. This guy generally does network television, so we hardly ever get to see him at his best, but he really shows his colors here, and he's fantastic. My favorite is the moment when he says, "I found you." It's, all at once, heart-breaking and bone-chilling.