double feature from the forties: the set-up and ladies in retirement

the Set-Up: (1949. dir: Robert Wise) After Body and Soul, this is the best boxing movie ever. Robert Ryan is brilliant, his broken face shining with doomed optimism. It's a black and white world set in the ass-end of the city, the part where Hunsecker and Falco never dare to venture, a city carved out of noir lighting. It pulses with sweat and neon, it beats to the sounds of blowsy music spilling from too-bright doorways, punctuated by bursts of too-loud laughter and the occasional train roaring from an unexpected tunnel. It's the kind of world where a girl making out with her beau on a fire escape cackles when she sees you creeping along the alleyway below, callously oblivious to your crumbling world. The camera moves smoothly, and the story moves smoothly, with the feeling of destiny unspooling like malevolent silk.

And a supper of a hamburger, two cans of vegetable soup and two bottles of beer costs a buck sixteen, tax included, at which Audrey Trotter grumbles, "You oughtta throw in a floor-show for that."

Ladies in Retirement: (1941. dir: Charles Vidor) You forget how really good a screen actress Ida Lupino is. She photographs well, and so trusts the camera to pick up on subtleties. This is a play adapted to screen, which is generally a bore, and doesn't work here any better than usual. Still, Vidor ratchets up the Gothic with moments of near-Expressionist use of chiaroscuro, the grotesquerie of extreme close-up to convey unnatural emotion, and the age-old trick of setting the story in an eternally fog-enshrouded cottage on the moors.

The story is moth-eaten: a woman caring for her two nutso but harmless sisters kills the selfish ex-whore who refuses to open her house to the annoying and demanding women, taking over both her house and income. Complication ensues with the entrance of the family's caddish nephew, who susses out the situation and tries to wrest control to his own advantage. Edith Barrett and even the redoubtable Elsa Lanchester are annoying and cliched as the two mad sisters, but Louis Hayward is rather good as the faux-cockney nephew. He's like Dan Duryea, only less so; Duryea would have been slightly more clownish, and therefore also more terrifying in moments of truth.

It's good for visuals; it's good in moments. The old-fashioned story, though, with its outdated morals, barely translates across 75 years' worth of paradigm shift. Is this retired prostitute really obligated to take on unpaying boarders just because she earned her money through looseness of character rather than more socially acceptable channels, like inheriting from a dead husband? Is she really, as the Lupino character posits, responsible for those less fortunate than herself, even when they don't respect civilized boundaries? In other words, does she really deserve to die because she's not Dorothy Day?

misogynist double feature: one deadly summer and cold in july

One Deadly Summer: *SPOILER ALERT* (1983. dir: Jean Becker) The French (in decades past, anyway. I'm not sure they persist, as I've given them, for the most part, up) have loved to give us films about a gorgeous woman who is so crazy, so entirely ratfucked by neurosis, that she is sexually available (although never emotionally so) to even the homeliest man who exhibits a little persistence. The trade-off is that by the end of the film his life will be ruined, but what sex he will have until then! What wonderful obsession! "She was too wild," this particular fellow admits, resigned, in the end, "too animal." Ah, yes. We are to be feared and tamed, we women. We must learn this lesson from the French, over and over, it seems.

No one is better than Adjani at playing crazy, even different kinds of crazy. I'm trying unsuccessfully to think of a film in which she plays a normal person. It's just not her place in the French zeitgeist. And this kind of crazy, this kaleidoscope-shifting from spoiled brat to careless seductress to terrified innocent to stalking predator, she's a master. When she makes the shift into genuine little girl, you'd swear she really was ten years old. When she squints, you'd swear she really was badly near-sighted. The brilliance of Adjani, though, doesn't excuse this movie. Rape is a plot-point in many French films from that time, and Becker does not shy from showing it to us. Indeed, there is a certain Gaspar Noe-ish voyeurism about the whole venture.

The movie begins inside the head of the smitten fellow (ridden by lust, not by love), and I nearly turned it off, mad at having been suckered into thinking I'd be watching a movie about a woman, instead finding just another movie about a man's image of a woman and how he manipulates her into his bed. About a half hour in, though, the narrative voice jumps, without warning, from his head into hers, and then into her mother's, then his aunt's, etc. It's a bold device, albeit lazy, since a better director might be showing us these things instead of spelling them out diegetically. This little girl's craziness has its roots in the tragedy which her mother survived, a rape which fathered her, but the issue is not really between mother and daughter (although the 20-year-old still finds solace at her mother's breast. Yes, we get to watch it. The French will do anything to titillate you, if you're a heterosexual man) but between her and the father who adores her and yet will not give her his name since she is not of his loins. This seemingly minor reluctance on the part of an otherwise loving father creates in the little girl an unbridgable abyss, resulting in a psychotic episode on her part which changes all their lives forever.

And so we have that enigmatic, French thing: a film about a woman who is unbearably strong, in that she single-handedly ruins the lives of everyone around her, and unutterably weak, her desperation for father-love finally driving her into the patriarchal hands of the insane asylum, where she can, finally, relax.

Cold In July: (2014. dir: Jim Mickle) This is a good movie. It's an interesting story well-told. Sam Shepard gives his wonderful, dry, interesting line readings, and shares a good buddy-chemistry with Don Johnson. Michael C. Hall is convincing as our everyman, and I love all things Nick D'Amici.

I tell you what I'm done with, though: movies that use the bodies of nubile young girls, non-characters, not allowed to speak, not allowed to wear more clothes than a Victoria's Secret model, they use these girls in scenes meant simultaneously to rouse up dicks and rationalize the self-righteous blood-bath which will follow, laying waste to the bad guys. They say it's in the name of justice for these ravaged girls, but really it's about movies wanting to titillate men with rape scenes then titillate them some more with bloody, righteous massacres. And I'm getting to the point at which I'm done with that, no matter how well done it is.

2015 in review: crimson peak

*SPOILER ALERT*

(dir: Guillermo del Toro) Grand Guignol Gothic ghost story by a master of magnificent self-indulgence. Mia Wasikowska plays Edith, our Gothic heroine in hoop-skirts and spectacles, an aspiring novelist who has endured ghostly encounters of her own, whose father is an American tycoon, and who allows herself to be swept off her feet by a romantic but broke English nobleman (Tom Hiddleston). Returning with him to his secluded mansion which he shares with no servants, just an enigmatic, smouldering sister (Jessica Chastain), she finds herself suffering the plight of many a Gothic heroine: that is, isolated, haunted, persecuted, and running around eerie hallways illuminated only by candelabrum and wearing only a nightie.

Fortunately for Edith, she's not in a Le Fanu story, or there'd be morphine hallucinations involved. On the other hand, she does share with the majority of Gothic heroines certain unfortunate traits: a tendency toward hysteria and thick-headed thinking, naievete, and a weird passivity which seems foreign to a modern sensibility. (Why does she keep drinking the tea, which makes her pass out and wake spitting blood?) The one quality she maintains which keeps our interest is an unvanquished curiosity, and this, of course, will save her in the end.

This particular mansion (and, as is traditional in Gothics, the aristocratic family it represents) is mouldering and decayed not just metaphorically, with a vast hole in its roof letting the snow and leaves in and the red clay earth shoving up through cracks in the floor. The ghosts are not whispering suggestions, but hysterical, ridiculously aggressive creatures wearing no skins, just bloody musculatures or spidery underskins blackened by cholera.

I suspect this movie wants to be Coppola's Dracula, with its overbright color scheme (teal and orange to begin with, turning a complete fairy-tale red-white-and-black by the end), but it lacks both the palpable sensuality and the macabre playfulness to do it. What it does share with that absurd but superior effort are inconsistent accents, copious amounts of blood, and a complete and utter shamelessness. (For a hilariously funny exploration of its shamelessness, see the conversation by Nicole and Mallory about it over at the Toast. It's got big spoilers, but don't miss it once you've seen the movie.) Unlike the Coppola film, the historicity here is uninspired, like going to a museum, where the dust-covered details are there but never spring into life. The movie culminates in, I kid you not, a Victorian chick-fight between the black queen and the white queen, wielding butcher knives, cleavers, even snow shovels.

It's too bad. I thought I was going to love this.

a concise list of my favorite movies of 2015

1-Bone Tomahawk: Dialogue with its own poetry to it, and a story blending Western and Horror elements so well that it defies categorization. Kurt Russell is dignified and believable as the small-town sheriff tasked to retrieve hostages taken by a band of primitive cavemen. Richard Jenkins is heartbreakingly good as the mild-mannered deputy who accompanies him. I only watched it once because it contains the most brutal killing I've ever witnessed. It is, in a unique way, utterly chilling.

2-the Revenant

3-Mad Max: Fury Road

4-Star Wars: the Force Awakens: I can't resist it. After years of Lucas-resentment, I can't resist the possibly cheap but utterly joyful nostalgic pull of it. How about the zestful partnership between Rey and Finn? And what about that Kylo Ren, huh? Who can possibly resist?

5-Cop Car: A modern Tom and Huck steal the wrong patrol car and set off on an adventure. A superlatively well-told story using minimal dialogue. Kevin Bacon gets my Oscar for transforming himself into the tough and corrupt sheriff, managing somehow to look like Abraham from the Walking Dead while being half his size.

6-the Queen of Earth: Great opening. Great relationship between the two leads (Elizabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston). Masterful allowance of subtlety and the unspoken. The closest thing to a Bergman film that I've seen in a long time.

7-It Follows: Minimalist horror at its finest. There is much genius at work in horror these days, and this is a low-budget example.

8-Steve Jobs: Just when I was ready to give up on Danny Boyle entirely. I don't give a crap about Apple or Jobs, but this movie was inspired, and I can't get enough of Fassbender.

9-Slow West: The title says it all. Fassbender continues his ascendancy into zen-like mastery with his three unmissable performances this year: this, Jobs, and the bloody Thane of Cawdor.

10-Predestination: It's funny to think with what fury I used to hate Ethan Hawke. Nowadays, he's doing some of the best genre work around, including this one, the Purge, and Sinister. This is from a Heinlein story, and, flawed as it is, I love the boldness, the twistiness, the time travel stuff.

the hand: vengeance upon the castrating bitches

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1981. dir: Oliver Stone) This is an early work of Stone's, not a good one, but I suspect a labor of, if not love, then some kind of obsession, in which he muses upon the questions, "Wouldn't the world be nicer if women would just stay in their designated positions and stop making trouble for us? Why won't they stop making us punish and kill them?"

Jonathan Lansdale (Michael Caine) is a thriving comics artist whose main character is a Conan-like warrior whose queen has been stolen from him and his quest is to retrieve her. In an early scene, the family cat (a vicious black She-Cat called Sheba) is brutalizing a lizard and Lansdale's little daughter shows him how the disengaged tail twitches whenever she pokes a stick anywhere near it, as if it is still alive, still somehow attached to the beast itself. In the fomenting scene, Lansdale's selfish, emasculating, She-Wolf wife (Andrea Marcovicci) drives him down a two-lane country road while simultaneously telling him she wants to leave him. As they quarrel, she tries to pass a truck and barely avoids an oncoming car, but -- you guessed it -- Lansdale's drawing hand is sheared off in the incident. Although the wife and the cops comb the field, they cannot find it. (She probably wasn't looking very hard, as she was busy secretly gloating at her successful emasculation.) Lansdale himself, however, sees The Hand in dreams and visions, molding and eaten by spiders and bugs.

He tries vainly to teach his left hand to draw, and his comic is given over (by his emasculating She-Publisher) to a different artist. ("You've weakened him," Lansdale accuses the new guy, "by making him look too deeply inside himself. All he wants is his queen back.") When the offending storyboards turn out to be ruined, scrawled across in ink, Lansdale's career is finished. On his way out of the building, he is accosted by a drunken bum, also one-handed, a great cameo by Stone himself, and he becomes The Hand's first human victim.

Folks are harsh about this film. Yes, it is not just rife with misogyny, misogyny is the foundation-stone upon which the piece is built. Also, it sports its cheese. There's a climactic scene in which Lansdale is fighting The Hand, and, yes, here is cheese to spare; you can't help but laugh. Still, the metaphor is deeply felt, so much so you wonder if Stone wasn't going through a humiliating divorce at the time himself. Although Platoon is still five years up the road, he's already making the kinds of bold choices that will set him apart from the rank and file. When Lansdale fades into his fugue states, the color drains from the screen into shades of grey, preparing us for what will come. Once he's moved to a Californian forest to teach cartooning at a community college, we watch him demonstrate to his class how the emotion of rage can be simply suggested with a few basic strokes to the face; during one of Landsdale's many moments of humiliation (always, always with a woman as root-cause), Stone lets us linger on Caine's face as it hardens into the rage-mask.

Although the artist is forced, eventually, to take responsibility for the works of his own hand, Stone doesn't let the ladies (ie: the Emasculating Bitches) off so easily. The final scene has Lansdale in a mental institution, being worked over by a powerful She-Shrink, played by the marvellous Viveca Lindfors. She patronizes him, insists she knows better than he does, claims she wants to help him to mend, and, boy howdy, does SHE get her comeuppance. Then the credits roll over a self-satisfied smirk on the wronged psychopath's face.

2015 in review: diablo and fifty shades of grey

Diablo: (dir: Lawrence Roeck) Diablo is an interesting idea for a Western which has gone badly awry. At first, it looks like the Outlaw Josey Wales: an ex-Union soldier is burned out of his farm by bandits who steal away his wife, and he buckles up and goes after them. It's Scott Eastwood, too, looking just like his dad when he smiles except handsome, and in the first scenes he's doing almost an impression, with the flat, well-enunciated readings and the white-toothed grimaces. As the story evolves into a strange Night Sea-Journey about a soldier irreparably wounded by War, it is fatally hampered by an unforgivable score of lush pomposity set against far too much gorgeous scenery. In other words, if it's reaching for "epic", its grasp is nowhere near the mark, and it loses the punch it might have had (and it certainly might) in the miscalculation.

Ultimately, we get two successfully gripping scenes: in the first, our hero seeks out a fellow ex-soldier, well-played by Danny Glover, and we discover his true nature. The other is the stalking scene toward the end, when our hero finally fully embodies his true self and we watch him at his work. Crucially, in this scene, the music at last lets loose its fascist grip on the piece, and that's partly why it works so well. Also, Eastwood is not to be discounted as an actor. The early "imitation" doesn't stretch past the first quarter hour, and by the half-point of the film he's already emoted more fully and convincingly than his dad did in the first half of his career.

And the ending? The ending is just awful, a bad cheat.

IN SUMMARY: It could have been a good movie, should have been, in fact. It has the actors and the story. Alas, it also has a director who ruins the whole thing.

Fifty Shades of Grey: (dir: Sam Taylor-Johnson) Equal parts completely incredible fantasy (chiselled, gorgeous zillionaire, accomplished at both dour, classical piano and the piloting of helicopters, who has never slept in the same bed with a woman, whose own family has never seen him in company with a woman, loses his cool over a girl who, despite having sensuous and loving parents and despite heavy partying with her libidinous roommate and friends, is not only still a virgin mere days prior to college graduation, but has never even "done other things"), hysterical Harlequin romance ("Why won't you let me touch you? I love you!" "You can't love me!" "Why are you trying to change me?" "It's you who's changing me!" ad nauseam) and naughty S&M primer (although the Spader/Gyllenhall Secretary carries a truer feel), it's saved from its own shallow absurdity by perfect casting and a director's loving care.

Dakota Johnson (as the porn-star-named Anastasia Steele) is pretty like a normal girl is pretty and projects sufficient cute, dorky intelligence to justify catching the attention of the man who could be spending his time in the hot-tub with the super-models if he so desired. Jamie Dornan, our mysterious Mr. Grey, carries the cool distance and the charisma with just enough reluctant warmth showing through to convince us he's truly the Dom Who Longs to Please. The two share a super chemistry, and therein lies half the battle.

Then, just when the ups and downs of the silly non-relationship are making you roll your eyes and slump down in your seat, it's got this killer end-image, just a perfect ending.

IN SUMMARY: Just as Diablo's director took potential gold and crappified it, Taylor-Johnson has taken a piece of pretty mucky dross, shined it up, polished it with some self-knowing quirks, glittering visuals, sexy music and super editing, giving us a thing much better than we, its audience, deserved to expect.

little darlings: formative

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1980. dir: Ronald F Maxwell) Amazing to think this was R-rated when it emerged. There's no nudity beyond Matt Dillon stripping down to his skivvies (far more heat-inducing, as I recall, than that later, too-much-ballyhooed Tom Cruise underwear-dance in Risky Business). There's relatively little cussing, and no violence outside of one well-deserved girl-punch to a nose and an unconvincing, momentary girl-fight. There's a lot of teen smoking, but the ratings board didn't care about smoking back then, it was just part of the cycle of life and death. A couple of the hoodier teens drink some lame-looking canned beer, but the only drugs are the ginseng pills the hippie-girl (Cynthia Nixon!) dispenses to encourage sexiness.

And that has to be the crux of the matter, that awkward, teenaged focus on the Sexiness. Carted off to summer camp, rich teen Ferris (Tatum O'Neal, badly cast and looking too old for the role) and tough girl Angel (the kind of kid who in those days would have been called, not consciously derogatorily, believe it or not, just as a matter of identification, a "dirtbag"), played with stunning truth and vulnerability by Kristy McNichol, find themselves the object of a camp-wide bet: whoever loses their virginity first wins. It may be that the upgrade from PG to R came because it was girls, and not boys, doing the clumsy, innocent exploring. In any case, most of it is not so much about sex as it is about the weird things our peers, parents, and society try to make us believe about it, and how adolescence is the time when the discrepancy has to be confronted and somehow reconciled.

Amazing, also, to think that a human of the male persuasion was even allowed to direct it, it's so distinctly about and aimed at young girls, but those were days when women weren't much allowed behind the camera, I guess. (Who did we have in America back then? Seidelman, Amy Heckerling, Martha Coolidge, Penelope Spheeris, and that's about it for the early part of the decade, right?) Maxwell, who would eventually find his true work in Civil War epics (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals), does a creditable job with a woman-penned script (by Kimi Peck and Darlene Young).

Anyone who went to summer camp back then will tell you the kids had nowhere NEAR that amount of autonomy, it was all about regimentation, and that the Armand Assante character, an athletics counsellor chosen by Ferris for The Deed, would not have forgiven her so fully and quickly for so nearly destroying his reputation and possibly his career. But the stumbling into sex that Angel and Dillon's Randy do, a rushed and unwieldy but heartfelt courtship leading to a deflowering in a boathouse, becomes a wonderful unfolding when Angel opens up afterward, saying she didn't expect it to be "so personal", then, "God, I feel so lonesome." As a girl of the same age watching it in the theater at the time, it was jaw-droppingly thought-provoking. (We grew up in the '70s. This was just before AIDS hit. We weren't taught that sex was personal. Everything in our culture told us if you took it too seriously, you were a drag.)

The emphasis on friendship between the girls being the important object in the end, after Angel (with wisdom I remember envying) turns down Randy's offer to start over again (she points out that it's too late, as they'd begun in the middle) is a truth I didn't recognize at the time. When you're fifteen, you take your girlfriends for granted; it's the boys who are the fathomless, life-consuming mystery.