things i've been watching: september edition

the Man Who Would Be King: (1975. dir: John Huston) By God, I love this movie. I loved it when it came out and, by God, I still do. It had to be one of the last from the politically incorrect side of the Empire, or, anyway it cast nostalgic eyes back toward Empire while making shrewd comments about it. Never have Michael Caine or Sean Connery done anything to match it, and as a pair, they are unstoppable. Extrapolated from a surprisingly lean short story by Kipling, Huston fills it out and his telling is spectacular. It's got the old '70s epic feel without ever losing itself in the impersonal. The sense of foreboding that arrives with the lovely Roxanne (played by Caine's wife Shakira) and her ululating entourage is one of the eeriest things I know on film.


Vicky Cristina Barcelona: (2008. dir: Woody Allen) When's the last time you thought a new Woody Allen film was funny? Matchpoint had me on the edge of my seat, but no chucklefest that. So here he is, at last, ladies and gentlemen, the man you've been pining for all these years: please welcome, in a special return engagement, the Old, Funny Woody Allen. He's still preoccupied with the hows and whys of human relations. He's come through some bad habits with the camera (that shaky-cam phase in his middle period, for one) into a place of elegant inconspicuousness. I had two worries in the first few scenes: that the narration was too extensive, and that the actors might be getting ready to fall into that old we-all-want-to-talk-like-Woody-talks thing which can be so cringe-inducing. The actors manage in the end to avoid the hero-worship trap, and the narration allows us to circumvent the exposition that bores Allen so he can get to the bits that don't, so it all works out.

As part of my Spontaneous Christian Bale Film Festival I sat through Captain Corelli's Mandolin (which, once I accepted it as big, color-saturated sentimental hogwash, was not as excruciating as I'd expected. Christian Bale gives one of his always intriguing performances, for one). It brought up the old Penelope Cruz enigma. She's not just good, she's crazy good: genuinely, poetically, with a physical grace and subtlety of expression that are to be treasured. So why don't I like her? I never enjoy her company. The time I came closest was in Abre Los Ojos, so maybe it's a language thing, because HERE, in Barcelona, she's won me at last. She's not only perfect as a self-obsessed artist and crazy ex-wife, she's hilarious. When she and Javier Bardem have the last two of their wild-eyed, half-Spanish, half-English scenes, the timing is so spot-on you don't even need to know what they're saying. You could switch the subtitles off and still they'd have you laughing.

Another great find is Rebecca Hall as Vicky (Sarah in the Prestige) who manages the ultra-intellectual, neurotic Woody Allenisms without getting anywhere near caught in the sticky web of Woody Allenishness.

Also, as a Spanish coworker of mine pointed out with misty eyes, it really, really makes you want to go to Spain.


Firecreek: (1968. dir: Vincent McEveety) McEveety's resume reads like a TV guide covering twenty years. He had his fingers in several of the classics, from Star Trek (this is the guy who gave us "Balance of Terror", in which we were first introduced to Romulans and their pesky cloaking device, "Patterns of Force", which pitted Kirk and Spock against the Nazis, and "Spectre of the Gun", that shining piece of absurdity which set them down in the midst of the gunfight at the OK Corral) to Gunsmoke, none of which would have prepared me for this creepy, awkward Western from the late sixties. With one foot in classic cowboy mode and the other in the impending existential spaghettis, it plays like a post-Kitty Genovese commentary about the criminality of standing by protecting oneself while atrocities are committed. Although its violence is Disneyfied compared with its Italian counterparts, it's not an easy film to watch. The humiliations of the townfolks are discomfitingly photographed in long, invasive camera shots, and the rape of a townswoman by the horribly giggling James Best is awful.

Jimmy Stewart is the part-time sheriff in over his head among outlaws who take over his town. Henry Fonda takes on a difficult role as the tenuous gang-leader and makes gold of it, not by finding the truth of the character, but the way he always does: by remaking the character into Henry Fonda, a man so fascinating in his quiet charisma that we don't care that there are loose ends which make no sense.

and a bit more of my spontaneous christian bale film festival

the Prestige: (2006. dir: Christopher Nolan) In the opening shot, the camera pans silently across a forest floor cluttered with top hats. Bale's soft voiceover asks, "Are you watching closely?" In the final shot, we dolly away from a dead man through a burning basement filled with glass tanks, Michael Caine's voiceover explaining that we don't see the secret because we don't really want to see it. They're two brilliant endpieces, and between them lies a masterful piece of storytelling. The less you know about it going in, the better. I will say, though, that even if he'd never made another film, Nolan would still have my unwavering attention just for this.




Mary, Mother of Jesus: (1999. dir: Kevin Connor) Another uninspired, paint-by-numbers nativity. This one was Catholic-backed, by the Shriver family, I think, and it got some press for being a little scandalous, possibly because Mary has a second son in it. I guess that's why these Lives of Mary are so dull, because it's so easy to offend folks. The good news about this one is that Jesus is Christian Bale; the bad news is he's kind of a mama's boy. It's a bit of a maternal fantasy, in fact. Mary gets a lot credit: the parables, for instance, are stories that she told Jesus at his bedside as a boy, and it's only through his mother's continued prompting that he bothers to turn the water into wine at the wedding. Since we follow Mary we miss out on many of the incidents one looks for... a particular supper, for instance, or that forty days in the desert, or a certain agony in a certain garden. A nice touch is that Jesus looks drawn, haunted, and sickly from the time he embraces his calling through much of his ministry, exactly as you might do if you'd taken on a job that only you can do and upon which the well-being of the entire earth throughout history depends.

spontaneous christian bale film festival

Equilibrium: (2002. dir: Kurt Wimmer) Ridiculous but interesting faux-Matrix stab at Orwellianism. Emotion has been outlawed in this futureworld in attempt to save mankind from self-destruction. In pursuit of this end, indulgence in art, music, literature, and all things beautiful is proscribed and punishable by execution, and all citizens are required to take continuing doses of an emotion-numbing drug. The silly bit is that any little kid (or Sartre) could tell you that it's OTHER PEOPLE who rouse up emotions of all kinds, and any attempt to quell passion is doomed to failure unless everyone is quarantined into constant solitary confinement. The story doofs around looking pretty harebrained most of the time: Bale is John Preston, virtuoso of the gestapo in charge of tamping down all that crazy emoting, until his partner crosses over to the emote-y side, and then he meets a girl... et cetera...

BUT... and here's the good part... somewhere inside the silliness and "gun kata" (don't ask) is a really beautiful heart. The section of the film in which Preston stops taking his drugs and rediscovers beauty and sensation is absolutely stunning, a tribute to both Bale's performance and the artistry of the filming. A gesture as simple as removing a glove to feel the balustrade as he walks up a staircase becomes more sensuous than most love scenes. And imagine the power of going your whole life without music, then suddenly hearing Beethoven. I'll own the DVD, just for that twenty minutes or so of epiphany.




American Psycho: (2000. dir: Mary Harron) This might have been a good film, judging by its production values, had it been based on a story--even the same story--as written by, say, JD Salinger, or Joss Whedon, or you, dear reader. Had you written the source material for this film, it might have been a decent view. We will never know, because in fact it was written by Brett Easton Ellis, whose stories are all, always, about Brand Names, the Names of Hip Places to Hang Out, and the Names of Celebrities. The vapid and loathesome characters who "people" his stories (I use the term loosely) exist for the sole purpose of speaking these sacramental words. Because this director has stuck by Ellis in his primary purpose (to hold lovingly to the light and admire the very shallowness for which he feigns disdain) what little story there is disintegrates into a stumbling idiocy of loose ends. Important characters vanish without sound or reason, just as does the mounting and gruesome evidence for the titular psycho's crimes, seemingly via Deus Ex Machina. Ellis' point seems to be that here in the shoals of our frivolous society, humans are entirely interchangeable, but the result is a sophomoric punchline instead of an ending.

For many years a child star in Britain, this is the movie that propelled Bale's full-grown adult potential for superstardom across the water, and it speaks well of him that he's turned down offers to do sequels.




the Machinist: (2004. dir: Brad Anderson) This one goes in a category I call Night Sea-Journey films, a strange, narcotic little piece that is half-dream, half-reality, and you don't know until the end which half is which. (Filed also in this category I keep Siesta and Jacob's Ladder, along with some Cronenberg titles, Naked Lunch, Existenz and Spider among them.) Night Sea-Journey films require a greater commitment toward suspension of disbelief than most, and the burden on the filmmaker is greater to bring the ends in to an ultimately satisfying design. The Machinist is very much a success in this respect, and the performances by Bale (skinny as a whippet) and his costars are compelling. It's also extraordinarily difficult to watch, like being caught in that grinding, exhausting sort of nightmare from which you wake feeling sleepless and spent.

dark was the knight: my two belated cents on the batman

>WARNING: SOME SPOILERS<

I was raised in a strictly Marvel household. Spiderman came calling regularly, as did the Fantastic Four and Thor, who sometimes brought along his Avenger friends. Those DC fellows were verboten, considered relics from another era, somehow out of touch with the modern world. Then, in 1986, DC and Frank Miller unleashed the Dark Knight Returns on the world and it was like an earthquake. There was nothing out of touch about this wounded fisher-king of a superhero. Suddenly it was Marvel left looking quaint and a little shopworn.

It took me a long time to watch Batman Begins, largely because I couldn't get a lather up about anything with such a pedestrian title, but also because the buzz that it sprang up from Miller's Dark Knight mythos wasn't borne out by the trailers. The Dark Knight graphic novels are all about aging: the bitterness, guilt, loss of idealism, all while watching one's body begin to decay and fail. Bruce Wayne is 55 when they begin, and has been retired and drunk since the second Robin was killed in action. The wormwood encounters between the silver-haired Wayne and the ever-buff, never-aging Clark Kent are brutal, particularly since Kent is an unquestioning soldier of the American government, entirely lacking in Wayne's agonizing doubt and introspection. What did these questions have to do with the young and virile Christian Bale version of the Batman?

It's too much to say I was underwhelmed when I did finally watch it; more accurate to say I was merely whelmed. I enjoyed myself, but let my itchy trigger finger stray to the fast-forward button during the climactic action scenes and also, decidedly, during the final walk through the rubble of Wayne Manor, when Katie Holmes gives her "Oh, Bruce, maybe someday, but not today..." yawners.

The Dark Knight, on the other hand, has upped the intrigue in the whole Batman matter considerably. Sitting in the darkened cinema, watching the darkened Gotham, it struck me that this might grow into something more interesting than the original novels. It's the scapegoat thing that really sold me: the idea that the Protector of the City must be so strong that he can and will, voluntarily, carry the entire shadow of that city, forego the name of hero, be hunted as a villain, all for the good of the city's soul. That's exactly the kind of axiology one wants to find whilst grubbing in the nightsoil of the Dark Knight's Gotham, and Christopher Nolan doesn't let down the side.

It was a bold move on his part to de-hyperbolize the place itself. This is the first realistic Gotham City I've ever seen-- stylistically, it was exaggerated even in Batman Begins. And there are good reasons for using exaggeration. You watch those old "Batman" shows on TV, or the other movies, there's no question that we're not in the real world, so you don't ask things like, "How the hell did the Joker manage to DO that?!" Now, suddenly, Gotham is a real city, in our real world, and nagging questions creep in, like, "OK. How the hell did the Joker manage to DO that?!" How do you plant thousands of bombs in the major hospital while the city is on a sort of terrorist red-alert and nobody notices until they go off? And If I tied up a soldier and stole his uniform to sneak into the Mayor's honor guard... again, while the city was on red alert for just such an incident in that very place... Well, I wouldn't get very far, even WITHOUT huge telltale scars on my face announcing exactly who I was. Things like that. Old Bruce pulls off near-miracles, too, but it's easier to shrug off. He is richer than Croesus, and rich folks with geniuses on the payroll can do stuff, end of story, or so those of us who scratch out a living day to day are prone to believe.

Most of the problems I had with the film concerned the Joker, in fact. Here's a fellow who claims to be the opposite of a schemer, the anti-schemer, the big spontaneous trickster guy without a plan, but he has HUGE plans (granted, he's also a big fat liar). Somehow his plans get carried out in spite of the fact that although his organization of petty criminals must be enormous, he has no right-hand guy, nobody he trusts... And yet he manages to keep complete control of these guys? Terror is a good discipline, certainly, but one guy? without backup? Hitler and Stalin and Capone had inner circles. All dictators and crime-bosses do. Nobody manages to stay on top of a criminal organization without trusted troops to do the wetwork... and, although the Joker is not one to shy away from the wetwork, there's no way he could do it all, not in an operation this size.

In the end, these are minor itches, and there are more things I love than hate about this Dark Knight: the script, its reversals and surprises, for starters. I even liked the car chases this time. I love Alfred's story about the Burmese jungle. I love Harvey Dent's speech about Rome and its protector, and I love the full and tragic human they've made out of Two-Face. I love the big thumpy music they play during some of the action scenes. I love the convict on the ferryboat who offers to bear the shadow for the whole boat, much as Batman will for the whole city. I've had to go back and watch it three times to decide finally, but I think Nolan has pulled off a triumph, one that might lead to increasingly wonderful sequels if he can keep his interest up. Even one, perhaps, when Bale is 55, playing a man who has been retired and drunk for ten years...

post-punk: radio on

Music feels sometimes like a gateway, or a catalyst for magic, particularly when you're young. I suspect there are few from any generation since vinyl came readily available that have not had at least a spell of their teenaged lives that was outlined, defined and painted into deep and velvet colors by the music of are what I was looking for, unless it was Adventure or God.

Radio On (1980. dir: Chris Petit) is a film that rises up out of that sensibility. Robert (David Beames) is a DJ so alienated from the world we not only never see him touch anyone, including the girlfriend who is leaving him and the German girl he picks up on the road ("Last night I thought we would have sex," she tells him, "but today I know that we won't,") he never manages to have a fully engaged conversation. This is the story--if you can call it that--of his road-trip through the bleak countryside of England as the snarling '70s were turning into the MTV '80s. Looking like a fellow that Paul Weller might hire to play keyboard for the Jam, he lives a nocturnal existence working at a tiny radio station, one of those DJs who so cares about music that he does annoying things like playing Ian Dury's "Sweet Gene Vincent" when someone has requested "Whatever Gets You Through the Night", because it's "better". (Hogwash. Not only is "Sweet Gene Vincent" not better than the simple but invigorating Lennon song, it's not even the best track on New Boots and Panties! Rant over; carry on.) His brother is dead under strange circumstances and he drives down to Bristol, ostensibly to check into it, but he never really does, not much. The death apparently had something to do with a rash of murders among a ring of pornographers, but those ends are left dangling, as are all others. This film is not about its story but about a sort of equal-parts bleak and joyous post-punk nihilism, and it survives across the years better than some of its more outre counterparts like Derek Jarman's ridiculous and cringe-worthy Jubilee from 1977, and probably better than my then-favorite, a little Susan Seidelman film called Smithereens which I haven't seen since it opened in 1982 but which I loved very sincerely at the time.

It is almost 1980 and the ferocious and fleeting moment of punk has flattened out into the electronic drone-pop of Kraftwerk, Lene Lovich, Devo, that sort of nowhere music which seemed interesting and odd at the time but was never designed to rouse one into greater life or passion. In fact, in one of the two spirited moments in the movie, Robert meets a petrol station attendant (played by Sting) who speaks with enthusiasm about his idol, Duane Eddy, but whose exuberance turns into a grimace when he hears the Kraftwerk on Robert's tapedeck.

It's an aimless and existential black-and-white ramble, less pretentious than most which answer to that description, and it captures a moment in time rather well. It evoked in me a nostalgia for that very alien and now lost England, before there was a Starbucks on every corner and the Millennium Bloody Eye scarred the landscape, back when you could no more find a well-made coffee than you could veg or decent condiments for your burger, but you could find a culture so different from the American that it was like, well, a foreign country.

The film's best bit is the opening, before we've met Robert, when the camera takes a leisurely look on its own around the dead brother's flat, focusing on a view out a window here, a photo and a bit of paper here, just a glimpse of the bathtub and its inhabitant there, and all the while David Bowie is singing the English/German version of "Heroes" in its entirety, a perfect song, one of the most buoyant songs ever recorded, joyful and tragic all in the same moment. And, as in the rest of life, it all flattens out a bit from there, because who can sustain perfection like that? Not even Bowie.

things i've been watching: july edition

The Mist (2007. dir: Frank Darabont): Bleak. Bleak. Decidedly bleak. Lovecraftian tentacles from space meet Shirley Jackson's venomous terror of provincialism and those who embody it. EM Forster (in Aspects of the Novel) once famously called Ulysses "a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud," and "a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell." Those words spring to mind when holding one's nose and lowering oneself into the sewer that is Stephen King's reality. Joyce's, anyway, was brilliant mud. Reading Stephen King is like a bad love affair with a dangerous drug: the thrills get secondary to nausea and disgust all too quickly.

King pretends to be setting his fantasies within our modern reality, convinces us he is doing so by including references to brand names and current fads, but his humans are peculiar, I think, to his own mind. For instance, I've never heard of a Christian leader who cusses like a sailor in public. It seems to me a poverty of mind that the writer can't think of a way to make the Big Bad Christian Villain truly loathesome except by having her swear like the bedridden Regan in the Exorcist. The most chilling portrait of an evil Christian I ever saw was Paul Scofield's inquisitor in the Crucible, precisely because he exuded scientific rationalism. This one, in spite of the extreme talents of Marcia Gay Harden, is just a cartoon. But then, most of King's characters are. Our hero, well played by Thomas Jane, is an unabashed King alter-ego (well-to-do painter of fantastical movie posters living in a small Maine town). You come away with the impression that this story is peopled with caricatures as an exercise in revenge on King's part... the unschooled yokel who insulted him at the gas station, perhaps, or the African-American who accused him of racism in his books... the characters seem not so much people as little cogs in a personal vendetta machine.

(CAVEAT: Never having read the novella, I fully admit this may all have been peculiar to the film, for which he did not write the screenplay, in which case I'm being unfair to Mr. King and I duly apologize.)

In any case, the movie has much to offer. I will never forget the slow car-ride through the mist and the creature they see there. It also has the dubious honor of sporting the single most cynical ending I've ever seen in a motion picture, possibly barring Dr Strangelove... but that one was meant to be funny. This one is most decidedly not.




WALL-E (2008. dir: Andrew Stanton): I wept through most of this. Go ahead. Laugh. But once you accept that the robots are feeling and thinking, human in every capacity except biological mechanics, they seem so terribly vulnerable.

Of course, why would they be so humanlike? Why does WALL-E have such eclectic tastes and hobbies? Were they programmed into him? Why, since he was created as a trash compactor? Did he evolve into them over his 700 years alone on the planet? Then again, this is Disney, which is the answer to all these questions, including "and why is WALL-E so lovable?" Might as well ask why the cockroach living in the Twinkie is anthropomorphized. It's Disney! The real question is this: why do I have such a hard time accepting what my boyfriend calls "the Don't Asks" in this one? Maybe BECAUSE I was foully and egregiously manipulated into weeping through the whole damn thing, which strips one of any small vestiges of dignity. I suppose that Disney has been doing this forever (I remember the Incident Involving Bambi's Mom as being a traumatic but fruitful lesson in life's vagaries. If I were to watch it again now, would I experience it as PT Barnum-like emotional manipulation?) but it's been so long since I've watched one I'd forgotten that it treads the same emotionally blackmailing ground that Steven Spielberg frequents.

The first part, the bit on earth, is by far the best. There's some lovely silent (or, at least, quiet) comedy and WALL-E himself brings to mind an old favorite of mine, a little-lauded and independent sci-fi outing from the '80s called Android which also featured a robot enamored of old films and harboring eclectic and romantic tendencies.

Once the two robot-lovers rocket off to join the humans on the space station, the filmmakers' loving interest seems to fade a little, or the love gets superceded by the Message of the Piece. The space station is, however, where my favorite character resides, the little scrubbing robot called M-O. Adorable and hilarious.

All that said, I now feel unclean, and I'm going to watch some Peckinpah.




Weirdsville (2007. dir: Alan Moyle): I nearly turned this one off after five minutes. What saves it, what kept me watching, was the combination of Wes Bentley and Scott Speedman, so good they give actual dimension to the same stoner duo we've been watching in foiled-heist/drug-deal-gone-wrong/ODed-girlfriend-gotta-bury-her "comedies" for years. This one is just well-acted enough, just unusual enough, to keep me along for the ride. There's a Satanic cult, there's a gathering of dwarves involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism, there's an abandoned drive-in, there's a kidnapped rich hippie played by the inestimable Matt Frewer. There's a metaphor about a rat flushed down a toilet that I just half-remember and maybe I made it up. Pro-drug? Hell, yes, it's pro-drug. You know those "relationships are hard but you gotta keep with 'em" movies? The moral of this one is, "Life as a drug addict is not easy but it pays off if you commit to it. Don't give up, bro."

pivotal double feature: one day in september and munich

September 1972: Munich is hosting the Summer Olympics. The Germans have high stakes in keeping proceedings light and positive, as less than thirty years have elapsed since the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler's Berlin Olympics are still impressed on the world's memory. On the morning of September 5, eight Palestinian terrorists from an organization calling themselves "Black September" climb over a short wall into Munich's Olympic Village, kill two and capture nine other Israeli athletes, coaches and referees.

What follows is unmitigated horror by any but the most barbaric standards. And West Germany, hampered by post-WWII lack of a trained terror squad and a constitutional ban on German troops entering into Bavaria, stumbles through an 18-hour nightmare of fumblings, boners and missteps, culminating in conflagration and tragedy during a muddle of a rescue attempt.

I was eight years old and it was my first Olympic Games. It was also the first time the event was broadcast live, but I didn't know that. It was interesting: Mark Spitz and Olga Korbut and the America v Russia basketball travesty. The hostage crisis seemed unreal to my child's mind, like war footage randomly interspersed with the more readily understandable sports coverage. This was the moment when I first heard the word "Palestinian", and, more than any other, despite Vanessa Redgrave, despite Karen Armstrong and the abysmal and bloody complexities of the situation, it is the moment that will forever ensure that Americans of my generation always feel, in a pre-thinking and primordial way, that the Palestinians are the bad guys. A kid knows some things instinctively, on a one-situation-at-a-time basis: that men with moustaches are not sexy, for instance (sorry, Mark Spitz), that messing around with the clock during a basketball game is unfair and uncool (hand over the gold, U.S.S.R), and that the guys with machine guns who invade a place of peace and kill the unarmed are, unequivocally, the Bad Guys.

One Day in September is a brilliant documentary. Its official narrator is Michael Douglas, but the thing is so adroitly assembled from archival footage and new interviews (including one with the only terrorist involved to have escaped death both at the airport and in ensuing years at the hands of Israeli vengeance squads) that Douglas speaks maybe thirty sentences during the whole piece. The tragedy and horror of it are extreme, and the end, when the camera hesitates on old footage of the evil and triumphant smile on the young terrorist's face, leaves you hungry to know what happened next, if justice was served, if the horrors were avenged.

Enter Steven Spielberg. Munich, catapulted into the world amidst a roar of controversy, follows one of the Mossad death-squads launched specifically to track down and assassinate the instigators of the tragedy. Based on the ostensible memoir of one of these commandos (George Jonas' Vengeance), it's a tough story to tell, spread out across years and continents and therefore involving a whole ton of exposition. It's tough in other ways. The catalyst event was short and focused: a few days in Munich. The retribution, on the other hand, comes across as an unending and unendable thing, a continually ascending and increasingly bloody spiral, in which every man killed is replaced by another in need of killing, and every act of violence is a terrible act of faith in one's possibly faulty, possibly devious informants and commanders.

Eric Bana is downright poetic in his controlled intensity as a man on a journey from innocent patriotism and righteous outrage towards haunted obsession and justified paranoia. By film's end, I was wrung dry of my initial bloodthirst, no longer occupying any particular point along the spectrum of Palestinian v Israeli enthusiasm, feeling nothing but a sort of empathetic exhaustion for both factions in their frantic and neverending tarantella. Obviously Hollywood is no place to learn your history (ask ten people who the Pharoah of the Exodus was; all ten will say Ramesses II, better known as Yul Brynner) and you can place pretty safe money on a guess that no more than, say, a fourth of any historical movie is strictly "true", but Munich succeeds in one important venture: it lifts the proceedings up away from the Bush-y "yer either fer us er agin us" black and white of self-righteousness to examine it in differing slants of light.