my a to zed of cinema: a-d

Android: (1982. dir: Aaron Lipstadt) Apparently, we as a species are unable to consider robots without imagining them turning human of their own volition. Certainly it makes for some of our most compelling science fiction tales, and this is one.

Max 404 (Don Opper) is stuck on a space station where he assists a scientist (Klaus Kinski... and, therefore, a mad scientist) in his obsessive work, which aims at the activation of the perfect android. Android research has been outlawed on earth since the Munich Massacre, a terrible Philip-K-Dick-ish robot uprising, some years prior. Word comes that his project has been terminated just as three escaped prisoners take refuge on the station, eagerly welcomed by the adventure-hungry Max, and more insidiously by Kinski's Dr. Daniel, who needs the energy of a human woman to breathe life, Metropolis-like, into his robot.

Max's whimsical charm never sugar-chokes because it's soon enough leavened by the story's descent into darkness, leading Max into his own dark places. The budget is low, the acting good, the story well and easily told. It's easy to catch a boom-mike lowered into a shot, hard to block out the '80s cheeseboard electronica soundtrack, but all flaws are forgiven in the end in this bare-bones prize.



Blueberry: (2004. dir: Jan Kounen) Overlong and pretentious (it is French, after all) but gorgeous and strange Euro tripper-Western, slipped quietly and belatedly onto U.S. video shelves in a truncated version called Renegade. Based on a popular French-language comic, it brings to life the blood-feud between Marshal Mike Blueberry (Vincent Cassel) and archnemesis Wallace Blount, played by a well-used Michael Madsen. In fact, in a largely humorless film (it is French, after all), Madsen has the one laugh-out-loud moment when he holds a tarantula in Eddie Izzard's face and says, "If I was a spider, you'd crush my head. You would. You'd crush my furry black head."

Now that I've given away the one joke, what's left is an extraordinary landscape that blurs boundaries between internal and external realms. The phenomenal thing about this film is the showdown in the end, a full ten-minute segment which takes place entirely in the heads of the two enemies as they lie next to each other, physically incapacitated but psychically released on a wild and mutual peyote trip.





Conflict: (1973. dir: Jack Gold) In the early sixties, the Catholic Church was rocked by an earthquake from within called the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican -- Vatican II for short. It changed everything, issuing revolutionary rulings on liturgy, theology, and many aspects of Catholic living. Nowadays we take these rulings for granted and are easily appalled when Mel Gibson takes an unapologetic hard line on non-Catholics being destined for Hell, but a mere generation ago the hard line was all there was, short of heresy.

Originally titled Catholics for its television debut and based on the novel of that name by Brian Moore, this low-budget b&w outing brings a young and hip Fr. Kinsella (Martin Sheen), as representative from the Vatican, to a tiny island off Ireland where Trevor Howard and his band of dedicated monks have attracted unwanted attention for the crime of saying the Mass in its traditional Latin. The monks are played by a coterie of brilliant Brits (Cyril Cusack, Andrew Keir, a young but assured Michael Gambon) and the whole film is a quiet and engaging conversation about the issues raised by Vatican II: about the nature of worship itself, what lies at its heart, what compromises are necessary in its name and what battles are worth fighting.





Dark Wind: (1991. dir: Errol Morris) I refuse to feel guilty about this low-key pleasure. It's an early screen version of the Tony Hillerman novel (one of the first Jim Chee books), made prior to the PBS series. Morris, famed for his documentaries, has an arresting visual style, and the measured pace keeps faith with the book without sacrificing suspense. Lou Diamond Phillips provides an especially sad-sack Jim Chee appropriate to his tenderfoot status on the rez, and Gary Farmer brings his usual trickster magic to Cowboy Dashee.

movies that changed me fundamentally: jaws

I guess I was eleven the summer Jaws came out. I'd read it. We all had; it'd got passed around at Camp Fire Girls; and what I remember about the book was that Mrs. Brody's thighs stuck to the naugahyde of the booth and she wanted to move them up and down but didn't, didn't want to spoil the moment. When the movie hit at last, I was relieved that they hadn't wasted time on the extramarital nonsense between Ellen and Hooper. For one thing, according to the morality of popular fiction at the time, the affair ensured a future as fish-food for Hooper, who was much more likable in the film and I would have been loathe to watch him perish.

Anyway, I read the book. I learned new words like "femoral artery" and "Carcharadon Megalodon", and it was pretty scary, but it was nothing, a mere indulgence, compared to the movie.

We went to see it right away, as soon as it hit the Varsity. And there it was, from that very first attack: with the camera angles, the clanging of the buoy, the excruciating vulnerability of that naked, stoned girl alone at night in the water, and that fucking music, for God's sake, that music. It was genius. Not like Einstein but like Frankenstein: cackling, "It's Alive!", mad-scientist kind of genius. I went back and saw it three times, maybe more.

That's the background. This is what happened.

I don't remember how long after I saw the film it was, or what sparked it. What I remember is lying in the dark in my bed at the Taylor Street house. The house is quiet, everyone is asleep, and I somehow become absolutely convinced that there are sharks swimming around my bed, teeming, that the floor is not a floor at all but a silent ocean which is so thick with sharks you wouldn't fall into it if you went over the edge, your flesh would scrape open on the sharp scales and the frenzy would begin, with you barely in the water, barely out of the air.

The creepiest part was the silence of it. That such a transformation could have happened in my own bedroom, a room where I'd slept for four years, and that it happened without a sound, not one sound. If I were to throw a hand over the side, I'd be handless in an instant. Of course there was the voice of the left brain scoffing: rubbish, of course there are no sharks, of course the bedroom floor is just wood with a dust-ridden rag-rug tossed over it, same as yesterday and the day before, but the very monstrousness of the uncertainty overwhelmed the rational. Just because something's never happened to you before doesn't mean it won't. Some things happen unexpectedly, and some things happen just once. Like death, just one time, but to everyone, sometimes suddenly and without warning or congruity.

Stand up, I told myself. Stand up, turn on the light. Once the light is on, all will be as it always was. The trouble was I had no light at my bedside. To turn it on I had to jump down on the floor and run to the door. My light switch had a blue owl covering over it. It was just above my dresser. I could see it in my mind.

I stood on the edge of the bed, I don't know how long, listening, waiting for the sharks to give themselves away with a sound, but there was nothing. It was several minutes, anyway, shivering in my little-girl blue polyester nightie, shifting back and forth on my feet, shaking, picturing it: I could make it in one step. One single, well-placed step and I'd be at the door, my hand on the light. But whenever I pictured that I pictured the other thing, too: the foot falling not on wood and cloth but against hard, viscid scales, no way to reach the light, swallowed in an instant by salt-water and sharkflesh, torn apart at their leisure, helpless, screams choked and silent.

Eventually I did jump down, one well-placed step. It took no more than a fraction of a second and the light was on, and my bedroom was the same, same furniture, same dust, same posters of kittens and Narnia on the walls, but something was different. The air was different. Maybe I'd ionized it with the intensity of my fear. Anyway, it didn't feel like my room anymore. It felt like while I'd lain there shivering in my existential ferment someone had torn my old room down and built an exact replica in its place, a quiet, grinning imposter.

apocalypto: fecund nightmare

Mel Gibson is criminally underrated as a director. Before y'all start howling, let me state my case.

Great directors have some things in common: a strong and unforced personal style, for one. There's a unity to their works, related through shared themes, with personal demons and power-images recurring in apparently disparate films. The camera-work is deft and bold, drawing attention not to itself but to the telling of the story, which is conveyed as adeptly through images as through words. Lastly, great directors sin boldly; their mistakes tend rather to be mammoth, interesting blunders from running too far out on the limb than sins of omission or timidity.

I'm a sucker for a guy with vision, even if that vision is disturbing.

There's a thing that Mel Gibson does as well as and possibly better than anyone else. It's the effortless visual shift he makes between an intimate, thought-reading shot into a swift, clear action shot and back again. He's got a natural feel for the dynamic of it, and tells a clear, personalized but fast-paced chase story like it's the easiest thing in the world. And it's not. In fact, I suspect it's a dying art. Even slower-paced stories get lost these days in shenanigans behind the camera. Sean Penn's The Pledge and Fernando Meirelles' the Constant Gardener come to mind, both potentially great stories that sputtered and perished because the director was showing off, superimposing his own presence between the camera and the story. As for action films, well... as I say, a lost art. I've given the rant before and I won't repeat it here. The point is that Gibson turns everything into an action film, and he's a master of it.

Two directors remind me most of him: Terrence Malick, whose films step easily across continents and centuries, but whose style and obsessions are such that his fingerprints are magnificently apparent on each, and Sam Peckinpah, whose shoddiest studio drudgework bears personal scars and some scintilla of greatness from an ongoing wrestling match with his personal demons. Cross a Malick with a Peckinpah, Mel's in there somewhere. He's a bloodthirsty sumbitch, for sure. There's a lingering salivation in all three films over torture suffered by his characters, but to stop there in describing him is to commit an injustice, as has been argued in regard to Peckinpah. And, devout like Malick, it's not only in the uber-Catholic Passion of the Christ that Gibson's religious phantoms emerge. His demons and fascinations are worn on his sleeve for all to see, captured in brilliant visuals.

*****

WARNING: SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

and CAVEAT: I haven't seen Man Without a Face, and I'm no fan of Braveheart, which I consider his juvenilia, but it bears the hallmarks of, and forms a sort of tryptych with, the later two, fully-formed works, so I'll be alluding to it.

*****

In all three, a hero submits to an ordeal in order to save his people. In the first two, the hero dies and the people are saved. In Apocalypto, the hero lives through a combination of his own efforts and divine assistance (that crazy solar eclipse; the fastest one in history) but the white man has arrived, and a race is about to be decimated. It looks like the gods are on the side of the hero, but Gibson makes it plain through the device of a prophecy that God is on the side of the hero only as an afterthought to being on the side of the approaching white man. Jaguar Paw, the hero, becomes a sort of John the Baptist figure, unwittingly ushering in the era of the conquistador.

Here in Gibson's jungle, people undergo unrelenting brutalities. Those who don't die are left unblemished by their ordeals. It's a Nietzschean place: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Ugly arrow and spear wounds (including one Christlike to the hero's side) magically heal, and a woman is ready to travel apparently just days after giving birth while standing on a slippery rock in a pit up to her neck in rising water while carrying her firstborn on her shoulders. If this were the real world, she'd at least have a headcold and a very sick child.

But it's not the real world. Gibson takes legends and finds the action films lying dormant within them.

*****

ON THE SUBJECT OF BIGOTRY

A great fracas came about with the releasing of the very Catholic (very Traditionalist Catholic, I should say) Passion of the Christ, much of it in charges of anti-semitism. Yes, the Romans come off better than the Jews. Gibson has an innate feel for the soldier, traditional machismo, and the man of discipline, all which skew the affections of his camera toward the Romans. When the Christ rises up after his three days dead, it is to the martial music of drums; he wakes as a soldier, marching into war. Any cursory reading of the New Testament, though, will tell you that Gibson didn't invent the anti-semitic slant. It's there already, in the pointed focus on Pilate washing his hands, in the Jewish crowds crying for the release of the criminal Barabbas, in the finaglings of the Sanhedrin. Gentile rationalizations were built into the story from the beginning. We didn't do it, swear to God; it was THEM that did it. Gibson didn't invent that. As a traditionalist Catholic with pre-Vatican-II sympathies, he just doesn't let political correctness stand in the way of his telling it like he reads it.

In Braveheart, homophobia was the issue (although he was also accused of the lesser offense of Anglo-bashing), the most egregious instance being the sickening moment in which Edward Longshanks defenestrates his son's gay lover, a scene played for laughs. The incident itself is telling about Longshanks, but the comedic angle draws our gaze to the director. Not necessarily gay men, but the effeminate, the "unmanned", are a frequent source of Gibson's ridicule. In the Passion, the court of Herod Antipas is a nest of decadence, which one knows because it is filled with grotesquely-maquillaged, epicene courtiers and slatternly women. This scene also drew cries of anti-semitism, which seems to me a wrongheaded perspective. He's not talking about Jews, but a specific roomful of aristocrats. The court of Herod has always been a symbol of extreme licentiousness. (Married his sister, slavered over her daughter's dance to the extent that he cut off the Baptist's head and gave it to her on a plate. Sybaritic decadence. No question.) If there's an uncomfortableness to be had, it's that his visual expression of that decadence is in willfully womanish men. In Apocalypto, the same attitude manifests in a painfully protracted and embarrassingly puerile string of gags at the expense of a fellow unable to sire children.

His bigotry can be distracting and offensive, but his worst flaw as a storyteller is his mortifyingly bad sense of humor. The jokes in all three films are, if not insulting, then barely not. Jokes he does not do well. Peaceful Village Life is also not his forte, possibly since he tries to incorporate humor into it. What he does is action, and this he does better than anyone.

******

A SHORT TO MIDDLIN' DIGRESSION ON HISTORICAL INACCURACY IN HOLLYWOOD FILMS:

Don't learn your history from Hollywood. Even films that feel true like Munich and the New World begin showing their artistic license at second glance. A movie is there to tell a story. Enjoy it, then go read a book.

My favorite response to charges of historical accuracy came from Gibson himself who voiced Captain John Smith in Disney's animated Pocahontas, which caused its own hubbub among historians. He said, --and I wish I could remember where I read this,-- "Come on. It's got a singing raccoon in it. How realistic is it gonna be?"

There are two charges against Apocalypto that I dismiss from the start: first, that his portrayal of the noble villager vs. the corrupt city-dweller is untruthful. This is an age-old story-telling trope, big-city-bad, small-town-good, particularly used since the dawn of Hollywood, and needs no defense. The other is his compression of time. The charge is that he's taken details from several periods of Maya culture and thrown them together slapdash; this is another well-used cinematic tool. In every culture as old as this one, big holes exist in our knowledge of a specific year, and where better to find material to fill in those holes but from other centuries from the same culture? Drink it in, enjoy the story, then, again, go read a damn book.

This man is no stranger to causing uproar amongst academics. In real life, for instance, Isabella of France never met the real William Wallace as she does in Braveheart, much less bore his child. Still, look how much stronger the plot is when Wallace's secret heir is destined, after his terrible death, to take the throne of England! Bad history it is, but it's great story-telling, and we gave him an Oscar for it.

What the havoc cried over Apocalypto mostly comes down to is that he didn't make the film they wanted him to make. A historian wants a documentary, and Gibson made an adventure film. Julia Guernsey from the University of Texas, interviewed in the Times Herald Record, was asked what she'd hoped for before she saw it. "I thought it would highlight some of the achievements of the Maya, but none of them is presented. They show some buildings but they don't talk about them. You get glimpses of some art, but it's overwhelmed by the nonstop violence." ("Expert: Apocalypto is an insult to Mayan Culture", 12/14/2006, on christianaggression.org)

Gerardo Aldana, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, brings up the objection (in "Where Was the Maya Civilization in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto?" 12/10/2006 New America Media) that Gibson has projected four bloodthirsty practices from the white man's West onto the Mayans: "...the raiding of villages for human sacrifice is undocumented for Maya cultures." Richard Hansen, field archaeologist and technical consultant for the film, counters, "There was tremendous Aztec influence by this time. The Aztecs were clearly ruthless in their conquest and purusit of sacrificial victims, a practice that spilled over into some of the Maya areas." Aldana objects to the depiction of public slave auctions while he admits to Mayan use of prisoners as slaves. He objects to the human heads impaled on stakes in the city center. While he admits that the Mayas left us "depictions of skull racks," he sees no evidence that there was flesh on them when they were impaled. Which brings up a few questions: why is using slaves okay as long as they're not bought and sold in a public forum? why is an acre of human heads on stakes "more humane" if they've been stripped of flesh before being displayed? Gibson is taking the basic facts of slave-use and heads-on-stakes and making the most visually interesting use of them.

Aldana allows that there was some evidence of Maya heart sacrifice (ie: ripping the heart out of a living victim's chest), but that its "attribution to the Maya is largely anchored in Spanish accounts of Aztec practices..." Mark Stevenson in LiveScience ("Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims,"AP, 1/23/2005) says that Indian codices depict the Mayan use of multiple forms of human sacrifice, although the numbers were probably inflated in Spanish reports. "Victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced to death, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples." Children were victims ("...it was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of the sacrifice..."), but more often the victims were enemy rulers or strings of warriors, as in this film. And, says Dr. Herman Smith on DigIt, the warriors were painted blue, just like in the film, stretched across an altar and had their heads cut off or their hearts pulled out in public rituals, just like in the film. Even the outraged Julia Guernsey admits that there were accounts of sacrificial temple-pyramids, and that the priest probably did "roll the bodies down," just as in the film. In fact, Dr. Smith says, Gibson showed some restraint: "...the corpse would be thrown into the courtyard below where priests of lower rank would skin the victim except for the hands and the feet. The skin would then be worn by the officiating priest who would solemnly dance among the spectators. If the victim had been an especially brave warrior his body might be butchered and eaten by the nobles and other spectators..." Imagine the wailing and gnashing of academic teeth if Gibson had gone with the skin-wearin', flesh-eatin', baby-killin' Texas-chainsaw-massacre version.

The point is, many would like Gibson to say that the Maya were noble and exalted. And he DOES: they WERE that, but they were other things, too, like all men everywhere are. White men don't have the monopoly on cruelty and bloodlust. We've been extraordinarily talented at it for a very long time, but other folks have got some licks in, too. Gibson did his research, got the details in costume and architecture and geography right, then he took a rollicking, bloody, hero-outwits-pursuing-villains story, set it in that time, in that place, and told it very, very well.

*****

The movie opens with a long tracking shot closing in on greenery in a peaceful forest. A tapir leaps out at full speed, and a handful of villagers hunt it to its death. It's a gorgeous sequence, a simple and astute opening metaphor which also introduces us to a mechanism which will be involved in a crucial plot-point down the line, and the action is engaged. Their triumph is interrupted by a chillingly beautiful bit in which Jaguar Paw stands up, leaves the frivolity of his companions, faces a seemingly empty jungle and asks, "What do you want?" There is a silent shift and a whole tribe appears. They have been rousted from their own village by raiders. The encounter between these bands of strangers, who will meet again under worse circumstances, is tense and lovely, perfectly filmed.

The first time I watched it, I nearly turned the thing off in despair at about the 45 minute mark, at which time Gibson was relishing the cruelty and violence of the raiding party on the villagers. If you saw the Passion of the Christ, you know the kind of lip-smacking gusto for sanguinary horrors that I'm talking about.

I was glad I stuck with it, because the film doesn't really take off until the creepy little leprous girl makes her prophecy of doom. (But you can say that about so many films, can't you?) It acts as a skeletal shell into which he splashes his mad colours, up to the edges and overflowing. He's at his best when working within a structure. In the Passion, two of the awfullest bits were the crow pecking out the eye of Gestas and the "Jesus-Invents-the-Dinette-Set"(*) scenes, both of which sprang up from the fervency of his own imagination which had momentarily thrown off the happily honing effects of his source material. One of the best is Judas Iscariot's gibbering run toward madness and death, depicted using horror film conventions, which ranks among my favorite dark and phantasmic scenes in all of cinema.

Here, too, some of the best details are nightmarish images. All the visuals are stunning. The cinematography, the production design, the camerawork, the editing are some of the best you'll find in any recent film. Gibson has an extraordinary talent for ocular unfolding. As the prisoners enter the city, it seems to unveil itself to us slowly in all its strangeness and vibrant, gemlike colors. Then, once Jaguar Paw escapes and starts the run through the wilderness which will fill up the rest of the film, Gibson is on his best footing and rarely falters. He shoots the forest so that we feel an intimacy with it, the same intimacy Jaguar Paw knows, having lived in it all his life. He makes it a character without belaboring the point, and that is no mean feat.

*****

All right. You can start your howling now. But at least watch the films. Look at the strange, fecund nightmare that is Apocalypto, shot in the brilliant colors of a lost world, a melding of history, legend and perversity. Look at the unspeakable, misshapen beauty that is the Passion. From the first shot of the moon over Gethsemane to that extraordinary drop of rain falling on the Cross which is the movie's sole allusion to the presence of God in a world rampant with the Devil, it's like no other movie you'll ever see.




(*) Many thanks to Derek Hill for naming the Jesus-Invents-the-Dinette-Set scene. I wish I could take credit for it myself.

the mighty and colossal werner herzog

*At a cinema near you right now: Herzog's latest documentary, Encounters at the End of the World*

Somehow in high school I stumbled across an old issue of Rolling Stone and in it was Jonathan Cott's classic interview of Werner Herzog ("Signs of Life: Werner Herzog", RS 226, 18 November 1976). The entire piece is riveting, but I was particularly taken with this story, as told by Herzog, from the set of Heart of Glass:

During the tryouts, I wanted to find out about the poetic quality of the cast, so I hypnotized them and said: "You are in a beautiful and exotic land which no person from our country has ever set foot on. Look in front of you--there is an enormous cliff, but on looking at it more closely you'll find that it's actually one solid piece of emerald... In this country, a couple of hundred years ago, a holy monk lived here and he was a poet and he spent his entire life engraving just one inscription into this emerald cliff... Open your eyes, you can read the inscription."

A single paragraph, and I was madly in love.

Despite my passion, only one time have I watched a film of his more than once. It was Nosferatu, which I saw first in an arthouse in Eugene. In love with the man already, and sufficiently Goth to throw myself with some zealotry into the vampire mythos, I fully expected to fall in love with the film as well, see it over and over until it became part of me, ran in my blood and lived inside my bones. That is, I expected the film to be simple enough that my reaction to it could be simple, and that was not the case. I left the theatre weary and ill at ease, uncertain about what I'd seen. Arguably one of the more accessible of his features, it's still no stroll in the park. The long, slow deterioration of the town being crushed by its nameless plague is exhausting and beautiful at once, and the easy glamour I preferred in my vampires was nowhere to be found. I didn't watch it again until some twenty years later; its beauty was still compelling and awful, its slow horror still unflinching.



Passing years mitigate infatuations and encourage realizations: like that a man with so strong a vision-- a vision so potent that he is arguably the star of all his films, he so overshadows his actors-- while easily lauded as a poet from a distance, might look up close like a powermad control-freak. Cott says:

Herzog's concern with the extremities of experience is meant to bring to light what Master Eckhart called the "scintilla animae"--the spark of the soul... Herzog has fashioned a spiritual and aesthetic program similar to the great magus Giordano Bruno: that of opening the "black diamond doors" within the psyche and of returning the intellect to unity through the organiziation of significant images.

This "concern with extremities" pushes his actors into notorious hardships. In the extras on the Rescue Dawn DVD, Christian Bale and Steve Zahn speak of swimming in snake-filled rivers, walking barefoot through thick jungles, pulling leeches off their skins, eating live maggots and chewing the hide off a raw snake, not to mention lying manacled to their prison-mates and enduring the constant attentions of biting ants; all this after having lost maybe a third of their normal body weight apiece. Although Herzog claims that the hardships are disciplines through which cast and crew are inspired into manifestations which would otherwise be impossible(as quoted in Les Blank's Burden of Dreams), he might lay himself again open to charges of tyranny and sadism but that he willingly undergoes anything he asks anyone else to do, always a great inviter of respect.

Still, when Klaus Kinski, a fellow constantly on the verge of making himself ridiculous through his own self-importance, throws a hissy-fit on the set of Fitzcarraldo (as seen in My Best Fiend), he looks like a primadonna but perhaps really has reached a breaking point which many actors might have long before. People were nearly killed during its filming (in a plane wreck); two natives were struck through with arrows and another lost a foot to snakebite; even the original star, Jason Robards, jumped ship after 40% of the shooting was done, having picked up amoebic dysentery. Robards' desertion led to the loss of Mick Jagger, who was playing a sort of Lear's Fool to Robard's Irishman, a loss which Herzog called irreparable and rather than try to recast it, wrote the character out of the finished film (see also Burden of Dreams). And the end product seems oddly anticlimactic, as if the real movie was never made, and what hit the theatres was a patchwork of compromises. Kinski, for all his fascination, is not by any stretch of anyone's imagination an Irishman, and his lack of a sidekick makes for much ranting at barely comprehending natives and long Herzogian stretches of silence. Anyway, that's how I remember it. It's been many years, and it's doubtful I'll ever watch it again.

What I have watched repeatedly across the years is Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, his documentary about the many tribulations dogging the making of Fitcarraldo, and this explains the sense of anticlimax. The real drama was on the set and in the mind of the director, and most of that didn't make it in front of the lens. Herzog's steady, clipped way of speaking English, with its overemphasis of consonants and lovingly precise choice of words, is at odds with his wild romanticism. This soft-spoken steadiness, his unbending solidity under pressure, a dry and understated sense of humor, his childlike interest in the world, and the sheer poetry of his vision are the things which make his arrogance not only palatable but completely unimportant.

In one of my favorite quotes (from the Great Ecstasies of the Filmmaker Werner Herzog, a companion book issued by the Goethe-Institut in honor of a 1995 retrospective), Herzog describes the notebooks he kept in the last phases of shooting Fitzcarraldo, notebooks written in such tiny print as to be, for all intents and purposes, written in cypher:

In the end, everybody deserted me. Nobody believed anymore that the boat could be moved over the mountains, and no one believed either that one day that film would be completed. I felt very lonely then, and my last anchor, my support, the one thing I could firmly hold onto, was writing. These texts do not resemble a true diary: they are texts in which the writing tries, as if through a magical process, to prevent the next misfortune. And these texts have such a terrible beauty that I still don't dare read them today...

This encapsulates the Herzog mythos quite wonderfully. He is a visionary who has undertaken an impossible task, and so a romantic. He will use any method or tactic to achieve it, even magic: he is a magus, but also a pragmatist. Everyone has turned away from him: he is an outsider. And, most importantly, he achieves his ends, the world and its opinions be damned... and in this respect, he is the master of all he surveys.

appaloosa: this year's oater

The long and short of it is that if I'd stumbled across this on late-night television I'd have been happy as the clam from the adage. The deciding factor is that I have to wait too long between my oaters -- a year, two years -- and my appetite gets whetted. I start to salivate; my expectations get pumped up. I wind up hoping for the Unforgiven or 3:10 to Yuma every time. To quote Jessica Lange in Sweet Dreams, people in hell want ice water, but that don't mean they get it.

This is a project from the heart for Ed Harris, directing and starring in a script written by Robert B. Parker. Harris loves a Western. You can feel it from the first frames, the love that went into the making of it, and the good things about it are many: the relationship between Harris as Virgil Cole and Viggo Mortensen as his sidekick is chief among them. The banter between the hero and his sidekick makes or breaks a buddy-western, and these two actors have an engaging and affectionate rapport. Then there's the authentic feel of the weaponry, a sense that the guns were chosen with pride and care. My boyfriend was particularly impressed by how authentic the gunshots sounded, -- so, well-done, foley artists.

The movie's built on a foundation of good, strong set-pieces: a train ambush, a stand-off with the Chiricahuas (which Viggo solves in a wonderful manner), a trial and a kidnapping, some gunfights, some betrayals and a showdown. Everything, in fact, that you'd expect from a Western. It's the frame upon which these pieces rest which feels creaky and insubstantial. The timing is off, and it never does work up a full head of steam.

I'm working on a theory that the best Westerns are very specifically concentrated in time. Stagecoach and High Noon and Yuma are compressed into very short periods. Alternatively, a movie like the Searchers spans years but the task at hand is so exactly focused as to provide the needed compression. Now look at a near-great but flawed movie like Peckinpah's Major Dundee (flawed or not, one of my favorites): it starts up gangbusters with a classic juxtaposing of buddy/nemeses Richard Harris and Charlton Heston, there's a specific task at hand, lots of action and suspense, then Heston's Dundee gets shot through with an arrow and the film takes a dark respite while his wound heals but he becomes a drunk. Because of the time passage, the film is split in two pieces, lending it an emotional complexity, as the characters are given time and space to grow, but Peckinpah never quite recovers the suspense. In a way, it sacrifices greatness as a Western to explore possibilities in other areas.

*WARNING: SPOILERS THIS PARAGRAPH*

Appaloosa has a specific Big Bad (Jeremy Irons, with not enough to do as the wicked rancher Randall Bragg) to be put down, and although he acts as catalyst for the major events, the canvas of the story is stretched out over such a long and indefinite period of time that the concentration relaxes, and the focus is soft and diffused. Soon after riding into town, Harris meets the love of his life (Rene Zellweger as a widowed piano-player, giving us not a single moment that is not entirely predictable for anyone who's already seen a Rene Zellweger movie, and who among us can say we have not?). In the next moment they are building a house, and, just as suddenly, she's making moves on other fellas. The psychology of her character might seem both apt and interesting except that the uncertain passage of time confuses things, and we get her perhaps interesting psychology told to us in clumsy exposition instead of watching it unfold and discovering it for ourselves.

Ach. It's not a bad film. It's got good fun. It's got Lance Henriksen, and I'd ride a long way through bad weather to watch that man act. The final showdown is concise and graceful, marred only by Viggo's bookend voiceover narrations, which are unwieldy and unnecessary.

The long and the short of it is: I liked it, but I left the theatre unsatisfied, already craving next year's Western, and hoping to God it's not made by Kevin Costner.

every prophet in his house: carnivale

If destiny exists, it exists for the malefactor, same as the godlike. You read about Hitler's life and find a chilling and unmistakable air of vocation in it; apparently he had a calling every bit as strong and mystical as any saint's. ETHOS ANTHROPOI DAIMON, Heraclitus said some 2500 years ago, a statement which usually shows up in English as, "Character is fate," but translates literally as, "A man's character is his daimon." According to Plato's Republic, each of us chooses his Daimon prior to birth, a being both subjective and objective, abstract and real, both within us and beyond us, some combination of guardian angel, touchstone and life-path. Our Daimon keeps us to our chosen purpose when we stray, sometimes gently, sometimes driving us with brutal force. The Greek word EUDAMONIA, which finally grew to mean something like happiness, earlier meant "having a good daimon." If you've chosen a good daimon, your life will tend towards the smooth and blissful, and if you've chosen one choleric and surly, things won't come easy. Yeats (who had a turbulent but acknowledged relationship with his Daimon) said, "Each DAIMON is drawn to whatever man... it most differs from, and it shapes into its own image the antithetical dream of man," and "...there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny... [yet] a man loves nothing but his destiny."

These last words might be splashed across a title card at the opening of Carnivale. Set in the dustbowl of the 1930s, it tells the parallel tales of Ben Hawkins and Brother Justin Crowe, twin avatars, one the servant of light, the other of darkness, and nothing is black and white. The world of Carnivale is dirt and sepia coloured, like the Great Depression itself. Nobody ever gets completely clean. Blizzards of dry topsoil blow across the land like Biblical furies. When we meet these men, one is earnestly seeking to follow God's will and offer hope to the many homeless and destitute, the other is skulking and mistrustful, his legs still sporting the chains of an escaped murderer. One finds a family amongst carnies and roustabouts, the other begins his true ministry while locked in an asylum. Both spend much of the first season trying to escape their individual destinies. Brother Justin, until he accepts his mission as "the Left Hand of God," wants only to do good works; Ben Hawkins wants only to be left alone. Questions arise, up into the last moments, about where the evil resides, how much is there, and how much of it is inevitable.

This was an extraordinary moment in television. It lasted for two seasons, twenty-four episodes, all told. Talk about bold: the first season is all exposition, all set-up for the second. Amazingly, it works. We are introduced into the time and the lives of the characters, and we watch as these mirror avatars are roused up from their mediocre human lives, each to travel through his own peculiar Chapel Perilous, never meeting but sharing overlapping nocturnal dream-lives. In the second year, they are drawn together into an inevitable but unpredictable piece of armageddon between God's two warring hands.

Here are a handful of champion performances: particularly by John Carroll Lynch as Brother Justin's chief henchman, John Hannah in the best two episodes ("Babylon" and "Pick a Number") as the doomed and cringing barman in a Texas helltown called Babylon, and Robert Knepper as a radio journalist who becomes entangled with Brother Justin's story. The best,--in fact, possibly the best performance I've ever seen on the small screen--is by Toby Huss as the weak and good-hearted carnival-barker Stumpy. Surrounding these champion performances are a host of very fine ones, and the women are a downright revelation. With minimal makeup and no trick lighting, women who would normally fall into the unsexed category of the too-heavy, too-natural and too-old are given full sway in displaying their considerable charms. Pushing 60, Adrienne Barbeau's face is creased and worn and lovely, her sensuality as powerful as ever as the strong and virgin (in the old, pagan sense of being unowned by man) snake-dancer Ruthie.

One never sees God in Carnivale. There are characters with preternatural traits: the mysterious Management, who runs the carnival with an iron hand but never emerges from his trailer, or Sophie (Clea Duvall) who has a disturbing empathic connection with her comatose mother (unsettlingly played by Diane Salinger). No character ever sees God, but Destiny is nearly a character in itself, it is so fully present. The first episode kicks off with a dark and manic dream sequence, every flashing image of which is part of the greater destiny of Ben Hawkins, only we don't know it until much later. There's not a loose end here; the writers knew every nuance of the world they were creating from the first words and images. Nobody ever sees God, but there is no question that someone is there. Some puppet-master with a heightened sense of mischief and at least a little bent toward sadism is the organizing intelligence behind this vast and fascinating chess-game.

high gothic strangeness: the wyvern mystery

J. Sheridan LeFanu is what my acting teachers used to call "culturally bound". (Adam Sandler and Lindsay Lohan are culturally bound; Cate Blanchett and Gary Oldman o'er-leap caste, temporal and ethnic barriers with ease and grace.) Although very much products of their time and culture, there is something about a Bronte or an Austen novel that allows it to make the leap; not so the LeFanu. His heroines are too obsequious, too passive to please us; his villains are so particularly the sons and daughters of the opium habit that they seem, despite all their glorious evil, weirdly passive as well. Anyone who wends his way through the entirety of a LeFanu ("Carmilla", weighing in at a svelte 152 pages, doesn't count) realizes early on that it's probably not going to take him where he wants to go, or anywhere that a modern sensibility has come to expect. There's nothing for it but to relax the critical faculty and drift as far into his dream-state as possible.

Screen adaptations, then, are a perplexity of Gordian intricacy, and the Wyvern Mystery is a singular case. Directed for television in 2000 by Alex Pillai ("Wire in the Blood", "Touching Evil II"), it was obviously made with great care and with a genuine regard for the author, yet the story is entirely changed, and for good reason. The result is a beautiful lesson in the filming of an unfilmable novel.

Intact are the book's laudanum-soaked eeriness, its pastoral landscapes, its encroaching claustrophobia as our heroine is entangled in her slow-closing net. The book, however, loses its focus about halfway in, as if LeFanu has changed his mind about who exactly dunnit and what exactly was done. He jumps back and forth as fancy takes him from one character's head into another until he loses interest at last and abruptly leaves off. Screenwriter David Pirie ("Poirot", "Murder Rooms") takes the threads unspooled in the first half and spins from them a surprisingly stalwart tapestry, plumping characters up from two dimensions into three, from Dickensian blacks and whites across a subtle palette of moral greys. A fellow who looks like a straightforward black-hat in the first minutes may not be by the end and the same, sinisterly, is true amongst the white-hats. Pirie has taken the most daunting obstacle in his path, our heroine's naive credulousness, and shaped it into a lens through which we very slowly see the world around her move into terrible focus as she passes from innocence into adulthood. And because it's Naomi Watts playing the role, throwing herself into the melodrama with laudatory whole-heartedness, the thing comes off smashingly.

I've seen the dramatization dismissed as muddled (the Videohound calls it "confused and stodgy"), but LeFanu must always be approached sideways rather than headlong. It's not a straight tale; it's an opiate nightmare, with dark passages that lead into dead ends and rooms glimpsed through smoky glass that never do come clear. This fellow Pirie has done wonders, pulling the dark velvet of the story across a solid frame, and in doing it he's managed to create at least one absolutely masterful character.

In the book, she is the dark and almost buffoonish Bertha Velderkaust, your fairly standard Madwoman-in-the-Attic. In the film, she becomes the formidable and chilling Vrau, her name spoken from the chest like a growl, and she is the monster from the id. Played brilliantly by Aisling O'Sullivan, Vrau is blind, insane, addicted to opium, disfigured with burn-scars and driven by lust for vengeance, a homocidal maniac. When she must wait, she waits patiently, stock still, a beast of prey; when she attacks, it is with terrifying ferocity. She is one of those rare characters who are both symbol and human and work flawlessly on both levels. The last time we see her she is sitting quietly, lost in thought and drenched with blood, as dignified and compelling in her silence as any Monte Cristo who has realized a vengeful dream only to find it hollow at the core.

LeFanu chose the marble and had the vision, leaving a tantalizing half-sculpture for this crack team of Brits to finish. The result is one damn fine evening of old-fashioned, blood-and-laudanum, virgins-in-nightdresses-running-down-dark-hallways, Gothic delerium.