my cinematic a to zed: u - v

>SPOILER ALERT<

Unfaithful: (2002. dir: Adrian Lyne) Adrian Lyne is nothing if not controversial. Often accused of misogyny (in some cases, a cringe-inducingly difficult thing to deny), I prefer to think he is less interested in denigrating women than in digging around in that fascinating mulch of our darkest passions and watching the dreadful consequences that grow from the fertile grounds of our obsessions.

A friend of mine whose opinions I hold in high regard dismisses this film on the moral ground that it presents the guilt of a woman's infidelity as a crime equal to or greater than the murder committed by her husband. But if you think of it as a French film (which seems fair, since it's based on Claude Chabrol's 1969 La Femme Infidele), the question alters. Those crazy Francais have always said (on film, at least) that passion is passion, whether its manifestation is sex or murder. I'm not saying a concern with ethics has no place in film-making, but a very well-made film gets an out-of-jail-free card to examine human situations from a place transcending moral questions. This is one such well-made film, with an extraordinarily strong internal cohesion intrinsic in its story, and I'm willing to let Lyne go where he likes because his journey really does serve the telling of it.

The film has two disparate halves: the beginnings of the affair between the not-so-ironically-named Constance (Diane Lane) and the young bookseller Paul (Olivier Martinez), then the consequences of the meeting between Paul and Constance's husband, Edward (Richard Gere). The story is wonderfully told by way of close-ups and mirroring images (Constance frantically scrubbing away signs of her infidelity in one public lav and her husband later scrubbing frantically away signs of the murder in another; garbage blowing in the windstorm which may be seen as the initiator of the affair and garbage blowing later in the rubbish heap where Edward buries the body; an intimate close-up of the nape of a neck is mirrored in two very different contexts), and edited by Anne Coates (Lawrence of Arabia) who brings to it an absolutely perfect tempo, with room to breathe but steadily building tension, a tempo which implies from the first shots (the wind picking up, blowing a boat against a dock, knocking over a bicycle) a powerful suggestion of predestination taking a hand. Shakespeare often used a "wild place" -- a forest, an uncultivated moor, Petrucchio's house,-- as liminal ground where everyday laws soften and blur and, for a short while, a carnivalesque misrule of less reasonable gods reigns, breaking up the previous order so a new one will be established in its aftermath. Lyne uses his windstorm in this manner, as a transient fury which touches down for a moment and leaves whole lives disordered in it wake. The story rises relentlessly up from there into its last, whispered exchange, culminating in a truly great final image.

My generation as a whole has a collective soft spot for both Diane Lane and Jodi Foster because we grew up with them. That confessed, you'd have a hard time convincing me Lane didn't deserve an Oscar for this (which Nicole Kidman took home for putting on a fake nose. Behold Hollywood's wafer-thin values: a beautiful woman makes herself ugly, the Academy shudders with horror, thinking it's the bravest act ever, and would gladly give her a Nobel for it if it were able). She avoids all the cliches about the rich, suburban homemaker and remains grounded and likable; her affair, her repentance, and her decision to stand by her husband are clearly chosen and completely believable in context.

It's no secret that I love a director who can tell a story through pictures without drawing attention to himself, and this is a great example. The spoken words are the gorgeous block of marble from which a masterwork is carved. The train scene alone stands as a genius stroke of nonverbal communication: on her way home from her initial assignation, she recalls the encounter with palpable corporeality. The two scenes -- the lovemaking (without question, this movie has the best sex ever filmed) and the reminiscence -- are powerfully interwoven, and it's no surprise to learn that Anne Coates also edited Out of Sight, with its love scene so well-integrated into the continuing story.




and again: >SPOILER ALERT<

the Verdict: (1982. dir: Sidney Lumet) In this Mamet-penned courtroom drama, the halls of justice are ice-cold, gleaming, brilliant, austere, and the verdict goes to the party with the most expensive lawyer. Paul Newman is Frank Galvin, a man at lowest ebb, a broken, alcoholic ambulance-chaser grovelling at funerals for possible work. Given a chance to press a lawsuit on behalf of the family of a healthy woman who lapsed into coma after supposedly minor surgery, he finds his passion again and begins the gruelling and dangerous climb back into self-respect. James Mason plays his powerhouse opponent with easy command, and Charlotte Rampling is perfectly cast as the inscrutable beauty Galvin loves.

Newman's greatest strength lay in his unbreachable likability even when playing the most despicable roles, a quality which allowed him to barge all-out and gangbusters into the dark side without ever alienating an audience. It's a knack few have, and although I can think of actors who'd have been technically better as Galvin, in this very cold and harsh world it's Newman's unfailing warmth that's necessary to make this cringing failure of a man watchable. Galvin's task is Herculean, the suit impossible to win, which makes the unfolding arduous but the pay-off all the sweeter. Lumet and his crew (DP: Andrzej Bartkowiak, ed: Peter Frank) have an easy technical grace and the self-confidence to allow space, which in this context grants a possibility of thawing in this ice-cold world, a single moment in which springtime is conceivable before winter renews its grip. It's also got a marvellous early appearance by Mamet's then-wife Lindsay Crouse, maybe the best thing she ever put on film, husky-voiced and genuine, before she stopped showing us her feelings entirely, which seemed to be around the time of the Mamet-helmed House of Games in 1987.

my cinematic a to zed: r - t

The Race for the Double Helix: (1987. dir: Mick Jackson) For me, the BBC was always an argument in favor of socialism. What proud American network would ever fund a film whose climactic suspense depends on our interest in postwar boffins seeking the shape of DNA? And they pull it off, without all this "microscope-gazing-as-extreme-sport" absurdity-in-editing one finds now in the 1001 forensics shows one wades through every night en route to the soccer channel. Race is drawn from James Watson's memoir about his time in Cambridge, on his way to the Nobel Prize for uncovering the elusive helix. The first hour or so suffers for it, dragged down by a priapic and celebrity-hungry Watson who seems to have stumbled into science not due to any particular interest in it but because he hadn't got the looks to be a movie star or the social grace to be anything else. Jeff Goldblum brings his usual Jeff Goldblum to the role, working hard every moment to steal focus from anyone else onscreen, a performance that only works because it seems a fair delineation of the equally smart but self-obsessed Watson.

Luckily, it's not a one-man show. Tim Piggott-Smith has a lovely, light touch as Watson's cheerful partner Francis Crick (I love Tim Piggott-Smith. Have you ever seen his Hotspur, or Jewel in the Crown?). Alan Howard is affecting as the bemused, gentle Maurice Wilkins, in whose "province" DNA research ostensibly lies at King's, and who just wants everyone to get along and work as a team. He ends up with a share in the prize but having been shut out of the joy of the discovery, first by the solitary Rosalind Franklin, then by the glory-hunting Watson and Crick. It is a young and baby-faced Juliet Stevenson who really steals the day as Franklin, the woman who did the painstaking physical research and photography on which Watson and Crick based their model. She was dead from cancer by the time they picked up their Nobel, and Stevenson gives us a frank, clearsighted character who is caught in a bleak old-boys'-club of not ill-intentioned men who have no experience dealing with an unconventional woman on equal footing and so tend to avoid her and mock her behind her back. Stevenson's Franklin is no victim, seeing her situation clearly ("They're making me hard... In the end you become the kind of person people expect you to be,") and finding solace in the process of exploration.

It all snaps into focus once the famous Linus Pauling has a go for the prize, and suddenly Watson and Crick are up against a deadline. After that, things move at a run and it's all about the science, which is when it's at its most engaging, even to a scientific illiterate like me. The moment when they find the proper base-pairings puts a chill up my spine, and I've never given a thought to base-pairings in my life.





Safe Men: (1998. dir: John Hamburg) This movie ought to have been awful, but it borders instead on the sublime. First, the actors: Sam Rockwell and Steve Zahn are a brilliant comic team, backed up by a second brilliant comic team in the shape of Mark Ruffalo and Josh Pais. It took me a long time to trust Ruffalo, possibly because he emerged full-fledged into the zeitgeist on a wave of hype that roused my suspicious nature. This is the one that sold me, baby. His sad-sack, lovelorn safecracker is about as perfect as it can be, but that's par for the course in this film. Even cameo players exude easy brilliance. Early on there's a scene in a fast-food taco place with Michael Showalter as an overachieving micromanager. It's a tiny scene, maybe half a minute long, and if you picture the words written on a page, there's nothing there, no humor to speak of. He made it up from scratch, created a very funny bit and did it all with delivery. Then there's Paul Giamatti. There's a protracted scene, probably my favorite in the movie, in which he (as a gangster-in-training called Veal Chop) tries to talk Zahn and Rockwell (failed musicians Eddie and Sam, whom he's mistaken for a genius safecracking team) into breaking into a particular house. It's not just Giamatti's flawlessly funny delivery, not just the great reactions by Zahn and Rockwell... it's everything. It's the outrageous backlighting, and the smooth, ambling Al Green song tumbling easily beneath it, and it's the big space they have to work in, the space allowed them by the editors (Suzanne Pillsbury and M. Scott Smith). It's no easy task editing comedy. If you cut off the pause a half second early, it doesn't matter how funny the actors are; the joke's not going to play. I give as much credit to these guys as to director John Hamburg, who was in his twenties when he wrote and shot this with such a firm hand and strong personal style that he may be some kind of freaky comic genius.

The script veers wildly between the inspired and the halt and lame, hovering a lot of the time right over the abyss of near-suckage without falling entirely in. There are certain scenes I fast-forward through when I watch it, but only three or four, and there are others I rewind to watch repeatedly. The thing about Shelly Hack. The scene in the sundry goods store. When Christina Kirk (underplaying beautifully as the straight-man love interest Hannah) and Sam fall in love across the table at Rosh Hashannah, another scene that succeeds beyond its material because the editing is so good.

But I don't want to underemphasize the comic genius(es) of Sam Rockwell and Steve Zahn. Rockwell has a bit when he's standing at Hannah's door, rehearsing what he'll say to her, that bears the subtle hallmarks of comic mastery (the pats on his own butt are the coup de grace), and a few of Zahn's many virtuoso moments that come first to mind are his explanation of the term "fence" (again, nothing much as written; it's all in the unique way he says it), and his inability to stop himself from questioning a fearsome gangster's use of metaphor.





The Twelve Chairs: (1970. dir: Mel Brooks) Mel Brooks is in it, and Dom Deluise, so you know the kind of movie it is, right? Neanderthally lowbrow humor, so awful sometimes you laugh at the sheer shamelessness of it. Only this time, somehow, Brooks has managed to create the most convincing snapshot of just-post-revolutionary Russia I've ever seen. Ron Moody is an ex-aristocrat chasing the family jewels, which got sewed into a chair before the government absconded with the furniture. Moody has a physical comedy like Peter Sellers', with a wonderfully expressive face. Frank Langella (as the trickster-beggar who helps him) flows through the movie like a long drink of water, the very personification of grace, beauty, and charisma, handling both the corniest jokes and truly poignant moments (yes! true poignancy in a Mel Brooks film!) with equal aplomb. He was just beginning his film career after a good, strong training onstage, and busted right out of the gate with this and, in the same year, Diary of a Mad Housewife, a darkly humorous classic which has inexplicably never seen the inside of a video store.

my a to zed of cinema: n-q

Night of the Generals: (1967. dir: Anatole Litvak) It's a failure, this movie, but a wonderful one. Its ambitions exceed its grasp, as it gamely tries to encompass the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler and post-war reconstruction, reaching across a span of some 23 years, all within the framework of an ongoing murder investigation. A prostitute has been viciously murdered, and the field of suspects quickly narrowed to three: all of them generals in the Fuhrer's wehrmacht. In one of Hollywood's unlikelier casting choices, Omar Shariff plays Major Grau, the intelligence officer responsible for bringing the butcher to justice. He is remarkably convincing in the role, avoiding the allurement of settling his character into "the Good Nazi", a snare ready-made for him in the script, in which he is described as a friend to the resistance and a man dogging the generals out of pure love of justice. In fact, largely through nonverbal subtleties, Shariff clearly communicates that Grau is more amorally pragmatic than anything, disregarding right and wrong on the larger scale almost entirely, and that his obsession with the murder has more to do with the gleeful prospect of hanging a general than in justice for the murdered woman. When the Valkyrie plot intrudes on his investigation, he ignores it entirely, not only refusing to choose sides but refusing to address the issue at all until it becomes useful for him in his pursuit.

It becomes apparent early on who the guilty party is, but that's just a piece of the sprawling puzzle, which includes Tom Courtenay as a reluctant soldier in love with a general's daughter and an awkward expository device in which Phillip Noiret's Interpol policeman continues the investigation in post-war years. The most wonderful thing, of course, is Peter O'Toole as General Tanz, a man so ruthless in his warmongering that Grau nearly eliminates him as a suspect, naively reasoning that a "maniac" who daily destroys whole neighborhoods and villages need hardly commit additional murders in his leisure time. O'Toole has always been electrifying in his stillness, and never more than as Tanz. The segment in which he must step maladroitly into civilian clothes and take a few days off is unforgettable: Courtenay's Hartmann drives him around Paris to point out the sights while Tanz sits in the back, pale and rigid in a bowler hat, drinking and chain-smoking. When his face starts twitching, it is truly ominous. His silent communion with a Van Gogh painting is fascinating, both to Hartmann and to us, but it's when the man regains his composure that the real sense of dark menace sets in. And it's not just his face. Even in a long shot O'Toole communicates the grotesque: whether it's a crooked but taut stance by a window after shooting a man, or his Christ-at-the-Last-Supper pose at the table of the Niebelungen, he compels the eye through sheer muscle control.

The movie's biggest flaw, its ungainly length and breadth, is the window which allows its greatness entry: in any reasonable cut of the film, all the great parts would have been pared away and only the more pedestrian skeleton would remain. 1967 was the year of mass onscreen revolution -- Bonnie and Clyde, the Graduate -- and this massive, bloated epic would have looked like a dinosaur at the picnic. Free from its chronological context, it can take its rightful place among the fascinating oddities of cinema.




Odd Man Out: (1947. dir: Carol Reed) In college I was in a production of Pinter's Old Times, a wicked little claustrophobic one-act about three points of a "love" triangle stuck in a room together, in which this movie is repeatedly referenced. At the time there was no way to get ahold of a copy, and it wasn't until years later on AMC that I finally saw it, late at night, which is the best way to watch it, sleep-deprived and half-dreaming. It provides the template for Jarmusch's Dead Man: cast the most darkly beautiful man in the world, give him a slow but fatal wound early on, then follow him through his encounters and hallucinations as he fades. It's an ongoing amazement to me how inventive these old British movies from Gong-and-Certificate days are: not just the Carol Reed pictures, but it never hurts to have a genius at the helm. On the most superficial level, it's an examination of character. We watch as people react to the wounded Johnny McQueen (James Mason), an escaped prisoner and most-wanted in the IRA, some struggling with conscience more than others. Many try and save him for their own selfish purposes, but only the girl who loves him throws her back into it. Even she acts with an obsession that might be construed as selfish, since he's never given her much encouragement and getting him safely on the boat is her only hope of having him to herself. In fact, as Kathleen (played by Kathleen Ryan) moves stoically through the story to its inevitable end, she reminds me of no one so much as Kim Hunter in the Seventh Victim, that strange, proto-Goth Val Lewton tale of (among other things) young girls and fascination with suicide.




Persuasion: (1995. dir: Roger Michell) Every ten years or so, Hollywood remakes Pride and Prejudice, and that's as it should be. Each generation deserves its own. The other Jane Austen books get the treatment now and then, and this is my favorite. It's my favorite of the books to start with, as the heroine is older (27) and sadder than the others, and its concern is whether or not there are second chances in love. Anne Elliot made a mistake the first time round and said no; Frederick Wentworth went to sea, brokenhearted. She's long since seen the error of her ways, and now he's back. Is reconciliation possible? As in life, it's harder than it ought to be to say what is in one's heart, and the story follows the two through a torturous labyrinth of evasion and tentative forays and finally into the marriage that ought to have been, eight years before.

At first I was annoyed with this movie and its lack of glitter. It has a muddy look because it was filmed with true lighting, or near true. Night time scenes glow orange with firelight, and everyone is pale and washed out in the chilly sunlight of Lyme Regis and under the dismal skies of Bath (it always rains in Bath). Nobody wears makeup except as they would in life, and when they dress, the ladies' hair looks like it was done by each other and not by a Hollywood stylist. It's a far cry from the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility (which has its own, different yet undeniable charm), for which director Ang Lee had the sheep permed to make them more picturesque.

On top of this feeling of authenticity that I've never seen replicated quite as fully even in BBC productions, there's the script, which is lovely, and the actors, who are great. They OWN these characters; they ought to be granted patents. There will never be another Mary Musgrove; Sophie Thompson has created the epitome, the absolute acme of Mary Musgroves to which all others will owe obeisance for all of time. Simon Russell Beale knows the very soul of her husband Charles, and Fiona Shaw and John Woodvine are the most wonderful Crofts possible, embodying the possibility of true love lasting over long years amidst humor and mutual devotion. Corin Redgrave and Phoebe Nicholls are perfect and awful as Anne's appearance-obsessed father and sister; Susan Fleetwood makes Lady Russell believably sympathetic without sacrificing her character as set forward in the book. As for Anne, Amanda Root will always be Anne Elliot for me. It is true that Rupert Penry-Jones, in last year's BBC remake, is the sexiest Captain Wentworth you'll ever see, but he comes across as romantic fantasy, whereas this version has Ciaran Hinds as the more believable, conflicted lover, vascillating between hope and disenchanted abdication.




The Quick and the Dead: (1995. dir: Sam Raimi) Q is hard. Does one write about Quick Change, the funniest of all clown-heist films? or Quadrophenia, a brilliant movie I watched over and over in youth that was weirdly formative for me? I decided on Raimi's joyfully violent homage to spaghetti westerns because it gets overlooked. It's not perfect. It's glib and overly clever sometimes, many characters are two-dimensional, the violence is absurdist. You might call it the Evil Dead of spaghetti westerns. But big joy it's got. Gene Hackman, as always, is scarily compelling as the bad-ass, and Sharon Stone commits absolutely as a tough she-gunslinger haunted by horrors from a past which she's come to avenge. It took me ten years to forgive her for Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold (don't, for the love of God, see it), but this is the performance that won me. It's the first time I saw Russell Crowe; not only was he gorgeous but he still cared back then, hadn't been poisoned yet by his fast-approaching mondo-fame. The bottom line is that everyone's having so much damn fun making this film, including Raimi and the crew behind the camera, that you can't help but have fun watching it.

my cinematic a to zed: l-m

the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: (1962. dir: Tony Richardson) That wonderful British road between Kitchen Sink and Carnaby Street is studded with lovely pieces, and this is one, arguably Tony Richardson's best work. Its great flaw is in his use of the "comic techniques" (ie: "it's very funny to see people moving in fast-motion". It's really not). In the following year, this same taint would proliferate and spread its eldritch tentacles all through his Tom Jones so that, highly lauded as it was at the time, it's faintly embarrassing and almost unwatchable in retrospect. With that exception, though, his instincts are right on in Loneliness and he carries us dynamically through a largely introspective story which might have stagnated in cravener hands. Equal credit goes to Tom Courtenay, one of the greats of the time. Although only twenty-five while filming, he seems like an old man playing a young one and doing it extraordinarily well, with the distance and wisdom of age but without sacrificing the raw emotion of youth.





Montenegro: (1981. dir: Dusan Makavejev) I've seen this strange film exactly twice: once in the theatre in my youth, where I fell in love with it, and again some twenty years on. I was clenching my teeth the second time through, expecting it to have lost its appeal since I'd long ago well squashed my salad-days' passion for allegory, but I was pleasantly surprised with its lingering charms. Makavejev strikes just the right balance between absurdity and dark satire, and never lets his lead character, easily and unpretentiously played by Susan Anspach, flatten into less than three dimensions. There are plot twists and surprises around each corner, and although it flirts heavily with cynicism, the humor keeps its touch light enough for enjoyment. It's a sentimental favorite, too, because it reintroduced me to Marianne Faithfull, with her gravelly, post-apocalyptic voice.

my a to zed of cinema: i-k

Inside Daisy Clover: (1965. dir: Robert Mulligan) Strictly speaking, you could describe this as a big-budget, star-studded musical and you wouldn't be lying. Shot largely on the Warner Brothers backlot during the waning days of the big studios, you don't have to scratch hard at the veneer to dig up a dark indictment of the studio system. It's about a gamine tomboy with a great set of pipes who gets Lana-Turner-at-the-soda-fountained into the movies, and every "Hollywood" character in the script is downright sinister -- if not at first, then as the plot unfolds: from studio boss Raymond Swan and his wife to Robert Redford as megacharmer movie-star Wade Louis and Roddy McDowell as a loathesome factotum. There's nothing convincingly 15-year-old about Natalie Wood, who was in her late twenties at the time, but her Daisy is likable, and the scene in which she's shanghaied by a nervous breakdown while in the overdubbing booth watching a huge, repeating image of herself doing a silent, grotesque musical number is eerily potent. Christopher Plummer is perfect as Swan, the black-garbed powerbroker and "prince of darkness", as he's known behind his back, who starts off creepy, fleshes out convincingly into three dimensions and, in the end, is even creepier. Each of the major characters gets at least one great scene in which to cut loose, including a doozy for Katharine Bard as Swan's damaged wife who glides through most of the movie in elegant gowns and frozen smiles and is almost terrifying when her emotions emerge.




Julia: (1977. dir: Fred Zinnemann) It's a movie shaped like memory, overlapping fragments unmoored from their proper temporal sequence, painted in rich, burnished, autumnal colors. There were two movies that formed my ideal of a writer's life: this one and Reds (which is in the running for my favorite movie ever). Those eastern beaches with their sloping sands and leaning fences, their eternal grey and windy skies, a secluded cottage, thick fishermans' sweaters, plenty of smokes and whiskey and an old Royal typewriter, the handsome and intrepid Jason Robards as lover and companion in the next room. That's a piece of paradise, my friend.

Part of the story's brilliance is that it's not based on memory at all, not the part about the character Julia, anyway: although Lillian Hellman published it as memoir, it was established later that she'd cut it from whole cloth, interweaving a fictional character and plot with true strands of her life with Dash Hammett and her early fame as a playwright. Doesn't matter: it reads well on the page and plays well here, although the less you know about Hellman, the easier it is to swallow. The idea of the kitteny-gorgeous Jane Fonda playing homely old Lillian draws the first smirk -- much of Hellman's toughness of character seems intimately tied up with her want of conventional pulchritude -- but the real howler is imagining Lillian Hellman torn up for more than a few hours' drunk over the disappearance of a child she'd never met. No... the REAL howler is the idea of anyone who knew Hellman trying to thrust an innocent child upon her to rear; if ever there was a couple unsuited to the nurturing of innocents, it was Hammett and Hellman.




Kicking and Screaming: (1995. dir: Noah Baumbach) I've written about it elsewhere so I'll keep it brief... Baumbach's debut (at age 25) is deadpan hilarious. What he hasn't yet learned -- in terms of character definition, for instance -- he makes up for in casting (Josh Hamilton from Outsourced, Chris Eigeman from the Whit Stillman trilogy, Carlos Jacott from Joss Whedon's stable of recurring actors, Olivia d'Abo in a performance so good I forgave her at last for Conan the Destroyer) and fantastic writing. It's an adept melange of merriment and exploration of youthful angst: the story of a tightly-knit group of boys graduating college but unready to enter the world. There are wonderful, poignant scenes amongst the funny: when Grover (Hamilton) finally listens to the message his ex-girlfriend (d'Abo), who left him to live in Prague, has left on his machine, or when he convinces a ticket agent to let him spontaneously onto an overseas flight in the name of destiny and true love. Even Elliott Gould, who usually makes me grumpy, enhances the work in a small role as Grover's dad.

Baumbach's later works (Squid and the Whale, Margo at the Wedding) are what you might call "better", and that's as it should be, but THIS is the movie that has his heart, and it's the one that's over-and-over watchable.

the greatest movie i've never seen: herostratus

The center of the world is constantly shifting, culturally speaking: it was Paris at the fin de siecle, Greenwich Village in the fifties, Seattle for a few lively months in 1991. Herostratus came out in 1967/8, just as Carnaby Street was losing its vibrancy and the cultural omphalos was edging back overseas, possibly to California. It is the only feature film by Australian Don Levy, who apparently left the film industry afterwards in disgust. He was studying Chemistry at Cambridge when he became entangled in the moviemaking world, which led him into the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1962 the British Film Institute gave him a grant and he launched into Herostratus, which took five years to complete and opened in the same week as 2001: A Space Odyssey. He then retired to teach film in the U.S. until his untimely death in 1987.

Herostratus (named for the fellow who set fire to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 BC in a bid for immortality) is the story of a disillusioned poet who offers to sell his own suicide to an ad agency. They'll make some money; he'll send a final message of disgust; everyone wins. It stars Michael Gothard (a fascinating actor: he was the creepy-sexy exorcist in Ken Russell's the Devils, the stern-faced gaoler who tumbles for Faye Dunaway's charms in Richard Lester's Four Musketeers, and he joined that exclusive club of Bond Villains when he played Locque in For Your Eyes Only), and marks the screen debut of a nubile teenager named Helen Mirren.

Behold the reviews of the day: it was praised as "one of the great films of the year" (La Libre Belgique, 12/30/67), telling its tale "with discipline and astounding impact... in one masterly scene after another..." (Art & Artists Magazine). Molly Plowright in the Glasgow Herald (1/2/68) called it "the most astonishing film of my experience... right on the frontier of the cinema as we so far know it," and adds, "The visuals are more beautiful and the content more terrible than anything else I have seen, and the steady stare in the depths of the human mind makes Godard and Losey look like fumbling side glances." Richard Whitehall in 1972 said, "Distribution problems may have kept Herostratus from general audiences, but its impact on filmmakers, especially in Western Europe, has been profound. Its influence may be seen not only in the revitalized German cinema, but also Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange." Tom Ramage in Boston After Dark said, "Levy is a genius and Herostratus is one of the five or six most significant films of the last decade." The encomia continue... see the Don Levy Project for these references and more.

It, like much swingin' sixties' product, apparently doesn't age well. Londoners were privileged to see a revival showing a few years ago, and TIME OUT called it "Antonioni crossed with Lester... polite, irreverent, inarticulate." It may be that after all these years of longing for it I will be vastly disappointed, as I was when I finally saw Privilege.

If someone would release it on DVD, I could find out.

my cinematic a to zed: e-h

Enigma: (2001. dir: Michael Apted) A Ukrainian dog digs up a human arm. A single word, the German word for the flower Columbine, is transmitted over all frequencies then an ominous silence reigns in Nazi airspace; when messages resume, the code has been changed, and the English can no longer read it. A haunted genius, loosely based on Alan Turing (a heterosexual version played by Dougray Scott), is recalled back to his duties from the clutches of a nervous breakdown. Thus begins Enigma.

There are few places, few moments in history that I romanticize as fiercely as I do Bletchley Park. In the thick of WWII, a disparate crew of geniuses, puzzle fanatics, and maths experts were secretly gathered on an unassuming estate some miles north of London where they quietly broke Nazi codes and thereby allowed the Allies to win the war. Realistically, crammed into tiny huts and forced to share rooms, taking down or, at best, deciphering messages all day, even one's personal conversations restricted by fears for national security, I'd have been miserable. Still, I often dream myself into that time and place. This movie, then, was made for me.

First off, Tom Stoppard wrote it, managing to squeeze a Brobdingnagian heap of exposition -- about the enigma machines, the breaking of the codes, the shifting political face of the war, not to mention the mores and customs of the time -- gracefully into the action without dragging at the timing. Then there's the cast: stuffed full of fantastic Brits, from Tom Holland to Corin Redgrave to Saffron Burrows. I've seen Dougray Scott act well in only two films, and this is one. Kate Winslet and Jeremy Northam, meanwhile, have a gleeful old time, he as a silky, condescending government spy-catcher, she playing the frumpy girl for a change.





Firefly: (2002. creators: Joss Whedon and Tim Minear) This is the best thing that television ever came up with. Only television didn't come up with it; Joss Whedon did, and that makes him a big damn hero. Fox, that inscrutable tyrant, cancelled the series practically before it debuted, leaving fourteen episodes and the postscript film, Serenity, which hit cinemas a few years later. Do not under any circumstances judge the TV show by the movie, which has lost the good, beating heart and deft humor of the original. My theory is that Joss' own heart was broken by the cancellation, hence the icy spirit of the movie. It's not bad, Serenity; it just doesn't inhabit the same beautiful space that Firefly did.

It can't be described, not with justice, but here's the cornerstone: some five hundred years in the future, Earth-That-Was is no longer inhabitable, but humankind has moved out into space, creating livable planets out of moons with a process known as terraforming. The planets are tied together under the empirical rule of the Alliance, and some of the crew of Serenity, the transport-class spacecraft we follow, fought ferociously for the Browncoats in favor of independent rule in the interplanetary war six years earlier. An amalgam of Chinese and American languages is spoken, and the feel of the 'verse is as much Western as sci-fi. Settlers are dumped on a terraformed planet not with rayguns and teleportation devices but with six-shooters and horses and chickens. That's out on the boundaries of the galaxy. The closer to civilization, aka Alliance territory, the more futuristic and sci-fi it gets, but our crew of thieves and misfits keeps its distance when it can from civilization.

Whedon is never afraid to get dark (the darkest eps are the best: "Out of Gas", "War Stories", and the chilling swan-song "Objects in Space") but he's downright poetical with his humor, as well. I was going to quote some favorite lines, but it's better you watch it yourself, hear them in context. (OK, just one: "If wishes was horses, we'd all be eatin' steak.")

Seriously. It's so good I sometimes wish I'd never seen it before so I could watch it again for the first glorious time.





Gorky Park: (1983. dir: Michael Apted) Why is this a neglected film? It's a cold-war classic far superior to any John Le Carre outing, including the bloodless and ridiculously overhyped Smiley series, which are packed full of tasty British actors doing little or nothing, including Sir Alec Guinness, so distant in the role you can barely see him; his edges are almost blurry, he's so far gone. This one, on the other hand, has a tasty menu of Brits acting up a storm. The whole thing is worth a viewing just for Ian McDiarmid's five-minute masterpiece of a performance, or Ian Bannen at his best, or Alexei Sayle as a black-market profiteer. It's based on Martin Cruz Smith's novel, arguably his best, and it's got William Hurt at his handsomest (as the Moscow policeman walking a thin line between solving a triple murder committed in Gorky Park and avoiding the quicksand of fingering KGB for it) and Lee Marvin as the Big Bad. What's not to love? Plus an engaging mystery that has a ring of truth about it and snappy dialogue (Irina: "KGB have better cars, you know?" Arkady: "Yes, but they don't always take you where you want to go, do they?"), a great sense of atmosphere, a good take on the menace and mundanity of the interlocking rings of Soviet hierarchy, and the story never gets muddled in the telling. Its biggest flaw is that it bogs down in its sentimental-hogwash love-story toward the end, but the last shot, of six angry sables romping toward freedom in the snow, is wonderfully satisfying.





Hearts of Darkness; a Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991. dir: George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr) Along with Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, this is my favorite movie-about-a-movie documentary. Both are behind-the-scenes studies of lumbering behemoths of the cinema (Herzog's Fitzcarraldo and Coppola's Apocalypse, Now!) and their respective directors' doubts and egomanias. This one was originally begun by Eleanor Coppola as a way to pass the time (years, it turned out) while her husband's film, massively over-budget, massively behind-schedule, massive in every respect, was shot. It's best watched in tandem with reading her published journal of the same title, which lets us in on further details, like that Francis was frequenting an onset love-nest with a production assistant during shooting, and the marriage was in danger. Apocalypse is one of the most fascinating movies ever made, and that makes this one fascinating doc. If you really catch the bug, read assistant director and actor ("Terminate" pause "with extreme prejudice") Jerry Ziesmer's account as well, set forward in Ready When You Are, Mr Coppola, Mr Spielberg, Mr Crowe.