lightweight fare

The Thomas Crown Affair: (1968. dir: Norman Jewison) Featherweight story counting on its surface charms to pull it through: its soundtrack ("Windmills of my Mind", a massive hit at the time), its "edgy" editing style (Hal Ashby goes crazy with the geometrical shapes), and the magnitude of the individual charismas of and purported chemistry between its two megastars (McQueen and Dunaway). The chemistry is lacking, they largely left the charismas at home, the story is absurd, the editing style distracting, and most pop songs sound dated after forty some-odd years. Mostly you watch McQueen's playboy distract himself (gliders, dune buggies, polo, Sotheby's, pouting girls with foreign accents, arranging multi-million-dollar bank heists) and then enter into a pretty dull and unconvincing relationship with Dunaway's insurance sleuth (plagued by a costumer who must have hated her. Check out the continuing parade of terrible hats) who's trying to bring him to justice. Even my boyfriend, a big McQueen fan who felt genuine jealousy over that glider, said, "That might have been the most uninteresting movie I've ever seen."

The Curious Dr. Humpp: (1969. dir: Emilio Vieyra) Had Ed Wood and Russ Meyer collaborated, in Argentina, on a remake of Eyes Without a Face, using a budget of about twenty-five bucks and a case of beer, the result might have looked something like this.

Easy A: (2010. dir: Will Gluck) Comedy daunts me. For every good one you find, you have to slog through another fifteen that either suck or offer at best one or two laughs.

But here, at last, we have it! A well-written, well-acted, well thought out, unified comedy! Never having been a John Hughes fan back in the day, imagine my amazement to find such joy and satisfaction in the old high-school-coming-of-age comedy-package. In addition to being inspired by the Scarlet Letter, that compact yet tedious novel through which we all had to slog in school, Easy A is a kind of tribute to all those high school movies from the '80s, but it's so much better than they were. First of all, Emma Stone is so relaxed, un-vain and with such perfect timing that she could carry to success a far lesser script than this one. Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci (who must be married in real life, because it seems like they've made about a hundred movies together) are beyond perfect as her parents, and Penn Badgley (who?) is the exact fit to be that secret crush guy, the guy who's so cool that he's uncool, the one she'll end up with.

Also, as is so crucial in a high school comedy, the music is just about perfect.

Absolute thumbs up, with no reservations. It renews my faith in comedy, and not a moment too soon. I was about to give up.

the brilliant sami frey, a lawman with a past, and a bad hamlet

*SPOILER ALERT*

the Little Drummer Girl: (1984. dir: George Roy Hill) This is easily my favorite film from a le Carre story. The Oldman Tinker Tailor is a better film, almost perfect, in fact, but I love the Drummer Girl like you do a redheaded stepchild, the better for all its flaws. Most of the shortcomings lie within its time: the music (Dave Grusin), Diane Keaton's massive-shouldered, big-plasticked costumes and jewelry, not to mention her mullet, and the slow, schmaltzy scene transitions, all these things and more reek of the eighties. Keaton is miscast as a young theatre actress (too old, and with a truly appalling attempt at an English accent) but in the end carries a good role well enough to serve, with a few really wonderful scenes, including one when she tries and fails to go back to parlour-room comedy after living the life of a spy. As in the Deadly Affair, one of the best parts of this film is the glimpse it gives into English theatre, peopled by the likes of a young Bill Nighy.

I saw it in the cinema when it came out. It was the first I ever saw of Klaus Kinski, and, more importantly, Sami Frey, whose late-arriving double-role he performs with jaw-dropping skill and subtlety. If I were making a list of my favorite cinematic performances of all time, Frey would be on it for this.

the Law and Jake Wade: (1958. dir: John Sturges) It starts with a bang: a jailbreak for a cynically amusing sociopath played by Richard Widmark (an actor who lovingly drew up all the maps of cinematic Cynically Amusing Sociopath territory. My favorite line, drolly underplayed, after shooting two men: "Those guys sure picked the wrong time to walk in"), including an enigmatic relationship between him and his rescuer (Robert Taylor). The second unit long-shots are beautifully framed, but the rest of it descends quickly into that stagebound, pedestrian dialogue one has wearily come to expect from the TV-influenced Westerns of the fifties and early sixties. This movie sports all the symptoms of the spoilage: bad television writing in the middle, with one of the lesser characters given cheap dysfunctional familial motivations, little bonding between characters, and largely shot on soundstage in medium shot.

Only Widmark has any charisma, and the girl (Patricia Owens) is just annoying. DeForest Kelley plays one of the outlaw gang, and again I cite the general rule-of-thumb: if an oater's got an actor from Star Trek in it, it's probably not very good. I'm not saying one is a direct result of the other, just that you can usually count on a mysterious and synchronicitous correlation.

The hide-and-seek shootout in an old ghost-town at the end is nice, with no music or excess noise to distract. Here's the way to do it: watch the beginning and the end, and skip the hour and a half in between.

Royal Deceit: (1994. dir: Gabriel Axel) It's a Danish movie about the origins of the Hamlet story, which is a fine idea, except that it's done in English with British actors, and any time somebody takes one of Shakespeare's stories and rewrites it, let's face it, it's not going to be as good. What you get are actors like Helen Mirren and Christian Bale running around embodying Gertrude and her infamous son while NOT speaking Shakespeare, and the contrast is both jarring and disappointing. Also, it's badly directed (no doubt this poor fellow's first venture in directing in English, often a thing which leads to dismal failure), with poor timing, over-idealized scenery, and over-sentimental music, none of which helps.

This is one of the movies on Bale's road to stardom, but he's far better in Little Women from the same year.

the lords of salem: it's the women who matter

(2013. dir: Rob Zombie) This may be the first truly gynocentric horror film I've ever seen: most of the characters, and all the characters who matter, are women. Villains, ostensible hero, intended victims, all women. It's not spoken in the script, but you come away with a sense that within the vast, metaphysical reality of this film, it's the women who are fighting, hip-deep in the blood and muck and quagmire of the things that matter, life and death and the consequences of the war amongst angels in heaven, while the men live superficial, dancing existences in a sort of lightweight, parallel existence. There are male characters, and they feel true and three-dimensional, and they try to help, try to get involved, but ultimately their efforts glance shallowly off the sides of the true action and they can do nothing but helplessly observe. Even the original witch-killer who kicked the whole plot into whirring motion, you could argue he did very little. Yes, he burned a coven of witches, but here they still are, centuries later, while he is worm-food, long past. As one of the witches (there is also a strong sense that every woman in this film, whether she knows it or not, is a witch, and not in some sleazy, she's-a-spider-and-lured-me way, but a witch of immeasurable, untapped power) points out, destiny gives you some room to maneuver, but your fate was written in stone long before your lungs ever filled with breath.

This is the first horror film I've ever seen that never once uses female nakedness, which is plentiful here, for titillation. Nakedness is, rather, a stripping away of the false trappings of society, and a necessary state for the birthing and blooding and mudding and murdering that is involved in the metaphysical war which is their true work. Zombie gives aging actresses strong roles to play, women of an age at which you never hope to see them playing anything but powerless and dotty: Judy Geeson (10 Rillington Place), Dee Wallace (the Howling, Cujo), Patricia Quinn (Rocky Horror), Maria Conchita Alonso (Running Man) and, most notably, Meg Foster, who was all over American television in the '70s, with her astonishingly beautiful, strange-looking eyes. Now she looks amazing, a true crone, with a fantastic, otherworldly voice and as strong a presence as ever as the original coven's Master-Witch, Margaret Morgan.

Most obviously an offspring of Rosemary's Baby and Ringu, it reminded me several times of the Tenant, with its claustrophobia and the horrible sense that insanity is encroaching and there is not a thing you can do about it. It really ought to be seen in a cinema, in a bounded, inescapable, darkened room, so that its creeping atmosphere can close slowly around you. As I watched it in my living room, I felt guilty whenever I paused it to answer the phone or get something to drink, aware that I was cheating, not allowing the spell to weave its full course. Sit still, if you can, while you watch it.

some very short reviews

The Monk: (2011. dir Dominik Moll) Only Vincent Cassel could play this role. It's why they waited these two centuries to make the film(*). Only he has the intensity which can slide credibly from inspired holiness into depravity with the twitch of a few muscles.

This is a slow and lyrical translation of one of the original Gothic novels. It was the author's visit to Geneva and his reading from the book which inspired both Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein and her husband's circle of friends in their dark musings during what has come down to us as The Haunted Summer of 1816.

* Addendum: It turns out that Franco Nero played the role in 1972 in Greece and Paul McGann in England in 1990. Until this moment I never heard of either one, so I'll get back to you when I find them.

Kiss of the Damned: (2013. dir: Xan Cassavetes) Cassavetes is a director to watch. This one is so gorgeous, so stylish and smooth, so flawless both visually and aurally, that you almost forget it's wrapped around one of the most pedestrian scripts ever written about vampires, a genre not renowned for its erudition.

It owes a great deal to Daughters of Darkness, possibly a nod to Argento as well.

Sex, Lies and Death (Sexo, Mentiras y Muertos)(2011. dir: Ramiro Meneses) Strangers on a Train transported into some bizarro Latin soap opera world where all women are lesbians, and all lesbians are smokin' hot and dress like street hookers. A truly strange endeavour, but not particularly interesting beyond any titillation it might afford.

Avalanche Express: (1979. dir: Mark Robson) This was Robert Shaw's last movie, and what a stinker. It's badly shot, badly edited, and it uses ugly colors. The dubbing is horrible: this is Robert Shaw without Robert Shaw's voice, and it's mortifying. Partway in, I thought they were going to pull a Seagal/Russell Executive Decision on us, getting rid of the ostensible hero prematurely, but it was a fake-out. The movie would have been far more interesting had they done it.

In fact, the most interesting thing about it may be Joe Namath in a secondary role. Wrap your mind around that.

a classic study in misogyny, a failed noir, a ridley scott trainwreck

Carnal Knowledge: (1971. dir: Mike Nichols) At last I see it! Brilliantly shot, brilliantly edited, this is one of those early pieces of genius by the wunderkind, whip-smart team of Mike Nichols and Sam O'Steen. The subject matter is tough and controversial, but it's not misogynist; its study is misogyny, rather, and the psychology of misogyny among thinking men, a whole different ball of wax. M*A*S*H (the movie, from the same era) is far and away more woman-hating than this. This, in fact, has such fully human women in it (even Rita Moreno's prostitute, who has only one brief but very important scene) that the only hatred in it comes from the characters, not at all from the film-makers, which makes all the difference.

All my life I have suffered under a delusion that Candice Bergen was wooden and stilted in this, her tenth film but arguably her first important one, and I am delighted to find that completely unfounded. She is wonderfully vulnerable and true and unguarded while playing a stoical, thoughtful, slightly wooden co-ed. There's a unique and unparalleled scene in a bar where the camera stays firm on her face while Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel are making her laugh uncontrollably, a fabulous, extended shot which tells us more about why they both fall in love with her than any amount of exposition would. Her performance is overshadowed by Ann-Margret's Oscar-nominee as a woman cursed with extreme sex appeal and, of course, by Nicholson, because who could compete with him back then, back when he actually cared and worked hard?

The ending might feel a little like a cheat, but really I think that's just our surprise that the Nicholson character, who seems so fully alive, fights so successfully against becoming a fully-grown adult that in the end we are a little disappointed that he is, ultimately, shallow.

SPOILER ALERT

Blue Gardenia: (1953. dir: Fritz Lang) The more I see of the fifties, the more awful they seem. It was a good idea: a gynocentric noir about a nice girl who takes a date with a cad in a moment of weakness after her heart is broken by her absent soldier beau. She wakes up hungover amidst shattered glass to find the cad (Raymond Burr) has been murdered and everyone, including herself, assumes she is the killer.

It's familiar Lang territory, but the societal bindings within which women had to live in the American fifties were so constrictive that he is given no room to explore or move around when the protagonist is no longer male. Edward G Robinson can suffer romantic weakness over Joan Bennett (Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street) and we are fascinated to watch him flail in his trap because he has freedom to make choices, usually bad ones, even as the walls close in more tightly around him. Anne Baxter, restricted to good girl behavior, can only sit quietly, panic, and eventually lay herself meekly at the feet of the man (Richard Conte as the amoral and undeserving reporter who becomes fascinated with her) whom she trusts will save her. It's not very interesting, and it's not Baxter's fault.

Conte solves the mystery with a ridiculous piece of good fortune (the only clue is a record which was playing during the murder. He goes to the record store where it was bought, et voila! the murderess is the clerk), Baxter and Conte "fall in love" without any interesting dialogue or chemistry, and it's all a frustrating dozer except as a symptomatic study of the hideousness of that decade in this country.

Prometheus: (2011. dir: Ridley Scott) It's a general rule that any time you hear someone say, "The special effects were great!" about any movie, you can bank on it that the rest of it sucked. (This all-encompassing truth was revealed to me when the fourth Star Wars came out and that's all anyone could say about it. To this day I have not seen that lame piece of marketing, nor will I, despite having had some kind of spiritual awakening during the first one when I was thirteen.)

So, with that understanding between us, let me say that the special effects in Prometheus were great! If you disregard the fact that special effects should exist to enhance the telling of a story, and not to draw attention to themselves. Is somebody ashamed of their screenplay, perhaps?

It's loud and it's gross, as opposed to scary and real, which is what the first Alien movie was, remember that classic? Still scary, after all these years. And, much as I hate The-Director-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, in its sequel, Aliens, the soldiers knew how to explore a cave, unlike these folks, who aren't really scientists and soldiers, they just play them on TV, and not very well. Charlize Theron (whom I adore) is largely wasted; Kate Dickie is completely so. Idris Elba manages to shine some in a secondary role as the rough and tumble captain, as, of course, does Fassbender, who is a god among men, and those two are easily the best things about the film. In fact, had they spent all their time following David the Robot (Fassbender), the movie might have been as interesting as the trailer they put out in advance of the film in which David introduces us to his world. Ah, the clarity of hindsight.

And, OK, why do you cast Guy Pearce and then bury him in old-age makeup, which always looks false, if you're never going to make him young again? This thing is packed with stars and up-and-comers, and it doesn't help. The shocks are gross-outs, not scares. Mostly you get a lot of pseudo-rape imagery alongside a metric ton of bodily fluids. The best part, easily, is in the beginning, when we're just hanging out with David.

It's Scott's fault. Over and over, he sacrifices the old-fashioned but still worthy pursuit of the Making of Sense to Grand Guignol. In some cinematic pursuits, that works. In this one, the word trainwreck comes to mind.

manassas, a sweaty courtroom, and an ancient, pissed-off shaman

Gods and Generals: (2003. dir: Ronald Maxwell) This is somebody's favorite movie, I'm sure of it, someone for whom the War Between the States is as real today as it was 150 years ago, and I respect that. Most of us, though, will find it overlong and a little tedious, employing too liberal a dosage of swelly music. It can be summarized as somber, earnest speechifying by very good actors, punctuated by protracted (and probably very accurate) battle re-enactments. You can find here all your favorite quotes by all your favorite Civil War heroes (Robert E Lee pausing long enough to say the thing about it being well that war is so terrible, or, my favorite, Stonewall Jackson's dying words about crossing over the river and resting beneath the shade of the trees.) Nobody can argue with the performances, though, and the over-serious, thoughtful and sentimental way of speaking, although strange to our ears, rings true for the time. This is Stonewall's story, mostly, and when Stephen Lang (an actor who never stops amazing me) takes off his hat and starts to pray aloud, it is as genuinely stirring as it is alien to our modern cynicisms.

Civil War enthusiasts will want to hang on every moment, but most of us benefit from keeping the fast-forward button close to hand. If you speed through the first five seconds of every scene, generally a long, establishing shot, a sweeping pan of the next battlefield or an extended view of a crowded parlor with a young lady playing piano, and then again some through the thicks of the battles, you can cut this epic back by a much-needed half-hour.

A Time To Kill: (1996. dir: Joel Schumacher) Self-righteous claptrap intertwined with sentimental hogwash, but every now and then they get a moment just right and it almost sends a shiver down your spine.

Much as I hate to admit it, this failure does not rest at Joel Schumacher's door (like all his myriad other failures): he did his part just right. It's old-fashioned in its presentation, old-fashioned in a good way, perfect for the story, which is courtroom melodrama in which the villains are heinous and the heroes are spotless. (Patrick McGoohan is a piece of perfection as the judge.) It's the script that's mostly the loser. With its repetition of charged emotional exchanges, it put me in mind of soap opera, like when they have to re-live the heated conversation they had last week for any viewers who missed last week's ep. The characters are shallow, and only a top-notch cast, clear down the line to the smallest supporting roles, gives it the leg-up to make it watchable.

Schumacher creates a world we can experience with all our senses: this is a South where you can feel the heat, smell the sweat, you can taste the sensuality between the leads. The colors are saturated so it feels like an old-time movie, and the editing goes right along with that, never drawing attention to itself. Seriously, though, Grisham (or whoever) should be ashamed of himself, writing soppy, melodramatic dialogue like this.

the Manitou: (1978. dir: William Girdler) Ah, the cheeseball horror films of the seventies. This has something in common with the Fury, the Car, the Brood (although none of the best things), and it wants to have something in common with the Exorcist, but you can't say that with a straight face. The thing it has most in common with, in fact, is the original Star Trek series. It has Michael Ansara (Kang from "Day of the Dove"), the big-assed lizard from "Arena", an overblown score by Lalo Schifrin that could easily have whumped up over the top of Captain Kirk overacting, and the same set-builder, as far as I can tell. When the "manitou" (a 400-year-old spirit of a powerful medicine man) is about to erupt (from the neck of a randomly-chosen woman) into the world, the whole floor of the hospital goes ice-cold, and it looks way more like Star Trek than the Exorcist, with all the cheap badness that suggests (ie: styrofoam icicles instead of seeing people's breaths).

This is about the epitome of an MST2K movie, and should be approached as such. I think Susan Strasberg got cast because of a strange facial anomaly: when she screams, it appears that her mouth is larger than the rest of her face. And that's as good a reason as any for a movie like this.

spring breakers: swinishness in neon pastels

(2013. dir: Harmony Korine) I know we're supposed to assume there's a metric ton of ironic humor here, but that doesn't mean you're going to laugh.

Questions of morality aside, can we all agree there's something creepy about a guy whose life-work involves surrounding himself with kids and convincing them to strip off and party for the camera? The Message of the Film seems to be that "Spring Break Forever, Bitches" is an ultimately unsatisfying motto by which to live. Korine uses it as a rough equivalent for (and therefore a condemnation of) the American Dream, but mostly he just wants to show us two hours of an unrated version of MTV's Spring Break. And it all feels (creepily) like just an excuse for him to exist at the epicenter of a big, naked party.

The movie starts out as a sort of girl-bonding thing, while the four chicas are getting pumped up to go to Florida, and terrorising diners in a local greasy spoon to get the money for it, but once Franco steps onboard, he hijacks the project. In a good way, I mean, because he's a good actor. The downside is that he's one of maybe two in the cast who can improvise effectively for longer than five words at a time, and the bulk of the film is improvised. The result is a lot of deadly dull dialogue, and Korine repeats this dialogue (his sound design is like a party dub remix, get it? It's Spring Break, y'all!) over the tops of subsequent scenes, sometimes several times and for no good reason, dialogue which was, and let me repeat this for emphasis, truly dull the first time around. Apparently some of these actresses were once innocent kid-actors: hence, irony. I didn't recognize them, so I don't know about that, but that's an outmoded trick. Remember Lisa Bonet? She was a Cosby kid until Angel Heart. Miley Cyrus, anyone? Justin Timberlake? Christina Aguilera? Most of the famous innocents veer wildly into the dark and dirty zone, because how else do you grow up? It's the only way to wash away the pong of the mawkish goo.

The important point is that unless you're particularly interested in youthful hedonism, or want to jack off, "Girls Gone Wild" can be simultaneously boring and depressing. He's got an interesting visual sense, Korine (albeit annoyingly pastel. I get it: we're in Florida. Flamingos and Margaritaville and Miami Vice. It's still annoying), and his ASS is downright SAVED by whoever is editing the thing (Douglas Crise. Good work, dude. Without you, nobody would have paid this movie any mind at all), but it's all built up out of endless, mindless set-pieces: "OK, everyone get in the pool and fire off your guns." "OK, everyone do coke off this naked chick's torso," or my actual favorite: "OK, all the girls get into your bikinis and pink ski masks, bring out your baddest-assed weaponry and gather around the piano by the pool, where Franco is going to sing a Britney Spears song." But, mostly, it's "OK, everyone jump up and down and holler and pour beer over each other as salaciously as possible. It'll be so fucking awesome."

By the film's end, all the girls have decided, --ridiculously, in two cases,-- that "being a good person is the most important thing, mom," and they all want to forget the trail of spent weaponry and dead bodies and go home to the old pink-curtained bedroom with the teddy bears on the bed. What?! It's got to be ironic, because it can't be anything else, but it just reads as a clumsy way to finish a film he didn't know how to finish.

To those of us who are long in the tooth, youthful hedonism feels slightly embarrassing, maybe indicative of a lack of imagination. It is of course possible that this perspective makes it impossible for me to relax into the spirit of the thing, but what I come away with is this: a story that is not interesting, pallid dialogue, a too-obvious message, unfunny humor, and unengaging characters.

That said, my co-worker and I have been having a good time today randomly punctuating conversations with a soft and sinuous, "Spraaang Breeaaak!" like the ones that Franco gives.