in which i enjoy halloween at sinescope

In honor of Samhain, the brilliant and wonderful Derek Hill has invited me write a horror post on He Watched By Night, the film portion of the Sinescope website. Come over to read it, and explore every cranny of this eclectic corner of the internet while you're there...


THIRTEEN HORROR CLASSICS (in no particular order):




Toby Dammit (1968)

Long before the dark-bellied whimsy of Lynch, before the Japanese brought to our awareness the ultra-creep potential lurking in images of little girls, there was Federico Fellini’s “Toby Dammit.” It is the final chapter of the swingin’ European triptych Spirits of the Dead, three short films loosely inspired by Poe stories. The Roger Vadim is inconsequential, the Louis Malle is interesting in a lurid way (Delon strip-n-whip with Bardot!), and the Fellini is a bounding little romp through a surrealist hell. Terence Stamp is the beautiful and disintegrating movie star decked out in Carnaby Street satin and lace, his smile a death’s-head, walking -- mostly doubled over in agony -- through the loving insanity that is Fellini’s Rome toward his inexorable death. Aside from delivering an image so uncanny that it’s burned forever into my mind, the film seems to me perhaps the truest psychological portrait of the absurdity of superstardom ever entrusted to celluloid.




Pulse (2001)

Pulse is not my favorite Kiyoshi Kurosawa film; that’s Bright Future. Despite its revenant, though, its ominous use of ambient noise and a strange plot involving toxic fish loosed into the waterways of Tokyo, Future’s optimistic, sometimes jaunty mood sets it uncomfortably apart from the horror genre. Pulse, though, is a worthy example of this director’s stunning oeuvre and contains some of his most compelling images. In Kurosawa’s world, murders and suicides occur not by individual design but in waves, in plagues and infestations (in Pulse, such an epidemic reaches its logical culmination in worldwide apocalypse). The dead are active among us, and no action of theirs is benevolent (with one wonderful exception in Bright Future) outside of a rare forgiveness (Retribution).

A man stands still in a dimly-lit room. Gradually, without obvious change of lighting or perspective, we become aware of a spectral presence behind him, its stance somehow off, crooked; the presence dawns on us, as it does on him, with the same slow horror. The ghost of a woman walks with long strides across a tiny room, grotesquely slowly, and she’s moving her arms wrong. A man meets his doppelganger and sets it on fire. There are unearthly stains on cement walls, and baleful pools of dark water on the ground. Kurosawa leans toward the police procedural, but it is the antithesis of CSI: there is no single murderer and no simple motive. Crime is both viral and supernaturally motivated, not in the possessed-by-the-ghost-of-a-serial-killer sense so beloved of Hollywood, but in the Jungian sense that we are all of us capable of all things, and even a reasonably good person living in the isolation dictated by our modern society is vulnerable to dark suggestion. Don’t stop with Pulse: watch also Cure, Seance, and Retribution.




Ravenous (1999)

A masterpiece, and the most exhilarating cannibal movie you’ll ever see. Anthropophagy in Old California is the metaphor for the greed and rapacity of the white man with his empire-building and his Manifest Destiny. The music is perfect, the casting is perfect, the script is an unpretentious gem. Director Antonia Bird steers the helm with a strong hand, and the thing can be grimly funny. Once you’ve seen it, TRY and forget Robert Carlyle’s manic fit in the snow outside the cave or Jeremy Davies’ anguished cry, “He was licking my wound!” Or the marvelous endgame, in which two men caught in a bear-trap are playing Whoever-Dies-First-Gets-Eaten.




Night of the Demon / Curse of the Demon (1957)

Wonderful old telling of the M.R. James story “The Casting of the Runes.” Niall MacGinnes is a Crowleyesque mage, equal parts aristocrat, buffoon and coldly effective demon-raiser; Dana Andrews is the skeptic who has to re-examine his Weltanschauung. Classily shot in deep, velvet b&w, its demon is controversial: while its emergence from the clouds is eerily magnificent, the close-up looks like what might have happened had Ed Wood designed a muppet. A great story, though, and an undeniably great film from director Jacques Tourneur.




The Leopard Man (1943)

A Spanish dancer walks down a threatening street playing castanets. A fortune-teller keeps drawing the Ace of Spades. A girl trapped in a cemetery watches, fascinated, as a tree-branch lowers menacingly to block out the moon. This is my choice to represent the truly unique body of work by producer Val Lewton, which deserves to be watched in its entirety: Cat People is the most famous, Isle of the Dead perhaps the best, but this one (directed by Jacques Tourneur) I love for its strong female characters, appealing dialogue, and really dazzling images. As in most Lewton films, there is nothing supernatural here (a cat has escaped, a murderer may be impersonating it), but the presence of Death is unnervingly tangible, throwing its dense shadow across everything.




The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Four people -- a physicist, his wife, a mental medium, and a physical medium -- walk into a notoriously haunted house, a house which has killed and driven men insane. Richard Matheson has written an economical script from his own book, and director John Hough has conjured the house into life, made it a breathing and genuinely frightening character by means of ambient roars and indiscernible whispers, crooked long-shots, and creeping dollies. The four actors (Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowell, Clive Revill, and Gayle Hunnicutt) seethe and ham a bit, but you do when you’re fighting possession by an evil house. In fact, the film’s genius lies in its Britishness; that’s the dignified foundation from which it can run wild with impunity.




The Stepford Wives (1975)

While the sixties were turning into the seventies and women were sloughing off old roles to step tentatively into new, Ira Levin wrote two extraordinary potboilers, Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. Their heroines walk into a nightmare of complete isolation in which there is literally nobody they can trust, and anyone who believes them is powerless to help. This was no rehash of the old mothers’ nightmares or don’t-walk-alone cautionary tales that Hollywood was used to dishing up for women. This was a new brand of total nightmare for a new breed of total woman. Having grown up with the network television version of Bryan Forbes’s film, I was shocked to see the huge breasts on the Katherine Ross-bot at the end of the DVD. The anguish of her husband makes it scarier than if he were cold and conscienceless. These men aren’t inhuman. They do love their wives. Making the decision to replace them with obedient, boobalicious clones is not an easy one, but THEY ALL MAKE IT ANYWAY. I don’t know how it plays for men, but one of the most chilling moments in film history for me is when the heroine asks the replica-maker why they subrogate their wives and he says, “Because we can.” Nearly as chilling is the feminist consciousness-raising session which is highjacked by replicas who froth with manic joy about household cleansers.




Duel (1971)

Yes, it’s a monster movie. That truck is a monster, and if director Steven Spielberg were sitting here with us, he’d second the notion. My favorite bit, the bit that always gets the hair standing up on the nape, is when Dennis Weaver is at the side of the road thinking the danger is past, then he looks back and sees the truck lurking in the tunnel, rumbling, watching him. He thinks he must be imagining it, and then, as he looks, it TURNS ITS LIGHTS ON.




Angel Heart (1987)

Some of us remember a time when Mickey Rourke was heralded as the De Niro of his generation, and this is some of his best work. It’s after World War II and Rourke’s unkempt, charming PI who has “a thing about chickens” follows a missing persons case steeped in voodoo from New York to New Orleans. Under director Alan Parker’s unfailing guidance the sense of dread grows to unbearable levels. A haunting soundtrack and a hypnotic, repeating series of fragmentary flashbacks weave a mesmerizing spell, and if it weren’t for two badly miscalculated elements (the glowing eyes and the ham-fisted De Niro character), this might have been a perfect horror film.




The Dead Zone (1983)

Saying The Dead Zone is one of your favorite Cronenbergs is like saying Hanky Panky is your favorite The The record: the disciples cry apostasy and reach for the tar-bucket. Great directors have strong, sweeping vision and suffer obsessive returnings to specific themes and visual tropes, but the best prove their mastery by stepping easily outside their own shoes to make “normal” movies with ease. As my sixth-grade teacher said, Picasso had to conquer the rules before he could cast them off. Who might have predicted the Lynchiana to follow from the exquisitely melancholy The Elephant Man? Similarly, Cronenberg takes a peripatetic Stephen King work, pares it down into clean lines, then tells the story austerely, with simple elegance. It could not have been better shot, better edited, or better cast. Christopher Walken gives a great and subtle turn as a man who emerges from a coma with unnatural powers, and I defy you to watch The West Wing easily again after seeing Martin Sheen’s powermad senator Greg Stillson.




Prophecy (1995)

Who wouldn’t love to live in a Miltonian universe in which angels vie with men for the love of God, in which the heavens are perpetually rent by war between seraphim, where Christopher Walken is the ruthless archangel Gabriel and Viggo Mortensen is Lucifer himself? For two hours and two sequels, you can revel in the gnostic angst. This is the other side of Walken, dry-witted and unstoppably brutal, and there’s nothing fey about these angels, who are fierce and homicidal. Gabriel’s speech about the nature of the beast (“I’m an angel. I turn cities into salt. I kill first-borns while their mamas watch…”) is a piece of cinematic perfection. There are other adeptly macabre moments in Gregory Widen’s film: one in particular in which a little girl who carries the soul of a genocidal general inside her assesses the battle-worthiness of a stronghold. Elias Koteas, always the virtuoso, gives his doubting-thomas hero a complexity rare in the genre.




The Fool-Killer (1965)

Not a horror film, exactly, but what is it? Lovely in b&w, it’s a good one to watch while feverish or sleep-deprived for the full, dreamlike effect. Reminiscent of The Night of the Hunter, Servando Gonzalez's film follows a boy (Edward Albert) on his travels through post-Civil War America. He’s on the run and he hardly knows from what, but it’s embodied in his mind by the mythical demon of the title who may or may not be his mysterious traveling companion. There’s a pleasing Manly Wade Wellman quality to the world, and the camp-meeting scene, with its Dutch angles and fearsome Calvinist sermon, is something to behold.




The Passion of the Christ (2004)

The world of The Passion is dark and Manichean. Satan and her archons are everywhere in evidence and God is impossibly remote, embodied in the moon at the moment it is obscured by clouds or in a single drop of rain. Meanwhile, demons race out of nowhere and disappear just as fast. In Gethsemane, a gorgeous scene, the night in the garden is electric with dread and panic. The crowd jeering at the flagellation is nothing short of Boschian. Lucifer walks constantly among the masses, gloating and taunting. Judas harassed to death by demons in front of the maggot-ridden grin of a rotting cadaver is some kind of horror-film epiphany. You’d think director Mel Gibson had been working in the genre all his life. This is not a movie about love, God’s or otherwise; it’s about suffering, horror, the easy supremacy of evil, and mankind’s unending and continuous failure to rise to any level of goodness. The upbeat ending, if you can call it that, in which God takes matters into His own hands and the Christ rises up to the ominous sound of a martial drumbeat to go forth and make His war, is obligatory and unconvincing.

bad lieutenant port of call new orleans: redemption after the deluge

SPOILER ALERT

I couldn't put off Bad Lieutenant forever. First, it's Herzog, then it's New Orleans; on top of that, I heard an intriguing thing about an iguana, and I couldn't shake it out of my mind.

We begin during the immediate aftermath of Katrina. The police force has disintegrated, along with much of the town. Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) and his partner (Val Kilmer, playing a guy who would very much like to be a badder cop than his partner but doesn't seem to have the flair for it, lacks the imagination or some other je-ne-sais-quoi) find a prisoner about to drown in a flooded holding cell. Initially inclined to lay bets on how long it will take him to submerge, an uncustomary impulse to do the right thing kicks in and McDonagh leaps into the water to save the man, an act which will simultaneously earn him promotion, decoration, and a painful and lifelong disability. For the rest of the film, he is a crooked man, in both soul and physique. He lumbers across it like a Frankenstein's monster, committing crimes large and small to support his habits, escape his pain, keep some semblance of control over a life spinning wildly out of control.

I began, as I always do, feeling uncomfortable with Cage. He is so strange, that guy. In this one he uses a phony voice. In physical terms, it seems like he's moved his voice down from his mask by consciously opening his throat; it sounds like he's trying to sound like a normal person and failing. Maybe that's the desired effect, because God knows his character is one of those thousands who spend (to paraphrase the immortal Camus) an extraordinary amount of energy chasing an elusive appearance of normalcy. I don't think so, though. More likely, that uber-weirdo Herzog took him aside and said (in clipped, sombre, carefully-chosen verbiage, with all "t"s over-enunciated), "I want you to sound like a different person. I want that your own mother, when she hears your voice, shall not recognize you as her son."

In the end, none of that matters. There's nobody in the world plays a particular brand of drug-addled psycho-crazy better than Cage. By the final frames, I was convinced that not only could no one else have played it, but that the mad, stoical, romantic visionary Herzog may have found his new perfect foil: this may be his new Klaus Kinski. No one else would have given that perfect spin to lines like, "You don't have a lucky crack-pipe?" and "Shoot him again. His soul is still dancing." And yes, we do, in fact, see the soul dancing. It dances gracefully and frantically, as if for its very existence. Herzog uses magical realism boldly, deals it with a sure hand and in ideal amounts: it is the device through which he simultaneously communicates the ongoing drug-haze blurring McDonagh's grasp and also the numinous possibilities of a shining spiritual super-reality overlapping the purely physical realm.

That's where the iguanas come in. And not just iguanas, but fish and reptiles of many stripe and color. A snake glides rather beautifully through the filthy flood waters. A crocodile lies dying in the middle of a road; its mate, or perhaps its child, unseen by the humans at the scene, watches it helplessly from the roadside. At his initial crime-scene, McDonagh finds a child's stangely compelling verse written for a beautiful red fish caught in a drinking glass, and it haunts him. The iguanas? these, my friend, you must experience for yourself.

One of the best things about being Werner Herzog, a thing which must make him cackle and rub his hands together with glee, is that you get actors of the quality of Michael Shannon and Brad Dourif in your secondary roles. Eva Mendes is perfect as McDonagh's gold-hearted whore-girlfriend, really stunning. My favorite part,--and I don't want to spoil it by saying too much,-- involves an old spoon and pirate treasure, and delivers a message of hope and the persistence of innocence which easily outweighs the corrosive immorality chewing at this world from the outside.

Who but Herzog would have thought such strange redemption would be possible in a place like New Orleans? Who but Herzog would have given us such Catholic themes, without more than a frame or two of Catholic imagery, in so very Catholic a town as New Orleans? In the end there is so much redemption that he gives us a fairy tale ending... and then he shows us how life goes on afterwards, after the words "happily ever after", life which is not easy.

The piling up of complications is ruthless, and perhaps only believable in the context of so corrupt and magical a city, and the ending is sublime: the fish. The silence. The laugh. Herzog's hand, in fact, is so sure at the helm, his pacing unhurried yet flawless, the music an exact vehicle for the story, neither more nor less, that it's a pleasure to watch it unfold. You can relax into it with the absolute certainty that you're resting in the hands of a master.

things i've been watching: august 2010

Ghost Writer: (2010. dir: Roman Polanski) Another sly masterwork from that genius of claustrophobic paranoia, a man who can say more convincingly than most that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Ghost Writer fits right into the natural curve of his oeuvre alongside Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown, the Tenant, Bitter Moon and the Ninth Gate. Ewan MacGregor plays an unnamed hack hired to ghost the memoirs of a disgraced ex-Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) after the original ghostwriter dies under mysterious circumstances. As in most Polanski, the world into which the slightly naive protagonist steps is both unfathomably dark and deceptively attractive, with hidden depths just beyond his ability to plumb; and as in most Polanski, it feels from the first like a slow noose tightening around his doomed neck. Although the earlier films were more brilliant, Polanski has developed over the years a light, whimsical touch which makes the newer ones easier to enjoy, less entirely devastating. His storytelling is satiny smooth, without a wrinkle or blemish, without any flirting with the hackneyed or banal. Even when a plot-point seems obvious, he tells it from an unexpected angle or in an image that feels new.



Winter's Bone: (2010. dir: Debra Granik) It's based on a book by Daniel Woodrell, and it plays like a cross between a Kem Nunn story sans the surfing and Donna Tartt's the Little Friend. It's a small world in the wooded mountains of the modern-day Ozarks, a world bounded by poverty and drug-fueled paranoia, and Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) has to track her father down or lose the house he's signed over for his bond. Although everyone in the area seems to be vaguely related to everyone else, the code of silence among them takes precedence over blood-ties and she's in danger just by walking into a yard and asking a question. These actors, with a few cannily-chosen exceptions (Garret Dillahunt will forever be heartily welcome in my DVD player), have the leathery faces and worn-out voices of real people with hard lives, and there's no Hollywood lighting or makeup to interfere between the camera and the sense of realism.

And then there's John Hawkes, who is my hero now, after this. Like many, I noticed him first as Sol Starr in Deadwood although he'd been working for twenty years already by then. (I extolled his virtues to my mother, who's a big LOST-head, and she looked at me like I was a little tetched; so either Lost is so filled with brilliant performances that a genius like Hawkes' is just another pebble in the cinder-pit, or maybe he was uninspired by it. Despite the zealous testimony from the converted, I haven't got the faith and mustardseed to trudge through all the various seasons just to find the scattered gems from loved ones like Hawkes and Kiele Sanchez, Jeremy Davies and Terry O'Quinn. Maybe someday.) In any case, the naturalism of the world created in Winter's Bone is so entirely unimpeded that when Hawkes' character (a near-tragic bad-ass called Teardrop) walks to the back of his truck and takes out an axe in the middle of a parking lot where it can only be used for ill, the shock is far more frightening than had it been accompanied by suspenseful music and fancy camera-work. The ending, and Teardrop's last exit, is one of the great underplayed scenes of the decade.



The Last Days of Pompeii: (1935. dir: Ernest B. Schoedsack) Did you know that Vesuvius erupted to devastate Pompeii specifically because a fellow had a chance to to try and save Jesus' life and didn't? Yup, a direct result. Fellow called Marcus, used to be a gladiator until he lost a fight to Ward Bond and went into slave- and horse-trading instead. This feels like a silent DeMille epic that maybe got its budget slashed and sound accidentally added. Basil Rathbone shows us his Ponderous Thespian side as Pontius Pilate.



The Falcon Takes Over: (1942. dir: Irving Reis) One of my favorite moments in the history of literature is in Farewell, My Lovely when Moose Malloy steps out of the shadows and says to the girl he's been obsessively and ruthlessly tracking, "Hiya, baby. Long time no see." Moose is one of the great enigmatic characters of all time: big as a truck, just broken out of jail after having taken a fall for his boss, completely amoral in his relentless search for the beautiful showgirl who promised to wait for him, he leaves a trail of bodies behind him but never sways from true love for his elusive Velma.

For your wartime enjoyment, the studio has bowdlerized the great novel to make a comic vehicle for George Sanders, and almost all of the beauty and punch of it are gone. The one great thing that remains from the grand opus is that haunted, Ahab-esque quality that Ward Bond brings to his Moose Malloy. It's perfect casting, and George Sanders isn't actually bad as a sort of leering, playboy version of Philip Marlowe, but he's fighting a middlin' script and a good deal of cornpone. For my money, the 1975 Robert Mitchum/Charlotte Rampling remake, flawed as it is, remains the go-to version, with Mitchum's deadpan voiceovers and world-weary visage providing just the right stuff. The original (Murder, My Sweet) capsizes beneath the insurmountable weight of an uncharismatic Marlowe (Dick Powell?! Was he somebody's son-in-law or something?) and I'm flummoxed as to why this perfect story hasn't been remade for every generation, like Pride and Prejudice and Hamlet and Robin Hood.

more things i've been watching: july 2010

Salt: (2010. dir: Phillip Noyce)
SPOILER ALERT
We all know there are two reasons to see summer blockbusters: either you're a 12-year-old boy or you have no air conditioning. Had this come out in the more reasonable month of April I never would have ventured out; that understood, it turns out to be far more enjoyable than I ever imagined. Had there been a man in the lead as initially planned, it'd have been a rehash of myriad things of old. With Jolie soaking up and dealing out the damage, it's intriguing. It turns out there's something oddly gratifying about watching a gorgeous, psychopathic woman (are all action heroes psychopaths these days? I suspect they are. Remember in the old West when you knew the good guy because he would never shoot a guy in the back? Huh. Bunch of wusses) peeling open a ferocious can of whoop-ass on a good portion of the male population. I HATE the Bourne Method of editing fight scenes (such fast cuts and dubious angles that one is forced to take it on faith that there's an actual fight in progress); in this context, however, when you have an eighty-pound woman taking on whole rooms full of armed and trained 200-lb gorillas, not seeing too much is a boon and helps you to take it all with the necessary load of, well, salt.

The thing this movie did right was to let us just far enough into the heroine's head that we know she truly loves her husband; further than that, it keeps us guessing. Jolie's got that great, stoical ice-face and she knows very well how to use it, when to emote and when to hold back. She gets the crap kicked out of her by the Koreans, the Russians AND the Americans, but she REEKS of toughness, takes it all as part of the job and gives out better than she gets. I love her line deliveries. I love it when she's got trapped by the Feds against a car, guns pointed at her from all sides, men encroaching, shouts that she should drop to the ground, and she says with a perfect blend of aplomb and stubborn petulance, "I didn't do anything wrong," and rolls into one of those perfect action-movie escapes that are just barely possible enough that even though nobody you or I have ever met could ever do it, we'll buy it now and then onscreen because we've gladly accepted our load of, well, salt.

There are absurd plot points, but not too many laws of physics get broken (as in, say, the Dark Knight movies), and the stunts look unrehearsed, by which I mean that when she's jumping from one moving truck to another it doesn't look easy, and, although I have no personal experience from which to draw, I'm fair certain it wouldn't be. The final scene is badly written (poor Chiwetel Ejiofor has taken on a thankless role; at least he's one of the few who doesn't get his ass kicked) and afterwards when the screen flashed to black and credits I was outraged. I felt like I'd only seen half a film. My boyfriend pointed out that it'd been two hours, and she'd killed all the bad guys and saved the world, and what else did I want? I guess that speaks well for it, the fact that I was ready to sit through another two hours, and speaks badly against it that it lacked the satisfactory denouement which would have sent me back into the heat of the day with a cathartic sense of time well spent.



the Charge of the Light Brigade: (1936. dir: Michael Curtiz) Ultimately unsuccessful but enjoyable historical/patriotic hash with some nice visuals (an Indian soiree communicated through exotic shadows against a wall, David Niven avoiding the moonlight to crawl out of a fortress unseen) and an easy, loping pace punctuated by exciting battles. But what it comes down to is this: Olivia de Havilland spurns the love of Errol Flynn for some milquetoast boy. And who can countenance such nonsense?



Sanjuro: (1962. dir: Akira Kurosawa) The great thing about having deprived oneself of the classics in one's youth is the chance to see them for the first time as an adult. The stream flowing with camellias! The night that Sanjuro kills a whole roomful of guards alone, like Old Boy in the parking garage basement. Toshiro Mifune is huge! Bigger than life. The humor! The characters! That last, awesome showdown: the silence. The stillness. The proximity. The sudden geyser of blood! Just awesome. Five stars; no qualms. Completely enjoyable in every respect.



Black Book: (2006.dir: Paul Verhoeven) Graceless and inadequate string of absurd coincidences and overt melodrama in Nazi-occupied Holland. It all LOOKS great, and Carice van Houten is very good as the Jewish flirt who uses smarts and looks to play both sides, resistance and invaders. In a bid to surprise us about who the bad guy is (well, the OTHER bad guy, besides all the SS), Verhoeven stretches his plot into incredible and, more importantly, unsatisfying shapes.

inception: three levels and philip k dick

Straight off, my prejudice: I'm a Nolan fan from way back. The care he takes with detail, story and psychological exploration (Memento, Insomnia, the Prestige) seems fascinating to me and possibly unmatched among working directors.

WARNING: TONS OF SPOILERS AHEAD

Here's a basic summary of the plot: Cobb (DiCaprio) is a specialist in the art of entering a person's subconscious through their dreams to extract information. He does this for a living, but he's on the run from some vague, disgruntled ex-client and wants out. Extraction is not a feat which can be achieved alone; an extractor needs a team: he has a right-hand man (in this case, the lovely Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a dream-architect who builds the details of the dream-world, a chemist and a forger (who doesn't forge papers; rather, he morphs his appearance to impersonate someone else in the dream-world, perhaps an intimate of the subject's). Saito (the intriguing Ken Watanabe) hires Cobb not to extract but to implant an idea deep in a dreamer's mind: for vague but convincing ethical reasons, the son and heir (the wonderful Cillian Murphy) to a mega-billionaire (the underused Pete Postlethwaite) must be convinced to break up his father's empire. In return, Saito will give Cobb the one thing he truly desires: reunion with his children, from whom he has been banished since he was set up by his suicidal wife (Marion Cotillard, playing the same tense, neurotic beauty she did in Public Enemies) to look like he murdered her. In order to implant the idea, the team has to go three levels deep into the fellow's subconscious; in order to do THAT, they induce a group-dreaming using sedatives and a fancy machine, then in the dreamstate induce another, using sedatives and a fancy machine... you get the idea. Why do sedatives and machines work on a dream-level as they do in reality, when you and I both know that if you dream of sitting at a computer trying to work, the mouse and keyboard seem not hooked up and any words which appear are nothing like what you're trying to type, and if you swallow poison, chances are good you'll continue unharmed? That's a good question, and I'm glad you asked it. Let's put it on hold for a minute and come back to it. Also, notice how often I'm using the word "vague". It's important, and we'll come back to it.

A crucial thing to know about existence on these particular dream-levels is that if you are killed on a shallow level you wake up; if you are killed on, say, the third level down, your consciousness is lost and you spend a near-eternity wandering confused in the ramblings of your underconscious world, having forgotten that it is not reality. Another important thing to remember is that although the dream- architect is ostensibly the one who designs the world down to each detail (how? and how do the others manage to curb their own impulsively creative tendencies? well, it's vague), powerful emotional content buried in another person's subconscious can wreak havoc there, as Cobb's does, conjuring freight trains that barrel down the center of city streets and a dead wife who follows him from one dream to another specifically to louse up any plans he might have. Why is Cobb the only one whose subconscious wreaks any havoc? Yes, he's sicker than your average pup, but everyone's got submerged crap. Why doesn't anyone else's undealt-with psyche-stuff show up, even in small ways? That is a very good question, and I'm glad you asked it. We'll set it aside and come back to it later.

Meanwhile, through the unfolding of a visually stunning and ambitiously innovative story, the team navigates the three levels of non-reality while managing to solve Cobb's problems with his dead wife and successfully plant the idea which will, ostensibly, save the world. Then, they escape back into reality. Or do they?

I'm not being glib about this. This movie is a lot of fun. During a good half of it, granted, Nolan is wearing his Action-Guy hat and that makes me yawn some, but it's an old problem between us, a not-unheard-of dynamic between me and old Chris (I find Batman Begins a big snooze-fest, apart from the sound of Christian Bale's voice, which exercises some kind of eerie mystical power over me). But even in the Action Movie part lay things I loved: specifically, Gordon-Levitt's fistfights in zero gravity, which were delightful.

And let's dismiss right now all the moaning back and forth you'll hear about the Matrix: "it's a cheap rip-off; it's nowhere as good"... Whatever, dude. The only thing it's got in common with the Matrix is a mutual fascination with Philip K Dick and his exploration of the various levels of existence channeled through the medium of the action film. In fact, the movie it's most like is Shutter Island, since both tell the same story: a man, traumatized by the tragic loss of his family due to a devastating action by his wife, goes to intense psychological lengths in attempt to keep at bay the devastating truth and halt his own creeping sense of guilt. The rest is window-dressing.

My absolutely, no-question, full-on favorite thing about this film is the ambivalent ending. IS the top wobbling? WILL it fall? Has the word "reality" been stripped so clean of meaning by the time the top is set in motion that the question itself has no relevance? This is exactly why I love Christopher Nolan.

That said, I have a few beefs. A big one is aural. What's with the bombastic soundtrack almost constantly intruding? Had there been silence, or ambient noise... Think of the possibilities! The soundtrack of dreams! Think of the soundwork that Gus Van Sant has done in recent years (Last Days!) and imagine if Nolan had used something like that... a different tonal register for each different level of dream, perhaps? Ah! How eerie it might have been. Instead, he focuses (very well, very ably indeed, there is no question) on the visual, and the sound is tossed to the overweening composer guy, as it so often is these days in action films. It happens all the time, and every time I'm hugely disappointed. I tell you, hardly a day goes by that I don't long for the deep silences and natural sound of early-'70s cinema. Ou sont les neiges d'antan, you know?

My other big whinge is that the dream levels are far too stable. Yes, they can be manipulated by external forces (the lack of gravity when the van in another level in falling into the water) and by conscious choice (the dream-architect's job), but never once during the film did I think, "Yes! That's like in my dreams!", as I have in David Lynch works, for instance, or in that final episode of Buffy season four, when the scoobies are haunted in their dreams by the First Slayer. Personally, my dreams are constantly shifting. Even when I have a tentative grip of lucidity and consciously cause a change -- like making myself fly, for instance,-- the change never lasts, but turns into something new. The one constant is a shifting ground. If I try and read a book, the words shift in front of my eyes. If I'm waiting at a bus-stop and the thought occurs to me that I'm at the wrong corner, you can be damn sure the bus is about to pull up to a different corner and I'm going to be running after it. A single thought changes everything. Although I wholeheartedly subscribe to the notion that dreams are filled with messages from not only underconscious but superconscious and extra-conscious sources, the truest words I can use to sum up my dream-life are CONSTANT RANDOM SHIFTS. In short, my biggest disappointment about this movie was that I never believed I was exploring various dream-lives of various characters...

And that brings me nicely round to my main point, which is that I think (although I am open to discussion on the matter) that the only way the story ultimately makes sense is if it's ALL happening inside Cobb's head, from beginning to end, from before the opening shot, the whole shebang, the entirety of the enchilada. As in, he's already stuck in that lowest level of the dream-life when we come in on his story. It reminds me of Alex Garland's novel Coma, a short book tracing the mental meanderings of a comatose guy, which were a chillingly convincing semi-circular interaction with memories, overheard snippets from the doctors and nurses by his bed, and hallucinations in which he is driven, sometimes desperately, towards a vague but important goal which is continually frustrated and confused. Maybe the story we're seeing is Cobb's and Cobb's alone. He is like a man in a coma, and we are stuck in the widening circles of his hallucinations, his memories and his strivings. Perhaps its apparent stability comes from the closed nature of the world; the dream is an endless loop, without hope of waking. My theory is that every person in Inception is a projection from Cobb's subconscious as he fights to find his way up to a reality which has retreated so far away that he might no longer recognize it if he saw it. The only piece of true memory we see is that blurry, slow-motion, recurring image of the kids playing with their faces averted from him.

Think about it. It explains why nobody else's subconscious projections matter: they have none, being Cobb's own projections. It explains why the physical laws of one level of reality apply on each deeper level of non-reality: because it's all the same level, really, all happening on the endless racetrack of Cobb's unstill mind. It explains the vagueness of so many of the plot-points: the details are not, at last, the point for the man who is desperately combing his own mental labyrinths for a lucrative escape route. And it explains the question at the end about whether we are, in fact, in reality. We are not. The escape is illusory; he is trapped, but perhaps it has ceased to matter. Perhaps he can find joy anyway.

Philip K Dick, master-philosopher and godfather of multiple levels of experienced reality, returned to a pattern of three basics in his works: the Seen, the Is, and the Ought. The Seen (in his novels, as well as in life itself) is always illusory, and must be stripped away in pieces before one finds the Is. Only when one comprehends the true Is can one begin to contemplate changes necessary to create the Ought. In Inception, eveything we see is illusion. The entire action of the movie is Cobb's ongoing attempt to strip the Seen away and find the Is. It's the only way I can convince the story to hold together properly, and it's too enjoyable a story to reject just because the ends are too slippery to stay tied.

what i've been watching: july 2010

the Stendhal Syndrome: (1996. dir: Dario Argento) Is there a father in the world who's put his daughter through anything like what Dario does to Asia? It's almost beyond abuse. In this one, Asia plays an unconvincing policewoman trying to catch a rapist at the Uffizi and who, it turns out, suffers from the Stendhal Syndrome: a sort of aesthetic hysteria which causes her to be overwhelmed by the power of great art. The rapist (the redoubtable Thomas Kretschmann in an early but assured turn) uses her weakness to toy with her; on the plus side, it keeps him from killing her as he does his other victims. Argento films are never soft and cuddly, their roots firmly in the giallos from whence they sprang, but this one is very brutal indeed, featuring several cruel rapes and killings, including some moments of extreme ferocity by Asia herself. Although the story is weak and creaky at the hinges, Dario shows his masterful hand in structure and realization (he has another, less masterful hand, which turns up onscreen occasionally but thankfully not this time). The dreamlike quality of the first half gives the nightmare extra teeth by lulling the viewer into a trancelike state. Certainly it's not to be taken on if you're feeling at all sensitive. As I was switching off the TV, a sordid and inexplicable thought crossed my mind: that this was just the sort of movie a demon might use as a gateway if it had a notion to take up lodging in your soul.



the Burrowers: (2008. dir: JT Petty) There's an attack on a farmhouse; women go missing. A posse rides out, expecting to find them kidnapped by Indians, but life is not nearly so simple in this impressive horror/western amalgam, possibly inspired by Ravenous. It's not got the downright brilliance of that one, and its central metaphor is not as satisfying, but it's still a very fine horror film with wonderful production values: first-rate acting, dialogue and photography make up for its lapses in story and pacing. And then, at the end, Tom Waits sings an awesomely creepy "All the Pretty Horses" over the roll of credits.



Joan of Arc: (1948. dir: Victor Fleming) Hagiography can be so damned ponderous, don't you find? Although it's written partly by Maxwell Anderson, one of those playwrights (along with Eliot, Fry, Anouilh, et al) who masterminded the mid-20th century rage for historical drama written in poetry (if you can even imagine that such a thing ever happened), this has no poetry in it, nor does it have any moment of beauty or of truth, either in the historical or in the broader, all-encompassingly human sense. It was Fleming's last film and maybe he was exhausted. It plods lifelessly from one Disneyland-colored set-piece to another. Jose Ferrer is rather good as the spineless and amoral Dauphin; Fleming cuts out the character of Gilles de Rais entirely, probably not wanting to deal with the repercussions of having Bluebeard running around; Ingrid Bergman seems as uninspired as she is uninspiring. I watched it, naturally, because Ward Bond is in it, wildly miscast as a Frenchman. (If I wanted to show you a picture to illustrate the words "absolute opposite of Frenchman", I would show you a picture of Ward Bond.) Still, he has one thing going for him here: due to his years of strenuous training under Ford, he can carry off the most mouth-coatingly, gag-reflex-inducingly sentimental lines with aplomb.

Let me amend a previous statement: there is one moment of beauty in it, a late shot of Bergman's face while her voices are speaking. Therein may lie the key to the movie's dismal failure: focusing on the external events instead of showing us the gorgeous internal world of a girl who talks with gods.



Big Hand for the Little Lady: (1966. dir: Fielder Cook) I haven't looked it up, and I'm not going to waste time doing it, but I'd put good money on it that this was a play before it was a movie. You can tell because the dialogue is false and mostly filler, the exposition is stiff and delivered woodenly, and because the production style feels like musical theatre. Henry Fonda, Joanne Woodward, Kevin McCarthy, Burgess Meredith and Jason Robards all comport themselves well, but this is a fluff-piece, without weight and without any true enjoyment. It exists solely as a vehicle for its trick ending, a trick which also leaves me with a vaguely sour musical-theatre taste in my mouth: tastes like treacle, this, treacle and fluff.

the wolfman: alas, poor benicio

SPOILER ALERT

It's easy to understand why they thought of Benicio Del Toro when they wanted to remake the Wolfman; he's got that wonderful sort of feral cast to his features. And the transitions into beastliness are indeed a joy to behold, as is watching the monster in action, with its great, loping, superfast run. There's a lovely climactic battle between father and son werewolves amidst the symbolic inferno of the blazing family manor-house, and Anthony Hopkins does a superb job of creating a whole new character, by which I mean something rather different from what we've seen from him before (which seems impossible, since we've all seen him in 5,000 different things) (and, now I think of it, it may be only a personal effect, as I made a decision to stop watching his films some time hence), communicating his character well through broad but interesting brushstrokes. Anthony Sher is on hand to play a petty tyrant of a doctor who gets his own alongside a whole uber-talented cast of British journeymen character actors (sort of equivalent to having the Wrecking Crew backing you up on your record back in the sixties), including that guy with the great face from American Werewolf in London, the dart-thrower who says, "You made me miss. I've never missed that board before." He, also, meets a bloody but photographically interesting fate.

This, however, is just one further illustration of the rule against mixing Yanks and Brits in a single cast. The subrule is that Brits can meld into an American cast, but the opposite is rarely true. Yes, it's been done, sometimes with some success, but you must take very great care, because acting is like football: the Brits do it better than we do. Anyway, there's a certain kind of acting that we do better, but that's not the kind in play in this movie. Benicio is a huge talent, one of our best, but his skills lie in underplaying, eccentric humour, and improvisational naturalism. Here, those skills lie pinned and squirming beneath the combined weight of a massively stodgy script and an overweening production design. He's playing a successful stage actor born in England but raised in America, and from his first line, which, unfortunately, is, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio...", it's apparent that he's in trouble: either out of his depth or in over his head, I'm uncertain which metaphor is apter.

The production design is a direct descendant from Coppola's Dracula, which is a film that I loved when I saw it the first time, completely abhorred when I saw it the second time, laughed at and enjoyed when I saw it again, et al, ad nauseam: the roller coaster never ends. Its flaws and achievements are all so bold that there is no tepid response possible, and it all depends much on one's sense of humour at the time of watching. Anyway, that one had an eerie sensuousness that was so over-the-top as to be occasionally magnificent (also it had Tom Waits eating flies; Coppola knows what we want), whereas this lacks anything so attention-grabbing. If anything, the sheer density of its arty atmosphere, that flag-waving, look-over-here insistence of it, makes you feel suspiciously like someone's trying to deflect your attention from the puniness of the storyline or possibly the dreariness of the dialogue.

Still, I am devoutly of the opinion that there can never be too many werewolf movies, and I applaud the effort to make the old-style, pre-Underworld, pre-Twilight, Lycanthropy-Is-A-Curse-Not-A-Form-Of-Sex-Appeal kind of howler.