Krell Laboratories

2011 List Mania Part One: The Documentaries

2012-01-26T07:31:00.000-08:00

I'm composing my ballot for the Muriels right now, so I thought I'd use the blog to think out loud about the process. I'm starting with documentaries because I just watched a couple of them over the last two days and I only need to list five of them for the ballot. So, the best documentaries I watched from 2011:

1. Leh Wi Tok (directed by John Lavall). This is an example of how to go from the specific to the universal. It's ostensibly a portrait community radio in Sierra Leone through the eyes of DJ Andrew Kromah, but radio or any kind of media in Africa touches on so much else. You get a portrait of Africa from the point of view of Africans rather than through a white/colonialist lens, and that's invaluable. Kromah's radio station has been the target of strongman dictators and other factions in Sierra Leone's civil war. It has been burned to the ground twice. Cromah keeps plugging away, though. The filmmakers specifically watch him as he attempts to bring to light the causes for a landslide that claimed several homes and lives. In the process, you get a portrait of corruption, of powerful interests keeping the poor and disadvantaged in their place, and of the ultimate value of journalism as it speaks truth to power. This was the best film I saw when I was a film festival screener last year. This is still making the festival rounds. I hope it makes it into distribution. Here's the film's official site.

2: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (directed by Göran Olsson), which is an assembly of footage shot by Swedish television during one of the most turbulent periods of American history. Some background: I was a lower middle class white kid, so even though I lived through this (the film picks up the year after I was born), I don't know anything about what this movie depicts. I know the names of some of the players, but that's it. So this was eye-opening. Given that there's currently a movement in conservative statehouses to stamp out any American history that alludes to oppression and racism in the nation's schools, this sort of documentary becomes even more valuable. Race and oppression are still the fundamental problem of the American experience, and this film is just as relevant to current politics as it is to the politics of the late sixties. If this story is forgotten, it will only happen again.

3. Bill Cunningham in New York (directed by Richard Press) follows the titular New York Times fashion photographer around the city and beyond. The 90 year old Cunningham has been photographing the fashions of New York for decades, watching fashion take to the streets rather than walk the runway. Cunningham is a spry, charming old man who lives for his work. He doesn't appear to have much of a personal life, but, you know? It's fun watching someone who loves their work so much that it becomes a lifestyle. You also get a catalog of idiosyncratic fashionistas and a philosophy of fashion reporting. At one point, Cunningham says of Catherine Deneuve (who is arriving on the red carpet at Paris Fashion Week): "Why would I shoot that? Boring!" This is a man with a point of view and the movie makes that point of view infectious.

4. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (directed by Werner Herzog) finds the director exploring Chauvet Cave in France where the oldest cave paintings ever discovered decorate the walls. This was originally shown in 3-D, and watching it, I can see why it might have worked that way. I saw it on video, so I didn't benefit from this. It doesn't matter. Herzog's camera moves through the caves as if it was moving back through time. The paintings themselves are astonishing, showing in no uncertain terms that the human need for the aesthetic experience and our capacity to fulfill that need were fully formed 32,000 years ago. There's too much of Herzog himself in this film--a common failing among the director's documentaries--but the images he puts on the screen have a raw power that transcends the film's own limitations.

5. Tabloid (directed by Errol Morris). I'm a sucker for Errol Morris and his Interrotron. I mean, you would think that I would be over his technique after all this time, but I still find the stories he chooses to tell to be fascinating. In this case, we have a particularly lurid story (note the title, after all), in which the filmmaker recounts the case of Joyce McKinney, a Wyoming beauty queen who, in 1977, allegedly followed a Mormon missionary to Engand, kidnapped him, and held him as a sex slave. The film becomes an examination of the nature of truth, between what McKinney has to say for herself and her motives and what other people believe to have happened. For that matter, the truth of what happened is actually kind of beside the point. Morris, as he so often is, is interested more in the personality of the person in front of his camera than in what they may or may not have done.

Unfortunately, I missed some key docs this year, including The Interrupters, Into the Abyss, and a few others. I'm going to be blogging the True/False film festival in March, so hopefully, next year I won't be thrashing about to come up with five good entries. Also, it was all I could do to keep from listing Troll Hunter in this list.

Needless to say, this list is entirely fungible. The order has more to do with what I've seen recently and the freshness of what I've seen in my mind than it does with any qualitative differences between the films. Plus, I have my prejudices just as anyone does. So take all of this with a grain of salt. The mission of lists like this is not to enforce a standard of taste--at least it bloody well shouldn't be--but is rather a means of championing good films. The only utility found in this list for anyone who reads it is to point them at a film they may not have considered or heard of before.

The Ball Don't Lie

2012-01-22T12:23:00.000-08:00

Baseball movies always work on some level. The stuff of drama is built into the very nature of the game: baseball is about failure. Think about it for a bit and you'll know I'm right. The best team in the majors this year will lose a third of its games. The best hitter in baseball will sit down two thirds of the time. Some baseball teams wear failure as a badge, whether it's the Chicago Cubs or the pre-2004 Boston Red Sox. To be a baseball fan is to be a masochist. If, as in football, winning is the only thing, then the most hated team in baseball would not be the New York Yankees, who are a symbol of outsized success (the Yankees, it should be noted, have won a quarter of all of the World Series ever played). It's even in the literature of the game. Mighty Casey strikes out. So does Roy Hobbs at the end of Bernard Malamud's The Natural (and nevermind the bullshit uplift of the movie version--it rings totally false). The best baseball movie ever made is Bull Durham, where Crash Davis ends his career with meaningless home runs in the minor leagues while dreaming of making into the bigs as a manager. I mention all of this, because it informs my reaction to Moneyball (2011, directed by Bennett Miller), a film about an outrageous success that ultimately ends in failure. That's baseball for you.

The story one finds in Moneyball follows Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, who are faced with a roster gutted by wealthier teams hiring their star players away. Other teams have much deeper pockets than the A's. The A's exited the 2001 playoffs at the hands of the Yankees, who are the poster child for the haves, while the A's represent the have-nots. Baseball, it should be noted, is very much an American sport in this regard, because the rich just keep getting richer. Beane listens to his scouts absently as they ply him with suggestions for their inevitable rebuilding, but none of them gets it. He has a quarter the resources of the big boys, and is looking for a way to play smarter with those resources. He finds it in Cleveland, where a trade that he's looking to execute is undone on the whisper of Peter Brand, a mousy economist who works as an analyst. Beane wants to know why he torpedoed the trade, and who he is. Brand, it seems, views baseball from a completely different perspective, one built on stats and probability. Beane, having nothing to lose, rebuilds the A's on this model, much to the chagrin of the pure baseball people in his clubhouse. As they resist him, their season goes down the toilet. Once Beane forces their hands, the A's embark on the most astonishing winning streaks in the history of the game. Beane and Brand, it seems, are vindicated. Unfortunately, it still ends the way the previous season ended. They can play with the big boys over the long haul, it seems, but once the sample size shrinks, talent and money begin to outweigh stats. Beane views the whole exercise as a failure, but he's wrong, of course, because his methods have changed the game.

The movie itself is mesmerizing. In addition to baseball's romance of failure, this is a movie that's about the nuts and bolts of the way things work. Movies about work, like baseball movies, almost always work. There's something inherently fascinating about watching the minutiae of a profession one knows nothing about, and this movie provides a glimpse into the workings of baseball's front office, a place where fans never venture. Moneyball's visual scheme includes stats and math as a kind of punctuation to its ideas. It writes all of this large on the screen. There's an element of progress versus tradition here, too. This is a movie about technocrats who are imposing impersonal mathematics on a game that has always had an element of art to it.

If the movie has a drag, it's the emphasis on the personal life of Billy Beane. This is done with a series of flashbacks to Beane's career as a young player, which gives him some potted motivation to prove his scouts wrong. The movie also gives him a perfunctory family story in which he tries to remain connected to his daughter, who is living with Beane's ex-wife. These scenes are intended to soften the movie's hard edges, I suppose, but while they give Beane an added weight of desperation, they're not as interesting as the film's main concerns. The scenes where Beane walks into meetings filled with hostiles are charged with way more drama than these scenes. Brad Pitt, for his part, commits to all of the scenes he's asked to play as Beane. Pitt has aged into an interesting actor and I suspect he knows it. His last several roles have been fairly daring, the kind of roles that pretty boys who are losing their looks take on. This is one of his best roles. The camera's frame often frames Beane alone in dismal, workaday spaces. For a movie largely set in California, it's a surprisingly overcast film, but that's the Bay area, I guess, rather than el Lay.

This is a melancholy movie, as it should be. Again, that specter of failure hangs over the story being told here. The winning streak ends, of course. Beane is a disappointed man who doesn't feel his own vindication when it comes. And that makes for high drama.

Some Housekeeping

2012-01-20T17:26:00.000-08:00

I've been invited to vote in the Muriels at the end of this month. Fool that I am, I agreed. If it seems like I've been watching more new movies over the last several months, that's why. I started out way behind the eightball and it's been a struggle to catch up. This means that I'll actually be posting a best of the year list, which is something I've never been comfortable with. Unfortunately, I've been so focused on this that I've been neglecting some other things.

One of those other things is the fact that I'm starting a new career as a self-employed artist. I'll have more about that when I get all my ducks in a row. I'm not planning on turning this into an art blog, but I may start posting a lot more shameless self-promotion. My apologies in advance. Some of that art will definitely be movie related, and I'll post a link to my Etsy store once I'm ready to start selling stuff. I'll also probably start a sister blog for art.

Also, Womanthology is coming. I haven't plugged it recently, so here you go. I have a single page in this mammoth book, but I think I hold my own against all comers. I don't lack for ego sometimes. Seriously, there's all sorts of awesome stuff in this book. Here's the link:

Womanthology was one of last year's big Kickstarter success stories, so I'll pay it forward a little. I was contacted by an indie film producer to see if I would link to the Kickstarter she's running for The Joneses, a documentary about a quirky family headed by a transgender matriarch. Trans cinema being something of interest here at stately Krell Labs, I think it would be an interesting film. I hope it gets made. Here's the promo video:

Everything's Awesome But Nothing is Good

2012-01-16T08:29:00.001-08:00

It wasn't until I got to the end of the movie that I really started to hate Sucker Punch (2011, directed by Zack Snyder). I mean, I was irritated by it already, but the credit sequence, in which the filmmakers stage a big production number in which Oscar Isaacs and Carla Gugino sing Roxy Music's "Love is the Drug" and then completely fracture the frame for the requirements of the credits such that you can't actually see much of it was salt in the wound. The movie already wants to be a musical, and if the filmmakers were willing to go that route, it might have ameliorated the appalling sexism inherent in the movie, so say nothing of its other narrative flaws.

I have no doubt that the filmmakers view what's onscreen as some kind of half-assed empowerment of women. By dressing its mostly female cast in fetish outfits and having them slay dragons, they're indulging in the Strong Female Character fallacy that makes reading comics or playing fantasy games of any sort kind of an ordeal if you're not, y'know, an adolescent male. Don't get me wrong: I like looking at gorgeous young women in fetish outfits as much as anyone (I wear fetish outfits myself from time to time), but seriously, don't pretend that this confers any kind of empowerment on these characters. They're dolled up for the male gaze. The fact that the internal fantasy of the film's central character is a nested Russian doll in which she's alternately a stripper/whore trapped in a club owned by slavers and a videogame super-heroine who kicks ass in heels should be a giveaway. This is not a film about women taking control of their own sexuality for themselves. This has all been suitably derided elsewhere, though, so I'll refrain from piling onto this point, and even though it's annoying, it's not the MOST annoying thing about this movie. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The story here finds our heroine, Babydoll, committed to an institution in retaliation for resisting her stepfather's designs on her inheritance. Her stepfather pays off one of the orderlies to make sure that she's the victim of a trans-orbital lobotomy, and as she waits for that to happen, she escapes her situation into a dual-layered fantasy world. In the top level fantasy, she's been trafficked into the service of a high-end brothel/strip club, where the girls dance for and service the rich and the powerful. It's Madame Gorski's task to train the girls to dance, and Babydoll is special. During her dance sequences, she escapes even further into a fantasy world in which she is on a quest and needs to brave dangerous missions to retrieve the items necessary to escape from her predicament. The women who are patients/inmates with her show up in these fantasies, too, and they form a kind of elite ops squad, who go up against armies of clockwork zombies and fire-breathing dragons. Unfortunately for her, the final item of her quest is something she needs to determine herself, and the answer derails everything...

Okay, the most annoying thing about this movie is that whenever one of Babydoll's fantasy sequences has ended and she returns to the main layer of her fantasy world, all of the characters are agog with amazement at how she dances. This is all well and good, so long as you eventually show her dancing. SHOW HER FREAKING DANCING! This isn't rug pulling, or sucker punching if you want to take the title literally (more on that in a second), this is making a huge fucking promise to the audience and then completely reneging on it. I mean, maybe Emily Browning can't dance and they're working around her, but that's a limp excuse in a movie where she's asked to perform elaborate action choreographies. There's not a lot of difference between dance sequences and martial arts sequences.

I almost hesitate to go off on the narrative shift at the end, when we learn that everything we've seen so far is a sham, that the Maguffin doesn't even have any meaning to the end of the movie. The narrative structure cheats the audience as much as the film's aversion to dance. For a while, I thought this was going to end the same way John Carpenter's much more economical The Ward ended, or Scorsese's Shutter Island (which is more or less the same thing). But no. This has ideas all its own as to what constitutes a narrative sucker punch. It indulges in a non sequitur. At this point, I should probably give the movie it's due, though. The opening sequence, largely silent, knows how to tell a story, and I won't say I don't like watching Carla Gugino done up in dominatrix drag while channeling Marlene Dietrich, cause I totally do. For that matter, I don't necessarily disapprove of the way Snyder films his action sequences. Overwrought, perhaps, but comprehensible. Better this method, where the geography of the scene is almost always clear, than some dumb run and gun style that would make an already indigestible movie nigh unwatchable.

I dunno, maybe Zack Snyder is taking his lessons from Sam Raimi, who discovered to his sorrow that fanboy culture won't put up with dancing in its entertainments. Instead, he's provided "awesome" set-pieces, where the stakes are ever escalating and the action ever more absurd. Hot babes in fetish outfits fighting dragons? Cool! This is the trouble with the poisonous virus of fanboy culture: it values shock and awe over actual, y'know, quality. Everything these days is awesome. Special effects are at a zenith. What kind of praise is it that a movie has great special effects when everything has great special effects? The new frontier in this kind of filmmaking isn't how astonishing the things are that can be filmed, it's how beautiful and artful they are. Sucker Punch seems awfully derivative on this point. Its grimy slowmo music video aesthetic seems as second hand as its dragon, who is another descendant of Vermithrax Pejorative and even has the exact same moment of pathos over her dead offspring. Awesome at second hand is more draining than inspiring. Show me something new, motherfucker. Show me Emily Browning dancing to make my jaw drop. Now THAT would be awesome.

A Stab in the Dark

2012-01-16T07:42:00.000-08:00

I wasn't expecting to like Scream 4 (2011, directed by Wes Craven) all that much. I'm not really a fan of either the original Scream movies or of Craven himself. Oh, there are spots in his filmography that I like quite a bit, but the reflexive nature of the Scream movies seemed to be the director devouring his own tendencies. Craven has always been a post-modern filmmaker; Scream represented post-modernism eating itself. The second film in the series followed reduced this tendency to absurdity. I never did see the third film. I can probably take a stab in the dark as to how that film plays, given that it's set in the movie industry. It's been over a decade since the third film. One would hardly think a fourth film would be necessary at this point, let alone one where the principles from the original are all getting a bit long in the tooth. And yet, here it is.

Note: this review contains heavy spoilers. I'll put the rest behind the cut.

The film opens with a riff on the opening of the original film, in which two teenagers are tormented by a cell-phone wielding psycho in a ghost costume. This is feint, of course, a clip from the fictional "Stab" franchise nested inside another sequence from yet another episode from the "Stab" movies. They seem to recede back into themselves like the reflections of two mirrors facing each other. One character even comments on the fact that if the prelude was "X" number, then how did they arrive at "Y." The scream movies have always been aware of their own absurdity. The main story, once it's done noodling with the opening, finds Sydney Prescott returning to Woodsboro on a book tour. Her return coincides with the anniversary of the original murders, and sure enough, soon, teenagers are dropping. Meanwhile, Gale Weathers has settled into domestic, um, bliss with Riley, who is now the Sheriff. Gale is a writer now, too, and Sydney's return only exacerbates her already crippling writer's block. A new outbreak of murder is exactly the thing she needs to get her out of the house and back in the game, where she confronts the fact that the way people gather and consume news had dramatically changed since her days in front of a news camera. The web is where it's at. This hasn't escaped the killer, either, who films the murders with a webcam. The targets of the murders this time appear to be Sydney's niece, Jill, and her friends, Kirby and Olivia. Gale, meanwhile, enlists the high school film club to help her out, and discovers that the new killer is probably playing by the rules of remakes rather than sequels. But things aren't necessarily what they seem.

Ignoring the PoMo retconning of the "rules" of the slasher movie for the moment, this is Craven's best film in quite a while. His last decade has been a dead loss. Of his directorial efforts, only Red Eye enjoyed any kind of success, critical or otherwise, while the less said about the film's he's produced--including multiple remakes, it should be noted--the better. The fact that he's directing a fourth Scream movie smacks of desperation, but in spite of that, he actually makes a movie of it. This might be his best film since the original item. There's something about the minimal demands of the slasher movie that brings out the best in Craven, and this is about as sharp for most of its length as the first ten minutes of Scream. That's praise, by the way. The first ten minutes of the original are terrific. Craven has always been his own worst enemy when it comes to overcomplicating and overthinking his movies, and stripping all of that away always benefits his films. And so it is here. This stages some killer set-pieces, including one that makes clever use of multiple web cameras and another in which the second film's death by garage door is gently parodied. Craven knows how to turn the screws when he's got the will to do it.

This has an appealing cast, too, and takes more advantage of talented young actors than any of the previous films. Prime among them are Rory Culkin and Emma Roberts, who play our merry ghost-faced murderers. Culkin vanishes into his part to the point that I didn't recognize him at first, which is kind of the point. His motives are clearly defined and fairly simple. He's in it to get girls. Roberts, on the other hand, has motives that are positively baroque. It's not enough that she's jealous of her aunt's fame, she fancies herself as the center of a brand new franchise. She wants to be the final girl and she'll kill anyone she has to to get her way. She plays the role with a sociopathic light in her eyes that reveals the actress herself as a major movie star in the making (perhaps not surprising given her pedigree).

The climax of this movie, is suitably absurd, but it's totally committed to its own absurdity and it's awfully funny. This is important, because in terms of the status quo it enforces at the end, it's exactly the same as the previous films. This, too, is kind of funny, because slasher movies don't really change from film to film themselves, and it's entirely appropriate that this one provides the same thing that the previous films provide. Craven and company have a good laugh at this, and so did I.

Still, I hope this is the last trip to this particular well. It's always best to go out on a high note, and the punch line at the end of Scream 4 is terrific.

Lights Out

2012-01-13T07:53:00.000-08:00

Even though I'm the right age to have seen it when it first aired, I don't remember seeing the original Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. I saw plenty of made-for-tv horror movies when I was growing up and I remember them fondly. Those movies had an aura of weirdness all their own. They generally creeped rather than shocked, though that's not a universal--I mean, I'm still freaked out by that damned Zuni fetish doll from Trilogy of Terror, after all. These movies are a nice counter stream to the splatter films that were in the drive ins and grindhouses of the day, a refuge, as it were, for the Gothic as it retreated from movie screens. One of these days I should probably hunt down Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, because the remake (2011, directed by Troy Nixey) is interesting.

The story here finds 12 year old Sally moving in with her father and his girlfriend after her mother fobs her her off. Alex, the father, is an architect whose business is on the rocks. He's purchased Blackwood Manor, a sinister and dilapidated old mansion, on the cheap, planning to restore it and sell it at a profit. His girlfriend, Kim, is an interior designer who is working on the decor. Sally is a willful child and she goes exploring the grounds of the mansion out of sight of the adults. During her explorations, Sally discovers a basement that has been walled up. The groundskeeper, Harris, does his best to ward off Alex--he seems to know more than he's telling--but to no avail. In the basement, our heroes find the hidden studio of Edward Blackwood, a naturalist painter who vanished under mysterious circumstances. In the basement, there's a grate bolted over the remains of an ash pit. Sally hears voices coming from the pit. The voices promise her friendship, and Sally is desperate for a friend, so she unbolts the grating, unleashing the monstrous little creatures who live there. Soon, she realizes that the creatures mean her ill, but she can't convince any of the adults that they even exist, though Kim begins to take her seriously, seriously enough to investigate Blackwood and his disappearance. To her horror, she realizes that Sally is in grave danger, but it may already be too late...

This is an auteur's film. You can see producer/screenwriter Guillermo del Toro's fingerprints all over the visuals and themes of this movie regardless of the guy in the director's chair, whether it's the girl adjusting to a dysfunctional family or the various call-outs to labyrinths or the emphasis on fantastical renderings of nature. This is all of a piece with The Devil's Backbone, Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, and The Orphanage. I'm not complaining about this, mind you. I like del Toro's brand of fairytale horror, and there's certainly an expectation of a certain level of craft when you see his name on a movie. You get that here. The production design is first rate. This movie's creepy old house ought to be haunted. I almost wish they'd burned it down at the end (possibly licensing Roger Corman's old burning barn footage), but the house is real and I doubt the owners would have stood for that. I like the creatures, too. I don't have a problem with CGI monsters per se, and the filmmakers use their CGI intelligently in this movie, usually placing it in dark spaces so the gloss of CGI is diminished. This is a classic technique that carries over from generations of dodgy special effects movies. The dark covers a lot of sins. When the critters are finally shown in close up, they mostly stand up to the scrutiny. Del Toro is mining a lot of childhood weirdness with these creatures by casting them in the role of tooth fairies (he did the same thing with malevolent little beasties in the second Hellboy movie; he doesn't throw anything way). This is a literary film, too, one that calls back to the great weird fiction of the early 20th Century and earlier. The movie name-checks Arthur Machen during the scenes where Kim plumbs the history of Blackwood Manor, while the name "Blackwood" itself is presumably derived from Algernon Blackwood. The scenario itself resembles Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls," though that resemblance is fairly distant.

Bailee Madison is pretty good as Sally. She has a broad range of emotions to play and she mostly nails it. The adults are a mixed bag. Guy Pearce is cold and distant as Sally's dad and the movie doesn't really give him the opportunity to shine. It glosses over whatever dark night of the soul he suffers when his dream of saving his business collapses in the end, and the end of the movie loses some punch when it depends on his character for its effects. Katie Holmes does better as Kim, in part because the movie is at pains to make her sympathetic to Sally from the get go. Jack Thompson has the thankless role of Harris, the handyman who apparently knows more than he lets on. He's not ominous enough for the movie, and his lines consist mainly of "it's dangerous for children." Harris is the center of the film's most egregious demand on the credulity of the audience when, after having been attacked by the film's critters, Sally's dad goes on as if nothing untoward had happened.

It's a shame that this movie was rated R in the United States--a factor, one assumes, in it's disappointing box office--because this is a horror movie that's designed specifically for children. The trope of the child who no adult will believe is a persistent one in the genre, mainly because it's effective. This movie gives ample reason for the adults to disbelieve her, though if truth be told, the indifference shown to her by the adults sometimes strains credibility. I mean, do you let a child who is depressed and medicated wander around the grounds unattended? Do you dress that child up and bring her to the most important dinner of your career? Adults can be pretty dense sometimes, but it's all necessary to the script. This is disappointing. It's also disappointing that the movie splits its protagonist between Sally and Kim. Kim is the antithesis of the wicked step-mother. She's the only one who takes Sally seriously, and at some point near the end, the movie ceases to be about Sally and moves Kim to the center of the screen. This is a flaw, because by the time this happens, the audience has everything invested in Sally and nothing invested in Kim. The end of the movie SHOULD be about Sally finding strength within herself, but the structure of the screenplay mitigates this by shifting its focus.

In spite of its structural flaws, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark still manages to get under the skin. It understands the power of images to trump logic, and it exploits this mercilessly. The childhood fears of monsters under the bed gets a good workout here, but it goes one further by putting a monster into the bed itself, under the covers, violating that safe refuge where children shelter from the terrors of the night. It also places dangers into other spaces where children of all ages might feel vulnerable. The bath scene is a droll riff on the shower scene in Psycho, for instance, and plays on the same fears. Some of its terrors are more universal. This film pricks feelings of abandonment and lovelessness and powerlessness. These undercurrents work regardless of how the story plays out on screen and if anything, they're more fraught with terror than fairytale monsters.

Is It Real or Is It...

2012-01-11T19:00:00.000-08:00

If you want to talk about a movie that was totally misrepresented by its trailer, look no further than Certified Copy (2010, directed by Abbas Kairostami). If the trailer was to be believed, this was some kind of romantic ode tour of Tuscany, where a couple rediscovers their marriage. While there's certainly an element of that, that's SO not what this movie is interested in.

I haven't had a good experience with Kairostami, who is one of the major figures in world cinema these days. I hated his Palm d'Or winner, A Taste of Cherry, and I was indifferent to Where is the Friends House and The Wind Will Carry Us. I haven't seen Close-Up, the film that most of my movie friends call his masterpiece, but I know what it is. Enough for it to inform my reaction to Certified Copy, along with my negative reaction to A Taste of Cherry. Kairostami's subject matter is the cinema itself, though he couches it in small stories in the best tradition of Iranian cinema. In A Taste of Cherry, Kairostami denies the audience most of the pleasures the cinema sees fit to provide, including suspense, visual interest, character, resolution. As if to punctuate it, the director gives the audience a snippet of St. James infirmary over an end credit sequence that pulls back the veil to reveal the film crew packing up and going home. It struck me as table scraps. Close-Up (which, again, I haven't seen) is totally meta, in which the director completely obliterates the border between fiction and documentary. Basically, Kairostami doesn't trust the film image to tell the truth, and he likes to examine this in his films.

Certified Copy begins with an English writer who is promoting his new book in Tuscany. His book is about the value of copies as opposed to originals, and its major thesis is that if a copy is identical to an original, doesn't it have the same value? In the audience is a French antique dealer who takes the writer on a tour of the countryside. At some point, they're mistaken for a married couple whose marriage is deteriorating. The two begin to play act the part, and as the movie unfolds, it becomes more and more unclear whether they ARE play-acting or whether they are a married couple. The movie is mum on the point, and it leaves it for the audience to piece things together in light of the notion that if it seems real, then isn't it real? Is the copy the same as an original?

Unlike A Taste of Cherry, this movie pours on the pleasures of cinema, whether it's the Tuscan countryside or the big-time movie star (Juliette Binoche) or the dramatic scenes, but it's equally suspicious of their value. It gives them to the audience and asks them if they believe them. More than one critic has suggested that Binoche's performance here is deliberately actor-ish, going well beyond the needs of the plot and into a kind of meta performance. I can't really speak to that, because I'm a horrible judge of performances when they're not in English (though great whacks of this film are in English). Kairostami gradually confronts the viewer with the actors by increasingly filming them in intimate reverse shots in which they gaze directly into the camera as they speak, daring the audience to catch them out as they ramp up the emotion. In one particular scene, Binoche appears to be putting on a made-up game face as she gears up for the thespian fireworks. This is a tell, I think, but the movie is full of tells and interpreting them is the fun of the movie.

Meanwhile, the background is littered with the impedimenta of marriage itself. If they behave as if they're married, does it matter if they are or not? By inference, can we trust the filmmakers to clue us in? These are the questions the film raises, and it seems that merely raising them is the point. It's a deliberate challenge to the audience to examine their assumptions about cinema itself, all the while seducing them with the very means with which the cinema is known to lie and manipulate. It's an interesting dialectic, sure, and I think it's more or less successful here because the movie provides more sugar than poison. This is an intellectual movie--a puzzle movie, actually--but it provides plenty of emotionality if an audience wants it, even if that emotionality is suspect. Hey, a copy's as good as the real thing, isn't it?

With Friends Like These...

2012-01-11T01:40:00.001-08:00

That Will Gluck is such a tease. At the beginning of Friends with Benefits (2011), he gives the audience a brief interlude with Emma Stone (who he kinda sorta turned into a star in Easy A) and then she vanishes for the rest of the movie. Doing this to me is like flashing a pregnant woman some chocolate and then withholding it. You take your life into your hands, sir. Still, Mila Kunis is a suitable and appealing substitute. Appropriate, too, in a completely synchronistic meta sort of way, given that she's in the EXACT same kind of movie her Black Swan co-star, Natalie Portman, made a few months earlier, only this one is pretty good even if I find one of the film's central conceits to be kind of offensive. I'll get to that and my own unreasonable expectations in a bit. But first, a short interlude at the video shop:

Video clerk (handling the disc): Wow, this movie has a LOT of sex in it.

Me: More than Shortbus?

Video Clerk: Hah! No. That was kind of a special movie.

Turns out that this one is kind of special, too. I LOVE how it depicts sex. I'll get to that in a bit, too, but first, a synopsis:

Dylan Harper and Jamie Rellis are both coming out of bad relationships. He's a design professional who has made a big splash online, while she's a head hunter looking to place an art director with GQ. She brings Dylan from L.A. to New York to interview, and during the process of selling him on the job, they strike up a friendship. One night, while watching some dumb romantic comedy and picking apart the various tropes of the genre, Jamie laments that the worst thing about being single is the lack of sex. Her libido is still there, but she has no way to fulfill it. Dylan, it turns out, has the same problem. Neither of them, however, wants to screw it up with an actual romantic relationship. They strike a bargain to have sex with each other as if it were a tennis date. A workout, as it were. They have lots of sex and resist an emotional attachment. When both of them begin to date, the sex vanishes, but the friendship remains. And maybe something more, because their prospective partners are a poor substitute for each other. When circumstances force them apart, filling them with recriminations, they're miserable. When at last, they're re-united, they go on their first actual "date."

The basic premise of this movie is that friends can't have casual sex without emotional entanglements. This is flatly not true, and I find the notion kind of bothersome. The premise is kind of titillating for a mainstream romantic comedy, and I'm sure that's why there were two such creatures in the 2011 calendar year, but neither film looks beyond the strangling conventions of movies to see how real people are behaving outside the film frame. Some people do, in fact, have casual sexual relationships without romance and are generally quite happy with them. Somehow, I get the feeling that the sexual politics of what they decided to film here weren't important to the filmmakers. They were more interested, one assumes, in putting cute movie stars together in a novel romantic comedy situations, which kind of trivializes the mores it's depicting. I'd be ticked at all of this if it weren't all so damned cute. And if there a were winking, smirking attitude toward sex. Fortunately, on that count, the film scores aces with me.

This is one of the very few mainstream movies that I can think of that has any kind of imagination when staging sex scenes. Most sex scenes in mainstream product are completely boring, usually filmed from the side with some back light and not much action. They usually end with the couple sleeping with an l-shaped sheet that leaves the male partner bare chested, but conveniently covers the breasts of the female partner (who, like as not, will get up and take the covers with her like real people never friggin do). The scenes in this movie, by way of contrast, are clumsy, athletic, sometimes ridiculous, and usually really fucking hot. Given that both Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis are amazingly gorgeous people, I don't know that you could make either of them look genuinely ridiculous while having sex. They're too attractive for that. This film goes one further than that, though, in so far as it features a learning curve. This shows them getting comfortable with each other and showing the other how to do things that gives them pleasure . There's a conversation about peeing with a hard on ("Do you know how hard it is to pee with a hard-on?" "No, actually..."). There's a lesson in cunnilingus ("What are you trying to do? Dig your way to China?" "I'm good at this!" "Says who?" "Every girl I've been with." "Well, they're either lying or their vaginas are made of burlap."). These are all practical things that people do every day, but which you never see on a movie screen unless you frequent some types of independent queer cinema. There's a great deal of comedy value in all of this--seriously, sex is funny--but a certain verisimilitude, too, that undercuts some of the dumb romantic comedy elements.

Which, of course, is part of the point. Just as Gluck's Easy A was a sly subversion of the high school comedy, this is a sly subversion of the meet/cute romantic comedy. It knows the rules. It tells the audience it knows the rules. It breaks some of them--it knows which to break and which are inviolate. Sometimes, the elements of the rom com are arranged in interesting new ways. There's a gay best friend in this movie, but he belongs to Dylan rather than Jamie and he's pretty manly as played by Woody Harrelson. The mother daughter bonding common to these movies is absent, too, given that Patricia Clarkson's mom character is a complete flake. The actress should trademark these kinds of roles. The in-movie rom com our protagonists watch is agreeably dreadful, which gives the characters the opportunity to comment on the story they find themselves in. In another, less sincere movie, this would be kind of risible. Not here, though. Gluck has a taste for sweetness and manages to lace it throughout the movie. He's wise enough to underplay the end of the movie, too, in order to give it a suitable punch line, even after embracing the conventions he's seeking to subvert.

It doesn't hurt that he's got good actors. I'd say that this movie was a star-making film for Mila Kunis except for the small detail that she's already had a couple of such films. She's sexy, smart, relatable, everything you want in a leading lady. Justin Timberlake kind of surprised me. He's good too, the kind of leading man with charm to go with good looks. I almost want to see him in a musical, given his background. As I said a couple of paragraphs back, the leads in this look fabulous together when they're naked and seem comfortable with it (and, yes, I know that Kunis used a stunt butt, though I kind of wonder why). It's hard to play comedy when you're naked. It requires a certain amount of fearlessness that both of these two manage as a matter of course. Confidence, it almost goes without saying, is all kinds of hot.

So, all in all, one of the year's sweeter pleasures, but--and I'll kill you all if you breathe a word of this--I'm kind of a sucker for romantic comedies anyway, and it's nice to see that someone is still capable of making one that doesn't make me want to gag. Good for them.

Out in the Cold

2012-01-09T10:12:00.000-08:00

After John le Carré wrote his last novel about spymaster George Smiley, he lamented that Alec Guinness had stolen the character from him. In what is, perhaps, a bid to reclaim the character, the author acts as a producer on the new version of his seminal spy novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011, directed by Tomas Alfredson), in which Gary Oldman takes on the role. Smiley, in this story at least, is not an easy role to play. He's essentially a listener and for most of the movie, he's entirely passive. He has barely enough dialogue to register as a character. He's the audience, listening to the secrets of gray, tired men who have been out in the cold too long. Intelligence work is not James Bond, le Carré tells us. It's wearying, tedious, soul-crushing work. There's violence in this movie, but it's not thrilling. It's merely another unpleasant chore between poring over files and listening to taped conversations and drinking and smoking too much.

The story here finds British Intelligence infested by a highly placed mole. Near the top, the director of The Circus thinks, but before he can root him out, he is unceremoniously ousted. And shortly after that, he is dead, but not before planting the seeds of an investigation. Smiley's ouster along with Control exonerates Smiley, and when the Minister needs someone to clean house, he dumps everything upon him. The central mystery is defined by two others. First: what really happened during the mission gone spectacularly wrong when the agent sent to retrieve an allegedly defecting Russian general is killed in Hungary. The other revolves around who betrayed an agent in Istanbul when that agent found an asset (an attractive woman, as it turns out) with knowledge of a leak near the top? Smiley is given a young agent named Peter Guillam to do his legwork inside The Circus, while he himself interviews the ousted principles about what really happened. The trail leads to an operation called "Witchcraft," which has propelled its controller, Percy Alleline to the head of The Circus, but which Smiley suspects of being the work of his opposite number in Soviet intelligence, the sinister Karla. Witchcraft, it turns out, is the tool Smiley uses to force the mole into the open...

This is an unusually quiet movie. Great whacks of it are silent or nearly so, in which glances are more important than words. Smiley might be a poker player reading tells from behind a stone face. This is a lot like a Sherlock Holmes story, in which people bring the detective the facts and he deduces the solution from his armchair. There's even a version of Moriarty. The difference is that Holmes has a distinct personality, while Smiley is a cypher. Oldman plays him so guardedly that he seems completely inert until near the end of the movie, when he initiates the endgame. The other characters, on the other hand, are fascinating. The four men who comprise the suspects is each delineated by the cream of British thespians: Toby Jones is the over-ambitious Alleline, Colin Firth is the amiable Bill Haydon, Ciarán Hinds is the suspicious Roy Hinds, while David Dencik plays paranoid spear carrier Toby Esterhase. Each of them has defining ticks provided by the actors and they're more fun to watch than Smiley. Also fun to watch is Benedict Cumberbatch as Guillam (his presence underlines the Holmes connection, while his character seems like a deliberate nod to the homoerotic slash fiction based on his TV series). Tom Hardy and Mark Strong are good, too, as the blown agents at the center of the movie's dual mysteries. Hardy gets the more sympathetic role, while Strong's character wallows in defeat.

That last bit is important. This is a dreary movie. I have no doubt that Cold Warriors lived in a world much like this one, but it makes for a bit of distance between the audience and the story. Director Tomas Alfredson emphasizes this with a dismal visual design that drains the color out of the world. This is not a movie about right action or moral imperatives, rather, it's an examination of a peculiar political sickness of the last century. Alfredson has chopped the movie into a fractured chronology, which makes for some cinematic interest that the visual design does its best to stifle, but it sometimes confuses. I could follow most of what was on the screen, but had I not read the book, I might have foundered in the various narrative strands.

One thing about this movie brought a wry smile to my face. One of the production companies behind this film is "Karla Productions," which makes me wonder if this will be followed by two more movies based on The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, respectively. I'd be down with that, I guess. I like both of those books better than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which on the page is just as deliberately dismal as either movie version of the book.

New Year's Movie Meme

2012-01-06T06:47:00.000-08:00

Rachel over at The Girl with the White Parasol has authored her very own movie meme for the new year. Rachel is one of my very favorite movie bloggers, so I'll play along even if I'm a week late. Warning, this is image-heavy pic spam. Be aware.

She asks twelve questions:

1. What is your all-time favorite Grace Kelly costume?

The gown in To Catch a Thief with the diamond necklace and plunging decollete, and Kelly saying to Cary Grant: "Even in this light, I can tell where your eyes are looking." That's making something out of a costume, right there.

2. What classic film would you nominate for a remake?

I'm just asking for it, given the disaster of The Day the Earth Stood Still, but I could stand to see a remake of Forbidden Planet. A less sexist remake, I would hope, but I doubt they'd manage it.

3. Name your favorite femme fatale.

Jane Greer's Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past. This should come as no surprise to longtime readers of the blog.

4. Name the best movie with the word "heaven" in its title.

Hmmm...the pat answer is Leave Her to Heaven, but I think the true answer might be Heavenly Creatures. Plus, it gives me an excuse to throw a picture of Kate Winslet snogging with Melanie Lynskey. So let's go with that.

5. Describe the worst performance by a child actor that you’ve ever seen (since Laura gave me the idea).

The kid in The Last Action Hero was pretty insufferable, which is weird, given that he's kind of a kindred spirit, being a film nut and all. But then, the movie is the kind of work a poseur would make. Ah, well.

6. Who gets your vote for most tragic movie monster?

Alonzo the Armless in The Unknown, hands down. Er...well...maybe not hands, per se...This is pretty much Chaney's category, isn't it? I suppose you could make an argument for Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs.

7. What is the one Western that you would recommend to anybody?

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, I think. It's not my own favorite, but I'd feel uncomfortable recommending a lot of Westerns to Native American viewers.

8. Who is your ideal movie-viewing partner?

Someone who'll put up with Chinese musicals from the 1950s, hyperviolent Eye-Talian films from the 1970s, and silent melodramas, along with all of the other kinds of movies I'm interested in (which is to say, almost everything). Such a person may not exist.

(The Wild, Wild Rose, starring Grace Chang.
Yes, I've seen this movie. In fact, I own a copy. It's terrific).

9. Has a film ever made you want to change your life? If so, what was the film?

This is a hard one. I think probably not, but I'm not sure. Seeing Night and Fog as a teenager might be as close to a life-changing experience as I've ever had, I suppose, but I would be hard pressed to say why. I mean, would I have become a Holocaust denier or a genocidal lunatic without it? Probably not.

10. Think of one performer that you truly love. Now think of one scene/movie/performance of theirs that is too uncomfortable for you to watch.

I completely adore Ingrid Bergman (and George Sanders, for that matter), but I have a hard time watching most of Viaggio in Italia.

Related: Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet.

11. On the flip side, think of one really good scene/performance/movie from a performer that you truly loathe.

I could pick a bunch of scenes, performances, and whole movies by Mel Gibson, who is about as unpleasant a performer as can think of. There's a reason he was as big a star as he was. But, my god, he was a-MAY-zing in The Year of Living Dangerously, and he's my favorite Fletcher Christian (and The Bounty is my favorite version of that story). Great movie star, horrible person. Alas.

12. And finally, since it will be New Year's soon, do you have any movie or blogging-related resolutions for 2012?

Basically, I want to make fewer factual and grammatical mistakes. I hate it when I stumble upon those weeks or months after the fact. Doh!

Belated happy new year, anyway.

Not a Dog

2012-01-04T07:22:00.001-08:00

My partner lives under a rock. When I asked if she wanted to go see Tintin with me, she said, "That's about a dog, right?" I tried not to facepalm, and mostly succeeded. "No," I said, "That's Rin Tin Tin. There is a dog, but Tintin isn't the dog." I imagine that more than one American has had a variant of this conversation. Tintin isn't well-known here in the states, and this is a blockbuster that seems designed for the world market rather than the domestic one. The numbers on Box Office Mojo appear to bear this out.

So, anyway, my new year began with The Adventures of Tintin (2011, directed by Steven Spielberg). I'm a HUGE fan of the comics, so all of the previews of a motion-capture, lifelike, computer animated Tintin did not bode well. I mean, Herge's comics are known for their clean lines and their flat colors. They're elegant and simple. This is an element of the comics that this movie does not capture. Which isn't to say it's bad, necessarily. For what it is, it's an entertaining two hours at the movies from a director who was the best in the world at providing entertainments once upon a time. It's frustrating, though, because given the resources lavished on this movie, it should be better than it is.

The story, for the most part, gets it right. Intrepid young reporter, Tintin, buys a model ship in an open-air market that turns out to have the secret to a fabulous treasure inside it. Two other parties are interested in the ship: the secretive Mr. Silk, and the sinister Mr. Sakharhine. Mr. Silk warns Tintin that there are others that will stop at nothing for the ship, and sure enough, he soon finds his home burglarized and the ship stolen, but not before a chance accident deposits a clue in Tintin's hands. This sends him to Marlinspike Hall, where he encounters Mr. Sakharine and another model ship exactly like his own, only unbroken. There are three of them, and each holds a clue to the location of the treasure of the lost Unicorn. The clues tell everyone that only a descendant of that ship's captain can find the treasure, which leads Sakharine and Tintin to Captain Haddock, the last living Haddock. Haddock is being held prisoner by Sakharine. Sakharine has an ulterior motive for kidnapping Haddock beyond just finding the treasure. Tintin and Haddock escape and find themselves adrift at sea, heading for the small middle-eastern country of Baggar, where the third clue is held by the Sultan. Sakharine is hot on their heels, with a secret weapon designed to obtain the third ship: an opera singer named Bianca Castafiore, whose voice shatters the glass case that protects the ship. The chase is then on to prevent Sakharine from finding the treasure. This is all conflated from two classic Tintin adventures, "The Secret of the Unicorn" and "Red Rackham's Treasure," with nods to other stories. Screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish demonstrate a deep affection for the material here.

It's easy to see why Herge himself decided that Spielberg was the perfect filmmaker to make a Tintin movie. His adventures are kid-friendly globetrotting adventures a la the Indiana Jones movies. Spielberg, it should be noted, did not grow up with Tintin. One of his assistants brought him one of the books right after the premiere of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and for what it's worth, this movie is better than a couple of the subsequent Indiana Jones films. Indeed, this is Spielberg returning to pure entertainment for the first time in ages and it finds the director in fine fettle. He still knows how to stage an action scene. Unlike most directors who lose themselves in motion capture technology--Robert Zemeckis springs to mind--Spielberg hasn't made a film that seems un-directed. It's as carefully composed as any of his live-action films. This is a strength. On the whole this should all work. The ingredients are all in place for a magnificent film. In some ways, it IS a magnificent film.

But it doesn't work, and I think it's because the technology used to make the film is overcomplex for the task at hand. While I was watching the movie, I had a couple of thoughts that really jarred me out of the movie. The most persistent of these was: if you're going to make an animated Tintin movie, why aren't you making it in a hand-drawn, 2-D style. This would more closely hew to one of the key artistic pleasures of Herge's original and the movie itself suggests this with an absolutely delightful credit sequence that demonstrates just what the movie could have been. More than once, I wondered what a Studio Ghibli version of Tintin might look like. I also began to wonder why, having animated the thing with computers and motion capture, that the film tries so resolutely to present "realistic" characters while keeping the stylized exaggeration of a cartoon character. This reminds me a little of those freakish "realistic" cartoon characters drawn by Pixeloo. This is unintentionally grotesque. This has an interesting effect on Tintin himself, who reads fine as a cartoon character on the page, but in this film, I couldn't shake the idea that Tintin was a baby dyke lesbian. The haircut, the diminutive status, and the wardrobe all scream "queer" to me. That might be my baggage talking and not a fault of the film, per se, but I Tintin doesn't read as Tintin to my eye, however he reads to my brain. The only character in the film that seems completely "natural" is Tintin's dog, Snowy, who was significantly created from whole cloth by an animator rather than mocapped. Speaking of Snowy, I kind of missed his occasional asides (in the comics, placed in thought balloons), but I guess I understand why the filmmakers decided to forgo them. Basically, all of this occupies a space between live action and cartoon and it's not comfortable there. It really should have been one or the other.

It's hard for me to really judge vocal performances, but on the whole, the performances in this film match the characters. Jamie Bell has the right kind of youthful pluck in his voice, while mocap expert Andy Serkis is a fine Captain Haddock. I'm always happy when Simon Pegg and Nick Frost show up in movies, but they don't seem to stand out as Thompson and Thompson, the bumbling interpol agents, though that may actually be the point. Daniel Craig voices a fine villain. You may notice that all of these voices are Brits, which strikes me as wrong. Tintin should be in French, and if you're going to make a Tintin movie in English, a British accent is completely wrong as your go-to European accent. Better no accent at all, though that's probably not possible.

I saw this film in 3-D, and I'll complain about that again. 3-D doesn't serve this film. I've seen some commentary on the internet that claims that this film uses 3-D intelligently, but if you're not calling attention to something in the frame, what's the point. At a certain point, not far into the movie, I ceased to even register the 3-D beyond the fact that I wished the picture was brighter. Alas.

Should You Choose to Accept It...

2011-12-30T17:22:00.000-08:00

Improbably, the fourth Mission: Impossible movie turns out to be pretty good. Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol (2011, directed by Brad Bird) is the most inventive film of the series, one that takes its inspiration not from the contemporary action film, or the Hong Kong New Wave, but from silent comedies. One of the film's major set pieces seem like transliterations from Harold Lloyd's Safety Last. Another seems like a conflation of several Keaton movies, filtered through Chaplin's Modern Times and a few Looney Tunes shorts. The finale, set in an automated car park, bears comparison to some of the loonier set pieces from Pixar. Director Brad Bird is a Pixar alum, after all. This all comes at a cost, of course. Mission: Impossible 4 has a screenplay that seems like it was made in a food processor from a couple of shredded James Bond novels. You can't have everything, I guess.

The story, such as it is, finds our old friend, IMF agent Ethan Hunt, incarcerated in a Russian prison. Upon being sprung from the Russian hoosegow, he's shortly put on the trail of some Russian nuclear launch codes that have been lifted from another IMF operation gone disastrously wrong. Someone is trying to pit the US and Russia against each other (no, really) and in order to find out who, Hunt and his team have to break into the Kremlin. This, too, goes disastrously wrong and soon Hunt and his team find themselves disavowed, but still the only thing standing between the world and nuclear annihilation. The trail then takes them to Dubai, where the operation requires our heroes to conduct two separate transactions at the same time with two enemy agents who are exchanging diamonds for nuclear codes. This involves climbing up the side of the world's tallest building like Spider-man. This, also, goes wrong, and soon, Hunt is chasing the villains through the streets of Dubai during a massive sand storm. Finally, our heroes wind up in Mumbai, where they must break into another secure location to steal yet another set of codes in order to trace the bad guy. Coincidentally, the bad guys are in the same city at the same time, but they've initiated their launch. It becomes a race against time to retrieve the launch device to abort the missile.

This all sounds more coherent than it really is. The plot in this movie exists solely to provide set pieces. All other concerns, including character development and, well, plausibility, are thrown to the wind unless they serve the intricately staged actions scenes. There's nothing wrong with this approach, per se, and it's kind of a hallmark of the series given that all three of the previous entries have had the same problem, but it makes the movie less than it could have been. One element of the previous film in the series that doesn't make the jump to this one is its winking self-awareness of the fact that it doesn't need to be about anything so long as it provides kinetic thrills. I'll sacrifice that kind of self-awareness for creative set-pieces, thank you, because M:I 3 kind of sucked for all its meta noodling while this one, just as empty, is a lot of fun to watch.

Some of this is purely visceral. I've already mentioned the scene at the scene at Dubai's Burj Khalifa Tower. It was filmed in IMAX, though that's not how I saw it; I can only imagine how that would have affected me had I watched it on an IMAX screen. As it was, on a moderately large movie screen, this scene was dizzying. I don't know if there were special effects involved--probably, but the movie's publicity says it was all done as practical stunts, which is awesome. Regardless, this scene has a real feeling of danger as the equipment Tom Cruise's character uses to scale the building begins to malfunction on him. The movie continues to place obstacles in his path that accelerate the scene's feeling of tension. As I say, this is analogous the scene in Safety Last in which Harold Lloyd winds up scaling a building and hanging off a clockface, and like that scene, it's an example of one damned thing after another. The previous Mission: Impossible movies have made a great deal of bank from cool (if fanciful) technologies. This one inverts this by showing what happens when those technologies fail. Very little goes right for our heroes in this movie, and whether or not the plot itself makes any sense (I think it doesn't), watching our heroes improvise when their magic gadgets fail them is a LOT more fun than watching them work like clockwork.

The chase through the streets of Dubai is the film's most elegant action scene. It's a pretty standard chase scene at its base. We've seen hundreds of these kinds of chase scenes in the movies, but the filmmakers give this one a twist by changing the environment; by setting it in a sandstorm. This turns the sequence into something new, into something we HAVEN'T seen before, into something exotic, and this is what the movie hinges on. It doesn't provide us with a stock fight scene to end the movie. Instead, it provides us with a sequence in which the main obstacle is an elaborate mechanical environment. There's an enemy to overcome, sure, but the enemy is in the same predicament. It reminds me a bit of the climactic chase scene through the door warehouse in Monsters, Inc. It's an absurd environment that provides the viewer with something they've never seen before and the novelty in itself is kind of exhilarating. It amps up the danger of the scene, too, by putting flesh and blood characters in a kind of situation where animated characters routinely find themselves. When things go wrong, there's a physical reaction that you don't get in a cartoon. Human beings aren't rubbery and invulnerable to cartoon violence. The sound design of this film amplifies this effect, because whenever flesh strikes metal in this scene, the audience winces.

At a base level, though, the complications get the audience--well, this particular member of the audience, at least--thinking that it serves them right for making things over-complicated. The scene in which Jeremy Renner's character is dropped into a fan shaft and supported by a magnetic trolly is a good example. Why the hell is this necessary. Why can't Renner crawl under all that dangerous machinery, given that the team OBVIOUSLY has access to a safer route to his mission objective? This is a scene included for "cool" factor, and it's kind of cathartic when it goes haywire. It should be noted that this applies to the bad guys, too, though the film's attempt to make their schemes overcomplicated backfires a bit, given that they beg questions about the plot that the movie isn't prepared to answer. For instance, when Hunt catches up to Lesinker after chasing him through the streets of Dubai, he's found to be wearing the kind of mask that the IMF uses. He's revealed to be Hendricks, the main baddie, in disguise. Why? Both this scene and the scene at the Kremlin suggest that Hendricks has some kind of infiltration of the IMF, that nobody can be trusted, but then the movie adamantly refuses to explore these possibilities. This is frustrating and undermines some of the pleasures the movie provides. Worse, the villains are underdeveloped. Michael Nyqvist is a capable actor--as seen in the Swedish Millennium trilogy--but here, he's not given any scenes to play a character. He's a stock villain, intent on starting a nuclear war for the sake of starting a nuclear war. This is another high-stakes action film that seems conveniently free of ideology (lest it play poorly in some foreign markets). This is a movie where the villain himself is the Maguffin, which robs the audience of the pleasures of watching a good actor chew the scenery. Alas.

I'm kind of disappointed at the naked franchise-building going on in this movie, though. The Jeremy Renner character is obviously designed as the eventual successor to Cruise's Ethan Hunt. While the final scene's introduction of the TV's series' main antagonists as a throwaway gag suggests Mission: Impossible movies for the foreseeable future. In spite of this, the end of the movie also spends some time indulging in visual and textual rhymes with the earlier films. The character arc given to Jeremy Renner's character, for instance, is a subtle call-back to the plot of the first film, while the re-appearance of some of the characters from previous films give this one a kind of valedictory feeling. Frankly, if they want to phase Cruise out in favor of Renner, Paula Patton, and Simon Pegg, I'm down with that. They're all pretty good. I don't have any hatred of Cruise even if he is a kook in real life, but he's getting a bit long in the tooth for sequences like hanging off the world's tallest building. It works in this movie, sure, but in another movie four years from now? That's going to reek of desperation.

It's Just a Shot Away

2011-12-30T16:00:00.000-08:00

There's a really good horror movie buried somewhere in Take Shelter (2011, directed by Jeff Nichols). I think the filmmakers know it, too, because they spend a large part of the movie dancing around horror movie imagery. More than one sequence is reminiscent of a zombie movie, while others recall disaster movies and J-horror ghost stories. There's also an economic horror movie here, in which a family that has heretofore done everything right, that is participating fully in the American dream, loses its footing and falls off the precipice. I don't think the movie manages to synthesize all of these strains into a cohesive whole, though. I think it's undone by its own millennial vision.

The story here follows Curtis LaFourche, a mining technician somewhere in Ohio, who by all accounts has a perfect life: family, job, house, everything. Oh, his daughter is deaf, but the family is learning to deal with it. So why is Curtis having these horrible dreams, in which a terrible storm looms on the horizon, in which his dog turns on him, in which the people around him attack him like so many zombies. Curtis's mom was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was a kid; is this the onset for him? It freaks him out and he does seek help, for what good it does him. In his freakout, he fixates on the tornado shelter in his back yard and takes out a big loan to expand it. He uses equipment borrowed from his work, and when it's discovered, he loses his job, and, importantly, his health insurance. His insurance had just cleared a cochlear implant for his daughter, so this does not please Samantha, his wife, at all. He pushes ahead with the shelter in any case, and when a storm actually does come, he locks himself and his family into the shelter. He's convinced that this storm is the apocalypse. Samantha has other ideas, of course, and must convince him to let them all out.

In synopsis, this sounds like a terrific suspense movie. Locked into a storm shelter with a man whose grasp on reality is tenuous at best? That sounds like a corker to me. But the filmmakers don't exploit this in this way. For that matter, the effort to convince Curtis to let everyone out of the shelter? That could be an awesome dramatic piece, and that's closer to what this movie intends. But when all is said and done, the function of the shelter at the end of this movie is kind of slips away from everyone. Here's what this sequence does: It promises a suspense film it doesn't deliver. It promises a dramatic scene that underwhelms when it comes. It promises a twilight zone-ish twist that it doesn't deliver, then DOES deliver after the shelter is a memory. As I say, this wants to be a horror movie, but for some reason, it doesn't know how. And I don't even think this is an example of an upscale filmmaker dodging the horror genre, either, because it bloody well plays with the toys. The visions Curtis LaForche has are horror movie images, whether it's the ominous role of birds, the special effects of the storms, or the persistent zombie movie tropes. This is a movie that has horror in its DNA.

All of which is a crying shame, because Michael Shannon is a spectacularly good actor, and he brings his "A" game to this movie. His portrayal of Curtis captures confusion, fear, resolve, and a whole gamut of other emotions demanded by a difficult part. The movie also has its finger on the pulse of the times, too, when it suggests that the American dream is only a step or two away from calamity. All it takes is a little shove: a bad illness, a mistake at work, or both at once. There's real fear to be had in the economic malaise this movie presents, because it's a malaise that's everywhere right now. This is coupled intimations that the world is spinning down, that the climate is changing in horrifying ways and that time is running out. These are real-world horrors and the movie is clear-eyed about them. The way Take Shelter presents all of this has a method to it, too. It's a movie that roots its horrors in the mundane. The movie spends a lot of time watching the day to day routine of Curtis's family, whether it's following them to an ASL class or to a crafts fair where Samantha sells handmade stuff or to various small-town social functions. This is totally early Spielberg, in which the mundane co-exists next to the fantastic. Look at how many scenes in this movie are set around a dining room table; how many are set in drab offices. Hell, Curtis's breakdown even resembles Roy Neary's obsession with Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The last scenes in the movie blow all of this to the wind, unfortunately. It's not necessary for the movie to go where it goes. In fact, by making some of Curtis's visions real, it voids some of the deep wells of unease that the rest of the movie has so scrupulously dug for itself. That it comes after a false ending feels like a cheat, too. This is a film that could have used more ambiguity.

I Officially LOVE Isabella Rossellini

2011-12-29T07:25:00.000-08:00

...possibly even more than I love her parents. "How Did Noah Do It?" from her Sundance series, Green Porno:

Do the Collapse

2011-12-27T08:11:00.000-08:00

There's a pervasive feeling of melancholy at the heart of the 2011 financial drama, Margin Call (directed by J.C. Chandor), in which every character moves through the film as if it were a party that had ended and the last stragglers are loath to head home. You can almost hear someone say "turn out the lights before you leave." Indeed, most of the movie is set after hours, where desperate characters seem even more desperate. This is the kind of financial drama that Edward Hopper might have made. It feels kind of like The Nighthawks:

The story here presents twenty-four hours in the life of an investment banking firm that is leveraged to the gills with mortgage backed securities. The time, I presume, is sometime in the second half of 2008. The firm itself is never named in the movie, but it seems like it's modeled on Lehman Brothers. As the film commences, bloodletting is happening on the trading floor, as the higher-ups are cutting back on their work force. One of the casualties is Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), a risk manager who is in the middle of creating a troubling financial projection based on current market conditions. He doesn't have the chance to finish his model, so he hands it off to Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), one of the bright young up and comers who survives the bloodbath. "Be careful," Eric tells Peter, with good reason. His model is looking at economic Armageddon for the firm and for the market at large. Peter takes this to his boss, Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), who kicks it to his boss, Sam Rodgers (Kevin Spacey), who is having the worst day of anyone there. His dog is dying and he's stuck at work. Up the chain of command it goes until it lands with the CEO, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons). In a rash of late-night meetings, a plan is hatched to dump their position with the toxic assets and damn the poor shlubs who get caught holding the bag. They will intentionally be unloading worthless paper in order to secure their own survival. And to hell with what it does the the rest of the world.

This is obviously a movie about moral choices among sharks. It goes out of its way to humanize its characters, but in the end, there's not enough moral fiber here to stem the ruthless expedience of business. The only character who emerges with his hands clean is Eric Dale, who the firm retrieves after shit-canning him, and pays him an obscene amount of money to sit by while they perform their hatchet job. The rest? They're destroying capitalism in the name of capitalism. It's a thing to watch. At one point, Tuld says to Rodgers that he's made a career of putting people out of business, so why should this be any different. Of course, the last three years of history have shown the consequences, and why it is different. This is a nuanced morality play, in which some characters know what they're doing is evil and go along anyway, some characters don't care, and some characters just don't know it at all. To them, it all seems perfectly reasonable in context.

This is a sociological movie, too, one that details a particular set of people at a particular time and place. As a portrait of late capitalism, it's particularly damning. Eric's lament about the bridge he once built mourns for a useful life. Peter relates his background as a rocket scientist to his superiors. His job at the firm pays better. In these two characters, the movie seems to be saying that the manipulation of wealth for its own sake has no intrinsic value compared to actual work. Maybe it's right. Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore), one of the people responsible for conveying the risk of what they all were doing has hit a glass ceiling and has no chance against Jared Cohen (Simon Baker), her aggressive opposite number. The scene early in the film in which some of our characters relax after work at a strip club doubles down on this, and the movie elides an appalling casual sexism. In any event, this is basically a shark tank. The revelation of the value of mortgage backed securities is blood in the water. The financial crisis is a feeding frenzy.

The movie codes its characters well, too. Peter is a technocrat. He's always surrounded by computers. Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley), Peter's friend and fellow technocrat, doesn't have the initiative to succeed. He's always got a bottle in his hand. Tuld, one of the masters of the universe to whom the concerns of the little people are as the comings and goings of ants, breakfasts overlooking the city from what might just as well be Mount Olympus. Each character has his or her individual fatal flaw--gender, conscience, motivation or lack thereof--and it brings them all down in the course of a night. All except Tuld. The gods are above it all.

I don't know what it is about movies about business or work, but they're fascinating. Movies that point their cameras at the minutiae of how the world works hold my attention like no others. That's true of this movie, even though I know for a fact that it's being deliberately vague about the nuts and bolts of high finance. This plays a bit like a thriller even though it's not one. The filmmakers have placed its story in a glasscine modern space and lit it with harsh fluorescent lights and poured booze all over everything. I was reminded a bit of that scene in Tokyo Sonata where all the unemployed salarimen dutifully walk the streets in a parade, as if they're dead men. As I say, this has a late-night feeling to it.

I'd like to think that this film is an epitaph for the excesses of Wall Street, but the world hasn't learned anything from the 2008 financial debacle. High finance is still largely unregulated and the world for those who aren't the masters of the universe continues to spiral downward. When this movie concludes, with Sam Rodgers burying his dog in his ex-wife's yard, there's a sense that he's burying a civilization along with it. When the movie fades to black and the credits roll, the sound of the shovel continues, no longer specific to the task on screen.

Vampire Redux

2011-12-25T22:58:00.000-08:00

Add another casualty to the list of movies I chose not to see in the theaters this year. When the remake of Fright Night (2011, directed by Craig Gillespie) hit theaters this summer, I gave it a pass because I didn't feel like paying the damned up-charge. This was a familiar situation for me all year long, and by the time Fright Night came along I was getting angry about it. I wanted to see Fright Night, actually. I just wasn't willing to pay the going rate. So here it is, months later, and I'm watching it on TV alone rather than with an audience, the way movies are intended in the natural order of things, and I'm feeling pretty crummy about it. Because, y'know, it's a pretty good popcorn horror movie. This movie would have rocked with an audience. Alas...

If you know the original movie, you more or less know the plot of the remake. Teenager Charlie Brewster suspects that the guy who has moved into the house next door is a vampire, a suspicion that proves to be horrifyingly correct. Charlie enlists the aid of horror star Peter Vincent (in this iteration of the story, a Criss Angel-style Vegas occult showman) to help him, only to be turned down. Jerry Dandridge, the vampire, kidnaps Charlie's girlfriend, Amy, and Peter Vincent has a change of heart. Our intrepid vampire hunters head into the belly of the beast to save Amy.

As I say, the story is more or less the same, but the individual incidents are very much changed. The setting of the movie in an isolated development in the desert just outside of Vegas transforms the suburban setting of the original into a kind of remote village, for one example. For another, Dandridge doesn't have a familiar. For a third, Charlie's mother (played by Toni Collette) and girlfriend (played by Imogen Poots) both have a great deal more agency in this movie. They're active opponents of Jerry Dandridge. The scene in the original where Charlie's mom invites Dandridge into their house, for example, is not present in this movie, or, more accurately, is drastically changed. Evil Ed is still on hand, too, played with geeky abandon by Christopher Mintz-Platz, everyone's go-too geek kid these days. Colin Ferrell's Dandridge is a more ruthless vampire in this movie, too, though one is disappointed that this film doesn't replay the scene in the original where our vampire hunters discover that Dandridge locks his coffin from the inside.

The middle part of the movie is where this deviates most from the original, in which the filmmakers have inserted a pretty good action sequence in which Charlie, his mom, and Amy flee from Dandridge in a car chase from their development toward Vegas. The desert highway at night is a nicely menacing setting, and this sequence is executed with high style. The movie also departs dramatically from the original with the nature of Peter Vincent, played with considerable cheek by David Tennant. No longer is the character a call back to the great horror movies of the past. He resembles neither of his namesakes in this movie. He's a good deal younger, too. It's disappointing that Vincent caves so easily to a belief in vampires. There's no clever discovery of the truth in this movie. They've also given Vincent a backstory that makes his emnity of vampires personal. This is a huge misstep and it makes the movie's endgame more of a banal Hollywood ending. There's a certain video game quality to the way the end of the movie is structured, too, with the minions running interference for the boss at the end. Tennant is able to transcend the character that's been provided for him by the sheer force of his personality, but he's playing the character while weighted down with chains. The ending of the movie, too, creates a situation where the only characters to have actually killed anyone are our heroes themselves. This is a big flaw.

I'm also disappointed by how much less queer this version of the movie is. The removal of Jerry Dandridge's familiar and the emphasis on his female victims suggests a much more heterosexual monster, while the subtextual theme where Charlie is more interested in his queer next door neighbors to the exclusion of his girlfriend is voided. This is further heteronormalized by making Amy a much more interesting character and by having her play a co-hero for a portion of the movie. Charlie, for himself, is depicted as being completely gobsmacked at his ability to land such a hot girlfriend, which turns him into a kind of preening prick to his friend, Ed, near the beginning of the movie. Charlie, it should be noted, isn't a very likeable character here, and Anton Yelchin underplays him.

In spite of all of this, I still had a good time watching this. In general, it's a wittier movie than the original--particularly David Tennant's swaggering brand of British nastiness--and its horror beats are generally more sinister than in the original. I do miss the carnival of practical monsters, replaced here by CGI creations that don't have the weight of reality that the original had, but I don't mind the CGI, either. The production design of the film, is pretty slick, eschewing suburban Gothic in exchange for a vapid suburban landscape where postmodern flourishes suggest a soulless way to live. That Charlie's mom makes her living selling this lifestyle to people as a real estate agent is a nice touch. And those signs in her garage? As tidy a piece of foreshadowing as you'll run across. Full marks for that. And if this movie isn't a profound and terrifying experience, well, neither was the original film, nor, for that matter, are most horror movies. What this is is a fun popcorn movie, which is the legacy to which it aspires.

Arrested Adolescence

2011-12-22T08:39:00.000-08:00

The arrested adolescent man-child has become a fixture in contemporary comedies. Like most right-thinking feminist film types, I blame Judd Apatow for this. Fortunately, we're beginning to see a countervailing narrative: there are arrested adolescent women out there, too. Jason Reitman and his muse, Diablo Cody, take a look at one of them in Young Adult (2011), and it's like gazing into the abyss. Young Adult is funny, though it's not a farce like the similarly themed and structured Bridesmaids, but it's also kind of a horror story, with a completely psychotic central character and a bitter view of mid-American banality.

Young Adult follows Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) as her life implodes. She's coming out of a divorce, she's the ghostwriter of a series of young adult novels that are coming to an end, and she's become obsessed with her old high school sweetheart, Buddy (Patrick Wilson), who has just sent her a birth notice for the first child he's had with his wife. Mavis decides to take a trip back to her small Minnesota hometown with the perverse idea that she'll steal Buddy away from his wife and all will be hunky dory. Her pretext is the invitation to the baby's naming ceremony. When she makes it back to town, her every interaction with Buddy is an exercise in awkwardness, but she clings to her delusion like she'll drown with out it. In on her scheme is Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), who she meets in a bar on her first night back. Matt was the kid who had the locker next to her, a victim of a horrifying hate crime that has left him disabled and living with his sister. Matt is a sharp cookie, though. He sees right through her. They strike up an uneasy friendship, though two people couldn't be more different. When Mavis's delusion comes crashing spectacularly down, she turns to Matt, and then back to her empty big city life.

This sounds a bit like it embraces a cornball, salt of the earth attitude toward small town versus big city, but it does no such thing. Small town America is shown in Young Adult to be just as vapid and empty as Mavis's version of big city life, in which she drinks too much and watches too much reality TV. Small town America, on the other hand, is a wasteland of chain hotels, "KenTacoHuts," and unchallenging opportunities mostly faced by mediocrities. The only person in the movie who seems to get any joy in life is Matt, who brews custom hootch in his garage that he names after Star Wars locations and builds custom action figures. Mavis, on the other hand, can't let go of who she was in high school. She's trapped herself in adolescence through the expedient of writing young adult novels in which she is constantly re-living her glory years, though, in her tirade at the end of the movie, we find out that her glory years were a trauma, too.

In truth, Young Adult follows a kind of predictable narrative. As I was watching it, I thought it resembled a couple of Alexander Payne's early films. Like those, Young Adult is laced with arsenic, but also like those films, it follows a familiar narrative arc that erupts in a scene of profound humiliation for its protagonist. One wishes that the structure of the screenplay was a bit more adventurous, but what can you do? It's otherwise pretty good, even if the movie itself is kind of unpleasant.

What keeps you watching is Charlize Theron. It's hard for me to imagine another actress so willing to completely subvert her own beauty in a movie like this. She's not playing ugly--not at all. Theron already did that in Monster. Though, on second thought, maybe she is, because Mavis Gary is a close relative to Aileen Wuornos. There's a sickness in her soul and you can totally see it in Theron's eyes, even surrounded by the wildly inappropriate glamour girl trappings Mavis brings with her. Then the movie deconstructs the glamour girl by pulling back the veil and showing us the process. There's a scene late in the movie where Mavis isn't quite naked, but she might as well be, in which she stands in front of the camera in panty hose and pork cutlet silicone falsies that is as brutal a deconstruction of beauty into sheer ridiculousness as you will find. Theron, as I say, is completely fearless here.

Of course, if you're looking for a tidy lesson to be taken away from the movie, you're out of luck. The filmmakers send you on your way with a bitter homily on how much small-town America sucks. We've already seen how big city America sucks. Basically, we're all screwed.

A Final Problem

2011-12-21T06:54:00.000-08:00

I had a discussion on the social networks last week that went something like this:

Me: There's a movie coming out that has both Stephen Fry AND Noomi Rapace in it, and I don't particularly want to pay money to see it. What is WRONG with me?
Friend: Hey, it's got Jude Law in it, too--and you know that alone is enough for me!--and I don't want to see it, either. Looks like shit.
Me: This is like that time that Chow Yun-Fat and Keith Richards were in a movie together playing pirates and I thought: "How can this be bad?" Hollywood turns everything it touches to shit...
Friend: Well, now, not EVERYTHING. But point taken.

Basically, I was not looking forward to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011, directed by Guy Ritchie). I didn't like the first film at all. I thought it looked like mud and I thought it was a bit too arch, playing to Robert Downey, Jr.'s screen persona rather than to the character. Add to that my absolute delight with the BBC series, Sherlock, and you have a film that is completely superfluous to my interests. But then, as I note, they went and cast Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes and Noomi Rapace as a gypsy fortune teller and my resistance to seeing the movie with my partner (who has no such qualms--she's a much less demanding viewer than I am) evaporated. To my surprise, it wasn't awful, though there are elements that make me cringe.

All of the principles are back, Downey, Jude Law, Guy Ritchie, Rachel McAdams (who is sadly wasted in this movie), and Moriarty has moved front and center as the film's nemesis. The film is ultimately an elaborate riff on "The Adventure of the Final Problem," with it's climactic resolution at Reichenbach Falls. I don't think I'm giving anything away by this. The name "Reichenbach" is spoken early in the film and anyone who has read Doyle will perk up. But, as with the first film, this only has a distant relationship to Doyle. The things that annoyed me about the first film are still here, including Holmes the action hero and a depressing reliance on "bullet time" action sequences and a bunch of Downey shamelessly mugging for the camera. But this movie introduces a couple of elements that make this go down a bit easier.

The plot finds Holmes unraveling the threads of Moriarty's empire of crime. Central to his scheme is a campaign of bombings across Europe intended to pitch France and Germany against each other. Moriarty, it turns out, has bought up the machineries of war and intends to profit from them. Meanwhile, Watson has gotten himself married, and in order to save the happy couple from Moriarty's assassins, Holmes invites himself on the honeymoon. Holmes ropes Watson into the adventure when it's made clear that Watson and his new wife will never be safe while Moriarty is alive. Holmes is following the Gypsy fortuneteller, Madam Simza, whose brother is somehow ensnared in Moriarty's machinations. Simza leads them to an arms factory in Germany, where the true scale of Moriarty's scheme is made clear to them. They then follow on to Reichenbach, Switzerland, where a peace conference is under way. This conference is a powderkeg waiting for a match, which Moriarty hopes to provide.

This is really two films stitched together. The seams show, but I like the ambition of the thing even if I have reservations about the execution. The first film is the romance between Holmes and Watson. This isn't the first film to load their relationship with homoerotic undertones, but it's probably the broadest of them. This is a farce--intentionally, I think--and it carries the film through its exposition while setting up the more troubling second film. That second film is an examination of the roots of the absolute calamity of the 20th Century. Moriarty is orchestrating a world war, and in this, even his evil seems dwarfed by the horror this suggests. The scenes where Holmes and his friends flee the arms factory in Germany look like a war film. This part of the movie is fatalistic, with Moriarty suggesting that the world hardly needs him to tumble into darkness. It's doing a fine job on its own. Unfortunately, this has the ring of truth. Where the first film was a Victorian adventure romp, this one shades into the 20th Century techno-thriller. There's a line of descent from Holmes to James Bond, and this film feels that relationship. Certainly, Mycroft's connections in the intelligence community suggest all of that. As a Bond film, this is a corker.

I have to admit, though, that I don't need to see any more drag comedy. This sort of thing just makes me grit my teeth. Holmes has long been a master of disguise, but this is taken over the top into abject silliness. Robert Downey looks ridiculous in drag. Har, har. Whatever antipathy I may have taken away from this is only partially mollified by the presence of Stephen Fry. Casting Fry as Mycroft Holmes is a stroke of genius, and contrary to the exchange I've included at the head of this post, Fry absolutely does improve the film, whether from the sly way he refers to his brother as "Sherly" or the way he lounges at home naked, and damn the propriety. Fry lights up the film. Noomi Rapace, unfortunately, doesn't have anything like the same kind of opportunity. Her inclusion in this movie just emphasizes how close to Holmes Lizabeth Salander was, and how disappointing it is that Rapace isn't Holmes. She acquits herself well enough in an underwritten part and looks fabulous, but Madame Simza could have been played by any number of actresses. The other major new addition is Jared Harris as Moriarty. This film suffers a bit of a letdown here, because the one element of the first film I liked was its treatment of Moriarty as a kind of shadowy puppetmaster. Here, he loses a measure of his ability to terrify by virtue of having a face. Harris is good as Moriarty, don't get me wrong, and I think any actor would face this problem, but as soon as you put a face to him, he becomes something banal, he becomes just another guy. This is a small gripe, though, and it's a problem shared with the James Bond movies: Blofeld was a lot more terrifying when all you saw of him was his hand stroking his white cat.

I do admire the film for giving Watson a place in the sun. "He's not nearly as dimwitted as you led me to believe," says Mycroft to his brother at one point, and he's not. He's not the idiot that Nigel Bruce's Watson often was. Part of it's the actor. Jude Law doesn't look like a buffoon, after all. But mostly it's the plot. The climax of the film requires Watson to deduce the enemy agent while Holmes plays chess with Moriarty. Moriarty, for his part, can't believe that Holmes would trust Watson that far, but Watson is totally up to it, of course. Indeed, Watson is the one that saves the oft captured Holmes rather than vice versa. There's more equilibrium between the two.

So, all in all, not awful. Not great, but at least it's not in 3-D. More than that, the film LOOKS cleaner than its predecessor. I don't know if that's a function of improved digital projection at the movie theater where I saw it or if it's some improvement in the actual lensing of the film, but where the first film's visual style was often murky, this one has been somewhat clarified. As I say, it's an improvement. There's also a subtle shift in visual emphasis, though only a slight one. This is more of a costume piece than the previous film. It's almost as if someone in the production staff (likely costume designer Jenny Beavan) realized that a huge portion of the audience for a Sherlock Holmes film starring Downey and Law is there for the eye candy and decided to cater to that by dressing them as fashion plates. The men in this film know how to freaking wear their costumes and it's kind of a pleasure to watch.

We'll Always Have Paris

2011-12-18T14:29:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to be objective about Martin Scorsese's new film, Hugo (2011), and I'm finding it to be almost impossible. I love it with an unreason out of all proportion to it's qualities, because it's a distillation of the things I treasure in life into one great delirium-inducing decoction. It's an act of unashamed love of cinema. It's the warmest, most affirming film that Scorsese has ever made and I came out of it walking on air in spite of the fact that my eyes were watering. This comes by tears honestly, with pure unadulterated joy.

And it's the most unlikely of movies. It's a kids movie? In 3-D? By Scorsese? The amount of cognitive dissonance built into that combination is daunting. What would attract Scorsese to such a project? As I watched the movie, it all became clear to me. This movie is chock full of the things that Scorsese values most in the world, too: the joy of movies, the history of movies, and preserving the legacy of the movies. Having seen it, I can't imagine Scorsese NOT making it.

The story here follows Hugo, a boy who lives in the walls of the Gare Montparnasse train station. He's the son of a clockmaker, with whom he had been restoring an automaton that Hugo's father had found in the museum where he worked. The museum is also where Hugo's father died, killed in a fire. Hugo then went to live with his uncle, Claude, who maintained the clocks in the train station. Claude has vanished, led astray by a taste for drink, leaving Hugo the task of tending the clocks and existing on his own. He still has the automaton, which he continues to restore because he's convinced that it contains a secret passed to him by his father. To this end, Hugo has been pinching spare parts from the toymaker on train station's promenade. One day, the toy maker catches him and seizes the notebook with the schematic drawings for the automaton that Hugo's father had drawn. The toymaker vows to burn it, but doesn't. Instead, he puts Hugo to work fixing toys as a penance. All the while, Hugo dodges the station inspector, who seems to relish sending orphan children off to an orphanage. Hugo also meets the toymaker's grand niece, Isabelle, and they form a friendship. Hugo takes her to a movie. She's never seen a movie. Her Papa Georges, the toymaker, forbids it, but she's enraptured by the movie (which is Harold Lloyd's Safety Last). She begs Hugo to show her his secret project, and he does. She turns out to have the key that will let automaton run, and when it does, it draws a picture of a moon face with a rocket in its eye, and signs it "Georges Méliès." "But that's Papa Georges' name," she says, and they set about discovering the life's work of her embittered uncle...

There's a lot more to this movie than I can encapsulate in this synopsis. Scorsese has populated the shops of the train station with interesting characters who enact wonderful little vignettes. Hugo watches most of these from a distance and the movie delineates them with the economy of a silent movie. You have Monseiur Frick who is romancing Madam Emilie only to be thwarted by her dog. You have the sinister Station Inspector, who is completely smitten with Lissette, the flower vendor, but who doesn't act on it because he feels inadequate due to the injury he suffered in the Great War that requires him to wear a clumsy leg brace. There's the kindly bookseller who lends books to Isabelle and to Hugo as a means of keeping their imaginations fired. All of these are filmed as a kind of miniature tableaux and each of them seems like their own silent movie in their own right. But it's the rediscovery of Georges Méliès that Scorsese is REALLY interested in, and he populates the movie with actual clips from Méliès's movies, while recreating his studio and his career in fanciful flashbacks that plunge the movie into a kind of never-never land where waking dreams are being made and preserved on celuloid. This is the invention of movie, and the movie celebrates it and mourns the loss of so much of our cinematic heritage. In some ways, Hugo is a vast piece of agitprop on behalf on film preservation, something Scorsese is passionate about. The film, too, goes to pains to present all kinds of varieties of cinema beyond the silent films. There's a wonderful scene where Hugo's notebook becomes a flip-book, for one example, and another where a paper with drawings on both sides flutters in the air creating an animated image. It's a hell of a conjuring trick. Cinema as a wonderment carries over into the presentation of this film in general. This is the first 3-D movie I think I've ever seen that not only justifies its use of the process, it positively demands it. 3-D gives the film a kind of picture-book quality that's appropriate enough for a children's movie, but it also emphasizes the novelty of early cinema. The movie restages the first showings of the Lumiere Brothers' film of a train arriving at a station and the way the audience ducks away from it suggests that cinema has always played games with the depth of its image. From the very beginning, it was showmanship. Scorsese punctuates this by filming a train crash of his own, patterned after a very real train accident at that very station.

Hugo is also a children's adventure movie beyond all of its meta concerns, and on this count, the movie is perhaps less good than it could be. Don't get me wrong: it's still boldly imaginative and it's still tied to a bottomless love of movies--Scorsese, ever the imp, shows a clip of the clock scene from Safety Last early in the film, and then recreates it later in the movie when Hugo is fleeing the Station Inspector for one example. But the whole children's adventure is just a means to an end here, and one gets the feeling that the director might have done without if he could have. Or maybe not. There are certainly touches that suggest a fondness for childrens' movies of the past. Sasha Baron Cohen's Station Inspector certainly recalls the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the fascination with toys goes a little beyond the necessities of the plot. But all of this seems secondary to me. The movie isn't all of a piece.

And do you know what, else? I don't care. I don't care because it's so packed to the gills with things I love, from books to movies to art to music that its like it the damned thing has sunk an electrode into the pleasure centers of my brain. I mean, watch quick for cameos by Salvador Dali, James Joyce, and Django Reinhardt, all of whom were in Paris at the time the film is set. The film's Paris, like the Paris of Casablanca, is a Paris of dreams. Watch, too, for a complete delight in magic and technology. This isn't Scorsese's first brush with a steampunk aesthetic--Gangs of New York runs up against it, too--but it's a comprehensive one. Like Gangs, it presents a past that was weirder and more sophisticated than dry histories will admit. The film is a gallery of wonderful faces, too, none of them overly pretty. Some of them look like they stepped out of a painting. Frances De La Tour, for instance, wouldn't be out of place in a Toulouse-Lautrec. And Christopher Lee! Christopher Lee is such a terrifying screen presence that it's delightful seeing him as the kindly old bookseller in this movie. I like to think that he's channeling his old friend, Peter Cushing, in the role, but that's just me projecting my own biases onto the film.

It's a mark of this film's basic humanity that it takes what could essentially be a villain in Cohen's Station Inspector and humanizes him. His brief romance with Emily Mortimer's flower seller is like a Frank Borzage melodrama in miniature. His bitterness in life is swept away by love. The kids do well under Scorsese's direction, too, though Chloe Moretz has already proven herself to be one of those uncanny child actors. She may not match Jodie Foster's performance in Taxi Driver, but she doesn't need to. She certainly acquits her self well. Asa Butterfield is all wide-eyed innocence. His performance suffers a bit because there's not much variety for him, but he suffices. Jude Law's brief part as Hugo's dad is underdeveloped, but if you want to get me interested in Law again, dress him in stylish period clothing as he is here. Yum. Ben Kingsley gets the juicy part of Georges Méliès, and it's twofold, requiring him to be both the impish dreamer who invented the movies and the embittered old man who believes the world has forgotten him. Kingsley is a terrific actor and Scorsese hands him the movie.

Like I say. I'm trying hard to remain objective, because this is the kind of movie that makes me prone to gushing like a schoolgirl. I don't know if this is the best movie I've seen this year. In purely formal terms, probably not. But I know this--know it down to the bottom depths of my heart: this is the movie I will treasure most from this year.

Return of the Repressed

2011-12-18T03:40:00.000-08:00

I sometimes forget that the Gothic novel is one of the roots of the horror movie, usually when I'm watching some stolid, well-costumed, Masterpiece Theater-style movie adaptation. These adaptations are so rarely filmed with an eye toward terror. Filmmakers prefer, instead, to pump up the romance elements or the drama or the respectability of great literature. Take a look at William Wyler's version of Wuthering Heights if you want an example, and contrast it with Hitchcock's Rebecca (Hitch knew the value of terror). So it's a bit of a surprise to me that so much of Cary Fukunaga's 2011 adaptation of Jane Eyre embraces the terror. It keeps the romance, sure, but it also casts Thornfield Hall, with its madwoman in the attic, as a great haunted house full of haunted people and things that go bump in the night.

Fukunaga's film is largely faithful to the book. It compresses things, as it must, but it hits the plot highlights like a pro. Jane Eyre is an abused young woman who is cast out of her childhood home by a cruel aunt who accuses her of being a liar. She's taken in at a school for girls where the sadistic headmaster beats her and where her best friend dies of tuberculosis. She takes her education ("I've had a thorough education," she says) and takes on a job as the governess of a child at Thornfield Hall, working for the housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax, and the mysterious absent owner, Mr. Rochester. When Mr. Rochester returns home, he becomes smitten with Jane and endeavors to marry her, but can't because his first wife, quite mad, is imprisoned in the attic. She escapes from time to time to wage mischief and violence. Crushed by the revelation, Jane flees Thornfield and is taken in by the Reverend Saint John, who sets her up as a schoolmistress and falls for her himself. Jane still loves Rochester and lets the reverend down as easy as she can. Meanwhile, she discovers that she is heir to a fortune. She returns to Thornfield Hall only to find it burned to the ground, Rochester maimed by the fire, but widowed. They can marry now.

Fukunaga gets the mood of this exactly right. Filming mostly in winter, and using bare trees as a dominant motif, the filmmakers create exterior shots that occasionally look like they were painted by Caspar David Friedrich. There's an overarching mood of melancholy over the whole movie, and when the scenes move indoors, they're set in candle-lit gloom, where mysterious noises in the dark conjure terrors. This part of the movie is usually lit by ambient candlelight or firelight. The filmmakers have chosen only these light sources by which to film, a la Kubrick in Barry Lyndon. The second act of the movie creeps away like a right proper ghost story, and a good one, at that. The gloom of the night will do that. Although it's not used in the movie, the trailer for the film tips the filmmakers' hands along these lines when it includes a snippet of Goblin's score for Suspiria.

All of this comes after a first act in which horrid things befall Jane as a child. Jane Eyre has that peculiar cruelty to children that so fascinated Victorian audiences, where abuse is intended to build character and is something to be overcome rather than something that scars children. Jane is an avatar of the strong, moral woman who becomes so to spite her abusers. When she goes back to see her aunt, Mrs. Reed, on her deathbed, she's rising above whatever resentment she might feel to fulfill what she sees as an obligation. There's no hint that she wants to throw her having made good in her aunt's face. Jane is sometimes moral to a fault. The scenes at Lowood School for girls early in the film are high on the creep factor, too, it should be added. Certainly, the sadistic Mr. Brocklehurst is a monster, played with wide eyed villainy by Simon McBurney. If he had a mustache, he might have twirled it. There's a certain amount of horror in the scene where Jane's friend, Helen, dies in the bed next to her, too.

While I'm kind of tuned to find horror in movies when I can, Jane Eyre has more on its mind than that. Like the novel, it's a moral tale and a romance, where love conquers all against all odds. The relationship between Jane and Rochester is the center of the novel and the movie and here, I have to admit that in this regard, Kate Beaton has ruined the Bronte Sisters for me.

Oh, sure, this movie stacks the deck by having Michael Fassbender play Rochester, and let me tell you, Fassbender was BORN to wear the men's fashions of the late Romantic era. This was a high point of men's fashions and when this movie wins its inevitable Academy Award for costume design--a deserved award, I'll tell you right now--it will be because Fassbender cuts such a magnificent figure in these clothes. The actor is so damned charming that you almost forget that Rochester is kind of a monster and you wonder why Jane goes back to him at the end of the movie. Love's like that, I guess. Mia Wasikowska, for her part, underplays Jane to the point where you wonder what Rochester sees in her. She's a plain, unremarkable girl, she tells him (and us), and so she is. Part of the point of the novel is the idea of her moral rectitude being what draws men to her, and this is a curiously Victorian idea. In any event, the romantic pairing in this version is the most troublesome part of the movie, because it falls back on that old chestnut of the virtuous, virginal woman falling for the dangerous bad boy and tends to exaggerate both archetypes. This carries with it another Victorian idea: that a bad man can be redeemed by the love of a good woman. These ideas tend to run counter to the underlying feminism of the story, in which Jane is a capable, self-reliant woman. Jane Eyre is a conflicted text sometimes.

The madwoman in the attic, it should be noted, becomes a symbol of the sexual repression both Jane and Rochester feel, in addition to her status as a plot device. Overt sexuality is dialed way down in this movie, much to its detriment, I think, but it's not entirely absent. Desire, after all, drives the characters to do stupid things, whether it's Rochester's desire to marry Jane while his wife is still alive or Rev. St. John's foolish proposal to Jane before going to India. And, of course, Jane spurns the kindly Reverend to go back to a beast of a man. Go figure.

In any case, the rest of the cast is well-appointed with interesting faces. Sally Hawkins's Mrs. Reed is very far away from the roles the actress normally plays, and she manages a severe spitefulness very well. Judi Dench adds gravitas to the film as Mrs. Fairfax. Jamie Bell is properly heartsick as Rev. St. John. But most of these characters are off screen. This is Mia Wasikowska's show. Jane is on screen in every scene, and Fukunaga makes sure Wasikowska is the first thing we see by fracturing the chronology and beginning the movie in media res. The young Jane is played by Amelia Clarkson, and she's good, but the filmmakers never give her the chance to swipe the spotlight. They gloss over Jane's early life a little too quickly, to the point where the fact that Jane works her way up from the bottom at school to become a teacher is never made clear. This seems like an important omission given the way the plot of the movie progresses, but, hell, Jane's biography isn't the center of the movie, I guess. All that really matters is that she has bad taste in men.

Lost Girls

2011-12-17T09:13:00.000-08:00

I wasn't feeling either of the movies I rented from my local video store last night, so I decided to give the ol' roulette wheel a spin. I sort of quailed when the result came up as We Are the Night (2011, directed by Dennis Gansel), a German vampire movie. I thought: "Vampires. Crap." Vampires are probably the most played out, most annoying archetype in the horror tarot these day, whether from the proliferation of paranormal romance novels or the vampire-themed soaps all over television or the goddamn sparklers in the Twilight movies. I really do try to leave my preconceptions behind when watching movies I haven't seen, but sometimes, it's really, really hard.

Anyway, We Are the Night opens well with a scene on an airplane, where the pilot and all of the passengers have had their throats ripped out by a trio of lady vampires. The plane is approaching Berlin, and with no one to fly the plane ("You shouldn't have killed the pilot," one of our vampiresses deadpans), the three jump ship and let the plane crash. I kind of warmed up to the movie a little with this scene, because it's a neat modern reworking of the arrival of the Demeter in Dracula. I thought: "Okay, maybe this isn't going to suck." Our three vampires are: Louise, the queen vampire; Charlotte, who was once a movie star in Weimar Germany; and Nora, the baby of the group, a punk rock good-time girl. Louise, it turns out, is looking for her lost love, and she scans the eyes of every woman she meet to see if she's found her. Meanwhile, on the streets of Berlin, a troubled young woman makes her living as a thief and a pickpocket. When we first meet her, she's robbing a Russian pimp at an ATM machine, where, unfortunately, a police sting is taking place. She takes off running, chased by nice-guy cop, Tom. During the chase, Lena changes clothes and poses as a bystander, Tom sees through her, but he likes her and chooses not to follow once she ultimately gives him the slip. That night, Lena follows her nose to a rave at an abandoned amusement park, where she plies her trade. This is Louise's party, and she sees something in Lena's eyes that suggests that Lena might be The One. She bites Lena and Lena turns. Louise and her companions introduce Lena to a life of decadents and abandon. Lena is terribly uncomfortable with all of it, and in order to acclimate her to the life of the vampire, Lena gives her to a trio of Russian mobsters to abuse, in the hopes that Lena's inner savage will surface. It does, but Lena still won't kill, so Louise and Charlotte do it for her. Unfortunately, this is all caught on video and the cops, including Tom, are able to trace them through the Lambourghini that Louise gives to Lena. A SWAT team descends on the hotel where our vampires are staying. The vampires have to take it on the lam in broad daylight, while Louise becomes torn between her obsession with Lena and her suspicions of her, while Lena keeps looking for an escape.

This all plays out pretty well. We Are the Night is a slick, slick movie complete with a strong sense of the fashions of underground Berlin. Once upon a time, this is the kind of movie that would have been made for a buck fifty and dumped direct to video, but this film has a budget more than adequate to stage elaborate set pieces. The SWAT invasion of the hotel is a particularly good one, as is the car chase that follows in which the vampires' "safe" car is riddled with bullet holes that let in shafts of sunlight. This last is kinda sorta swiped from Near Dark, but it's a good swipe. The movie even finds time for some pathos near the end as Charlotte visits her elderly daughter in the nursing home before they all leave for Moscow. The special effects-laden showdown at the end between Louise and Lena is kind of dodgy, but for the most part, but it has a pretty good punch line. The movie on the whole is well-composed, so points for style.

What this doesn't do is re-invent the wheel. This touches various vampire tropes, from the search for a reincarnated lover to the reluctant vampire who won't kill to the loneliness of immortality manifesting itself as a kind of fey decadence. None of this is new and most of these tropes are played out. There's a conversation mid-film that suggests an interesting path that the movie could have taken in the hands of a more adventurous filmmaker, though, in which Louise explains that there are no more male vampires because the female vampires have hunted and killed them all. What would such a sinister matriarchy look like? We get a little of it in microcosm with the relationship between Louise and her companions, but not enough to know what an entire society of exclusively female vampires would look like. We Are the Night instead chooses to use this as a throwaway means of introducing a kind of feminist subtext into the movie. If that was its intention, then it kind of backfires. Rather than being a feminist figure, she becomes the stereotype of the predatory lesbian intent on recruiting straight women into the "homosexual lifestyle." This movie is titillated by lesbians, but it's homophobic at its core.

Unfortunately, the version of this movie that Netflix is streaming is dubbed into English, and badly at that. I can't get a good feel for the performances from this film, though Karoline Herfurth is alternately feral and vulnerable as Lena. I don't need to hear her voice to see this; it's written all over her face. The movie tries hard at the outset to dirty up Herfurth as a tough street kid, but even in these scenes, the fact that she's got the bone structure of a supermodel is evident. So it's no surprise that after she transforms into a vampire, she becomes a swan from an ugly duckling. It's kind of a cliche, but the movie almost pulls it off. Almost. Nina Hoss is another matter. Her Louise is harmed more by the dubbing than all of the rest of the cast combined. She's a character that SHOULD be speaking German. She's a born dominatrix, flavored with a salting of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. The voice they've chosen for her simply doesn't match the actress or performance. Alas. I may have to revisit this in its original language to see if it is improved.

Or maybe not. There are too many movies to see.

One Whose Name Was Writ in Water

2011-12-16T07:04:00.000-08:00

There's a scene near the beginning of Silent Souls (2010, directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko) in which two men prepare the body of a dead woman for her funeral. The scene is filmed in a single shot, and the loving care and attention to detail makes it one of the most indelible images I've seen in a movie this year. The two men prepare the body as if she were going to her wedding. The narrator tells us that the Merjans, a Baltic ethnicity to whom the two men and the woman belong, customarily weave threads into the pubic hair of brides for their new husbands to undo. The two men follow this custom in death, too. Sex and death are the two great themes of the movie, and it incarnates these two themes as symbolic avatars, as love and water, the two ancient gods of the Merjans. This sounds kind of grandiose, but it's not. The movie is careful to elaborate its themes in quotidian strokes and an earthy sexuality. This may be a film about death, but it's also a film about life. Yin and yang. World without end.

The framework of Silent Souls is pretty simple. Our narrator is Aist, a mill worker, photographer, and failed poet. His boss is Miron, whose much-younger wife, Tanya, has just passed on. The Merjan's traditionally cremate their dead on the shores of water, and scatter the ashes to be swept away. Miron askes Aist to help with Tanya, knowing that there was once something between Aist and Tanya. The two men prepare her body and take her on a journey with them to where they'll perform the funeral. Aist takes a birdcage with him with the two buntings he's just bought; he doesn't want to leave them alone while they're gone. On the road, Miron regales Aist with tales of his sex life with Tanya, another custom of the Merjans, and through these reminiscences, Tanya comes to life. Aist, for his part, spends the trip remembering his father, another failed poet.

The film itself is brief. It only runs 75 minutes, though it seems more expansive given the preponderance of long shots. It's beautifully shot, though its tone is slow, deliberate, and ultimately mournful. Every so often, though, it lights up the screen with unexpected images, like the faces of the women at the mill that Aist photographs one after another, and later, the ecstatic side by side faces of the two prostitutes who our characters meet after the funeral as Aist and Miron have sex with them. Sex, for this film, is the way humans heal from pain and comfort the grieving. The images of faces of people drifting along in boats are striking, too. The end of the movie seems foreordained when it comes, with Aist's buntings acting as psychopomps, guiding the dead to their destination.

Silent Souls a film that finds the epic and universal in the specific, and an almost painful intimacy with its characters. I don't know if the Merjans are a real ethnicity or not--the film claims that they were a tribe of Finns who were absorbed by the Russians centuries ago--but it doesn't matter. Part of the thrust of the movie is an almost Buddhist sense of everything passing away: customs, civilizations, people, everything. The scale of being and nothingness suggested by Silent Souls is vast, even if the scale of what's on screen is miniscule. At its most basic level, this is a road movie, one in which the destination isn't that important. What matters, instead, is what the journey does to our two protagonists. The journey itself is a kind of metaphysical purgation so by the time our two travelers arrive at their ultimate destination, they've prepared for what the end actually means: love and water, sex and death, and an empty road ahead.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

2011-12-14T21:27:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to get caught up on this year's movies. For various reasons, my moviegoing has been way down this year. I blame most of it on 3-D. I mean, I LOVE popcorn movies. Love them. But in the last three years or so, I've had to put up with those damned glasses that don't fit over my own glasses and a ridiculous surcharge for the experience and a splitting headache afterward. If I choose to see a given movie in 3-D, that is. And this is even with the so-called "good" 3-D, as opposed to the after the fact 3-D conversions. It gets worse, though, because even when the movie is shown 2-D, there's a penalty. My local multiplexes--there are only two within reasonable driving distance because I live in the sticks--don't change out the damned 3-D lenses for 2-D showings, which darkens the picture. I saw both Captain America and the last Harry Potter in the theater and regretted it. I didn't write about either film, because I don't feel I could give them a fair shake based on what I could actually see on screen. My local art house is excellent, I should add, but they can only show so much, and often fairly late in the release calendar. Some movies never make it here at all. So, for the first time that I can remember, I'm preferring to see movies on video. This wounds my love of cinema, part of which is a love for the communal experience of sitting in an audience of strangers. Cinema is like church to me. I feel like an apostate these days. But it is what it is, I guess.

I probably could have seen The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011, directed by Rupert Wyatt) in the theater. It wasn't a movie that was released in 3-D, and probably would have been shown on a projector that didn't have the lens. I don't remember why I skipped it in the theater. Spite, I imagine. As Apes movies go, it's not abysmal by any means. It's certainly better than the Tim Burton movie from a decade ago. It's certainly a more faithful re-imagining of the original series, taking as its template Conquest of the Planet of the Apes rather than the original film. It's a film filled with in-joke self-references, so I'm a bit disappointed that they couldn't work a nod to Ricardo Montalban into the thing, but there's only so much you can throw into the pot before it becomes a comedy. I'll admit to this predisposition, too: Conquest is my favorite of the original film's sequels. I thought Roddy McDowell gave an absolutely terrific performance in that movie, channeling Malcom X. I wish the studio had had the strength of vision to pursue that film's plot to its logical end, but they ended up backing away. The new film shares this in common.

The story here finds researcher Will Rodman (James Franco) experimenting on apes in order to find a cure for Alzheimer's. He's designed a virus to deliver gene therapy that promotes neural regeneration. Unfortunately, Bright Eyes, his prodigy, goes berserk on the day he gives his pitch to the big pharma he works for to start human testing and the whole project is shut down and the apes destroyed, all except for Bright Eyes's baby, who was not known to the researchers until her cage was tossed. Rodman takes the ape home, where he names it Caesar and raises it in tandem with his Alzheimer's-afflicted father. Caesar, it turns out, has a greatly magnified intelligence, and his example encourages Rodman to test his cure on his father. It works a trick and his father's condition reverses itself for the nonce, but Caesar has issues of his own. His status as a captive, for one, and when he has a violent run-in with an obnoxious neighbor, he winds up being seized by animal control and placed in a primate sanctuary. Here, he begins to have a political awakening and begins to organize his fellow inmates. And with the next generation of Rodman's "cure" he makes his move.

For the most part this is a bunch of dumb fun. The big action sequences at the end of the movie are the kind of sturm and drang Hollywood specializes in these days, but at least they're not slashed to ribbons in the editing room. I'll say this for editor Mark Goldblatt: he knows how to cut an action movie. And the special effects that bring the apes to life are pretty good, too. I mean, the CGI isn't flawless, but it doesn't look any more fake than, say, the cheap rubber masks given to some of the extras in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. The end result of the ape rampage at the end of the movie strains my own credibility a bit, because I can't believe that the powers that be wouldn't hunt the living hell out of Caesar's merry band of apes after those apes wreck a helicopter and kill a bunch of cops. But details.

I'm less sanguine about the human characters this movie gives us. I admit that I'm used to monster movies being complete bores when not dealing with their star attractions, but this one is worse than most. The central character of Will Rodman is a serious problem. He's the designated hero, which gives him cover for doing certain very unethical and flat out stupid things. Such as administering a very dangerous experimental drug on his own father. Such as stealing said drug from his workplace. Such as designing a vector for gene therapy that is fatal to humans. Rodman has a chip on his shoulder, too. All through the movie, he's convinced of his rightness to the point of annoyance. This translates to an appalling sense of entitlement at certain points in the movie, particularly when dealing with bureaucracies. The way he gives orders to the poor woman at the courthouse is not endearing. Worse, still, his reasons for even being a scientist are specious: he wants to cure his dad of Alzheimer's, but that's ALL he wants to do. When his dad passes away, he loses all interest in what has been, to that point, his life's work. There's no curiosity here, no wonder at the universe. No compelling interest in science at all. And James Franco may be pretty, but he doesn't have the charm to pull this shit off. I mean, ALL of the bad shit that happens in this movie: the revolt of the apes, the death of his father, the virus apocalypse that the end of the movie hints at, are ALL his fault, but he doesn't pay any price for any of this. Designated heroes never do. Though he's hardly the worst character in the film. Tom Felton plays Dodge Landon, the sadistic attendant at the primate sanctuary, and he's pretty much a broad charicature. A cartoon villain, if you will, who gets an E.C. Comics-style comeuppance. For that matter, David Oyelowo's Steven Jacobs, Rodman's capitalist boss, is also kind of a cartoon villain. Rodman's dad is played by John Lithgow, and it's a role that Lithgow could play in his sleep. In another movie, it would be an Oscar bait performance: the genius who is laid low by Alzheimer's? Yeah. The movie writes this character poorly, and why not? He's a plot device, after all, rather than a character. It's the actor himself who gives him any spark of life, because the screenplay sure as hell doesn't. Ditto Freida Pinto's girlfriend character.

Also troubling are the racial politics built into this movie. This is a hold-over from Conquest, which is similarly allegorical. There are times when I wish I could communicate to Hollywood types just how fucking racist it is to use apes and monkeys as the instruments of racial allegories. This is a problem with King Kong. It's a problem with the Apes movies. Oh, you don't know why this is a problem? Ask yourself, then, why some on the racist fringe right tend to portray President Obama as an ape. Just fucking stop it. Please. There's also some emphasis on animal rights issues here, too, though these are inchoate, as if the filmmakers are only marginally aware of the fact that they're even there.

I understand that Fox wants to get Andy Serkis an Oscar for playing Caesar. Serkis is the go-to guy for mocap performances these days, I guess, and this is his second great ape after Kong. Serkis is certainly game for the performance and you can see that there's some animating spark to his Caesar that eludes most mocap performances. He's certainly the most interesting character in the movie. The apes in this movie are generally fun to watch, even though most of them haven't the weight of reality that Rick Baker's apes in the Burton movie had. Doing it with computers lets the filmmakers get the shapes and movements of the apes more or less right, and it lets them expand the palette a bit with species that wouldn't have been practical before. Oh, the triumvirate of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans remains, but the filmmakers have added bonobos. The addition of bonobos suggests all kinds of interesting possibilities to me given that bonobos are matriarchal and utilize sexual intercourse as their dominant social interaction. Bonobos fuck to say hello, to settle arguments, and to apologize to each other, among other things. They also tend toward bisexuality. Man, just THINK of the Planet of the Apes movie that you could make with Bonobos in the lead. Sweet, sweet bonobos...

Cult Movie

2011-12-10T09:53:00.001-08:00

For a movie that generates such deep wells of creepiness, Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011, directed by Sean Durkin) starts on a note of pastoral banality. We see the various members of a farming community doing farm community chores: repairing the roof of a truck barn, planting gardens, etc. We also see a woman setting a table for a dinner, and the dinner is where the first notes of discord are played. The only people at the table are the menfolk. The womenfolk wait outside the dining room for the men to finish before entering the room for their own food. This is a patriarchy, then. When, a couple of shots later, we see how the women of this community live, warehoused in a room full of mattresses with no apparent privacy, it's apparent that this is a pretty stark patriarchy. It is, in fact, a cult, from which our title character, Martha, escapes.

Most of Martha Marcy May Marlene cuts between the present, in which Martha take shelter with her sister and her husband, and her time at the cult. The cuts between these realities sometimes match so well that they are occasionally disorienting. It's a blank-faced bit of styling that gives the film a manic, borderline psychotic feel. The form of the movie is reflective of the mind of its protagonist. She's obviously damaged. She behaves in odd ways that are mirrored by the disjointed narrative. She has obviously had great whacks of her identity reshaped by her time with the cult. Is she a paranoid? The movie is closed mouthed about this point. When it comes time for what would ordinarily be a horror-movie climax, the movie ends abruptly, leaving a sense of profound ambiguity and disquiet.

Elizabeth Olsen plays Martha with a disjointed, wide-eyed introversion. The actress coils up into herself for most of the movie and her dominant pose throughout is the fetal position. She understands the power of body shapes and they comprise most of her performance. She's waiting for the next blow to land. It's a tour de force. Her opposite number is John Hawkes as Patrick, the leader of the cult. Hawkes turns on the charm with an easy smile and a glib manipulation. I think people on the outside of cults wonder how anyone could follow a Charles Manson or a Jim Jones, but Hawkes seems to know implicitly how that kind of charisma works. he channels it effortlessly. Even when he's talking to a victim who is shortly to be killed, he exerts a kind of fascination on him, like he's a cobra gazing at a bird. He's a Charley Manson that even a marginally disaffected person might follow. You don't know how deeply you're hooked until it's far, far too late.

Martha Marcy May Marlene doesn't have any of the beats of a horror movie, per se. It doesn't have any gore or any violent set-pieces. For all that, it's a film that gets under your skin and gets you to squirming as it unfolds. It knows how to insinuate and suggest without spelling things out. The psychic damage on display in the film is comes more from the performance, particularly Olsen's, than from any actual events, though the events--a rape, a murder, the killing of a cat, the complicity in a rape--are frightening enough. The most devastating thing in the movie comes near the end as Martha tells her sister that she'll be a rotten mother. This is the horror movie by way of John Updike, in which the horrors derive from a dearth of meaning for its characters.

Martha Marcy May Marlene has strange political undercurrents. It's a movie that rides the zeitgeist but it's one that seems ambivalent about its conflict between bourgeois affluence--represented by Martha's sister and her husband--and the communist agrarian utopia represented by the cult. Neither is admirable. Martha chafes at the size and wastage of her sister's huge vacation home and calls her husband out for his dogged pursuit of money and possessions, but the alternative is a murderous collectivism. Martha is caught, it seems, between two worlds that have no place for her, a marginal woman who has no anchor to any kind of meaning beyond the terrors of her past and future. Is this the pulse of the zeitgeist? It might be.

The Films of Robert Aldrich: Kiss Me, Deadly

2011-12-07T08:37:00.001-08:00

Film noir filled a void during the post-War years left by the horror movies of the previous decade. By then the Universal Monsters were pale shadows of their former selves being paired against each other like they were carnival wrestlers.* The old monsters must have seemed quaint in the wake of the death camps, the Baatan Death March, Iwo-Jima, and the atom bomb. These were the real horrors in the world and the old fang and claw just didn't cut it anymore. Noir, on the other hand, seems like the ideal horror movies for the post-War era. There's a profound sense of personal annihilation in most of these movies, which is appropriate in a world where the horrors have become so large that they dwarf most human concerns. There's a line at the end of Jim Thompson's Nothing More Than Murder that seems to sum this up perfectly:

"They can't kill me. I'm already dead. I've been dead a long time."

Hence, you have noir anti-heroes like Jeff Baily in Out of the Past and Walter Neff in Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard's Joe Gillis charting a steep downward spiral into the grave. Hell, Joe Gillis even tells his story from beyond the grave.

But film noir wasn't the only genre of film filling the void left by the horror movie. Science fiction had also entered the fray, and science fiction addressed the horrors of the post-War world more expansively in apocalyptic visions like the ruined cities of The War of the Worlds and the soulless pods of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A lot of the concerns of film noir and science fiction intersect, and so, too, do the genres themselves in Robert Aldrich's profoundly disillusioned adaptation of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me, Deadly from 1956, a film that marks the beginning of the end for the classic film noir era.

Kiss Me, Deadly is a strange conglomeration of talent. It's a movie based on Mickey Spillane, that most right wing of popular authors during the 1950s, made by people who absolutely hated Spillane. The sentiment was reciprocated. Spillane didn't much like Kiss Me, Deadly. In fact, he so disliked Kiss Me, Deadly's depiction of Mike Hammer, he cast himself as the character in The Girl Hunters to show filmmakers how it SHOULD be done. On the one hand, he had a point. Kiss Me, Deadly bears only a cursory resemblance to his book. On the other, though, he doesn't have a leg to stand on because the Mike Hammer one finds in Kiss Me, Deadly is brutal, cynical, paranoid, and ignoble, kind of a sleazeball actually, just as he is on the pages of the books themselves. Hardcore fans of Spillane have long regarded Ralph Meeker's portrayal as being the closest to the hard-drinking two-fisted character they admire. The movie was written by A. I. Bezzerides, a writer who could hardly be called a conservative (his novel and screenplay for Thieves Highway is almost socialist). Aldrich himself had trouble from HUAC for his politics, even though he was never a victim of the blacklist per se. This conflict between the politics of its source material and the politics of its filmmakers creates an interesting tension in Kiss Me, Deadly, in which the world is topsy turvy. The film's ending departs radically from the source material. In the novel, the "Great Whatzit" is a bag of narcotics. In the movie, it's a device that promises universal annihilation.

Visually, this is a movie of many moods. It starts out in the deep shadows of film noir, on a lonely highway in the dead of night. It moves to the sun-splashed banality of the streets of Los Angeles. And then to the modernist interiors of mid-century chic. Aldrich is very creative with his shot compositions, in spite of the film's dominant blank facade. Mike Hammer's office is a chaos of rectilinear design and some of the shots there could have been designed by Piet Mondrian. Hammer in his element is rigidly square and bounded by rigidly square shapes. But when he thinks of Christina, the woman whose death kicks off the plot, who implores Hammer to "Remember Me," the movie rotates the squares and the shots become dominated by diagonals. She knocks Hammer off his axis. The movie punctuates this with an X marks the spot flourish when Hammer discovers the book of poems by Christina Rossetti, which is sitting under a piece of art on which is emblazoned a white X, in stark contrast to the black X Christina herself made in Hammer's headlights.**

Hammer's character arc is essentially a quest for redemption, even if the character himself doesn't seem to know it. Christina is kind of a representative of liberalism, who loves poetry. Her insertion into Hammer's narrative of fast cars and fast women and proto-fascist politics gnaws at him. Her death causes him to question his assumptions about the world. At first, he follows her thread because he thinks there's a payoff at the end of it. When the full horror of her situation manifests itself and when the world quite literally explodes, though, Hammer abandons greed and ideology and clings to the one thing in the world that he loves: his secretary, Velda. The filmmakers may not have liked Hammer, but they grant him this small moment of grace.

This version of Hammer is very much of a piece with Aldrich's other anti-heroes. Like Paul Crew in The Longest Yard or Joe Costa in Attack! or Ben Train and Joe Erin in Vera Cruz, Hammer chafes at authority, spits in the eye of "The System," and gets crushed by it in the end. This is the living end of Chandler's vision of the private detective as knight errant, where a determined individual could put a halt to the evil that men do. Aldrich's Hammer has no such effect. "The System" such as it is has become too big for just one man to take on. The world of Kiss Me, Deadly is paranoid, in which vast movements--the seekers of this film's "Great Whatzit" are presumably agents of an unnamed enemy power--dwarf the individual. In some respects, Kiss Me, Deadly is prototypical of the James Bond films, in which a world-devouring "Great Whatzit" is often the MacGuffin and in which great powers use hard men as proxies in some greater game. The connection to Bond is evident in the way this movie's main villain is usually filmed: you never see his face; you only hear his voice; he's elided in much the same way that the early Bond films elide Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

This film's Great Whatzit has been copied by so many other movies that I don't even need to list them. For the most part, it's a more elaborate version of The Maltese Falcon and doesn't actually have any value apart from the fact that it drives the plot. It very well could have been a sack of narcotics for all the difference it would make on the film's first two acts. At the end of the film, however, the nature of the Great Whatzit matters quite a bit: first, because it escalates the stakes of Hammer's quest, and, second, because it becomes not a stand in for the stuff that dreams are made of so much as it becomes the very avatar of the post-war nightmare. The suitcase in Kiss Me, Deadly is the same kind of boogeyman one finds in the big bug movies: it's a thing that reduces human concerns to less than the scale of ants. It's the djinn who won't go back into the bottle. It's a device that translates noir's usual personal annihilation into a universal apocalypse. This would be bitter enough, but Aldrich rubs salt into the wound. The world The Great Whatzit would destroy apparently deserves to be destroyed. Hammer's values are driven by greed and he'll do anything to sate his greed. The plot of the movie takes Hammer to the good life his greed might eventually provide. He walks among the mansions of Beverly Hills and along the poolside with the rich and famous and this milieu is utterly bereft of human feeling. The sex offered to Hammer here is perfunctory and predatory. The culture is gin rummy on the deck. This is the flipside of the American Dream of the 1950s: corruption at every level and utter banality amid splendor. This is a world that has no use for beauty. Art--such as the paintings that festoon Hammer's own office--exists to match the decor rather than as something to enrich. Christina represents a humanist culture that is destroyed by the relentless march of affluence. As the treacherous Lily Carver is incinerated when she opens the Great Whatzit, it's almost like it's a cleansing flame has been loosed upon the world.

*It should be noted that the essential horror movies of the forties were already shading into a film noir idiom, with the Val Lewton unit at RKO poaching one of noir writer Cornell Woolrich's "black" novels for The Leopard Man and with Lewton's The Seventh Victim prefiguring noir's dark descent.

**C. Jerry Kutner over at Bright Lights After Dark posted a thorough catalog of Kiss Me, Deadly's use of "X" shapes last week, so this has been on my mind. Highly recommended.

Mirror in the Sky, What Is Love?

2011-12-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

The science fictional premise of Another Earth (2011, directed by Mike Cahill) isn't unique. The notion of a duplicate planet orbiting the sun in the same orbital path as Earth appeared on movie screens way back in 1969's Journey to the Far Side of the Sun and even before that in the pages of the science fiction magazines of the 1940s and 50s. What Another Earth does with this concept, however, is very much of a piece with the science fiction new wave, in which sci fi high concepts are used to examine the interior of the human mind and heart. This isn't "sense of wonder" stuff. Indeed, it plays like an artifact of late capitalism, full of defeat and desperation. I like to think that this is the corner being turned on cinematic speculative fiction away from eye-drugging fantasies of destruction into a more humane idiom. I can be a foolish utopian sometimes.

The story here follows Rhoda Williams, a bright young woman who has just been accepted to MIT. Rhoda is interested in astronomy and on the way home from a rowdy graduation party, hears news of a new planet visible in the sky. She cranes her head out the window of her car to catch a glimpse and plows into another car. The other car is driven by John Burroughs, an Ivy League music professor and composer, and his family. His family is killed, but he survives. Rhoda goes to jail for four years and when she gets out, she screws up her courage to go face him and offer her apologies, but looses her nerve at the last minute and instead poses as a cleaning woman. They get to know each other, get to share the other's pain, become involved with each other. Meanwhile, the other Earth hangs in the sky, a mirror image of our own Earth, suggesting alternate lives and alternate realities. Rhoda wants to visit the other Earth and enters a contest to do just that. Has her other self made the same mistakes? What would you say to such a person. Can some wrongs ever be forgiven?

Like I say, this is a gazing ball into the human heart, though it's a particularly gloomy and heartsick view. This perception is amplified by the way the film is shot, with its meandering camera and wintery light and mournful classical and techno score. This helps to dull the fact that this has the structure of a mundane romantic comedy, in which Rhoda's deception might be expected to result in hijinks rather than heartbreak. The film largely eschews a tripod or a dolly for handheld cinematography that further distances it from conventional Hollywood narratives, though the handheld indie films it resembles are another kind of cliche, I guess. This is all necessary, because otherwise, the film would spin off into its own premise. The other Earth isn't even a Maguffin, so much as it is a leitmotif, or perhaps a kind of omnipresent memento of how life might be after making other choices.

The movie largely belongs to Brit Marling, who co-wrote the screenplay and plays Rhoda. She's in practically every scene--hell, she's in practically every shot--and she stands up to the camera's scrutiny. She could be a movie star, if she wants, but she's a mover behind the camera, too, so who knows where this movie will point her. William Mapother fares less well as Burroughs, given a role that lets him mope and be irascible, but he and Marling are believable in their scenes together. The movie gives them some good scenes, too, particularly one in which Burroughs shows Rhoda how he plays a saw and another in which a she eventually tells him who she is and what she did. The scene in which a SETI scientists contacts the other Earth and finds herself talking to herself is also memorable. Doppelgangers are not nearly so sinister in this movie as they are in horror movies, but it's a scene of Twilight Zone-ish dislocation none the less. So, too, is the film's final shot, which closes the film on a striking note of ambiguity.

There's A Riot Goin' On

2011-12-04T08:06:00.000-08:00

I was genuinely surprised by Cell 211 (2009, directed by Daniel Monzón). Toward the end of the movie, I kept wondering: "Are they really going to go there?" I must be conditioned by American movies that don't follow the strength of their convictions, because I didn't think this movie would turn the way that it did, given its various elements. It was kind of thrilling to watch, actually, as not only did it go that way, it did so with a vengeance. It serves as a stark reminder that the rest of the world still has the 'nads to kick the audience in the gut.

Cell 211 is a prison movie, which is a pretty sturdy genre after all these years. It follows two men during a prison uprising: Juan, who is a new guard touring the prison the day before he starts work, and Malamadre, the lifer who leads the uprising. Juan gets caught up in the uprising and since the inmates don't know him, he is able to keep himself alive by impersonating a new prisoner. He's sharp, too, and soon, he's Malamadre's right hand man, all the while searching for a way out of his predicament. The riot has a political dimension for the prison administration and the government at large, too, because three of the hostages the prisoners are holding are Basque separatists whose deaths would precipitate a crisis in the government should it result in a wave of terror attacks. Also caught up in this is mayhem is Juan's pregnant wife who is engulfed by the rioting outside the prison, a riot put down with an iron fist by Utrilla, the head screw. Juan has to walk a thin line between discovery and his duties as a guard, but sometimes, things don't work out the way that you expect them.

At its core, Cell 211 is film noir. At some point near the end of the movie, Juan has to make a choice that has no good outcome, and it sends him into the familiar downward spiral of the noir hero. This is not a film in which the lines of battle are drawn in black and white and the whole situation is a morass of tangled moral choices. The differences between the guards and the inmates are sometimes not so clear. The clear villain of the piece is Utrilla, while Malamadre emerges as a kind of anti-hero. This film is often about bad people behaving better than you expect. Malamadre's methods may be brutal, the film suggests, but they're not more brutal than the guards and he has noble intentions. Juan falls under his spell as the movie progresses and the two men form an uneasy friendship, though one tinged with the threat of death should Juan stray too far from the role he's playing. This pays a lot of attention to character rather than the brutality of the riot (though it doesn't skimp on that, either), and when it maneuvers its characters to the precipice, it isn't shy about pushing them off of it. Everyone loses in this movie, except maybe the system itself, which is shown to be stacked against everyone.

Some of the touches I really liked about this film: a sex scene between Juan and the very pregnant Elena, which is sexy as hell and completely unexpected (you wouldn't see this in an American movie). The graffiti on the walls of the titular Cell 211. The wishy washy political wavering of the Warden, who knows that the prisoners have a legitimate beef. The balance between the left-ish desire to negotiate a peace and the right-ish desire to go in and bust heads. This last bit is important, because it marks the film as socially aware in the way prison movies from the fifties and sixties were socially aware. As I was watching, I couldn't help but think that this would have been a crackerjack project for Robert Aldrich. It's more controlled than Aldrich, though. The filmmakers have set the film in a terrifically photogenic abandoned prison, too, and stocked the background cast with actual convicts.

This was a huge award winner in Spain, and it's easy to see why. This is a movie that's given over to its actors. Luis Tosar pretty much rules the film as Malamadre (whose name, I note, means "Bad Mother"). He's a charismatic presence in spite of the harsh voice the actor has affected for the part. Juan is played by Alberto Ammann, and it's hard to believe that this is his first film. He has the presence of a born movie star. He has a difficult character arc that goes from innocence to experience, and he sells it. Tosar and Ammann pretty much command the screen amid the chaos. It's a good looking film, too, with very deliberate color choices manifesting in the light rather than the decor. Prisons, after all, are gray and drab, so using color expressively is an impressive feat. It's pretty subtle, too. I suspect that the screenplay for the movie was a lot more filthy-mouthed than the subtitles, and I suspect, too, that the movie loses some texture along those lines if you don't speak Spanish (I sort of do, enough to catch a lot of the stray "mother fuckers" that the subtitles leave untranslated). Ultimately, though, there are plenty of prison movies that hit the same notes as this one does. I mean, the friendship between Juan and Malamadre isn't a lot different than the one between Red and Andy in The Shawshank Redemption. What sets this one apart is its instinct for the jugular. When that punch lands near the end of the movie, it lands hard, and as the credits were rolling, I was still staring at the screen with a kind of shock. This is a kind of film I love.

Strangers on A Train

2011-12-02T08:09:00.000-08:00

It's funny, the things you think about after you watch a movie. Sometimes, they don't have anything to do with how good or bad the experience was. For instance: when I finished watching Source Code (2011, directed by Duncan Jones) the other night, my first thought was: "When did Jeffrey Wright start to turn into Orson Welles? I mean, he has the vocal intonations down, and he has the forehead. I can hear him saying, "We will sell no wine before its time," in my head. Then, as I was driving to work the next day, it occurred to me that the movie demonstrates the limits of the Bechdel test. It has the requisite number of women in the cast, both playing characters who have names, one of whom is not the hero's girlfriend, but these two characters don't talk to each other, so it fails. Vera Farmiga's part, in particular, is a pretty juicy one that doesn't require her to be a sex object or a victim. She's almost a hero. Michelle Monaghan gets the more traditional hero's girlfriend role, but she's pretty central to the movie, and not just eye candy. Anyway, these are just random impressions. Your mileage may vary.

The movie itself is a pretty clever sci-fi thriller that has an intriguing premise and a punchy delivery. The idea is that when someone dies, their consciousness has an afterglow like a light bulb going out, or, if you want, before the wave form collapses. This is a movie about quantum mechanics, after all. This afterglow lasts for eight minutes, and during that eight minutes, it can be examined with the right person and the right scientific geegaws. The practical effect of this is that it throws the consciousness of the examiner into the mind of the person who has died. This can happen in the past. It's not time travel, per se, so much as it's time forensics. That's the movie's big idea, and it's not bad as sci-fi premises go. Very John Varley-ish. The movie explains all of this with admirable economy, too, then dismisses it all as unimportant to the story, which, ultimately, it is. There's another big idea here, too, and that's the important one. I won't spoil that one, though. Best you discover that for yourself.

The story it builds around this premise is that a secret government program sends its agent into the mind of a man who was on a train destroyed by a terrorist attack. They want to know what happened and, more importantly, who planted the bomb. Their agent is Captain Coulter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), a helicopter pilot from the Afghan theater who has the right physical profile to do the job. The process causes him some disorientation, and he doesn't know what's happening to him at first. At the beginning of the movie, he wakes up in the body of another man, a teacher named Sean Fentress, and he doesn't know how he got there or why he's now someone else. He's on the train, and he's talking to a girl. Around him are the suspects. He has eight minutes to find out what he needs. The movie sends him back into Fentress repeatedly, and the plot resembles an action movie version of Groundhog Day. What good is eight minutes? Well, that's what the movie examines. Interestingly, though, every time Stevens travels back into Fentress's consciousness, things change slightly. Stevens begins to suspect that he can change the past, but his handlers, Colleen Goodwin (Farmiga) and Dr. Rutledge (Wright) tell him that that's not possible. He's only in a simulation of the past, an after-image of the past, and what he does will not change things. Also, Stevens begins to wonder where he actually is, because he has no memory of signing up for this project. As events unfold, he begins more and more to suspect that his reality isn't what it seems.

The thing that drives this movie beyond its sci-fi premise and its action movie imperatives is an unusually close attention to characters. Most characters in this kind of movie are mannequins running through the plot--think of movies like Paycheck or Impostor if you want examples--but not here. The movie is less interested in what happens than in what its events mean for its characters, and this is where the movie sucks the audience in. In this, it shares its concerns with Duncan Jones's other movie, Moon, which was similarly structured around a man who didn't know what was happening to him or how he got there. Jones is using genre as a a speculum to examine the existential plight of his heroes and it marks this movie as distinctively his own. Jones is fortunate in his cast, too. The four principles are played by superior actors, none of whom is a conventional action star. The production looks to have paid its actors at the expense of some level of production value (not much, but enough that the set pieces are a shade off the state of the art), and it pays dividends. It also develops its characters at the expense of a big action climax, too, and I can't say that I miss that. The movie ends not on a bang--the resolution of the action plot is something of a fizzle, actually--but on a moral dilemma between what is pragmatic (a position taken by Wright's Rutledge) and what's humane (a position taken by Farmiga's Goodwin). The resolution of this dilemma has a surprisingly emotional kick, a kick amplified by the gruesome revelation of Stevens's actual lot in life.

It's been a while since a legitimate auteur showed up in the sci-fi genre. Most of the filmmakers who work the genre these days are obsessed with the fanboyish insistence on "awesomeness," rather than on ideas or stories. The spectacle is enough for them. Not for Jones. Both of his movies so far are introspective. His futures are inhabited by human beings, and how those human beings react to the challenges of those futures is more interesting than all the hardware and whiz bang action. Jones apparently knows this. I hope he never forgets it.

Skin Flick

2011-12-01T07:26:00.000-08:00

After I got home from seeing The Skin I Live In (2011), Pedro Almodovar's new film, I sat down at my computer and started to peruse the film's reviews. I do this sometimes when I'm trying to clarify my thoughts on something that I've just seen. Sometimes it's helpful. Sometimes its not. The reviews of The Skin I Live In fall into the latter category. Most of them get tangled up in the "twist," while others trot out words like "perverse," "kinky," and "twisted." Most of them catalog the film's many obvious touchstones (and I intend to do a little of that myself). Pedro does like his influences. Almost none of them treat with the central themes and problems of the film or what they suggest about its director. A twist will do that, I guess. As for the adjectives, well, I suspect that my own history inclines me to accept certain things as a matter of course.

I'm going to spoil the hell out of this movie. I thought I'd let you know that up front, because there's no way I can talk about what I want to talk about without spoiling it. If you're someone who hasn't seen the film and doesn't want it "spoiled," then stop reading now. You have been warned. For myself, I don't think a legitimately good movie can be spoiled, but for the sake of politeness, I'll put the rest of this below the cut and insert a handy still from the movie as a bumper. From here on out, though, I won't be coy.

The "twist" does have at least one benefit. It keeps writers on the internets from saying egregiously stupid things about transgender identities in relation to the movie. Oh, yes! This is one of those movies where the twist is "She's a dude!" I give this the side-eye, the eye-roll, and the facepalm, because the "twist," isn't much of a twist in the broad outline of the movie. I think cisgender movie writers may be conditioned to consider any kind of revelation of trans identities a twist--movies have been doing this for decades, after all--but that doesn't make what this movie does a rug-puller.

Anyway, the plot:

Renowned plastic surgeon, Dr. Robert Ledgard, has developed a new skin graft technique, in which the skin is grown from a genetically altered sample of pig skin. The new skin is more durable than human skin and resistant to burns. Ledgard's wife, it seems, was burned alive in a car accident and he is pursuing this line of research with a zeal bordering on obsession. He claims to have only experimented with his new skin on mice, but the truth is somewhat different. In his home, there is a woman being held captive. Her name is Vera. She spends her days ripping up garments for art projects, doing yoga, and watching National Geographic specials. She wears an odd, skin-colored catsuit. She is not permitted sharp objects. Ledgard's mother, Marilia, works in the house as both a servant and a jailer. She dutifully doses Vera's food with anti-depressants and provides her with everything she needs short of freedom. Vera, we assume, is Ledgard's test subject, though that impression proves to stop short of the truth. Vera's other son arrives home one day, inexplicably dressed in a tiger outfit, and rapes Vera, all the while asking her who she is and why she looks familiar. Trigger the flashbacks. In flashbacks from multiple viewpoints, the movie tells us that Ledgard had a daughter, Norma, who was suffering from a social anxiety disorder, and that during a party a decade ago, Norma was raped by a young man named Vincente, who may or may not have been aware that he was committing rape. Norma commits suicide and, after a time, Ledgard tracks Vincente down and kidnaps him. Ledgard then begins to exact his revenge, bit by bit stripping away Vincente's identity and his very gender in ever more elaborate and devilishly successful plastic surgery experiments, until what is left is the woman we met at the beginning of the movie: Vera. At some point, the movie intimates, the thirst for revenge has given way to some other obsession for Ledgard, and he begins to set Vera free in exchange for love and sex. Vera, for her part, sees her loosening bonds as an opportunity for escape and revenge of her own.

To tell you the truth, I was kind of dreading this movie. I love Almodovar, but I won't pretend that his recurring fascination with transsexuals doesn't give me fits, because it does. I knew the broad outlines of the plot of The Skin I Live In before I saw it, so I knew that this was another movie that casts transsexual identities as a construction of out-of-control quack medical science. I can't say that this movie doesn't go there, either, because it totally does. As I was watching, it was hard for me not to see John Money in Robert Ledgard and David Reimer in Vera/Vincente. Hell, Ledgard even has Money's appetite for collecting art. The film goes a step further than most with some of the squickier details of gender reasignment. While I laughed out loud at the scene where Ledgard arranges the dilators for Vera's new vagina on the top of a dresser, I noticed that some members of the audience were squirming a bit. I'm also uncomfortable--to put it mildly--with the rape and kidnapping narratives. It reminds me of a more elegant rethinking of Tiresia, a film I absolutely loathed. Still, most of these elements are plucked from Pedro's own filmography. He's a true auteur in this, because he's a filmmaker who never throws anything away. Almodovar's attitude towards transsexuals has always been disarmingly conflicted, too, and it was never more true than with this movie.

I need to back up a bit and give a little bit more context. At its core, The Skin That I Live In is a transgender slash porn narrative. It belongs to the subgenre of "forced feminization," and it hits the notes like a pro: the man punished for rape by being forced to become a woman, the reluctant acceptance of a new gender identity, the quasi-Stockholm syndrome as love story, the fetishization of transformation. The erotic content for readers of this stuff isn't in the sex, though there's certainly sex in the genre and in this movie, but in the thought of being forced to embrace a new gender ideation. I was talking to a trans friend of mine after I got home. "It's a Fictionmania story," she said, referring to an online archive of trans slash stories. She described seeing the film with two cisgender companions. She wound up having to explain to them that there is indeed an audience who would not be horrified by this film, but would rather be aroused by it. There's a profound streak of self-loathing in these stories. They're written by people who often repress their own gender identities in real life and who use these kinds of fantasies as a way to exercise (or exorcise) what they can't express otherwise. "In the literature of my people," Kate Bornstein once wrote, "we are always forced." It's always dangerous to try to psychoanalyze a filmmaker through his or her work, but I can't help it. I wonder if Pedro has some deeper gender issues than his public persona as a cis gay man.

The film also mines traditional themes of cinematic transphobia, too, though it does so obliquely. Ledgard is what you would get if you combined Hannibal Lecter with Buffalo Bill. Like Lecter, Ledgard is a cultured mad genius. Like Buffalo Bill, he's making a woman suit of skin, though unlike him, he's making it for someone else to wear. This is radical feminism's worst nightmares about transsexuals come to hideous life: patriarchal medicine is constructing a woman from a man to use as a fucktoy. And look at the symbols of femininity that patriarch enforces on his creation: dresses, make-up, an empty life confined in the home. There's a hint, here, of the argument that trans women tend to enforce regressive gender roles, especially in the scenes near the end of the movie when Vera appears to have embraced the paraphernalia of traditional femininity.

And yet...there's something else about The Skin I Live In's portrayal of transsexuality that undercuts the transphobic elements of the movie. I couldn't put a finger on it until the movie returned to its "present" after the long flashback in the second act. The first shot we see of Vera when we come back has her in a yoga pose framed very artfully by the camera. Vera, the film tells us, is an object of beauty, one that can be desired, one that can be sexual. Indeed, Ledgard is obsessed with her and takes her to bed toward the end of the movie. This is an inversion of the usual cis-sexist notion that trans bodies are objects of disgust and, "OMG! How could you ever have sex with THAT?" While the movie loads the deck by casting the extremely beautiful Elena Anaya as Vera, I'm guessing that that's not enough for most cis audiences. I should note, however, that the shots of Vera in yoga poses also feeds the idea that she's just another art object to Ledgard, though perhaps the prize of his collection.

I would hope that the very end of the movie detonates any residual transphobia, when Vera finally returns to her mother after being gone for six years. Anaya underplays the scene so beautifully that it hammers home the fact that whatever else she might be, she's someone's child and someone's friend. It takes Pedro a bit longer to find this essential humanity than he does in, say, All About My Mother, but he finds it none the less.

There's another layer to this, too, in so far as Almodovar has never viewed femininity as something less than masculinity, and there's not a sense in this movie that Vera is made "less than" by her enforced femininity. While this movie may set up transphobic tropes in its plot, it completely dismantles them by refusing to pair them with the requisite trans-misogyny that would give them any backbone.

A comparison between this film and Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face is almost inescapable. The plot is similar. The imagery is similar. Some of the underlying messages are similar. Both films are about the enforcement of beauty norms by some patriarchal authority. In both films, identity is derived solely from the face you wear. The Skin I Live In goes Franju's movie one better on this count, because the patriarchal figure in this movie enforces not only the beauty norms of gender, but gender itself. The movie pairs all of this with the cinema of voyeurism. Ledgard watchs Vera on huge television monitors, and she gazes back at him directly. "I know you're watching me," she tells him, but he doesn't stop. Neither does the audience.

As a cinematic object, The Skin I Live In shows off all of the filmmaking savvy Pedro has developed over the years. It's tempting to suggest that this is a return of the enfant terribles who made Kika and Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down. The return of Antonio Banderas (as Ledgard) and Marisa Paredes (as Marilia) certainly calls back to those movies. But even though it has the transgressive queerness of those earlier films, its filmmaking moods are more reflective of the director's late movies. He's dialed down the garish colors into a more muted, more nuanced palette and he's found his groove when it comes to placing the camera in exactly the right spot and, in this movie at least, he's paired it all with an amazing score by Alberto Iglesias. If you want to discuss this as filmmaking in the abstract, this is as good as it gets, the work of a master at the height of his powers. I just wish that I didn't feel like I'm giving him a pass on this because of who he is and what his movies look like (rather than what they're about). I don't know if I want to give him the benefit of clergy.

More Thoughts On Nightmare Alley

2011-11-29T20:56:00.000-08:00

So I didn't have to make a pilgrimage to Noir City to see Nightmare Alley on the big screen after all (which I thought was going to be the case when I wrote about the movie in January). A mere eleven months after my last viewing, my local art house programmed it as part of their fall film noir series. I couldn't be happier. Nightmare Alley was an "A" picture that demands to be seen big. There's usually a discussion before and after these film series showings which greatly enrich the experience and get me thinking about the movies in new ways. Here are a few of my thoughts from this showing:

For some reason, the religiosity of the movie never registered for me before. I think this is a because religion is shown to be just another con early in the film in the aftermath of the circus being rousted by the cops. The religious element that gets taken seriously late in the film is no good for anyone, least of all our hero, Stanton Carlisle. When he starts acting like he's a preacher rather than a con artist, that's when the fall comes. Also, I never really thought of the name "Lilith Ritter" in a religious context before, but she precipitates The Fall. It's probably a stretch to call Carlisle another Adam, a la the Frankenstein monster, though.

I did not know that William Lindsay Gresham, author of the novel, had a wife who left him for C. S. Lewis. It makes me wonder a bit about whether Stanton Carlisle is meant as a kind of stand in for Lewis. Given Lewis's dubious conversion to Christianity after professing atheism early in his life, I can't help but see Carlisle as the same brand of hypocrite--at least in Gresham's mind. (edit: this speculation turns out to be groundless, per my friend Lee Price. See the comments).

Nightmare Alley is a conflation of a bunch of different film noir idioms. It's specifically at the intersection of the psychiatric noir, the epistemological noir, and the alcoholic noir. This intersection makes it a perfect film for film series where slots are limited, because it can sub for, say, The Lost Weekend or Spellbound.

Stanton Carlisle doesn't appear to like women very much. Oh, he uses them just as he uses everyone else in the movie, but there doesn't seem to be any sexual attraction to them. Both Edmund Goulding, the director, and Tyrone Power were bisexual, and I spent part of this viewing trying to spot whether or not Nightmare Alley is coded queer. I can't decide if it is or not, apart from Carlisle's curious indifference to women. He's a bit touchy feely with men, but not in any kind of sexual way. It's a curiously asexual movie, actually, a rare film noir not motivated by lust.

The discussion after the film touched briefly on film restoration, so I thought I'd throw out a plug for the Film Noir Foundation, which restores film noir. They were the beneficiaries of this year's Film Preservation Blogathon, and you can still donate to the cause. Here's the link:

Anyway, this remains a corker: Dark, perverse, sordid, and nasty. Just the way I like it.

Brain Drain

2011-11-28T09:11:00.000-08:00

"Moderation is a fatal thing" -- Oscar Wilde

So the news came down today that Ken Russell had passed away. I don't think I've ever written about any of Ken Russell's films, though those films had a formative effect on the younger me. I remember staying up way too late to catch Altered States on HBO when I was 14 and I saw Tommy at a midnight movie a year later and wondering what the hell I was watching on both occasions. Ditto with Crimes of Passion and Gothic and The Lair of the White Worm, all films that appealed to my sensibilities when you look at what they're about on paper, but doggedly refused conform to my expectations. And no reason why they should. They're Russell's films, not mine, and they're a challenge. In any event, in honor of Russell's passing, I decided to sit down with one of his movies. I picked Billion Dollar Brain (1967) because its streaming on Netflix right now and because I haven't seen it before and because it has Françoise Dorléac's final screen appearance. It turns out not to be typical of Ken Russell, though, at least not at first glance.

Billion Dollar Brain is the third of the Harry Palmer movies, in which Michael Caine again portrays the secret agent. The Harry Palmer movies were a James Bond knock-off, though perhaps closer to the world of Le Carre than similar knock-offs like the Flint movies. Even though they strove to be a kind of anti-Bond, they weren't fooling anyone. Billion Dollar Brain even has a Maurice Binder title sequence, fer Pete's sake. The wintery setting of Billion Dollar Brain drains it of some of its camp value, as does Michael Caine's cockney accent. Russell was contractually obligated to do the film and didn't want to make it. Caine wanted out of his contract for five Harry Palmer movies (he eventually made five, though he was released after this film). There's a lot of discontent behind the film and I think it shows up on screen. It's not a particularly fun movie, per se. But it IS an interesting movie, because whatever Russell and Caine's discontent with the movie, you can kind of see their interest in things perk up as the movie unspools. The last act of the film in particular turns into the kind of goofy excess Russell would become known for.

The story here finds Palmer retired from the secret agent biz and hanging out a shingle as a private investigator. His superiors at Her Majesty's intelligence want him back, but at an insulting raise in pay. He chooses, instead, to follow the package that has arrived on his doorstep with ₤200 and a mysterious phone call from a computerized voice. This trail leads him to Helsinki, where he finds his old friend, Leo Newbegin (Karl Malden), enmeshed in a plot to overthrow the Soviet Union. Newbegin's right hand is frosty blonde, Anya (Dorléac), whose loyalties are decidedly vague. The McGuffin in this movie is a thermos full of eggs that have been dosed with some kind of biological agent. Newbegin and his cell receive instructions from the computerized brains of the operation, belonging to Midwinter, a crackpot Texas oilman intent on taking down Communism wherever he finds it. Harry has to walk a tightrope to keep himself alive and to prevent Midwinter from fomenting World War III.

Caine himself is in fine form in this movie, but one wishes that he had more colorful co-stars. Karl Malden is a fine actor, but he seems a little plain to be a supervillain. Ed Begley, on the other hand, is a cartoon. He's hard to take seriously. Françoise Dorléac has her sister's frostiness, but Russell punches through it from time to time. There's a shot in this film in which the camera pans up from her toes to her face while she's playing the cello that's something to see. Dorléac doesn't have much chemistry with her co-stars, though, which is a shame.

The plot mostly meanders for the first hour of the film and only really gets going in the second half. It takes some sitting through to get to this stuff, but when it cracks, it cracks wide open. This happens once it introduces Midwinter. When he shows up on screen at an anti-communism rally complete with burning books and a Nazi eagle in disguise behind him, the movie commits to a path of wretched excess, which is Ken Russell's forte, after all, and this might be the first of his movies to foretell the deliriums of Tommy and Lisztomania. Certainly, the weird crypto-Nazi symbolism is gleefully over the top, as is Ed Begley's performance as Midwinter. This is all of a piece with the superspy genre of the period, though, so it may not necessarily seem over the top in context. Still, there are other touches that mark the film as distinctively belonging to its director. The flat where Harry discovers the unfortunate Dr. Kaarna, for instance, is festooned with nudes on the wall paper and in paintings. The director's love of classical music to the point of bombast occasionally manifests itself here, too. The critique of American intentions in the world is interesting, too, and unexpected. The movie has a reputation as anti-American, but I can't help but see eerie parallels to contemporary politics, where God-inspired Texans take the war to the enemy as a means of bringing their version of "freedom" to the world. Midwinter was allegedly inspired by H. L. Hunt (who also inspired J. R. Ewing on Dallas), and represents the toxic combustion you get when you mix religious fundamentalism with oil wealth and energy geo-politicking. This intersection continues to make the world bleed over forty years later.

In any event, fare thee well, Ken Russell. You made movies like no one else, even when boxed in on something like this.

Cuckoo Clocks

2011-11-26T14:14:00.000-08:00

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”
― Albert Camus

Orson Welles famously didn't much like The Stranger (1946). No reason why he should, really, given that it was a test to see if he could be a tractable commercial filmmaker. Welles had a reputation as a profligate genius whose movies didn't make money. "Showmanship in place of genius," RKO vowed after showing Welles to the door a few years earlier. The Stranger, made for the independent International Pictures and released by RKO was delivered on time and on budget and in spite of this, the producers still saw fit to meddle with it, removing 20-30 minutes of now-lost footage. It was Welles's only box office hit, too, which must have stuck in his craw. This is why it's always dangerous to take an artist's word for the worth of his work. The Stranger is one of Welles's most entertaining films. It's also one of his darkest.

The Stranger occupies that interesting twilight zone between the conclusion of World War II and the start of the Cold War when the villains of choice were ex-Nazis intent on infiltrating post-War society in order to continue their pursuit of a Thousand Year Reich (see also: Notorious). Five years later and this film's boogeyman would be a communist, but this film was made while the wounds of the war were still fresh and bleeding, so communism would have to wait its turn. The story here follows Mr. Wilson, an investigator for the War Crimes Commission, who is hunting for one Franz Kinder, one of the primary architects of the Final Solution. To this end, Wilson has released Konrad Meinike, one of Kinder's underlings, from a Czechoslovakian jail in order to use him as a stalking horse. Meinike leads Wilson to Harper, Connecticut, where Kinder has gone to ground as a history teacher for a prestigious boarding school. Now living under the name of Charles Rankin, Kinder is about to marry the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice, cloaking himself in a mantle of respectability while he waits for the Reich to rise again. Meinike upsets this apple cart, and Rankin is obliged to murder him, setting off a chain of events that focuses Wilson's eye directly on him. His new wife, Mary, on the other hand, is snared along with him, torn between her horror of who Rankin really is (once she learns of it) and her devotion to the man she loves.

Welles has a trio of really good actors to work with in the lead, not least of whom is himself. Edward G. Robinson is a model of moral rectitude and implacable pursuit, kind of a variant of Robinson's character from Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. To my mind, Robinson is the Peter Cushing of classic Hollywood, capable of profoundly depraved villainy and absolute nobility of character. Loretta Young is a more conventional movie star, and her wholesome screen image served the film well as she gets caught up in the guilt of her husband. Welles was always good at making the most of what Hollywood gave him (which often wasn't much).

Of all of Welles's movies, this is the one that most closely follows the patterns of film noir. The past catching up with the present is a dominant theme, as is the downward spiral once crimes are brought to light. This has a positively Hitchcockian sense of evil coming to mundane places and hiding behind respectable facades (appropriate, given the subject matter; this is an early cinematic manifestation of Hannah Arendt's "appalling banality of evil"). And, my heavens, does this lay on the guilt trip. This has a dual narrative and two saps caught in the downdraft. Rankin bears the mark of Cain, and the movie builds a clockwork to facilitate his downfall. He's increasingly desperate as the walls close in. Mary, on the other hand, has appropriated the guilt of her husband and it pushes her closer and closer to the edge. Welles's visual style has always been one of the driving influences of film noir, and this movie shows that more than most. Even in bright, sunny scenes (of which there are plenty), Welles and his cinematographer, Russell Metty, works the shadows like a master. The night scenes are all studies in chiaroscuro. The philosophy of The Stranger is likewise a study in harsh contrasts. The film's vision of Harper, Connecticut is worthy of Frank Capra, and its American idyll is thrown into stark contrast by Wilson's film of the concentration camps of Europe. This is the first American film to show that footage, and it must have come as a huge shock to the audience of the day. This is one of the first film's noir that makes its theme of existential annihilation explicit and literal on the screen.

As with other films noir, time and clocks are a dominant motif in The Stranger. This film could have been titled "The Big Clock," though another film noir took that title a couple of years later. The entire time I was watching The Stranger, I couldn't help but think of Harry Lime's defense of his villainy in The Third Man: "...in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." This seems particularly apropos to this film, given that Charles Rankin is a cuckoo of sorts, and the climax of the film, in which he winds up on the track of a clockwork, could be viewed as an elaborate visual pun if you accept that reading. Charles Rankin/Franz Kinder seems very much to be a predecessor of Harry Lime. Welles poured his own thoughts on Germans and German reconstruction into Charles Rankin; his dinner party speech about how the only way to make peace with the German is to annihilate him closely parallels an editorial Welles wrote for The New York Times calling for a kind of Carthaginian peace. It's interesting that Welles puts this in the mouth of a villain when he himself believed it. Fortunately, The Marshall Plan was not so draconian.

Turkey Day

2011-11-25T13:17:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving in my house is kind of a big event. Don't get me wrong: I understand the sore spot Thanksgiving represents to Native Americans and I'm under no illusions about to whom most Americans give thanks. I'm uneasy with both of those elements of the holiday. Still, Thanksgiving is my second favorite holiday on the calendar after Halloween because it's an opportunity to gather with friends and cook and eat a whole bunch of food. We usually watch a movie afterward in my house. This year, I went a little bit overboard with the food. I did the turkey, which for me is a week-long production involving brine, wine, and a food injector. This year, I took advantage of the rosemary bush growing in my sun room and stuck a couple of rosemary branches into the cavity with the stuffing. The end result was terrific. The pumpkin I got at the farmer's market a couple of weeks ago made two pies and a loaf of pumpkin bread. I've never made pumpkin pie before, so the resulting pies were a huge crapshoot. Fortunately, they came up sevens. They were awesome. There were roasted root veggies, garlic mashers, cranberry stuffing, plus the various dishes brought to the table by my guests. A splendid time was had by all.

This year's movie was Anne of the Thousand Days (1969, directed by Charles Jarrott), a film I remember watching with my mother when I was a teenager. We used to watch a lot of these kinds of historical friezes, and I'm not sure if my fond memories of these kinds of films are due to the quality of the films or the experience of watching them with mom. On the evidence, I suspect the latter, because it's not nearly as good a film as I remembered. Anyone who read my review of Becket a few years ago may recall that I have a problem with these kinds of church and state showdowns, because you're choosing between the absolute authority of the Catholic Church and the absolute power of a secular despot, both equally illegitimate if we start from the proposition that authority to govern derives from the consent of the governed. This film compounds the issue by suggesting that Henry VIII of England put aside his wife, Catherine of Aragon, solely because he wanted to fuck Anne Boleyn and damn the consequences. Those crazy Tudors, eh?

Anne Boleyn has the title role of the movie, and I suppose the film is as much hers as it is Henry's. This makes the movie a bit more interesting than Becket or A Man For All Seasons, because it sidesteps the whole Church/State conflict and focuses, instead, on the role of women in Tudor England, and their means of ascending to power (and falling from it). Anne, for her part, has no desire to be a King's mistress and mother bastards for him. She's seen how that plays out with her sister, who was herself one of Henry's discarded mistresses. She'd much rather marry Harry Percy, who she actually loves. Blocked from doing so, she games the system with Henry and won't give it up until she's a queen. And then the movie does an about face, much to its detriment, by making Anne actually fall in love with King Henry and suffer the pain of losing him to indifference once he tires of her. This might have worked on the stage--this film is based on a play by Maxwell Anderson--but it's bad cinema.

Hell, most of the movie is bad cinema. Oh, the actors are good, though Richard Burton's Henry is entirely outshined by Genevieve Bujold's Anne and Irene Pappas's Catherine, and the supporting cast is mostly nondescript. For that matter, the palace intrigue is fun for a while and the costumes are gorgeous. But as cinema, this is dead on the screen. Embalmed, no less. It might as well be a filmed play. What should be glittering and ornate seems drab and utilitarian. And for a film that's chiefly concerned with sex, it's surprisingly sexless.

Bleh. In retrospect, I wish we had gone with the Kurosawa film, instead.

Why This is Hell, Nor Am I Out of It

2011-11-23T07:26:00.000-08:00

"Those repressed Okies, they go for that twisted, perverted stuff"
--Ed Wood (1994)

According to Wikipedia, Leave Her to Heaven (1945, directed by John M. Stahl) was 20th Century Fox's biggest hit of the 1940s. Bigger than Zorro, bigger than Santa Claus and Natalie Wood, bigger than everything. This, frankly, amazes me. All through last night's showing of the movie, all I could hear in my head was the line from Ed Wood that I've quoted at the head of this post. This is twisted, perverted stuff.

Leave Her to Heaven exists at a kind of cinematic crossroads where film noir, women's pictures, westerns, and melodrama intersect. A lot of people deny that it's film noir, and I can understand their point. It's a distaff movie, mostly about women, which is uncommon among enough among noir films, and it's rural rather than urban. Also, it's in color: blazing, high-saturation "burn the eyes from your skull" technicolor. If your idea of noir is that it's a style rather than a genre, then this film is totally NOT film noir. If, on the other hand, you think of noir as an idiom--and that's my point of view--then this movie is noir to the core. Noir isn't the only lens through which to view Leave Her to Heaven, but it may be the most useful even if one struggles to connect the dots between this film and the dark city where doom lurks in back alleys. On the surface, and even deeper than the surface, this film's most obvious touchstone are melodramas. It's almost impossible to avoid comparisons to Douglas Sirk's films in the 1950s, a comparison made all the stronger by the fact that Sirk remade both A Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life, two films originally directed by John M. Stahl in the 1930s. More than that, Leave Her to Heaven appears to be engaging in the same kind of coded dismantling of post-war bourgeois American culture, where everyone is affluent but nobody is happy.

The plot of Leave Her to Heaven follows the doomed romance between writer Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) and Ellen Barent (Gene Tierney), who meet, as lovers often do in classic films, on a train. Both of them have a common destination, it seems, and thrown together by happenstance, the two are attracted to each other. Ellen is traveling to New Mexico to scatter her father's ashes, and she meets her remaining family there. Harland ends up staying on the same ranch. Ellen fancies Richard enough to break off her engagement with Russell Quinton, an up and coming District Attorney, and uses the break to corner Richard into an engagement. Soon they're married, but Ellen is soon disappointed in her marriage. It's not all its cracked up to be. Try as she might to be the perfect wife, she can't seem to get Richard to focus on her and her needs. She becomes insanely jealous of Richard's brother, a teenager who is recovering from polio, and regrets becoming pregnant as a means of cementing her marriage, because it isolates her within her own house. She's also jealous of her cousin, Ruth (Jeanne Crain), who has struck up a friendship with Richard. Jealousy drives Ellen to commit ghastly crimes: she watches as Richard's brother drowns, she throws herself down a flight of stairs to abort her baby, and she kills herself while framing her cousin for the deed...

Ellen Barent Harland is one of the cinema's most indelible monsters, in part because her monstrosity is contained behind Gene Tierney's impossibly blue eyes and her polished and laquered movie-star face. During the course of the movie, Tierney's beauty contrasts so strongly with the completely awful things she does that it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. The movie pursues this kind of cognitive dissonance in its production design, too. As I've mentioned, this is a blazing technicolor extravaganza, in which the American Outdoors is writ large as a backdrop for what's essentially an intimate drama. It also provides a spectacular setting for Ellen's crimes. What may not be evident behind the intense contrasts this movie presents is that Ellen has a legitimate beef. She wants some time alone with her husband on their honeymoon, and instead, she has to deal with his disabled brother, her family, and the caretaker. And her husband is complicit in all of this! When can a girl find some time to get her freak on? Seriously?

Ellen reminds me a LOT of those characters that Lon Chaney used to play in movies like The Unknown and He Who Gets Slapped, where the monster is sympathetic because he's motivated by love that will never be returned. Ellen is kind of like Chaney's Alonzo the Armless, who cut off his arms to be with a woman who can't stand to be held, only to discover that the woman has gotten over it when courted by the strongman. Sometimes, the world is cruel. Ellen, for her part, completely sublimates herself to her role as wife and would-be mother only to be stifled by it. The movie suggests that Ellen could do anything. She's a horsewoman, she beats all comers in the water, she knows her father's chemistry lab inside and out. In another era, with different motivations, she would be a Renaissance woman. Instead, she's settled for a life of bourgeois domesticity. She does it for love, of course, but she gets nothing in return for it but bedrest, a pregnancy she doesn't want, and a man who doesn't love her back in return.

All of which begs the question of what the hell she sees in Richard Harland other than a pretty face. The pretty face is kind of characterless, actually. This may be an effect of the technicolor, which has an odd flattening effect on a number of faces, mostly the male faces, but Harland doesn't seem like he's passionate about anything in particular. He writes, sure, but he seems to approach that more as a job than as an art. There's a point in the movie where he notes that he dreamed of being a painter when he was in Paris, but gave it up when he saw the squallor in which the artists on the Left Bank lived. He chose, instead, a life of affluence rather than pursue any strong passion. He's a mediocrity, though one suited to life in post-war America, where mediocrities thrived. Even Jeanne Crain's earth mother-ish cousin has more glint of passion in her eyes when she does what she loves, though the movie is entirely correct when it ultimately pairs her with Harland. The one character that devotedly loves Ellen--played by a devilishly handsome young Vincent Price, I should add--is the one she casts aside. She knows that Russell Quinton (Price) would never be able to give his all to her, but unlike Harland, he would surely try. So why Harland, then? The movie suggests that Ellen has a serious Elektra complex, given that she immediately tells Harland that he looks like her father. As the movie progresses, it's clear that she felt the same kind of clinging jealousy with her father that she has with Harland, though that complex evolves toward a different myth later in the movie when Ellen turns into Medea.

The form follows function in this movie. Its plot turns strain at the credulity of the audience--some of the members of the audience were quietly giggling at some of the film's more excessive passages, particularly during the trial sequence at the end. I think audiences may bring too much internalized irony to movies anymore for true melodramas to work unless they're abstracted by another genre. The credulity is strained at points by the actual craft of the film at times, too. For all the beauty of its photography--and it IS beautiful--this has some of the worst day for night shots I can remember. This might be an effect of the intense technicolor. This also has one of the worst matte paintings I can remember in a major film, too. This is it:

I mean, that matte painting is worthy of Thomas Kinkaide.

Ultimately, though, the movie is best remembered for two sequences, both of which still have the power to shock. In the first, Ellen allows the Danny, Richard's disabled brother, to drown. This scene is unparalleled for its depiction of heartlessness. It stacks the deck: I mean, Danny is a kid, and he can't walk. You want an innocent victim? This kid is the very definition. The execution of this scene is absolutely merciless: no music, only the lapping of the water, Danny's cries for help, the epic landscape, and the impassive, beautiful face of Gene Tierney. The sunglasses give us no window into her eyes, and that's probably just as well. In the second scene, Ellen has just finished railing on how she wishes the horrid little beast in her womb would die. To this end, she dresses in a fine gown, styles her hair, puts on her make-up, all as if she's going out on the town. Then she tucks one of her shoes under the rug and throws herself down the stairs, leaving the shoe at the top like it's a glass slipper after the ball. Abortion is still a raw nerve in our culture, and if killing Danny didn't put Ellen beyond the pale, this certainly does. This part of the movie raises all kinds of feminist critiques, though, and most of them are spot on. The baby, this line of thinking goes, is a prison, much as the post-War ideal of house and home is a prison, and the intersection of these beautiful cages for the Ellen Barents of the world is too, too much to endure. She can't even fuck the pain away with the man of her dreams. Talk about a raw deal.

Snakes and Ladders

2011-11-22T07:37:00.001-08:00

I couldn't tell you when the rest of the world fell in love with Maggie Cheung, but I suspect it happened when she started making movies for Wong Kar-Wai. There's something to be said for that, because Wong and Maggie Cheung are one of the great cinematic collaborations of the last quarter century. I'm not kidding about the "love" part when it comes to the world at large, either. French director Olivier Assayas fell so hard that he designed a movie specifically to court the actress, who he subsequently married. The marriage didn't work, and I probably could have told you that it wouldn't given that Assayas's image of Maggie Cheung involved a latex cat suit, but who knows what actually went on with that. Love can be funny sometimes.

As I say, I couldn't say when the rest of the world fell for Maggie Cheung, but I know exactly when I fell for her. It was a few minutes into Tsui Hark's Green Snake in 1993 (which I actually saw about two years after its release, but details). It was the snake dance scene at the beginning of the movie:

That's some seriously erotic filmmaking there. Queerly erotic, at that.

Green Snake is probably my favorite of Tsui Hark's fantasies, in the main because the erotic charge is so strong. That scene has Joey Wong in it too, who was already seducing audiences as the ghost girl in The Chinese Ghost Story movies.

Green Snake is a retelling of the legend of Bai Suzhen, Madame White Snake, a thousand-year-old snake spirit who takes human form in order to do good deeds so that she might become a goddess in her next incarnation. She falls in love with a scholar. Humans and spirits are forbidden to love each other. A couple of Buddhist monks intervene: one is clueless, the other is downright bigoted. This is a pretty well known Chinese fairy tale and there are at least five other film versions to go along with operas and novels. This one, however, takes a slightly different tack. This version focuses more than you would expect on Bai's companion, Green, a much younger snake spirit who hasn't quite grasped the subtleties of being human. A large part of Hark's movie concerns itself with Green's attempts to find her humanity. At first, this is kind of funny. It's fun watching Maggie Cheung, who plays Green, scrunch up her face trying to cry or laugh or express human emotions. The movie gives the actress a broad palette of emotions to attempt and she totally nails the awkwardness of forcing them. When she finally DOES experience real emotion at the end of the film, it's a devastating turn of events, and boy, howdy, does the movie know how to put its finger on the moment. It's as if the world comes to a stop--and this during one of the film's more action-intensive sequences. Hark knows the power of human faces and he drops all the sturm and drang to point the camera square at Maggie Cheung's eyes, which for all the special effects and production design is exactly where the film's drama is really taking place. It's a moment worthy of Von Sternberg during his most passionate infatuation with Marlene Dietrich.

By the time he made this movie, Tsui Hark had already spent over a decade remaking Hong Kong cinema in his own image. This film is so visually distinctive that you can hardly imagine another director signing their name to it. There's martial arts in this movie, but it's so abstracted and so languid that this doesn't really read as an action movie, per se. There are a lot of special effects, too. If you just look at the surface, you might conclude that Green Snake is concerned with style at the expense of all. But you would be wrong. There's a deep humanism in this film, and it exists at a curious intersection in Chinese history. This is one of those films made in the run-up to 1997 that expresses Hong Kong's version of millennial unease. The brutal repression of the protests at Tiananmen Square were fresh in everyone's mind, after all. Would the take-over of Hong Kong be similarly brutal and repressive? You can see some of this in the scene near the beginning of the movie where we first see our intolerant Buddhist master scouring the countryside for spirits who are getting too uppity. He doesn't care that the spider spirit he encounters has improved himself over such a long time, or that he is almost human. He puts him down without a thought. Buddhism in this film, is a stand in for the People's Republic. This becomes even more explicit later in the film when our young hero is taken to a temple that resembles nothing so much as a re-education camp. That had to resonate hard in a culture that was only one generation removed from the Cultural Revolution. Green Snake, then, is a cautionary tale about the exercise of power untempered by humanity.

But Tsui is also clever in his choice of symbols. He rigs his symbols such that he can claim that he is instead criticizing Buddhism and religion when called on it by future cultural apparatchiks, and given that censorship offices are often pig-headedly literal-minded about what they see, he would have been perfectly safe. It doesn't hurt that Green Snake really IS a critique of religion, in which it is seriously taken to task for valuing the next world over this world, and in which religion suppresses everyone's basic human needs in the name of spirituality. This gives the movie quite a kick, actually, over and above the erotic charge that runs through the entire film.

Speaking of which, this is one of my favorite erotic movies. I saw this at about the same time I first saw Sex and Zen, and given my druthers, I'd prefer to watch this movie to get me all hot and bothered. A comparison with Sex and Zen is instructive, too, because for all it's perversion and willingness to outrage, Sex and Zen is fundamentally sex-negative, while this film, without the overt kink, is totally sex-positive. Given a choice, I'll take sex-positive every day of the week.

Note: I've put a link to Tai Seng's DVD of Green Snake below, but I don't recommend it. I don't believe that the film has been remastered since it was on laserdisc, and it still features burned-in subtitles that occasionally vanish because of white on white issues. The version that is currently streaming on Netflix is about comparable, but the subtitles look to be new. Caveat emptor.

Netflix Roulette: The Hazing

2011-11-21T10:26:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I spun the Netflix roulette wheel. I'd forgotten what a crapshoot it is. The first spin gave me a Masters of Horror episode that I've already written about. "No repeats" is in the rules, so another spin gave me The Hazing, a Tiffany Shepsis vehicle from 2004, directed by one Rolfe Kanefsky. The version on Netflix looks like crap. It looks like it was sourced from VHS and Netflix's transfer has more artifacts than I usually find acceptable. Great whacks of the movie look like they're projected on a tile wall, if you know what I mean. This isn't the movie's fault, but it doesn't speak well of either its distributor or Netflix that this movie looks this bad, because 2004 isn't that long ago. This ISN'T a movie that was ever on VHS, it's just one that was mastered by a careless film company.

The movie itself? It's kind of a fun throwback. It's very much a mash-up movie, in which a group of college students who are pledging to a fraternity and sorority respectively, are tasked with a scavenger hunt, to culminate in staying Halloween night in a haunted house. It's your basic spam in a cabin scenario and it does its level best to reproduce the experience of watching an Evil Dead movie, or Night of the Creeps. Only without Sam Raimi's native talent and moxie. It's derivative, of course, and it bloody well knows its derivative. But that doesn't make it bad. I won't go so far as to say it's "good," either, but I can totally see this as a party movie: get some girlfriends together, pop some popcorn, and put it in.

The details of the plot concern the spell book held by Professor Kapps, a magic artifact along the lines of The Necronomicon, capable of opening gates between this world and the next. Professor Kapps is interrupted from a ritual by our young heroes, who steal the book as part of the scavenger hunt, and accidentally impale Kapps in the process. He doesn't die, though. His spirit, a la Patrick, torments them even as his body lies in a hospital bed. At first, our group of pledges thinks that the the weird events surrounding them are caused by the fraternity having some fun at their expense--with some justifications, it should be added. But fun and games soon gives way to carnage as Kapps possesses one of their members and goes on a killing spree. This whole scenario is basically an excuse for gore gags and soft core titilation, but the gore gags are pretty good and the boob factor is pretty high.

This has reasonably good actors, which lets the filmmakers play some games with their characters' expected persona. The characters are types--the asshole, the womanizer, the nerd, the bimbo, and the final girl--but the way they are deployed pulls a few switches. The big switch comes from Nectar Rose's Delia, the bimbo. Her character turns out to be feigning the bimbo persona, and when she drops it later in the movie, it's a nice surprise both for the audience and the characters. Given the nature of this movie, if you can pull off a surprise, you're ahead of the game. Tiffany Shepsis has the no-nonsense personality of the final girl, but she ends up playing both sides of the horror movie fence through some convenient possession hijinks. The asshole, on the other hand, stays the asshole. Let's be reasonable about this, eh? And he gets his just deserts in a horror movie sort of way.

Surprisingly, the movie is almost undone by its big name star: Brad Dourif as Kapps. Dourif is a terrific actor, but he goes full-on Malcolm McDowell in this movie. He even sounds like him, with an affected British accent. I don't think the filmmakers really understood how to direct Dourif, and they let him chew the scenery with lunatic abandon. It's kind of fun to watch, but it doesn't serve the movie. The movie doesn't really go all in on discomfiting the audience, either. There's gore, sure, but it's cartoon gore and not even over-the-top cartoon gore. There's a ghastly scene involving a tongue, for instance, that would play better without the example of A Chinese Ghost Story in the marketplace. Pushing the envelope is NOT this movie's primary motivation. Consequently, it loses some steam as it unfolds. Still, as I say, it's a party movie, and I won't begrudge it that. I love popcorn from time to time. But none of that kettelcorn crap. A girl has to have standards.

Poor Superman

2011-11-17T12:38:00.000-08:00

The folks over at People magazine have completely lost their minds. Not that I follow People, mind you, but I can't help but absorb certain things from being in the culture. Their annual "Sexiest Man Alive," for instance, is one of those inescapable cultural events that you have to actively hide yourself away from. This year's award goes to Bradley Cooper. I've liked Cooper in the past, mainly in movies where he's suffering some horrible horror movie death or torture, a la The Midnight Meat Train, but I generally enjoy those movies because he has one of those leading man faces I like seeing get punched. But "The Sexiest Man Alive?" Um, haven't you guys seen this guy?

Hubba hubba, right? C'mon. I know you've seen him. He was on the cover of the magazine back in May. Well, to each her own, I guess.

Cooper, for his part, keeps getting his shot at stardom, and the jury is still out on this point absent the ensemble of the Hangover movies. He's attractive, yes, but he has a strange lack of charisma, that mysterious quality that determines "star power." Has Cooper been able to "carry" a movie yet? I don't think he has. A case in point is 2011's Limitless, directed by Neil Burger, a movie in which Cooper plays a character who takes a pill to unleash the hidden capacity of the human mind. This premise isn't new, of course. Science fiction has been dealing with supermen for decades. This movie, then, is a later day Flowers for Algernon. You get the meteoric rise, sure, and you get the fall. In this movie, the drug turns Cooper's Eddie Morra, at the beginning of the movie a sad sack writer, into a high finance version of Sherlock Holmes with a preternatural ability to connect the dots even in a down market. He can do a lot of other things, too, like learn a language in a day and write a novel in a week, but he doesn't value these abilities (which is odd, considering that people generally become writers for the love of it--there's certainly no money in it for most of us).

There's a lot to admire in this movie. It's an interesting high concept, and director Burger has staged some interesting ways to suggest Eddie's new abilities, including seeing the answers write themselves on the ceiling in one scene, and literally leap off the page in another. It's what he does with all of this that seems off, somehow, and it's an indictment of our cultural values, methinks. The pinnacle of human endeavor, this movie posits, is to become one of high finance's lords of the universe. It's buying into both the Horatio Alger myth (though minus the work ethic) and the universe of Ayn Rand. Look at how this goes: writer = unreliable loser; broker = awesome. Cooper is kind of likable as a loser writer, with all the polish knocked off of him, but look at what it gets him: his girlfriend leaves him, his landlord hassles him, and his editor holds him in contempt. When he becomes a financier, all of that reverses. Hell, he even gets to fuck any gorgeous woman he wants without any kind of commitment or consequence. I dunno. Maybe Cooper is perfect for this role, because it requires him to become a kind of asshole.

The movie sweetens the genre pot with a murder and the Russian mob and it gives Eddie the ability to have total recall of martial arts moves he's seen (a la Chocolate), but that's all pretty much make-work plotting to hang the movie's big ideas on and to give Eddie an incentive to distrust the pills he is taking. The movie has a moralizing point as it descends from it's midstream climax, but it's not cruel enough to Eddie. It doesn't strip enough away from him or make him take a cold hard look at what he's become. This is a movie completely built for the dark descent of film noir--it even has that noir chestnut of the murder the hero thinks he himself might have committed--but it blinks. Instead, it opts to keep its superman, sans kryptonite, and sans any moral consequences for his rapid ascent. All those dead bodies on the way up? That's the price of doing business and who's going to miss a bunch of evil Russian mobsters, eh?

In any case, I don't really dislike this movie, per se. It's engaging while you watch it and it's even cinematically interesting most of the time. But, man, I really hate Cooper's Eddie Morra and I hate the Randian fantasy at the core of the movie and I hate the fucking wardrobe it puts Cooper into with its casual suit sans tie and I hate the fact that the movie has Robert De Niro as a corporate raider and fails to make him an evil son of a bitch or a character of any pith and moment at all. I like Abbie Cornish as Eddie's girlfriend, and, hell, I even like Cooper himself in the early part of the movie, doing his best impression of Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days. But it's not enough. Cooper doesn't carry the movie, even when it's built around his specific screen persona. Maybe they should have tortured him more. I could have gotten behind that.

Shameless Self-Promotion: Womathology Update

2011-11-17T07:05:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned back in July, I'm contributing to a huge comics anthology by women creators. The project brings together comics creators of all experience levels, including industry veterans like Gail Simone, Devin Grayson, Amanda Conner, Ann Nocenti, Ming Doyle, Stephanie Hans, and Colleen Doran, side by side with relative nobodies like me. There are something like three hundred creators all told. I wanted to bring this up because the book can be pre-ordered from Amazon (link below) and should be out in a month or two. I've also linked to the Womathology sketchbook, which is available now. This is a project for charity, so buy a couple and give them as gifts. You'll be doing good work in the bargain. Also, even though I've included a link to Amazon, please, please only use Amazon as a last resort. Try to get it from your local comics shop if at all possible, because if you buy it from your local comics shop, it will send them a message that there's a demand for comics by women. This is something that's not always apparent in the comics trenches, and one of the primary missions of the Womanthology is to expand the playing field.

If you'd like to get a feel for what's in the book, a huge preview has been posted over on the Womanthology website. My own story is only a page long, but I had fun drawing it and I'm honored to have it included.

Bitch's Brew

2011-11-16T07:28:00.001-08:00

The opening shot of Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945) has a streetwalker cross the screen while walking a dog. It's one of those visual puns that Lang specialized in, because this movie is based on a French pulp novel titled La chienne, or, The Bitch. The shot, as it continues, is a kind of summary of the movie itself, as it turns its gaze from the lower-class "bitch" to a trained monkey and then to a high society kept woman. As opening shots go, it's a doozie. And then the story begins...

We are introduced to Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson), a bank cashier on the occasion of his 25th year anniversary with his firm. That 25 years have gained him a fancy watch, a shrewish wife and a loveless marriage, and a sad existence as a Sunday painter. Meanwhile, his boss--his married boss--steps out on his wife with a fast woman. Cross longs for that kind of life. People should be careful what they wish for. Later that evening, Cross interrupts an altercation between a gorgeous woman and thug who is beating on her. He knocks out the thug and takes the girl out for a drink. This is Katherine "Kitty" March, who mistakes Cross for a famous, well-to-do painter. The man who was assaulting her, it turns out, was her "friend," Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), and together, the decide to put the hooks into Chris. Soon, Chris finds himself siphoning money from his shrewish wife to Kitty, and then from the bank where he works. Meanwhile, Johnny tries to sell some of Chris's paintings, assuming they're valuable. They're "discovered" by a famous art critic. Johnny contrives to tell the critic that Kitty painted them, and soon, they've roped Chris into continuing to paint behind Kitty as a front. Chris is hopelessly in love with Kitty, of course, but she despises him. When circumstances contrive to free Chris from his marriage, he vows to marry Kitty, but after she rejects him, and after he catches her with Johnny, he consummates their relationship with an ice pick. After the fact, he contrives to let Johnny take the fall.

The relationships between men and women in film noir are often portraits in sadomasochism, but few films from the classic period take it to the extreme that Scarlet Street does. Chris Cross is a total submissive. He's like a kicked puppy. He lets Kitty dominate him so thoroughly that he's willing to annihilate everything he is to be with her. This, after he let his shrewish wife completely emasculate him at home. Adelle Cross (Rosalind Ivan) might just as well be keeping Chris's jellies in a jar in her dresser rather than the payout from her "dead" husband's insurance. The movie has some fun with this when it puts Edward G. Robinson, the epitome of the tough guy gangster, in a frilly apron as he does the dishes at his wife's behest. So thorough is Chris's domination that when he's out from under anyone's thumb, he cracks. Kitty March, for her part, is also a total submissive. Oh, she bosses Chris around--some of the best dominatrices start as submissives, after all--but she really likes being abused by Johnny. Johnny, for his part, has utter contempt for Kitty except for her capacity to make him money. His pet name for her, "Lazylegs," drips with condescension. This is a pretty twisted tangle of relationships, and it's perverse enough to keep the ultimate destination of the movie's plot in doubt. Needless to say, it all ends badly for everyone.

I was having a conversation the other day about my assertion that for this kind of film noir to work, you have to believe that the patsy will kill for his femme fatale, and Scarlet Street understands this implicitly. Just look at the way it dresses Joan Bennett through most of the movie. She's nothing but raw sex. When we first see her, she's wrapped in plastic like she should be on sale. Later, she's seen most often in lingerie:

Hubba hubba, right? Christopher Cross is such a desperately lonely man and so in love with his fantasy of a beautiful girl, that there's no doubt that he'd kill for her. The movie teases the audience with this idea in a series of droll shots of knives:

These shots go a bit beyond foreshadowing and shade into dark comedy. Lang hasn't followed Jean Renoir's lead--Renoir made a version of La chienne in 1931and put a punch and judy show at the beginning of the movie--but he's clearly having fun playing on the audience's expectations.

While Scarlet Street isn't the same kind of epistemological murk one finds in, say, The Phantom Lady or Somewhere in the Night where determining who's who and what's real forms the engine of the plot, it still delves into noir's usual obsessions with identity. Nobody knows who anybody is in this movie. Kitty thinks Chris is a famous painter, Chris thinks she's an actress, Adelle thinks her hero cop first husband is dead, the husband has been faking his death for years, and the authorship of the paintings in the film is a complete fraud. Unlike other films, where the investigation is the narrative, Scarlet Street is up front with all of this. The audience is hip to everything, while the characters are in the dark. This lets the movie lampoon ideas of the authorship of art and the value of art based on who is perceived to have created it. This all mostly comes at the expense of art itself. There's a hint that the art critics and the art dealers in the film are basically marks. It puts this into the mouth of a pawn shop owner who tells Johnny Prince to take the paintings back to the "village longhairs." Art provides the movie with it's coda, though, as a completely defeated Chris Cross stares at the "self portrait" of Kitty that he himself painted as it's sold for $10,000. As a matter of my own personal taste, I think the painting in Scarlet Street is a more memorable painting than the one that obsessed Dana Andrews in Laura. I'm tempted to recreate it myself and hang it on the wall in my living room.

It's not all cinematic fun and games. This is film noir, after all, and the film series that's showing it is titled "No Happy Endings." This turns very dark indeed toward the end, as Chris embraces his doom and gets sucked into the downdraft. One almost wishes that Lang had had the guts of Val Lewton and Mark Robson, who ended The Seventh Victim with a similar hanging scene, but Lang's ending is perhaps only a shade less bitter. If Scarlet Street starts out in an antic mood, it certainly doesn't finish there.

In the "credit where credit is due" department, I need to give a shout out to Rachel over at The Girl with the White Parasol. She got me thinking about this film's wardrobe. The observation concerning Kitty's raincoat is hers. Check her out. She's an awesome blogger.

A Small Assassin

2011-11-13T17:18:00.001-08:00

The plot of Hanna (2011, directed by Joe Wright) makes me kind of roll my eyes. It's about an ex-secret agent who is raising his daughter off the grid somewhere in a barely sub-arctic wilderness so that she'll be tough enough to deal with the enemies the agency will inevitably send for them. This set-up is basically La Femme Nikita or Leon with a new coat of paint. The older assassin preparing a younger, female assassin is a relatively recent cliche, but it's a cliche none the less. But that's okay, I guess. It was Sam Goldwyn who once vowed that all his studio needed was a bunch of brand new cliches.

This is an upscale version of this trope. Joe Wright is the kind of director one expects to find making Oscar bait for Miramax based on his resume, but he wouldn't be the first respectable director to take an interest in genre. It doesn't even feel like he's slumming, because he doesn't treat it like it's genre, or if he does, he doesn't see any difference in the way it should be made. One example: at one point, our young assassin in training is on the run and has hitched a ride with the family of another girl, Sophie, who is roughly her age. She strikes up a friendship. This is played for its suspense value, of course, and the audience fears for the poor unsuspecting family, but it also provides the movie with an excuse to shrink things down to small, humane moments. In one of these moments, Hanna and Sophie are under a blanket talking as teen age girls might do, and they bond as best friends. This has NO plot function, but it enriches our understanding of these characters immensely. The movie populates its first two acts with these kinds of moments, whether it's a potential first kiss or Hanna letting the wind move her hand like an airfoil in the slipstream as she rides in a car. A pure genre movie would strip these moments out. Wright leaves them in.

Wright is good at filming action sequences, too. He's surprisingly in tune with his score when it comes to assembling these sequences, and they're cut to sync up with the beats of The Chemical Brothers music. The escape from the hidden James Bond supervillain lair--yeah, it's totally a supervillain lair--is one of the most visually arresting sequences I've seen in any action film in quite some time. It's fun to watch. The climax of the film suffers in comparison, but it's not bad. It's undone, I think, by the dreary weather in which it takes place. The overcast drains the life out of it, which is odd given that it takes place in a fairy tale theme park. You'd think this would be an opportunity for all kinds of stylistic fireworks, but it's not to be.

Saiorse Ronan is another of those preternaturally gifted child actors who shade a little bit into the uncanny. She doesn't have the weird, impossibly deep eyes of the Fanning sisters, but she's got the acting chops. Hanna is a totally preposterous character, but Ronan absolutely nails it in such a way that we not only believe that she's a superwoman assassin, but that she's a girl adrift in a world she knows only from books. She's ultimately invulnerable, but you get the feeling that she longs for real human feeling in the scenes with Eric Bana, playing her father, and Jessica Barden, playing the girl she befriends. You can also see it in the scene when she almost steals her first kiss, though the movie awkwardly breaks this spell when it lets her superwoman assassin persona surface, but that's not Ronan's fault. Bana is good, too, though he's playing a character he's played before. Cate Blanchett, the movie's wicked stepmother, on the other hand, is awful. She annihilates any chance that her character is either credible or menacing with an affected southern drawl. The wardrobe department has done her no favors, either, by having her done up like Dana Scully in the X-Files (which got me to wondering if Gillian Anderson wouldn't have been a better choice for the role, come to think of it). Most of the other characters fade into the background even when played by interesting actors. Olivia Williams is fine as Sophie's aging hippie mom but the part is small, while this is yet another movie where I didn't realize that Jason Flemyng was even in the cast until the credits rolled.

As I say, the first two acts of Hanna are really, really good, but it seems like the filmmakers ran out of ideas when it came time to film the climax. The setting--a theme park dedicated to Grimm's Fairy Tales--is a little too on the nose when it comes to articulating the movie's themes, while the villains never really seem particularly dangerous to Hanna. The end of the movie is foreordained: It calls back to the scene at the beginning of the film when Hanna kills a deer after wounding it with an arrow. "I just missed your heart," she tells it. I'm hesitant to say that the movie has the same kind of just-off-the-mark aim, but the filmmakers make it too easy. Give a girl a knife and she's gotta cut something, after all.

Ebb Tide

2011-11-13T16:20:00.000-08:00

As I was sitting in the theater watching the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie eight years ago, I remember wondering if lawyers were going to be having words, because great whacks of that movie reminded me of Tim Powers's novel, On Stranger Tides, a book for which I have pleasant memories. Apparently, someone at Disney had the same idea, because they sewed up the rights to the novel early on, and after two artistically disastrous but financially lucrative sequels, they've dusted it off and gone back to the fountain, as it were. The newest film, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011, directed by Rob Marshall) places Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, and Mr. Gibbs into a story that more closely follows Powers's book, though only in so much as it doesn't impinge on the hallmarks of the series.

The goal in this film is the Fountain of Youth, allegedly discovered by Ponce De Leon, and rediscovered by the Spanish. The English want none of that, and dispatch Barbossa as a privateer. Also racing for the fountain is Angelica, a woman from Jack Sparrow's past, who turns out to be the daughter of Edward Teach, Blackbeard himself. Jack, for his part, knows where the fountain is, and what ritual needs to be performed. He bounces between the players. Also along for the ride is captive missionary, Philip Swift, and the mermaid whose tears provide the key to eternal life. Mix well.

In truth, it's pointless to outline the plot of this movie, because the plot exists solely as a framework for the set pieces. I don't think anyone really cares if our heroes find the fountain or prevent the villains from finding it or what not so long as there's action every so often, and the movie obliges this. This is less frenetic that the last two films in the series, both of which I once compared to being trapped in a closet with an ADD-afflicted ten year old on a sugar high, but the one damned thing after another plot remains. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

In truth, I hadn't planned to see this movie. When it was in theaters, the 3-D was enough to keep me away even if I hadn't absolutely detested the previous two movies. I mean, if someone had told me six years ago that you could make a movie in which Chow Yun-Fat and Keith Richards both play pirates, and that that movie would completely suck, I wouldn't have believed it. Preposterous! And yet, that's what happened. So I have a grudge against the PotC movies. My partner, on the other hand, had no such qualms and she bought a copy of On Stranger Tides while I was in Detroit. Our internet has been having periodic outages, too, so during one such last week, I sat down to watch this. I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting another cinematic abortion, and got, instead, a mildly diverting movie that kept me from thinking about the sorry state of the world for two hours. It's not good. I don't want to suggest that it's good. But neither is it particularly bad.

This is a movie that relies almost entirely on its actors and their movie star personae. Both Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush have refined their characters over the previous three movies to the point where you don't need to know anything about where they are or what they're doing to groove on their mere presence in the scene. It's important that both Depp and Rush are back, because the second film demonstrates pretty conclusively that Jack Sparrow really needs Barbossa as a foil. The producers don't make that mistake in this film. Of the new characters, Penelope Cruz has enough movie star charisma to keep up and Ian McShane is a splendid Blackbeard. Throw all these characters into a pot and you're likely to get a tasty stew. Only Sam Claflin as Philip and Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey as Syrena the Mermaid fail to make an impression. They're the Orlando Bloom/Kiera Knightley characters for this installment, and I decided long ago that Bloom and Knightley were the David Manners/Helen Chandler characters of these movies, if you know what I mean. Or Brad and Janet, if you will.

Rob Marshall stages this without the epic scale of the previous film and that's a tremendous relief. That stuff was exhausting even while it was completely uninvolving. But he also lacks any kind of flare when it comes to staging his action scenes. He keeps things in frame, but that's all he does. One wishes for the Jackie Chan-esque invention of the first film. Marshall is an average talent, and he's asked to "manage" the personalities on screen rather than forge an actual narrative. More than that is too much to ask of him, and we don't get anything more. What interest the film generates comes from the art department. I like the movie's conception of Blackbeard's ship, the Queen Anne's Revenge. I also like the scene with the mermaids, baited with Blackbeard's mutineers. This scene is creepier than anything in the previous movies and it appeals to my black little heart. Monsters always do. I also like the various cameos: Richard Griffiths is a splendid King George, while Judi Dench gets a few seconds of screen time as a woman who shares a cab with Jack Sparrow. Keith Richards even returns, and gets a better and more mysterious role this time. These are all small pleasures, but the do add up.

In any event, if they want to keep making Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I won't grouse about it. As I say, this was diverting for the two hours I was watching it. I do wish, though, that movie studios would grow some gonads and start creating new material that isn't based on some kind of brand name. I might as well wish for a pony, too, while I'm at it. Alas.

It Can't Be Love, For There Is No True Love

2011-11-12T10:55:00.000-08:00

So True Classics is hosting a debate this month concerning Citizen Kane:

Here’s your chance to either defend Kane’s position as King of the Cinematic Mountain, or to knock it off its storied pedestal. At some point during the next month (until November 13th), put up a post on your blog either explaining why Kane deserves to be numero uno, or lay out your reasons why it is overrated. And if you are among those who feel that Kane is not the best movie of all time, tell us which film really IS, in your opinion, and defend your choice!

The entries will be judged by Carrie, Nikki, myself, and a couple of guest judges whom we haven’t determined yet. We’ll be looking at several factors, but first and foremost, we’re looking for enthusiastic, informative, and entertaining entries that will engage us–and your readers–in lively discussion. And we will award prizes to our top three favorites entries!

I'm vocal in my aversion to ranking movies or indulging in any kind of canon-building that involves hierarchies of any kind. I learned my lesson young when Star Wars lost the best-picture Oscar to Annie Hall. The twelve-year old me was outraged! Mind you, I hadn't seen Annie Hall at the time, but it couldn't POSSIBLY be as good as Star Wars! When I finally DID see Annie Hall a few years later (and once I was old enough to actually appreciate it) I felt like an idiot. Mind you, Annie Hall is NOT a better movie than Star Wars, but neither is Star Wars a better movie than Annie Hall. In fact, the two have nothing whatsoever in common with each other apart from their comparative excellence, and when you get to that level of excellence, notions like "best" and "greatest" become pretty damned meaningless.

Which brings me to Citizen Kane, and I guess I can get this out of the way first: Citizen Kane is NOT the greatest film ever made. Seriously, every time I see this assertion, I roll my eyes, because there's absolutely NO SUCH THING as "The Greatest Movie Ever Made." Even for its time, it's impossible for me to separate Kane from the great flowering of classic Hollywood from 1938 to 1942. Kane is an important film to that flowering, maybe even the central film to that flowering, but it's not the whole story. It's not even the whole story for the year it was made. I'm NOT one of those people who would retroactively give Citizen Kane the Oscar for best picture at the expense of How Green Was My Valley, the actual winner, because, well, How Green Was My Valley is one of the most beautiful things on this Earth. I doubt even Orson Welles himself would grouse about losing out to John Ford. I mean, Welles claimed to have learned how to make movies by watching Stagecoach over and over again.

In the broader context, can anyone really make an argument that Kane is "greater" than Sunrise? Than Metropolis? Than City Lights? Than Seven Samurai? Than any number of other great films? I can't. Let me pose this question: if the basis for Kane's greatness is its synthesis of film language or the way it assembles diverse idioms into a cohesive whole or its influence on the way movies are actually structured, how can we say Kane is a greater film than The Birth of a Nation, which is similarly influential, perhaps to an even greater degree?* The arguments for Kane's primacy look kind of shaky when you put them into this kind of context.

Isn't it enough to acknowledge that Citizen Kane is a legitimately great film without insisting that everyone worship at its feet? Arguing that Kane is legitimately great is an argument from fact, and you can document both its influence, its critical stature over the years, its innovations, even its cultural impact simply by looking at the movies that come after it. If a film is still being parodied fifty years after the fact on a children's cartoon, as Kane was on Tiny Toon Adventures in 1990, you simply can't make it go away by asserting that you don't like it.

Mind you, I understand why someone might not like Citizen Kane. It's an intellectual movie filled with mostly unlikeable characters, and if you prefer movies that appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect, then Kane is probably not for you. This is an argument from taste, just as arguing that it's "The Greatest Ever" is an argument from taste. It doesn't validate or invalidate Kane's greatness. Superlatives are always arguments from taste, and these sorts of conclusions are always dubious because they are beyond the realm of facts. They aren't verifiable.

I should probably pause for a minute to implore whoever is reading this to hold off on sending me any poison pen messages telling me how much of an ignoramus I must be for denying that Kane is the greatest film ever made. Obviously, I know nothing about film. Likewise, I would prefer not to be congratulated by Kane haters for pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes. The truth of the matter is that I absolutely adore Citizen Kane. I understand its greatness and I bask in it every time I watch it. It's a film that I find to be bottomless. I find some new experience in it with every new viewing. It's a film of such grand visual pleasures and impish formal delights that I never tire of it. It's one of my favorite movies. Not THE favorite, but A favorite.

A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?
--Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

A few years have passed since my last viewing of Citizen Kane. More years than I maybe realized, actually, because as I was watching the film this morning, I kept hearing Jack White in my head talk-singing lines from the movie in The White Stripes' "Union Forever." I don't remember even having heard of The White Stripes the last time I watched it, so it was probably sometime during the last millennium. That makes me feel old, by the way, because The White Stripes were one of those awesome bands I saw "back in the day." And do you remember what I was saying about cultural influence? Yeah.

Credit goes to Jack White this time around for focusing me on the actual lyrics to the song at Kane's Florida party, to which I previously never paid much attention. "It can't be love/For there is no true love," is a particularly bitter commentary. I'm not sure how I ever missed it before, but that's what I mean when I say I continue to find things in the movie that make it new.

I don't remember having read Jorge Luis Borges's assessment of Citizen Kane the last time I saw it, either, but I remember having a conversation about the movie sometime around 2002 in which I was introduced to it. Borges describes Kane more concisely than I ever could when he described the film as a labyrinth without a center. Kane himself, Borges tells us, is a "chaos of appearances." The famous mirror scene in Kane seems to act as an exclamation mark for this way of thinking.

The film itself is a chaos of appearances, too. I remember the first time I saw the film when I was a teenager. My first impression of the film, before it was even well and truly started, was that it was a horror film. I based this on the ominous opening shots that cast Kane's Xanadu as a Gothic haunted house. There's a funhouse element to this, too: the first shot we see of Kane's nurse is a distorted reflection in the glass of the snow globe. The opening of Kane is creepy as hell. Of course, Kane has a more direct relationship with film noir, given that it's a kind of "metaphysical detective story," (Borges again). But it's also a Gothic, featuring the return of the repressed and a fractured, multi-viewpoint narrative that circles around a central mystery. All of this in spite of the fact that in the most basic of ways, its narrative is utterly banal. "The poor little rich kid whose wealth can't buy him love?" Oh, please. But if you think that's what Kane is actually about, you are sorely mistaken.

The form provides all the clues, rather than the plot. The elephant in the room is the character whose viewpoint is absent in the film. Kane himself. The movie clues you into this, too, with the puzzles that Susan Alexander is shown doing and the throwaway at the end when the reporter says Kane's life is a puzzle with some of the pieces missing. We don't know anything about Charles Foster Kane at the end of the movie, no more than the reporter does. Welles is thorough enough to carry this through into the movie's trailer, in which Welles himself and Charles Foster Kane do not appear.

What Kane is really about, then, is the existential lot of humankind: we are destined to be abject mysteries to everyone we know.

I think the last time I watched Kane prior to this morning, it was to find the pterodactyls. This is the impishness of Orson Welles. Great whacks of Citizen Kane were constructed from the leavings of other movies on the RKO lot. Welles had his pick of elements and the pterodactyls are part of this. They're in the backdrop shots at the party in Florida that Kane throws for Susan Alexander. The footage itself was shot for King Kong, or possibly Son of Kong, and the fact that there are dinosaurs in the movie hailed as the greatest of all time makes me warm and fuzzy inside. Kane is otherwise a special effects movie, too, most of them so subtle as to not read as special effects, but one or two of them are showy, like the shot that ascends the rigging of the Chicago Opera House where Susan Alexander has her debut. One of the subtlest is the deep, deep focus of the shot where Kane's parents sign Charlie Kane over to Mr. Thatcher, with Charlie framed in the window. The footage of Charlie in the window was a rear projection shot. The camera could go deep, but not that deep. Gregg Toland was as much a trickster as Welles. Welles claimed to be hurt by suggestions that he placed himself and his own authorship of Kane over the contributions of his collaborators, and he rightly points out that he shared his title card with Gregg Toland.

Of course, Kane is an albatross around the neck of the career of Orson Welles. I sometimes think that Welles is the cinema's version of Herman Melville: Both have the great early work that is the greatest thing ever (Kane, Moby Dick), the long eclipse, the great late work rediscovered (Touch of Evil, Billy Budd), the other unknown masterpieces (The Piazza Tales, Pierre, Othello, Chimes at Midnight), and the great mindfuck (The Confidence Man, F for Fake). Welles and Melville are alike in this, too: they are among the most disillusioned artists America ever produced. I've often wondered what Welles would have made of Moby Dick, but I have to satisfy myself on this point with his performance in John Huston's version of the story, playing Father Mapple.

The terms of the blogathon state that if you deny that Kane is the greatest movie of all time, you have to name something to unseat it. I'm not going to do this for obvious reasons, but I will say this: Kane is only my third favorite of Welles's movies. Don't get me wrong, this depends a LOT on what I've seen recently and what kind of mood I'm in, but both Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight stroke my own specific cinematic appetites a little more pleasurably than Kane, and I watch them more frequently. But, as I say at the outset, I don't really like to play favorites, and I would be a fool to claim that either of those movies had the same kind of impact on cinema as a whole. If this all seems wishy washy, well, then so be it.

*n.b.: I am willing to entertain arguments denying the greatness of The Birth of a Nation, because that film is deeply problematic. I won't go so far as to compare Griffith to Leni Reifenstahl, but similar question marks attend the film.

Out of Time

2011-11-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

There's a shot near the beginning of Anthony Mann's Raw Deal (1948) where Claire Trevor is sitting in the foreground and Marsha Hunt comes through a door in the background that has me completely mystified. I don't know how it was done, and it's a shot that most viewers won't even notice. It's a deep-focus shot, but it's a deep focus shot lit with a strong chiaroscuro. As I understand the way these kinds of shots were accomplished back in the days before diopters were available, this required a huge amount of light. But this shot is dark. Very dark. And I don't know how it was done. I especially don't know how it was done on the kind of budget for which this film was made. This was made by Edward Small Productions as "Reliance Pictures" and distributed by Eagle-Lion Films, which means that it was a Poverty Row movie. If it had a budget much higher than $10,000, I would be shocked, and I imagine that most of that probably went to Claire Trevor. So how did they do it? Hell if I know, but that's why John Alton is considered a giant. Giant? Hell, he was a sorcerer, conjuring dark dreams out nothing but shadows and fog! He worked on micro-budget quickies and, to paraphrase the host of the showing of Raw Deal I attended this week, he made them look like Citizen Kane. Even his day for night shots look good, and day for night shots NEVER look good. But these are the ordinary bread and butter shots. He saves the fireworks for the end, when he projects the image of Claire Trevor into a clockface as time runs out for her and her no-account beau. And then he stages a gunbattle in the San Francisco fog that's all abstract shadows. He would recreate this effect in The Big Combo a few years later, but here, it functions as a kind of existential dreamscape. The movie itself follows a kind of dream logic that seems unique to film noir.

Oddly enough, I came away from this viewing of Raw Deal with the Rolling Stones echoing through my head:

You thought you were a clever girl
Giving up your social whirl
But you can't come back and be the first in line, oh no
You're obsolete my baby
My poor old-fashioned baby
I said baby, baby, baby you're out of time

This seems like a kind of summary of the movie. Raw Deal is a distaff noir, in which the usual gender dynamics of the idiom are inverted. It's narrated by Claire Trevor, which is unusual enough, but it casts its leading man as an homme fatale rather than as a patsy, too. The story here follows Pat Cameron (Trevor) and Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe). Joe is a convict who took the fall for his boss, Rick Coyle (a particularly creepy pyromaniac Raymond Burr). Coyle, as it so happens, doesn't fancy ever seeing Joe again, so he's more than happy to facilitate Joe's jailbreak, on the assumption that the odds of actually making it out without being caught or, better still from his perspective, shot, are remote. But Joe DOES make it out, and with Pat and with his pretty legal aid, Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt), he goes on the lam. Coyle, for his part dispatches his minions to take Joe out, but time they keep missing the mark. Meanwhile, Pat has booked passage on a steamer to Panama and time is ticking away before the boat sails. And Ann, for her part, finds herself falling for Joe, who reciprocates, much to Pat's chagrin. The triangle of Pat, Joe, and Ann weaves an interesting pattern of corruption, as each character in turn offers one of the others both a fall from grace and a shot at redemption. It pretty much ends badly for everyone.

The movie is well-cast. It's amazingly well-cast for it's budget, actually. Trevor is the big name in the cast, and she's terrific. She's desperate and pathetic in equal measures, clinging to a man she knows doesn't love her. There's a touch of her Oscar-winning performance in Key Largo in the same year, as well as the amorality of her character in Born to Kill. Raw Deal cracks that amorality in the end by providing her with a "Tell-tale Heart"-style crisis of conscience. Guilt is one of the primary motives in film noir, and this one serves up a helping to go with the everything else. Trevor's opposite number is Marsha Hunt, who on the evidence of this film should have been a big star. She strikes me as a more charismatic version of Theresa Wright, with greater subtlety and more gravitas, but with all the fresh-faced beauty. Hunt fell afoul of the blacklist, unfortunately. Dennis O'Keefe has the face of a working joe: square and craggy. This is a good face for noir, because it casts interesting shadows. O'Keefe also had a voice that was like an engine with a couple of bearings starting to go bad, gin soaked gravel. He was a rough and tumble everyman, something this film exploits to the hilt. Burr I mentioned already. He was making a good living out of playing bad guys at the time, and his twitchy gangster here is a long way from Perry Mason (I've always thought that it was interesting that Burr and William Talman, who played Mason's opposing council, the hapless Hamilton Burger, both made a career as cinematic criminals before passing the bar. But I digress). Also of note is John Ireland as Coyle's flunkey, Fantail.

What sets this apart from other movies from the era that were equally cheap is the duo of Mann and Alton. I've already described Alton's contribution, but Mann brought to the project a sense of Greek tragedy (he would make a movie titled The Furies a couple of years later, so it was in his nature), and a willingness to kill his darlings. Everyone in this movie has a fatal flaw, in the classic sense of the phrase, and everyone in the movie is undone by them, as surely as the sun rises in the east. Mann also brings a real feeling for the subtle leitmotif. Claire Trevor's character, for instance, is usually shown wearing a black veil, a symbol of both her nuptial devotion to Joe and as a memento mori foreshadowing the end of the movie. Fire is another of the film's textural elements: Coyle is a pyromaniac, which provides him with the motivation for one of the film's ghastlier elements, as well as foreshadowing his own end. Ann's interest in Joe is kindled (if you'll pardon the pun) by an incident in Joe's childhood in which he rescued some kids from a burning building. There's a subtle twinning effect implicit in this; it suggests that Joe and Coyle aren't very different from each other, and it marks Joe as NOT the hero. Mann also contrasts the moral quagmire in the movie against the great outdoors, something he would ultimately take to its logical conclusion in Westerns like The Naked Spur. Finally, there's the emphasis on clocks. Clocks are a great way to put the screws to the audience because the notion that time is running out is enormously powerful. Clocks make this literal. Raw Deal's obsession with clocks famously culminates in this shot:

...and this one:

Our host at the showing I attended noted that this scene, in which Joe is waxing rhapsodic about the new life he and Pat will have together south of the border is a kind of replay of the scene where the Ringo Kid promises Dallas (also played by Claire Trevor, as it so happens) the same things in Stagecoach. And damned if it isn't, though the version of the scene in Raw Deal is a kind of shadow self of the one in Stagecoach. It's a nice fantasy, but the world is too cruel for it to ever come true. Certainly not in the cruel world of film noir, where doom is everyone's traveling companion and where if you get too attached to people, you'll end up lost and broken-hearted.

They Might Be Giants

2011-11-09T09:15:00.000-08:00

I really wonder what the hell is going on in Norway right now. I mean, in the last couple of years, we've had Dead Snow, Norwegian Ninja, and now Trollhunter (2010, directed by André Øvredal). All three of these movies work perfectly well as genre films, and you can watch them as such and have a grand old time. But, man, these films are all merciless put-ons, and I can totally forgive anyone who sees them as being entirely too goofy to take seriously. Is this what Norwegian cinema is generally like? Because if it is, I think Norwegians might be fun people to party with. Certainly, these films aren't as dour as the movies that come from their neighbors in Sweden (or, perhaps, what the rest of the world gets from Sweden), though the Finns are apparently in on the joke given the nature of Rare Exports last year.

Trollhunter is a lot of fun. I've spent most of October decrying the fact that the monsters in the horror movies I've been watching are all pretty lame, but here's a film that knows how to build a goddamn monster. The trolls in this movie are imaginative designs drawn from the darkest European myths. More than that, they give the monsters an actual ecology. The entire conceit of the movie--it's a s0-called "found footage" film about a film crew that follows a troll hunter who works for the Troll Security Service--is an excuse to learn as much about the habits of trolls: How they live, what they eat, how to kill them. The filmmakers obviously had a blast working all of this out, because it has the kinds of insane details usually reserved for documentaries. It knows how to riff on those details, too. The troll can smell a Christian man and Christians enrage them, for one example, but what about a Muslim woman? "We'll see how it goes," our titular troll hunter deadpans when she joins the film crew.

The story here follows a trio of journalism students who think they've stumbled onto a story when they don't trust the "bear" explanation for a series of animal mutilations. While investigating this, they notice a dour figure they take to be a bear hunter whose Land Rover shows a number of suspicious dents and scratches. What the hunter is actually hunting is something other than bears, and after much pestering, he agrees to let the kids follow him. His motivations? Troll hunting is a shitty job and he wants to agitate for better working conditions. This is one of the film's funnier jokes. Otto Jespersen plays the troll hunter, a character that was probably inspired by Steve Irwin, but who Jespersen makes his own. The troll hunter is dry, surly, and no nonsense and if the movie has a human star, Jespersen is it. The movie also includes his shrill superior at the TSS, one Mr. Finn, who is every government bureaucrat ever filmed translated into Norwegian. Seriously, if William Atherton spoke Norwegian, he would have been perfect for the role. The kids themselves? Well, they're mostly off camera, so we don't get a lot of character development from them, other than the fact that one of them lies when asked if any of them are Christians. He pays a steep price for that later in the film.

The trolls are pretty awesome special effects--Hollywood no longer has a monopoly on really cool special effects, it should be noted--and there is an agreeable variety to them. We get forest trolls, mountain trolls, and even a troll that hides under a bridge and is baited with goats. Some of the tasks our heroes have to perform, such as drawing blood from a troll before killing him, are designed to give us a window into the lives of trolls. They have a reason to be cranky: confined to designated areas, obsessed with a shrinking population of Christians, plagued by a vitamin D deficiency so bad that sunlight will turn them to stone, it's hard to be a troll. I like how shaggy the trolls are in this movie, and how much character their physiognomy gives them, with those great, bulbous noses and their unkempt beards. These are the kinds of creatures that I would imagine for myself after being raised on a diet of art by painters like Brian Froud and Alan Lee.

Norway itself is the other star of the film. The landscapes on display in Trollhunter are spectacular and the filmmakers capture it with that end-of-the-world Scandinavian light that infuses every Bergman movie. If Sven Nyqvist had shot a monster movie, this is what it would look like. Trolls aside, this is a terrific tourism reel for Norway. And if Norway is actually the physical location of Jottunheim, well, that's all of a piece, too, I think. When that place name came up, all I could think about was the Norse gods and their endless wars with the frost giants, and, sure enough, the movie actually gives me a frost giant. Whatever the movie's other shortcomings may be, it actually keeps the promises that it makes. This makes me happy.

Of course, it's not all skittles and beer. This is, as I say, a "found footage" film and it manifests all of the shortcomings of the form. I've already touched on one shortcoming: our trio of filmmakers are required to be off-camera for most of the film, so the emotional impact of their misfortunes later in the movie are kind of blunted. Another flaw in the format is the abrupt way it ends, and the questions that ending raises, though some of these are sidestepped by some footage of real-life Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg asserting that Norway has trolls and that they effect the placement of electrical towers, and by the disclaimer at the beginning of the film that the filmmakers made every effort to determine if the footage was "real." It's a good joke, but perhaps a little bit arch.

Still, this stroked my seasonal need to see a monster movie. I'm a monster kid at heart, after all. Other monster kids of whatever age are duly advised that this is time well spent.

Current tally: 36 films

First time viewings: 33

And so ends this year's October Horror Movie Challenge. All told, this was a good year. I'm not even burned out on horror movies, which is the usual risk I take with this event. I even managed to write substantial posts on every movie I saw, which was my primary goal this year.

I'll be taking a little time off from genre movies as I decompress, but Almodovar's new movie, a horror movie, no less, starts here next week, so it'll be a short rest. Meanwhile, there's a Citizen Kane blogathon running right now, my local art house is running a series on film noir (called "No Happy Endings"), and I already have a backlog of non-horror movies to write about.

For now, though, I'd like to extend thanks to everyone who participated in the challenge in the blogosphere and on the Facebook page. The Facebook page will remain open for business all year, so feel free to join if you'd like. There are lots of great folks talking about horror movies there. I'd like to thank everyone who wrote about their movies. Finally, I'd like to thank my awesome friends, Renee Knipe, the Rev. Anna Dynamite, Matt and Janet Gwinn, and Shelly J. for putting up with me for the last week of October. I hope everyone has a great holiday season and I hope to see everyone doing the challenge again next year.

The Cat's in the Bag and the Bag's In the River

2011-11-08T10:29:00.000-08:00

For the second year in a row, I attended a big Halloween movie party held by a dear friend of mine. She likes to dig deep into the oddball with the aim of showing her guests stuff they'd NEVER find of their own accord, and all of the stuff at the end of my challenge this year came from her collection (I was staying with her for six days; I was a captive audience). Perhaps the most oddball thing on the menu this year was Felidae (1994, directed by Michael Schaack), an animated horror movie from Germany that makes all kinds of bank from its idiom. It looks like a lost Don Bluth movie from the 1980s--All Cats Go to Heaven, perhaps--but that resemblance is a trap. The filmmakers are ruthless when it comes to springing that trap.

This starts out like film noir, with its noir protagonist moving to a new town only to discover something ugly squirming beneath. Someone is killing cats, and Francis, our hero, wants to know who and why. The movie then sends him on an odyssey through the cat underworld in which he encounters various lowlife cats, a femme fatale who gives it up for him immediately, a sinister laboratory, and an apocalyptic cult. By the time we get to the cult, the movie has turned into something beyond film noir. Not exactly a giallo, perhaps, but definitely on the horror spectrum. The scenes of violence done to cats in this movie are a stiff tonic for anyone who moons over cute pictures of kitties on the internet or snuggles up to a feline companion at night. Watching the cat cult indulge in mass self-electrocution is one of the stronger images I've seen this month, though the scenes of a cat genocide that populate this film give these a run for their money.

Felidae gets by on the juxtaposition of animation and atrocity, and not just any kind of animation. This is specifically the idiom of Disney and Bluth, which is surely not accidental. It plays a little bit like The Aristocats crossed with Suspiria, truth be told, down to the multi-color design of its mayhem. But if Felidae gets by on this combination it only just manages it, because it doesn't have the richness of Disney's animation, or even of Bluth's. The animation is very much second rate here, to the film's detriment. Some of the character designs don't register right, either: Although most of the cats read as cats, one or two of them read as some other kind of unidentifiable creature and not as cats at all. I found this distracting. Mind you, this was surely not an expensive production, but 1994 is fairly late in the game to be skimping on the animation, especially given that Studio Ghibli was already a player on the world stage and that the Disney renaissance was still in full flower.

This film needs the atrocity to sell itself in such a marketplace, and the atrocity itself is no big thing if it's not animated. It's a Catch-22, and if this was a marketing strategy, it failed big time. The movie also hamstrings itself with a palpably awful theme song (by Boy George, no less!) and a lackluster English language dub, though the latter is hardly the filmmakers fault, so I guess they skate on that. The atrocities in this movie conjure up other kinds of associations. Given that this is a German film, the emphasis on genocidal scientific experiments and on the idea of a kind of super-race of cats has additional resonance. The specter of the death camps is inescapable. Of course, one doesn't need that subtext to be horrified at vivisection, which is another of the film's dominant nightmare images.

Felidae is good at nightmares. It saves its most lavish and un-Disney-like animation for its nightmare sequences featuring Gregor Mendel as some kind of puppeteering war criminal. These scenes are more reminiscent of Gerald Scarfe's nightmare animations for Pink Floyd than they are of Bluth or Disney. I wonder how the movie would have played if the entire thing had been animated in this style, though that's only an idle speculation. It's good at imagining what kinds of societies cats might build for themselves. This it filters casually through the mechanisms of the whodunnit, as Francis comes into contact with various strata of cat society, each with a patois that subtly paints their world. My favorite piece of lingo in the movie is the way the cats constantly refer to humans as "can-openers," which seems very much a hard-boiled phrase. I like it. As for the rest, well, the movie has more texture than one might expect based on the first impression provided by the animation. And Felidae does fulfill one of my primary cinematic needs: it's utterly sui generis. I've never seen another film like it.

Nota bene: we watched this movie on a European DVD. It's never been released in Region 1, so if you go looking for it, good luck. Or, if you like, you can watch it on YouTube, where as of this writing, some brave soul has uploaded the whole movie in German (without subs), or you can watch the English dub in pieces.

Current tally: 35 films

First time viewings: 32

Ex Cathedra

2011-11-07T17:00:00.000-08:00

My first impresion of Terrence Malick's much lauded The Tree of Life (2011)? Jessica Chastain has a rawboned Northern European face that seems specifically sculpted for photography, though not in the manner of a model so much as in the manner of a landscape. Her face reminds me of those austere, careworn faces one sees in Bergman movies. She's Malick's version of Liv Ullmann or Bibi Anderssen. She's an actress whose face seems to reflect the light and cares of the world when you point a camera at her.

My second impression: "This is utterly banal." Maybe it's because I've been seeing a gajillion earnest festival films the last two years, but the trope of a family dealing with the loss of a child, and how it resonates throughout their lives, is one of those stories that arty filmmakers reliably fall back on when they think they have something deep about the meaning of life to impart. This is the story upon which Malick hangs his version of The Book of Job. "Why did this happen?" The film's mother and son ask. The movie's answer is the answer Jehovah gives Job: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation... while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" The movie doesn't elide this. It's right up front as an epigram to start the movie. Then it goes about the business of expressing this in the most literal of ways, with a creation sequence in which the universe forms, stars coalesce, planets form, and life emerges.* It's a film of great beauty. I won't deny that. But it's literal. The movie actually engages in more subtle things after it creates the universe--it equates Brad Pitt's father figure to an uncaring god, with his son, Jack O'Brien (get it?) suffering long under his heel. But that's as subtle as the movie gets. Other times, it puts it all on the table, as in this shot when Mrs. O'Brien points to the sky and tells her son "That's where god lives:"

My third impression: this isn't a story, it's a devotional. The Tree of Life articulates its theme early. There are two ways to live your life, it proposes: the way of nature, all red of fang and claw, or the way of grace, with humble submission to the whips and scorns of time and the will of god. The movie dispenses with nature and favors grace, which offers the promise of an ambiguous afterlife where you will meet everyone you ever knew again. When it arrives at this point--it's literal about the proposition that there IS an afterlife even if its exact nature isn't exactly clear--the soundtrack's incessant choral music sighs "amen." Hopefully, you haven't missed the point if you've made it this far, but if you have, the movie helpfully provides you with a musical cue.

There's an inherent danger in projecting the specific to the universal rather than the other way around. This is a conceit in which The Tree of Life indulges when it projects the mundane life of the O'Brien family in 1960s Texas up through the birth of the cosmos and into the afterlife. It suggests, to its detriment, that it is presenting a universal experience of life. Further, it suggests its viewpoint as normative when it surrounds the O'Briens by other families who are recognizably the same. I have no doubt that there are plenty of families out there like the O'Briens, or that Malick's own experience of "family" is in line with this, but it's not my experience of family, either as a child or as an adult. It irks me a little that the O'Briens are this film's version of Everyman, though as I work this out in my head as I write this I think maybe it's appropriate, given that this film is a 21st Century version of that sturdy medieval morality play. It's certainly drawn with the same broad symbolic brush. Unfortunately, there's nothing like a commonality of experience in the world anymore, and as hard as this tries for some kind of universal transcendence, it never manages to connect the dots to anyone beyond its narrow and specific lens. Or, at the very least, it doesn't connect the dots to me.

And it's SO self-important. It's SO somber. This is a film without any sense of humor or any sense of play, which is odd given that this is a film that places a huge premium on childhood and the play of children. The editing scheme that jumps from gliding shot to gliding shot with blank-faced jump cuts is a virtuoso performance, but it's virtuosity for its own sake and it's kind of cold. There's an aura of reverence, for want of a better word, that the movie sledgehammers home with its incessant chorale soundtrack and its portentous whispers and its hour-before-twilight light. This is not a movie that wants to engage your intellect; it's a film that wants to awe you into reverence.

This movie is the cinematic equivalent of a cathedral (complete with choirs and stained glass). The individual parts of most cathedrals are lovingly crafted, and when they're assembled into a greater whole, the results are often spectacular. Don't get me wrong: Chartres is one of the glories of human endeavour, as is the Hagia Sophia. The Tree of Life is a glory of cinematic light. But that's only half the story. Cathedrals are built with a specific purpose and they provide a house for a worldview and an ideology. The Tree of Life is a film for people who share its belief system, and, well, I don't. I think it's too dismissive of nature--of existence--which is really the only reality for which we have any evidence provided by our senses, while it provides a notion of grace that is built on the devout wish that everything we lose in this life will be restored after death. If you believe this, you'll have an entry point to this film. If you don't, if you think as I do that what it's offering is wishful thinking, that what it's offering is, in fact, bullshit, well, hell, it sure is pretty.

*The creation sequence in The Tree of Life seems like an upscale version of "The Rite of Spring" segment of Fantasia, though without that film's willingness to terrify. The Tree of Life also reminds me of The Coen's A Serious Man, which also retells The Book of Job in mid-century middle-class America, though with a good deal more irreverence and ambiguity. That film's injunction to "embrace the mystery" has its tongue deeply embedded in its cheek.