Money in the Bank

Whenever I start to get annoyed at our local art house (Columbia, Missouri's Ragtag Cinema), I need to remind myself of how completely awesome they are from time to time. Oh, sure, their main features occasionally leave me less than enthusiastic--a problem with the indie sector more than with our art house specifically--but they really do go the extra mile sometimes. They have two series in particular that make me inclined to forgive everything. The first is their "Ragtag 101" series, which is similar to TCM's "Essentials" series, but which tends to be a bit quirkier than that. The other is the "Passport" series, which focuses on contemporary foreign films. Both series are a godsend to this wicked little town.

I hadn't been to one of the Ragtag 101 films in a while, but I was damned if I was going to miss The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, oddly enough, directed by Mervyn LeRoy), which is one of my very favorite films. I mean, really, what can you say about a movie that starts with Ginger Rogers dressed in a gaudy outfit made of coins singing "We're in the Money" in Pig Latin? It's one of those completely out of left-field things that makes movies from the Pre-Code era a constant delight. There were no rules yet, so anything goes (as Cole Porter would later write).

In truth, this film's predecessor, 42nd Street, is probably a better film, but this one is the better movie. It's certainly more in love with surreality. The accomplishment of Busby Berkley in this film, and others, is to reclaim the "cinematic" for movies. Most early talkies are stage-bound. They unlearned everything from the silent era and had to re-learn it all over again. The Gold Diggers of 1933 is is a stark break from that. Even though the musical numbers are presented as diegetic, as performances on stage within the film, there's no way these were ever performed on a stage. There's no way they were designed the way that they are to be seen from down in a theater audience. The camera roams too freely for that. It becomes an active participant in creating the image, particularly from deliriously abstract overhead shots in which dancers become moving design elements. Parts of this film look like it was designed by Dr. Seuss.

The musical elements alone would be fun enough. But this is an interesting movie for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with the musical numbers (or, reasons that feed them). It's a film of pretty stark contrasts, made in the deepest part of The Great Depression. Like many films, it presents an escapist fantasy for Depression audiences. Unlike many films--particularly those made by MGM, which would never have made a film like this--this film doesn't shy away from the Depression, either. Part of this stems from the movie's parent studio, Warner Brothers, who were New Deal populists (in contrast to MGM's Louis B. Mayer, who was a Hooverite), and took it upon themselves to speak for the little guy and to deflate the rich and pompous. A good deal of this film's plot is devoted to exactly that. Anyway, as a stark reminder of the world outside, the "We're in the Money" number is shut down by the show's creditors, putting our showgirl heroines out of work before the show even opens. The placement of the musical numbers suggests a kind of yin and yang, too. The film is front loaded with the exuberantly upbeat "We're In the Money" and "Petting in the Park," but it finishes up with "The Forgotten Man," which is as dark a number as I've ever seen in a musical. The host for this showing, a pretty smart guy named Lokke Heiss who teaches film at the University here, prefaced the showing with documentary footage of the "Bonus Army" that Hoover had forcibly removed from Washington (with tanks, no less), as a means of providing context:

This is the state of the Union just before this film was made, and it adds a good deal of desperation to the "Forgotten Man" number at the end of The Gold Diggers of 1933:

Beyond all that, the film itself is typical of the pre-Code movies, in so far as it has a knowing sophistication and freedom of sexuality that would vanish from American movies a year later. The double entendre is employed like a razor in this movie, often by Aline MacMahon's Trixie, the comedian, but also from squeaky clean couple Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, and from Joan Blondell, to whom the film ultimately belongs.

Powell plays the scion of a rich family who would cut him off if they found him composing for and appearing in a Broadway show, which is the movie's McGuffin. Powell is fine, but Warren Williams has a much harder role as his uptight brother, who begins as a complete snob and thaws as the movie plays out. He manages the difficult task of becoming a character the audience actually likes.

All of which adds up to a film that would be my favorite movie musical if Singin' in the Rain didn't exist.

*****

The Passport Series brought me The Chaser (2008, directed by Hong-jin Na) last week, a Korean film in the mode of Memories of Murder. Like that film, it tracks the investigation of a serial killer. Also like that film, it goes to great lengths to show the strain the investigation exerts on the cops. But from there, it parts company. The hero of the film is Joong-ho Eom (Yun-Seok Kim), an ex-cop turned pimp who starts to get worried about the number of his girls that are disappearing. The latest to disappear wasn't even supposed to be working, and he takes it on himself to find her before the killer does her in. The rest goes to great pains to subvert the serial killer procedural, sometimes to the film's detriment. This is especially true of the film's ending, which seems gratuitous, though, admittedly, it's the kind of ending that would NEVER fly in Hollywood (there's an American remake in the works, unfortunately).

What the film lacks in, well, "heart" for a better word, it more than makes up for in forward motion. This is director Hong-jin Na's first film, but the narrative pulse he gives it is sharper than what many veteran directors can manage. It helps that the streets of Seoul at night represent a terrific noir background. There's a palpable sense of danger in the setting. The character arc of our hero is good, too, and Yun-Seok Kim invests him with a world-weariness that suggests that his choice of professions is taking a spiritual toll on him.

Worth seeing, in any event.

End of Summer

Anyone who follows the movie industry probably already knows that there are "down" periods, when the big studios start unloading the stuff they don't have any confidence in. Some clever studios counter-program during these periods, but the conventional wisdom is that these periods are wastelands. Usually, these fall in February through early April and late August through early October. Lately, though, I've been very interested in these periods, because some of those throwaway projects are a LOT more daring than the stuff from blockbuster season and award season. Case in point, two movies I've been mulling over for a couple of weeks.

The visitor's mother ship hovers over Johannesburg.

It's taken me a while to write about District 9 (2009, directed by Neill Blomkamp) because I've needed to divorce myself from the actual experience of watching it. I saw it in a theater with state of the art equipment, one that seems to have resurrected the old Sensurround process that rumbles through the audience with such force that it vibrates the fillings out of one's teeth. The screen itself was huge, though it was a shade smaller than an IMAX. In all, the equipment at the theater was pummeling. In truth, it gave me a headache, which wasn't helped by the visual conceit of the movie, which posits a cross between Alien Nation and The Battle of Algiers. Given the distance of a couple of weeks, I think I can divorce all of this from my reaction, and focus on the actual content of the movie.

What this is is a political allegory, though what the symbolism actually means is a matter of interpretation. The film is pointedly set in South Africa, where the "District 9" of the title calls to mind the ghettos during Apartheid. Certainly, the brutal tactics shown by the authorities towards the alien visitors confined here are deliberate echoes. The story itself follows a minor functionary who is tasked with clearing the alien visitors from the ghetto. This guy, one Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copely) calls to my mind Hannah Arendt's evocation of Adolph Eichmann as "an efficient bureaucrat." Evil is banal, after all. Wikus, though, has a political awakening after he's infected with alien DNA, which makes him able to operate the alien's technology. His transformation--literalized on screen as he begins to morph into an alien a la Seth Brundle in The Fly forms the moral argument of the movie. The other major character in the film is an alien named "Christopher Johnson," who has an agenda all his own. He's a pretty expressive character for being a computer generated avatar. This is all very interesting, but at some point, I began to wonder what was the point. I mean, it's a protest movie, of sorts, but in protesting Apartheid, it seems to me that it's waving its arms at the train after it has passed. Apartheid has been dead for a while.

So obviously it has something else on its mind.

The aliens in this film could be any demonized "other." The techniques used by the authorities--many at the hands of private contractors--seem very timely given revelations about how the United States has conducted the so-called "War on Terror." But some of these themes are undermined by the depiction of itinerant Nigerian gangsters, who are portrayed as cannibals. This seems a pretty racist depiction, really, but maybe the rest of the world has different standards of racism. This film is an international film, after all. I think it's a pretty confused movie, but it's not one without pleasures. Certainly, Wikus is a fun character to watch, all the more so because he's not a very likable character who manages the not inconsiderable feat of becoming a hero. He reminds me a bit of the lead in Peter Jackson's Braindead (Dead Alive to Americans), though he's more of a prick. He almost has to be for the audience to enjoy watching him slowly stripped of his privilege as the movie progresses. And, of course, the movie blows shit up real good. It mercifully shys away from the run and gun approach to action, which is odd given its hand-held shooting aesthetic. In a lot of ways, the climax of the film takes its cues from Japanese Animation rather than Hollywood action films.

In any event, it's an interesting movie.

Shoshana (Melanie Laurent) contemplates her revenge.

The other interesting movie is Quentin Tarantino's latest film, Inglourious Basterds (2009). Whatever else the film may be, it's a conversation piece, and not just for its willingness to re-write the end of World War II. I wasn't really sure there was anything there as I walked out of the theater, but I've had more discussions about this film than I have about any film in recent memory.

I don't really have any recollection of the details of Enzo Castellari's prototype. I saw it on HBO in the dim and distant dawn of cable television. I remember being titillated by nekkid women with machine guns, and I remember Bo Svenson because I had seen one or the other Walking Tall movies at about the same time, but of the plot, I remember nothing. Not that it matters, because this film doesn't have anything in common with Castellari's film apart from a title with the spelling slummed, and cameos by the director and by Svenson. This isn't a "remake" in any sense of the word.

The movie itself has two story tracks. The first is the story of Shoshanna Dreyfuss and Colonel Hans Landa, respectively a Jewish girl and an SS officer tasked with tracking down hidden Jews. Landa massacres Shoshanna's family leaving only her alive. She survives and shows up several years later as the owner of a Parisian movie house. A chance meeting with a German soldier who is also a movie fan sucks Shoshanna back into Landa's orbit and she conceives of a fitting revenge. Meanwhile, the other story track unfolds. This is the story track that gives the film its name. The "Basterds" (sic) are an elite unit of Jewish soldiers assembled by good ol' boy Lt. Aldo Raine and tasked with killing Nazis. Because of their position, they become the point man for "Operation Kino," a plot to kill the entire Nazi high command at the premiere of one of Goebbel's propaganda films. Obviously, these two plots have a collision course, but something odd happens near the end of the film: they never really connect. In more than one of those conversations that I've had about his movie, I've speculated that the movie might be better if the entire "Basterds" plotline were removed wholesale, because it's by far the weakest element of the film.

It doesn't take a genius to look at that plot synopsis and conclude that the movie is yet another of Tarantino's odes to his favorite movies. You can already find catalogs of all of the allusions online. I won't go into them here. The question I was asking myself when I left the theater was: "Okay, what is this actually saying about the movies?" My initial, knee-jerk reaction is that this was an example of pop eating itself, but that's too facile, because, whatever else it is, the way this movie re-writes the end of the war is too big a fantasy convention to be meaningless. And it's really no more offensive than the way war movies have always re-written the war, in spite of the way it takes it to an extreme. Our perception of World War II, now that it is receding from living memory, is always, always going to be drawn from movies, and I think this film is acutely aware of this fact. I might even be tempted to claim it as Inglourious Basterd's central thesis.

As pure abstraction, it's a showcase for all that Tarantino has learned from movies, and even though they're pastiche, he makes his found images uniquely his own. I'm not one of those people that thinks Tarantino gets all of his ideas from other movies. His preference for long takes, for example, is distinctive. So is his recurring foot fetish. The director has also relearned the potential of conversations to build suspense. The threat of death seems a bit more serious than it did in the Kill Bills.

As I say, I don't think much of the men on a mission part of the movie, though I like Brad Pitt just fine. He gets a good joke out of his southern accent late in the movie. Eli Roth (who directed the "Nation's Pride" film-within-a-film) apparently used up the production's entire budget for eyeliner. The other half of the movie, though, is fascinating. Landa is a charismatic monster, and Shoshanna, as played by Melanie Laurent, is basically Marlene Dietrich to Tarantino's Von Sternberg. The ending, in smoke and fire, is a love letter to Laurent's face, echoing an earlier sequence in which that face is made up to the strains of David Bowie's theme from Cat People.

All told, it's a prickly movie. Greatly flawed, admittedly, but it has people talking about movies in a way that they usually don't. It's certainly Tarantino's first really important film of the decade, just in time for the next decade to start.

The Limits of the Word

I re-read Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man last week for the first time in ages. I have one of those old omnibus editions that has Hammett's five novels on really thin paper. It had been a while. The Thin Man has always struck me as Hammett's least accomplished novel--certainly not in the same ballpark, to say the least of the same league or sport--as, say, Red Harvest. But it's entertaining. It's Hammett's most conventional mystery. Omit the hard-boiled banter between Nick and Nora Charles, and you have a fairly standard drawing room mystery. I doubt very seriously that this book would be well-remembered if the movies hadn't gotten involved. I also took a look at the 1934 movie version, and, in a rare case of transmogrification, the movie adaptation is superior in just about every respect. This doesn't happen very often.

The main problem with the novel is that Nick Charles, our nominal detective, doesn't actually DO anything. He and Nora just talk a lot. They talk to suspects, they talk to cops, they talk to doormen and taxi-drivers. Charles, who claims to be retired, doesn't actually do any actual detecting. The movie changes this. It also takes advantage of Asta, the dog, in a way that never occurs to Hammett. I'll come back to this in a second.

The advantage of the movie is that it has a pair of actors for Nick and Nora that forever steal the characters from the reader's imagination. I challenge ANYONE who has seen one of the Thin Man movies to read the book without casting William Powell and Myrna Loy in the roles. Although there are many and varied reasons that Hammett stopped writing after The Thin Man, I can't help wonder if having his characters--two characters ostensibly based on himself and his longtime partner, Lillian Hellman--completely stolen from him by the movies wasn't a contributing factor. I know that John Le Carre` stopped writing about spymaster George Smiley after Alec Guinness played the role for this very reason.

Film, of course, is a director's medium, and all good directors literalized the dictum of "show don't tell" far more adroitly than the written word. I'm not going to call W. S. Van Dyke a great director, but he knew where to put the camera. The scene that convinced me that Hammett was talking too damned much while the film struck a balance of word and image comes near the end. In the movie, Nick decides to go for a look-see in the murdered man's basement, where Asta starts clawing at a bit of floor. Sure enough, there's a body buried under the floor which proves key to the case. The poking around in the dark provides the film with a small element of danger, too. The book doesn't even bother with it. In the book, Nick suggests to the police that they check the workshop and all of it happens off stage.

The movie is as witty as the book. In some cases, it's wittier, because it has to work around the newly enforced production code while making its double entendres hit home. "Ain't you heard of the Sullivan Act," a cop asks Nick and Nora in their bedroom. "That's alright," Nora says, "We're married." The book does have a bit more freedom to be salacious, but the absence isn't even felt in the movie.

I suppose I should mention, as all literature about The Thin Man movies must, that Nick Charles ISN'T the title character. But just as Frankenstein's monster appropriated his creator's name, William Powell became "The Thin Man," and the character became forever his.

Church and State

So, as a stark example of how movies change as people age, I offer up Becket (1964, directed by Peter Glenville). When I first saw the film as a teen, I enjoyed it a lot. You had powerhouse performances from two legitimately great actors. You had "very serious themes." You had historical pageantry. You even had a bit of naughtiness in the early part of the film, the part that details Thomas Becket's life before becoming a saint. This is to say nothing of the homoerotic overtones, which the young, queer me immediately glommed onto. I originally watched this film with my mother, who loved this kind of history porn, so I have fond memories of it that have nothing to do with the film's actual qualities.

This was NOT the same film I saw last week, though. What I saw last week was a tendentious bore. I realized what the problem was when we got to the excommunication scene. At that point, I realized that neither side of the film's political dilemma had any kind of moral authority. The movie sides with The Church, though it gives The State its due. The hero of the film is clearly Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Cantebury and a martyr for the Holy Catholic Church. The film is adulatory of Becket's transformation from a womanizing rake into a pious champion of Christianity. Frankly, as he becomes more pious, he becomes less interesting. But that's not my issue. The fulcrum of Becket's clash with King Henry II is that Henry won't turn over a priest that has allegedly committed a crime for The Church's justice. In siding with The Church, the film is saying that there should be two standards of justice, one for The Church, and one for everyone else. Even if I wasn't an atheist, this idea would be anathema to me for many many reasons. We've seen how the Catholic Church cleans its own house in the years since the film was made, after all. So basically, Thomas Becket, and the film for that matter, are arguing in favor of the benefit of clergy. In this regard, it is completely regressive.

The alternative is an authoritarian State, though. Henry II has about the same moral authority as Thomas Becket. Vested with the divine right of kings, he rules absolutely. The early parts of the film demonstrate this in vivid detail. While Henry isn't Caligula, say, he plays in the same ballpark. For the most part, Henry doesn't even care about the idea of equal justice under the law. He plays politics for advantage. He wants to expand his own powers. For what? Vanity? It's certainly not an altruistic drive. I would suggest that the authority of Henry's state is also completely illegitimate. So the film offers a choice between two overweening powers, neither of which is vested with a justified authority. On the whole, it's a very confused, very vile tangle.

Still, palace intrigue is fun to watch, and so is Peter O'Toole as Henry, though I would argue that his Henry II is a LOT more interesting in The Lion in Winter than he is here. There's a certain amount of twitchiness to his performance that invests it with some life, and he was still gorgeous when the film was made. Burton, on the other hand, starts reserved and then withdraw into a fog of piety. It's not one of his better performances.

Farewell, John Hughes

So John Hughes died last week after removing himself from the movie world for over a decade. I can't say that I blame him. I'm of an age where I should be rhapsodizing about Hughes's movies as formative experiences. I came of age in the 1980s, after all. Frankly, though, I don't like his movies. Never have, really. I kinda liked Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but if pressed to name a favorite, it would be Nate and Hayes, which Hughes wrote, but didn't direct. It's got Tommy Lee Jones as a pirate. 'Nuff said. The rest? They tended to be about snotty rich kids. I didn't have any sympathy.

But I do recognize the cultural impact of Hughes's movies. At the risk of being taken to task for recycling old material ("leftovers agaiinnnn?"), I offer this in tribute: My very favorite movie poster of the 1980s, which uses one of Hughes's productions as a point of reference.

Which bears an uncanny resmblance to this poster:

RIP, Mr. Hughes.

Shooting Star and Dry Summers

The longer I stare into the abyss of cinema, the more convinced I am that it is bottomless. It's intimidating, sometimes. No matter how much I think I know, I don't know anything. This week offers up two examples.

First, there's Frank Borzage's Lucky Star, a silent film from 1929 (for which sound footage was made, but which hasn't survived). This is a movie about which I knew absolutely nothing. I knew only that it starred Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, making the film a kind of third panel of a triptych. I "knew" that Farrell was the weaker half of the team. The previous two films, Seventh Heaven and Street Angel belonged to Gaynor, and it was obviously her talent that invested those two films with life. Well, that notion goes by the wayside. Lucky Star is Farrell's film.


On its surface, Lucky Star is a pretty simple film. It would be easy to mistake it for simplistic. It is certainly unashamed of the raw sentimentality that underlines (but does not overwhelm) the narrative. It's a melodrama, and in fine melodramatic fashion, it comes by its emotional effects. The story follows Mary, a farm girl hardened by poverty and an overbearing mother, and Tim, an electrical lineman who is swept off to The Great War and who comes back a cripple. Also in the mix is Tim's no good supervisor, who follows him to France as a sergeant, and whose shirking of duty is in part responsible for Tim's misfortune.


The character arc in Lucky Star is considerably different from the ones found in the other two Borzage/Gaynor/Farrell pictures. Gaynor is not an innocent waif buffeted by misfortune in this film, but is pretty hard-boiled. Farrell lacks the swagger that carried him through the other pictures. We also have a different archetypal landscape. This film is pointedly set in America rather than Europe, and that entails a certain corn-pone atmosphere, though one that's overlayered with the director's poetics. Borzage also brings a preference for unsubtle metaphors to the film, too. When Farrell scrubs Gaynor clean of the filth in which he finds her, He's scrubbing away corruption, too. And the ending of the film is pure fantasy, but an appealing one. It's not an unearned fantasy. I wouldn't have thought that I would find a film that I prefer to Seventh Heaven at this late date, but here is a film that is irresistable. As pure light and shadow, it's a film of great beauty.

---

Also a huge surprise is Dry Summer (1964, directed by Metin Erksan), which I discovered over on The Auteurs. This is a film I had never heard of--not surprising since I know zilch about Turkish cinema. I should have heard about it, though, because, like Lucky Star, it's a masterpiece. It reminds me of the moment when Italian Neo-realism cracked wide open into operatic melodramas. It's in that vein. It's worthy of Visconti. It certainly has the political subtexts.

The story here concerns two brothers who own the land where a spring provides water to the neighboring village. One brother wants to dam it and keep the water for their crops. The other is more magnanimous. The younger brother is courting the beautiful Bahar, who the older brother also covets. This is a combustible mix, which explodes in murder, mob violence, and fratricide.

This is a film of often startling cinematic invention. For example: in one scene, Bahar has been told that her husband has been killed in prison and the camera looks to have mounted in a barrel and rolled along to give a version of her perception. In another, the younger brother, Hasan, chases Bahar into some brush, and the camera becomes unhitched and moves of its own accord in a kind of delirium.

The film is dominated by actor Erol Tas, whose central figure is as depraved a character as they come. His rise and fall has something of Shakespeare about it, and the film is ultimately a tragedy. His brother is played Ulvi Dogan, who has leading man good looks, while Bahar is played by Hülya Koçyigit. The film is considerably more sexually charged than I would have thought for a film coming from a Muslim country (though Turkey has always prided itself on its secularism). Two scenes in particular: Hasan and Bahar's wedding night, in which we see Hasan kissing up her legs; and a scene where Osman sucks a snakebite. It's a film of unrestrained passions.

As a final note, this film has real violence towards animals in it. I'm not inclined to fault the filmmakers--I have no idea what their cultural viewpoint is on this point--but it does make the film difficult to watch at times.

I wonder what other cinematic treasures lie undiscovered in the film vaults of the world.

You can see this film online for free until the end of August, when presumably it will revert to modest fee. Hopefully, Criterion or some other DVD label will pick it up. It's worth checking out.

Some Enchanted Evening

There's something appealing about a shamelessly over-the-top movie. If Orphan (2009, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra) has failings--and it does--shame is not one of them. It pursues its perversities and violent set-pieces with a startling (and frankly refreshing) single mindedness into which questions about propriety and taste never enter the equation. It's kind of brilliant that way. If it weren't so crazily stupid at points during its running time, it might even be some kind of crackpot masterpiece. You know what you're in for in the first five minutes, when an overhead shot of pregnant Vera Farmiga in a wheelchair gives way to a LOT of blood. It earns its "R" rating right off the bat, by suggesting awful things involving a woman's reproductive organs and process. But that's only the beginning. Things REALLY get fun when the title character enters the scene, adopted by our unfortunate parents (Famiga and Peter Sarsgaard). There's something a little bit odd about Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), a Russian girl who is scarily bright, oddly mature, and scarily manipulative. Bad things happen to people who cross her. As evil children go, she's world class. The film then proceeds to skirt right up to our culture's taboos about depictions of children. There's a twist at the end of this movie, and it's a good one. The filmmakers disguise their intent with deft sleight of hand. But there are strange plot holes, too, as if they thought up their set-pieces without considering how they played in terms of internal consistency. Along the way, you have a chilly, Cronenberg-esque production that uses its genre conceits to test their characters to destruction, showing every crack that appears in loving detail. The performances are mostly very good, especially the child actors (one of whom is deaf), but the dark family secrets seem occasionally banal. It's not a GREAT movie. Hell, it might not even be a good movie. But it is a FUN movie, the kind where you sit on the edge of your seat wondering if the filmmakers are going to take the next step suggested by their plot. Mostly they do.


There's a certain amount of deja vu involved with Richard Matheson's novel, Hell House, and the movie version, retitled The Legend of Hell House (1973, directed by John Hough). At its core, it has the same plot as Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, in which a quartet of ghost-busting investigators move in to a famously haunted house and take its measure. It even casts some of its characters in identical archetypal roles: The Scientist and the weak-willed Medium. The two stories are like shadow companions. Dark reflections of one another. But there's a key, difference. The Haunting of Hill House (and the film version from 1964) is an elegant, even delicate, instrument meant to strike deep chords on the intellect. Its object is terror. Hell House has no qualms against punching the audience in the gut. Its appeal is more visceral, its object tending more towards "horror" than "terror." In any event, the film version of The Legend of Hell House, like the book itself, is a minor classic, and suggests that the best way to adapt Matheson is to let Matheson himself do the adapting. The filmmakers have added a wonderfully dreary atmosphere to the film, from the brooding, fog-bound mansion to the weird, electronic score. When you're dealing with a haunted house movie, the mood is the key. The performers are up to the material and take it seriously. This is Roddy McDowell's movie, for the most part, even though top-billed Pamela Franklin is fine as the weak link in the chain.


The premise behind Enchanted (2007, directed by Kevin Lima) is as clever as it is goofy. It postulates a Disney fairy tale character thrust into the "real" environment of New York City, where "happily ever after" doesn't exist. This premise provides a framework for an agreeable send-up of Disney films and a terrific showcase for star-on-the-rise Amy Adams as our wayward heroine. When there are no woodland creatures about to do her bidding, she engages the wildlife that IS available in the form of rats, pigeons, and cockroaches. When confronted by insoluble relationship problems, she bursts into song (bringing the street musicians in Central Park along with her in a show-stopper). It's all utterly charming, and I confess to being more or less on board for most of the running time. It finally trips itself up at the end, when it lapses into self-aware deconstruction rather than clever send-up, and the live action version of the evil queen, played by Susan Sarandon, looks more than a little bit like a refugee from a fetish ball. Still and all, it was fun for a while, and Amy Adams is a force of nature. Fun.

Alone Against Tomorrow

It's been a long, long time since I saw a science fiction movie that engaged the intellect rather than the viscera, so imagine my surprise at the nuts and bolts hard science and intellectual rigor in Moon (2009, directed by Duncan Jones). It's not a deep, philosophical film along the lines of a 2001 or a Solaris, but neither is it a whiz bang entertainment. Like its central character, it's a blue collar kind of science fiction, of the sort once practiced by the writers in John Campbell's Astounding, salted with a bit of Philip K. Dick. It has an intimate scale--it really has two characters, and they're more or less trapped in a microcosm--but the devil is in the details. It poses some interesting questions about work, exploitation, identity, and loneliness.

The story concerns a mining tech on the far side of the moon, whose job is to keep vast strip-miners looking for helium-3 running. Helium-3 is necessary for cheap fusion driving the economy back home on Earth (this is actually fairly sound scientific extrapolation; helium-3 is real, as is its role in the fusion reaction that fuels the sun). Our hero, Sam Bell, is nearing the end of his three year stint on the moon. His only company is GERTY, the station's computer, and taped messages from home. He's beginning to come unglued. He's seeing things. On a trip out to service one of the mining rigs, he sees a ghostly image in the churning moondust, and wrecks his rover. When he awakens in the station's infirmary, things have changed slightly, and he finds that GERTY isn't as cooperative as he would like. There's something waiting for him out at the wrecked rig, and more than that I shall not say. It's best to discover the film on its own terms.


I'm not going to claim that this is a great film. It's NOT a great film. But it is a very good film, and it makes most of what's in the current science fiction film firmament look very, very bad by the mere fact of its good qualities. First and foremost, it doesn't insult the audience's intelligence. It assumes that the audience knows something about science, that the audience cares about the existential problem it poses for its hero, and that the audience can follow its plot. There are special effects in the film, but they are modest. As a matter of production design, this is a very good-looking film, taking its cues from any number of 1970s-era science fiction films. The film it most resembles to my eye is Silent Running, which shares its solitary protagonist doing a dirty job (and rebelling against that job), but it's better than that movie. That it accomplishes its effects on a modest five million dollar budget is a bit of a miracle, but it shows how the economies of scale on special effects have come down. The film's combination of model work and CGI creates a very plausible environment for the story. The film goes back to the "used future" look of those seventies films, and it's entirely convincing.


The thing that makes the movie tick, however, is Sam Rockwell, who plays the lead. He's given a difficult role that essentially devolves into a one-man play in which he goes through several stark character transformations. He holds the camera through the whole movie. It's a rare science fiction film that's a showcase for an actor, but this film is such a beast. Kevin Spacey gets the unenviable role of GERTY, with it's echoes of Hal-9000.

One other thing the film gets right is that it's creepy as hell. The cold, futuristic environment clashes mightily with the disintegrating intellect of its hero, and the film incorporates a couple of images that are as haunting as anything you'll find in a ghost story. This is a deep well of alienation, and that carries a powerful kick. Maybe it has more in common with Solaris than I thought.

Spidey Agonistes

This was another light week for me. Apart from continuing on with Dexter and The X-Files, this is what I saw:

By the time I made it to the end of this week's re-viewing of Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man (2002), all I could think was: "This is better than I remembered it being." Oh, I still hate the film's conception of the Green Goblin, and I think the special effects are pretty dodgy, but on the whole, it gets most things right, including the primal guilt involved with Spidey's origin story and his subsequent pathological need for expiation of that guilt. I see more of Raimi's personality in this movie than I remembered, too, including some shots that seem to me like they were originally planned for Darkman. And I still like the cast, especially the ensemble at The Daily Bugle. One of these days, someone will notice that you could build an entire film around these characters--especially J. K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson. No superheroes required. This is what I originally said about the movie back in 2002.

Spider-Man 2 (2004) is a better film, but it doesn't seem to be holding up in my head as well as the first film. Raimi lets his sadistic qualities get the better of him, and heaps the misery on poor Peter Parker like he heaped abuse on Ash in the Evil Dead movies. This leads the film to occasional passages that are maudlin, and the Spidey as messiah imagery at the end of the el train sequence is a bit much to take. But where the first film really stumbled with its villain, this one gets it spot on. Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus is a marvel (pardon the pun), and you can see the manic glee Raimi must have felt when filming him in the re-emergence of the gonzo style the director is known for.

Bryan Singer's first X-Men movie (2000) has it's pleasures--most of them provided by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, but it seems a bit unambitious in retrospect. Part of this is the result of a skinflint studio doing things on the cheap, but part of it is built into the material. How does one distill a thirty year soap opera into a 90 minute movie? Not easily. It's a miracle that the thing is watchable. My interest in these movies is really an interest in that most engaging of megalomaniacs, Magneto, who is possibly the most complicated evil mastermind comics have ever produced. The gleam in Ian McKellen's eye as he assays the role is a big part of this film's watchability. I laid out most of my gripes about this film when it originally appeared, and I don't really have much to add.

Sucking at the Glass Teat

This was a light week for me. Apart from re-watching Up (this time in 3-D, which added nothing to the movie but a needless distraction), I've mainly been watching stuff from television.

I went into Tobe Hooper's first entry for The Masters of Horror series with a healthy dose of skepticism. I'd heard bad things about it and Hooper is notoriously hit or miss. Would it be the same director who made The Toolbox Murders (which I loved) or Mortuary (which was awful)? It turns out that it was neither. It was the Hooper of the 1970s. Dance of the Dead was gritty, unpleasant, and shocking, a film that trades in humanity at its very worst, one that doesn't reassure the audience and one that damn sure doesn't cater to the expectations of horror fans. If I didn't know that this was based on a Richard Matheson story, I doubt I would have guessed it. It plays in the territory of the splatterpunks, and is more in the sensibility of Matheson's son, Richard Christian (who wrote the screenplay for this). It's all about violating taboos. It's about the corruption inherent in the traditional family, it's about the notion that there actually ARE things worse than death. Although this presents Robert Englund as a kind of ringmaster, and gives him a salacious patter as, perhaps, a sop to the unrelieved grimness of the rest of the story, what humor he provides is of a particularly hard boiled and nasty variety. Of the episodes by the major "masters" assembled by the show, this one is probably my favorite.

Back in the late 90s, just before the advent of DVD, Fox issued The X-Files on VHS. They didn't issue whole seasons. Rather, they issued half-season that they assured viewers were specifically selected by Chris Carter as the best of the show. I remember a lot of grumbling from fans--myself included--over this decision--but it turns out they knew what they were doing. I'm revisiting the first season right now, and almost invariably, the ones omitted in that first video offering weren't very good. And the ones that they DID offer, WERE very good. Some observations:

My favorite episodes from the first season are "Ice" and "Eve." "Ice" is a crackerjack homage to The Thing with some nasty little alien ice worms. Eve is driven by a memorable performance by Harriet Sansom Harris as multiple clones. Both episodes seem more cinematic than some of the lesser episodes surrounding them. They also explore their ideas more rigorously. Of the "mythology" episodes, I'm partial to "The Erlenmeyer Flask," which hints at the innovation the series would pursue later by providing a drastic pivot on which to redirect the character of Dana Scully. Unlike most characters in television series, Scully undergoes dramatic changes as the series progressed, and this episode provides the jumping off point for that.

The costumers started to subtly alter Gillian Anderson's wardrobe about mid-season towards a more stylish look.

The reversal of gender roles is also very interesting, with the male half of the team, Mulder, being entirely credulous of weird phenomena, and the female half, Scully, being the skeptic. Mulder is also palpably the more emotional of the two. This corresponds to interesting character developments later in the series, though those aren't even hinted at in the first season.

The dichotomy between the "good" episodes and the "bad" episodes is an interesting case study in the changing nature of television series. The bad episodes tended to resemble older television--in particular Carter's acknowledged role model, Kolchack: The Night Stalker--while the good episodes tend to point the way towards the more novelistic television series that would follow (Lost or The Sopranos, for instance). This second approach also shows the lingering influence of Twin Peaks, something exacerbated by the presence of Twin Peaks-alum David Duchovny. For the most part The X-Files feels like a transitional entity, one poised between eras.

The Films of Robert Aldrich: Vera Cruz

Vera Cruz was the second film Robert Aldrich made for the producing team of Burt Lancaster and Harold Hecht. It's also the second of four films Aldrich made with Lancaster. This establishes a pattern of relationships with actors. Aldrich frequently made films with collaborators with whom he was familiar and comfortable. Also in this film are Ernest Borgnine (later to appear in The Dirty Dozen) and Morris Ankrum (a holdover from Apache).

Made the same year as Apache, it shows the director growing in skill and confidence with leaps and bounds. This growth was undoubtedly aided by a much larger budget and by the visual opportunities afforded by filming in Mexico. The Mexicans, for their part, weren't too happy with the finished film, a fact that dogged later productions by other directors (notably Sam Peckinpah). This dislike might have been misplaced, as we shall see.

At its core, Vera Cruz is a buddy movie, the buddies in question being Ben Trane and Joe Errin, played by Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster, respectively. Trane, our nominal hero, is a former Confederate officer trying to rebuild his fortunes in Mexico, while Errin is an amoral mercenary. The two have a grudging respect for each other, but no trust. This relationship, like many other elements of this film, prefigures the cynicism of the revisionist Westerns of the sixties and seventies, particularly the spaghetti westerns, most of which appear to have used this film as a blueprint.

Aldrich continues to expand on his examination of the outsider, and, as in Apache, provided lead characters who in their essential actions, are terrorists. This time, there is no vague moral justification. Joe Errin is motivated by greed. What are we to make of him? He's charming. I mean, look at this smile:


But he's willing to kill his friends, hold children as hostages, and in all other respects behave like a complete heel. Ben Trane, for his part, allows all this to happen until the end of the movie, when he has a (half-hearted) change of heart.

Aldrich again indulges in a critique of America from the left, slanting the film as an indictment of American interventionism in Latin America. The film notably sides with the Juaristas in their fight against the Emperor Maximillian and his lackey, the Marquis Henri de Labordere (played with a robust charm by Caesar Romero), even while our American "heroes" side with Maximillian and money. This is all fairly unheard of in the films of the time, let alone the Westerns. Film noir not withstanding, this level of moral ambivalence was very atypical of American cinema at the time, though, as it turns out, it's not atypical of Aldrich. This is, again, an example of the director sneaking leftist values into a right wing kind of entertainment and making it go down smooth. This is considerably more refined a job of smuggling than what he accomplished in Apache. This is also why the Mexican resistance to this movie might be misplaced. They took it as a slight that so few actual Mexicans had any part of this movie's on-camera world--the exception was Sara Montiel, whose character in this film was not one that the Mexican public admired--while overlooking the fact that the film was reflexively criticizing American exploitation. In other words, their concerns were the same as those of the film itself. Go figure.

Still and all, it's not a perfect film. While Alrdich was refining his themes and his techniques, there are still odd bits of editing that suggest that Aldrich didn't have his camera in the right place (again!) or that he neglected to film coverage. This is especially true in the final gunfight between Trane and Joe Errin. The film also suffers a bit from the casting of Gary Cooper, whose screen persona resists the moral ambiguity built into the screenplay. I've always thought it might have been interesting to swap Lancaster and Cooper. Aldrich could have built in the kind of surprise with Cooper that Leone later pulled with Henry Fonda in Once Upon A Time in the West. But it was not to be. Lancaster himself was a perfect fit, and this film is one of many in which Lancaster shows no fear for his screen image in choosing his parts. Set this one next to his performances in Seven Days in May, Elmer Gantry and Sweet Smell of Success.

Kurosawa's The Quiet Duel

The Quiet Duel, 1949. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Miki Sanjo, Kenjiro Uemura, Noriko Sengoko.

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Synopsis: In the closing days of WW II, Doctor Koji Fujisaka contracts syphillis while operating on a wounded soldier. When he returns home, he finds that he must reject the woman he was planning to marry and treat his illness in secret while working in his father's charity clinic. His outward demeanor is of a paragon of virtue, but one of the nurses discovers his illness and shames him without knowing the details. When the man who infected him surfaces with a pregnant wife, Dr. Fujisaka's quiet duel with his own conscience comes to a head.

While The Quiet Duel isn't an apprentice work--Kurosawa had already made Drunken Angel by the time he tackled this story--it has never enjoyed the attention paid to the director's other works from the same period. Rarely screened, it appeared for the first time on home video at the end of 2006, a relatively late date for one of the world's greatest directors. And even this appearance was short lived--BCI, the label that put it out, has since folded up shop. This film can't buy a break.

Many filmmakers have skeletons in their closets, and many more have films in their portfolios that simply fall through the cracks. This film is certainly not a skeleton. It is, however, an awkward sell. Watching the film on DVD, I was continually struck by the reason it has remained unseen for so long. There was no way this film was going to be screened in America during the 1950s, Kurosawa's golden decade. The profession of Takashi Shimura's elder doctor alone would prevent that (he's a gynecologist), to say nothing of the frank depiction of syphillis, and the repeated use of the word "spirochete." That was never going to fly while the production code was in effect. By the time standards had loosened, the film had been forgotten.

It's not a great movie. One can occasionally see the constraints of the budget assert themselves in ways the director is unable to overcome. But it's pretty good, in spite of that. It's not a film that can be easily dismissed. Talent will out, and it certainly bears the stamp of its creator, however embryonic his cinematic anima may have been at the time. It's an easy film to place in the context of Kurosawa's career. With Drunken Angel and Red Beard, it forms a kind of "doctor's trilogy." The persistent use of rain, the way the camera moves to confront its characters (particularly when Dr. Fujisaka confronts a drunken Nakata when he demands to see his stillborn child), the presence of Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, everything about the film is pure Kurosawa. Like Stray Dog, made the same year, it's a fascinating portrait of post-war Japan. As in The Lower Depths, it's interesting to watch the director work out the conversion of a play to film. And yet, The Quiet Duel is an anomaly in Kurosawa's work, too. Rarely, if ever, interested in his female characters, this film is arguably told from the point of view of Nurse Minegishi, played by the superb Noriko Sengoko as a fallen woman trying to make good. More than that, the film hinges on as many of the problems faced by women as it does on the plight of men. That so much of the movie is centered around birth and diseases of the reproductive organs almost forces the director to examine both sides of the gender divide. Also unusual for Kurosawa, he lets Sengoko steal the movie from Mifune, though it's possible that he didn't have any choice in the matter. Her performance is a force of nature.

Some Favorite Japanese Films

Everyone has their favorites and these are some of mine. I don't do rankings, and this is subject to change at a whim. Freely associated and in no particular order, starting with the directors who are the three 800 lb. gorillas of Japanese cinema:



Seven Samurai (1955, directed by Akira Kurosawa). This was my gateway into Japanese film beyond the Godzilla movies of my youth (and, hey look! It's from Toho, too!). There are Kurosawa films that I like more than this, actually, but there aren't any to which I return more often. It's a big box with everything in it, a film that's actually too short at three hours long.

Ugetsu (1953, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi). Ordinarily, I don't care for Mizoguchi. I find him to be the most manipulative of any legitimately great director. You can generally see the wheels of the plot turning as you watch. And yet, I can't take my eyes off of Ugetsu. Because it's a ghost story, there's a certain formalism to the manipulation that makes it rather more palatable to me, and lends it the power to break my heart.

I Was Born, But...(1932, directed by Yasujiro Ozu). Later Ozu is too rigidly formal for my tastes (although, not so formal that he's above fart jokes in Good Morning, which, coincidentally, is a remake of this film). Early Ozu, on the other hand, seems positively antic in comparison. This is my favorite of his early films, in part because I was raised on the best of the Little Rascals shorts, and this film is like one of those shorts writ large. It's funny and touching at the same time.

Stepping away from the shadow of the Kurosawa/Mizoguchi/Ozu axis, here are some of my other favorites:


Onibaba (1964, directed by Kaneto Shindo), which strikes me as some kind of missing link between I Walked With a Zombie and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Desperation and survival set against a vast sea of grass. A hole. A demon mask. A weird erotic charge. Some days, this is my favorite Japanese film.

Black Rain (1989, directed by Shohei Imamura) depicts the bombing of Hiroshima in one of the most harrowing sequences in any film about the war that I can remember. But Imamura frontloads the film with that imagery in order to get it out of the way (and to influence) the more subdued horrors that awaited the survivors. I'm not talking about the immediate aftermath, but rather the long term effects. In this respect it becomes one of the director's more subtle examinations of class and women in post-war Japan.

The Human Condition (1959-1961, directed by Masaki Kobayashi). Another war film, this time a three part epic about the war in Manchuria, and a complete and utter rejection of Japan's militaristic past. One can sense a deep personal investment in this movie from Kobayashi, who really hit his stride with this movie.

Goyokin (1969, directed by Hideo Gosha) is an anti-samurai movie. Oh, it's got enough action and enough "cool" to satisfy the most jaded chambara fan, but it's a negation of the Bushido code and the corrupt social structures it gave rise to. If Kurosawa was the John Ford of the samurai film, Gosha was the Robert Aldrich.

The Story of a Prostitute (1965, directed by Seijun Suzuki) was made for a pittance compared with the commercial films Suzuki was making at the time, shot on standing sets with very little budget. But this is my favorite of Suzuki's movies, one where, for a change, the director seems personally invested in the story, without throwing out his restless experimentation with film as an abstraction. Another film set in Manchuria during the war. It haunts a lot of the Japanese movies from this period.

Cure (1997, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa) is one of the creepiest movies I can remember seeing. For some reason, this film always strikes me as a way of processing the sarin nerve gas attacks in the Tokyo subway by Aum Shinrikyo, even though it really has absolutely nothing to do with it. A serial killer/police procedural, this veers off into Kurosawa's now-trademarked horror of ambiguous alienation in its second half. The creepiest of the new wave of Japanese horror movies.

A Snake of June (2002, directed by Shinya Tsukamoto) is a combination of pink film and film noir, filtered through director Tsukamoto's freak-out sensibility. This is comparatively restrained for him after the fireworks of Tetsuo, but I like that about it. An amazing addition to the cinema of voyeurism and sadomasochism, all filmed with a persistent veneer of oceanic dread. Yet surprisingly optimistic in the end.

Giants and Toys (1958, directed by Yasuzo Masumura) is a candy colored dismantling of Japanese corporate culture that seduces with the visuals before sticking the knife in. At its core, this is as nasty a film as American films like The Apartment or Sweet Smell of Success, but it goes them one further by radically breaking with the "rules" of Japanese cinema. This is edited fast, with its beats coming almost syllable for syllable sometimes. Nagisha Oshima exempted Masumura from his blanket condemnation of traditional Japanese film. This movie is one of the reasons why.

Odd Obsession (1959, directed by Kon Ichikawa) is my favorite of Ichikawa's many films, mainly because it demonstrates that even in 1959, the Japanese had a more incisive insight into the sexual relationships between men and women than could be found in any other national cinema. Nobody does weird psychodrama like them. This makes a great double feature with Masumura's Manji, which also adapts a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki.



Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972, directed by Shinya Ito) is the masterpiece of Japanese exploitation cinema. What you might get if you hired Mario Bava to remake Caged Heat. It doesn't "transcend" it's generic roots, so much as it sinks into them so deeply that they become a kind of abstract art. Meiko Kaji cemented her place as the queen of Japanese cult cinema in this series (of which, this is the second and weirdest). She doesn't speak much, but her lacerating stares speak volumes.

Pale Flower (1964, directed by Masahiro Shinoda), which finds the innovations of the Japanese new wave finding their way into genre films. This is an austere, chilly fall from grace in the tradition of the bleakest of film noir, laid bare with a staccato editing scheme. Shinoda later turned into kind of a mannerist, but in this film, he shows an instinct for the jugular.

And two animated movies:


Grave of the Fireflies (1988, directed by Isao Takahata), which is, bar none, the saddest film ever made. Reduces me to a puddle every time I see it, which isn't often because I don't think I could take it.

Steamboy (2004, directed by Katsuhiro Otomo) has all the eyedrugging destruction you could ask for in a steampunk epic, while never losing sight of the "fun" quotient. I like this a lot more than Otomo's groundbreaking Akira, but I'm generally not an enthusiast for Japanese animation, so take that however you like.

Opening Gambits: Suzuki's Kanto Wanderer and Detective Bureau 2-3: Go To Hell Bastards

Both Kanto Wanderer and Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards were made in 1963, during director Seijun Suzuki's most prolific period. It's well known that he was getting bored with making stock yakuza films, and that he was beginning to dismantle the yakuza film's visual and generic conventions. This would find its fullest flowering a couple of years later, but these two films are an interesting example of the director beginning to chafe at the bit. The difference in these films is immediately apparent from their opening scenes, which are what concern me here.

Go to Hell Bastards is the more conventional of the two, but it has interesting characteristics. Suzuki tends to avoid close-ups in his opening. Most of it is master shots. But not all. The first shot is a medium two-shot of an American soldier:


Then cut to a few master shots:


The first real close-up of the movie. Note, that it's not a close up of a human being:


Cut to a couple of medium two-shots:



Then back to master shots for the mayhem that opens the movie:




Most of the interiors of the remainder of the movie are filmed from a dramatic distance, like this shot:


Even the close-ups start from a distance. This medium two-shot dollies in close for a striking face-off:



But a lot of the film is at arms length. These two shots are typical:


Well, so what? Let's compare this opening with the opening of Kanto Wanderer, which starts with a close-up:


And then another:


And then another:


And then another:


And then another:


And then another:

And so on, with the duration of each shot getting shorter and shorter. This is a mildly disorienting sequence for two reasons: one, we have no context for these characters. These are the VERY first shots of the movie. Second, Suzuki has unhitched them from their environments. We are looking so closely at these faces, we don't have any idea of where they are and why they are there.

What I think is going on in these movies is this: Detective Bureau 2-3: Go To Hell Bastards is exactly the kind of movie Suzuki was beginning to get bored with, and, as a result, he has adopted a cinematic idiom of distance. He doesn't really care about his characters, so he puts them at arm's length. He's deadpanning. In Kanto Wanderer, he's beginning to see the expressive potential of cinema, and he starts to experiment--not too much yet, but enough. I don't think the similarity between the title of Kanto Wanderer and Suzuki's later Tokyo Drifter is an accident. They explore the same kinds of existential anomie, but they ALSO share an exploration of cinema as abstraction. In any event, watching these two movies back to back is like watching the light bulb go off in the director's head.