Blood and Sand

I finally got around to restarting my Netflix this week. They didn't have the disc at the top of my queue at my local distribution center so they sent it afterwards and sent out an extra movie. I'm not complaining. The disc to which I was most looking forward was Street Angel (1928, directed by Frank Borzage), which I've only ever seen on crappy public domain VHS sources. Borzage is one of the great unheralded directors, and his work makes up the bulk of the Fox Murnau and Borzage box that came out last year, which Netflix claims to have. Unfortunately, that's not what they sent me. They sent me a public domain disc with a copyright date two years before the Fox box, and with a transfer that's among the most unwatchable things I've ever seen. I think I got ten minutes in. Imagine my disappointment. Grrrr...

Anyway, next in the queue was a Spanish horror film called Satan's Blood (1978, directed by Carlos Puerto), in which a young couple and their dog accept an invitation to come out to the estate of a man who claims to be the husband's old college buddy. Many Satanic hijinks ensue, including an ominous session with a Ouija board, a four-way, wife-swapping orgy, and a double suicide. For the most part, this film is an excuse to take advantage of Spain's then newly-lax censorship standards, and there's flesh aplenty in this movie almost from frame one. As for the rest? Well, it's a nicely nihilistic little film. It makes the most of its microcosmic setting. None of the actors is of much worth, but they are nicely apportioned for the numerous nude scenes. The ending seems a bit too Twilight Zone-y, and the film's conception of Satanism is very 1970s. Still, I've seen a LOT worse from Spanish horror of the period. Take that however you like.

I did another kung-fu movie night this past Saturday, and, again, we dipped into the Shaw catalogue. This time, we came up with a piece of insanity called Holy Flame of the Martial World (1983, directed by Chin-Ku Lu), which shows the Shaws trying to capture the lightning of the newly dawning HK New Wave in a bottle. The movie that this most resembles is Tsui Hark's Zu: The Warriors of the Magic Mountain, but as filtered through Shaw's stock players, stock sets, and stock direction. Just add special effects and completely insane fantasy elements and shake well. The result is completely absurd, the kind of movie that would play well to children if it weren't for all the bodies piling up. My favorite character in this is the guy whose main kung-fu technique is a demonic laugh that bursts organs, but I also love the Golden Snake Boy, a minor, but pivotal character played by Hsueh-erh Wen (a woman). Add this to the pile of transgender kung fu movies.


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Has there ever been another filmmaking career like Clint Eastwood's? Has there ever been a late flowering like his late movies? I'm trying to remember why I gave Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) a pass when it was in theaters, and the answer I keep coming up with is "because I was stupid, that's why." Holy cow, this was good. Eastwood's unfussy direction is perfect for this portrait of the Japanese before and during the battle of Iwo Jima, and he manages to get better performances out of his principles in Japanese than he got out of his English-speaking actors in The Flags of Our Fathers (this film's companion piece). This film doesn't try nearly as hard as its weak sister, and as a result, it conveys its themes with admirable grace. Ken Watanabe is the standout here, playing the Japanese general who gets command of the forces on Iwo Jima, and he's a paragon of military virtues. He's the kind of commander George C. Scott's version of Patton would have called "you magnificent bastard." Eastwood invites the audience to genuinely like the characters here, which is rare enough in an American WW II movie. That he manages to turn their lives into high tragedy is no small feat. This stands with the great Japanese war movies (Fires on the Plain, Black Rain). It may be the best WW II movie from Hollywood that I've ever seen. But don't hold me to that.

Rubber Reptile Rampage

I think the first horror movie I ever saw--or monster movie, anyway--was a Godzilla movie. I think it was Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, but I"m not sure. I vividly remember watching Godzilla vs. Megalon on television in prime time when I was in the first grade, but most of the Godzilla movies I saw as a kid were either shown just after school let out or on a Saturday. My brothers and I would positively drool if we saw that Destroy All Monsters or The Terror of Mechagodzilla was scheduled to play. More often, we got Son of Godzilla, which was awful. In any event, I never really lost the taste for rubber monster mayhem, though I gave it up for a long time in late adolescence and during college, but it returned full force when the so-called "Hesei" series started appearing on the grey market in the 1990s. Most of the Godzilla movies I actually own date from this period and after. I don't own Godzilla 1985, but I own all of the subsequent films. For reasons I don't fully understand, I started watching them this weekend.

Godzilla vs. Biolante (1989, directed by Kazuki Omori) follows directly on the 1985 movie, when, in the aftermath of Godzilla's latest rampage, various interests attempt to make off with some of the cells that have shuffled off of Godzilla during the mayhem for their own nefarious purposes. The film opens with a Hong Kong action-y shootout and the film follows several assassins over its running time. The final destination for Godzilla's cells is a laboratory that's researching genetically engineered crops and, well, you can probably see where this is going. Biolante is a huge plant monster. The movie also mixes up psychics, G-force (the UN team tasked with dealing with Godzilla's rampages, usually with cool technologies), and the military as usual. It's all pretty easy to follow, which is good given that the version of the film I have was sourced from a Japanese laserdisc without subtitles. It's actually kind of fun making up your own dialogue. The first time my friends and I tried this, it became a kind of Lovecraftian battle between the elder gods. We pretty much promoted Godzilla into the pantheon. Two scene stand out for me: first, a spy is ransacking an office and he opens the venetian blinds only to see Godzilla outside. His reaction? "S--t! Godzilla", which is probably how I'd react, too. In the other, one of the army guys tasked with shooting Godzilla with a suped-up bazooka flips the big guy off, turns his back to reload, then pays the price. I can't say this surprised me. This movie was a relative failure--it took almost a decade to make it to North America on non-bootleg versions. It's still not on DVD here.

Godzilla vs. Biolante was supposed to be followed by a movie introducing a new monster, but Biolante's failure was blamed on Biolante not having marquee value. So the next film went back to first principles. Most kaiju fans rank Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991, directed by Kazuki Omori) as the best of the Hesei series, perhaps because it has the most satisfying city-wrecking and monster brawling. It's also a kick to see a new version of Godzilla's old enemy, Ghidorah, in a new "mecha" version at the end of the movie. And, really, all kaiju fans demand of their Godzilla movies is great city wrecking and monster fighting. So I see their point. I do. But I'm a movie fan first, and the movie fan in me--to say nothing of the liberal humanist in me--recoils from the subtexts in this movie. This is a seriously wrong-headed piece of work. The plot involves evil westerners (read: evil, underhanded Americans) traveling back in time to prevent Japan from becoming the world's economic superpower. They do this by travelling even farther back in time to prevent the dinosaur that would eventually become Godzilla from becoming Godzilla, and instead, substituting their own creatures to become Ghidorah. In order to fight Ghidorah, Godzilla must be recreated. Godzilla kicks Ghidorah's ass, then goes on his own rampage that must be stopped by a revived mecha-Ghidorah. It's all very goofy, and very circular (as time-travel plots tend to be). But the attitudes on display here are disturbing. The movie tends to glorify the Japanese military during World War II, glorifies Japan's corporate culture of the late 1980s, and depends on an intentional ecological disaster to fuel its plot, no questions asked. In a lot of ways this is a neo-con kaiju movie, which seems perverse for a series that began life as an elegy to Japan's 1945 nuclear holocaust. It makes me rather sour on the whole thing, though it's interesting to contrast this film with the one that follows it.

Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992, directed by Takao Okawara) is Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah's ideological opposite. It's almost a point by point refutation of the the previous film. Mothra has always had an ecological subtext, and here, it comes to the fore. Again, there's a big corporation, but this time, the movie is scathing in its critque of that corporation's willingness to engage in ecological disasters in the name of profits. Mothra is unique in the Toho pantheon of monsters because he (?) has a mouthpiece in The Peanuts (or The Cosmos, as this movie renames them), the two miniature women who act to explain Mothra's actions). This movie has some pretty good mayhem, much of it provided by the "Black Mothra," Battra, who has a wing ding of a fight with Godzilla on the floor of the ocean in which Godzilla gets knocked through the Earth's crust and into the magma below. He then swims through the magma and re-appears in a volcanic eruption on Mt. Fuji. This provides me with my all-time favorite Godzilla moment. The scientists on the case are watching Godzilla emerge from an orbiting helicopter, and one of them says to the other, "Godzilla is beyond our understanding." Which is so, so true on any number of levels. This is my favorite of the Hesei series.

I chose to skip Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1993) for the present, because I absolutely hated it the first time I watched it.

By rights, I ought to hate Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla (1994), too, given that it has an even more appallingly cutesy version of Baby Godzilla in it, and it has pretty lame monster fights (in which the two principles stare each other down for the most part, and Space Godzilla is one of Toho's lamer monsters. All true. But there are some things in it that tickle my illogical kaiju love. First, there's Mogera, the second generation countermeasure to Godzilla following on from Mechagodzilla. Mogera is designed to look like the big robot monster from The Mysterians, a film I love. Second, there's a pretty cool scene in outer space when Mogera takes on Space Godzilla in an asteroid field. But mostly, I like this movie because I think the human story is more interesting than usual. At the end of most Godzilla movies, the human cast tends to watch the mayhem from a safe distance without adding anything to the film but astonished expressions (or bored expressions, depending on the involvement of the actors). In this one, the human cast is in the action. Of particular interest is the pilot of Mogera. Remember the guy who flips off Godzilla back in Godzilla vs. Biolante? That was this guy's best friend. His hatred of Godzilla has turned him into the equivalent of Captain Ahab. This is fun to watch. Still, this says more about what I personally look for in movies than it does the quality of the movie itself, so caveat emptor.

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The thing to remember when you're watching any given Brian De Palma movie is that you are watching a movie. Never mind all the swipes from Hitchcock and Antonioni and god knows who else, the proper frame of reference is Godard, who rendered movies as abstractions. Of course, De Palma's cinema is more commercial than Godard's ever was, but if there's anyone who wields his movies as weapons in the same spirit, it's De Palma. 1984's Body Double is the director's most vicious hate note to Hollywood, and the more you know about movies, about De Palma's movies in particular, and about critics, the funnier it is. I can only imagine the glee in De Palma's black little heart as he assembled the critical blurbs for his in-film porno movie, "Holly Does Hollywood." Sometimes, the film is blatant about what's it's really about: the swinging door with the mirror during the porno shoot is a good example--it reveals the film crew. Sometimes it's subtle. During the front credits, the main title is superimposed on a desert vista that is promptly picked up and carried away by workmen on a movie set, and right after the credits, Craig Wasson's character is shown driving a car with a rear projection that's just bad enough to call attention to itself if you're looking for it (in 1984? Really? Hence the cognitive dissonance). And the film invites--nay, compells--the audience to look. One thing I never realized the first time I saw the film is that it's a sly quasi-remake of Blow Out. Oh, the details are different, as is the tone, but the broad outlines are the same. This has to be some kind of post-modernist coup: a director quasi-remaking his own quasi-remake of another film. It makes the head spin. And then, the coup de grace. De Palma deconstructs the shower opening of Dressed to Kill by setting up a nearly identical scene over his end-credits, then showing you the results, all laid bare like a pathologist leaving a cadaver gaping wide on the table for a medical class to examine. Wow, did I ever underestimate this film when I saw it back when it was released. It's actually kind of a masterpiece.

As an aside to horror fans: watch out for a very naked Barbara Crampton in the early part of the film.

Asian Salad, Sharks, and Buttons

A friend of mine bought a new television last week. This thing is huge. Imagine the monolith from 2001 turned on its side and you have an idea of how big this damned thing is. It's really too much television for just one person. She also has a huge collection of Asian genre films, including an extensive selection of the Shaw Brothers re-issues from Celestial in Hong Kong. We've been trying to arrange a movie night for months now, and the stars were finally right for a night of kung-fu. We picked a couple of random films from her collection, figured out how to work the subtitles on her new tv, and plunged right in.

First up was The Deadly Breaking Sword (1979, directed by Chung Sun), in which Ti Lung plays a wu xia swordsman who breaks off a piece of his sword in the killing stroke when he dispatches his opponents. The movie takes it's time informing us that he's the good guy. The plot is never really clear on who is the protagonist. The character who would be the good guy in most films is lovable doofus Sheng Fu, who has gambled away his freedom early in the film, and is now indentured to the gambling house as a bouncer. I say he would be the good guy, but for something he does later in the film that seems fairly unforgivable. The main kung-fu baddie is Wai-Man Chan, who survives his opening duel with Ti Lung and falls in with a sinister doctor played by the always villainous Ku Feng. Fei Ai is the driver of the plot as a courtesan who manipulates everyone to her own ends. The martial arts action in this one is fairly dance-like, which is a surprise given the late date of its production. Still, it's a handsome film that makes good use of Shaw's familiar sets, and Ti Lung is always watchable, especially given that his character here is unusually unlikeable in spite of his heroism.

Next was Chia-Liang Liu's Dirty Ho (also 1979), in which Gordon Liu is the affable Eleventh Prince of the ruling dynasty who has slipped out of the palace to pursue his hobbies: wine, antiques, and art. He runs afoul of amiable rogue Yue Wong, who he contrives to take under his wing. The conflict is provided by the assassins sent out by the Fourth Prince to take out our hero before the royal succession can be announced. The attempts by the assassins provide the film with a couple of very clever sequences in which the Prince must defend himself without showing any outward kung fu skill. The best of these sequences finds him using a courtesan (played by the wonderful Kara Hui) as a kind of kung fu marionette, though the other scenes are almost as much fun. This being a Chia-Liang Liu film, there's a training sequence in which the Prince teaches his new disciple with various sadistic techniques, here mostly involving oil lamps and candles. The filmmakers manage to make Shaw's familiar backlot seem like new by dressing it up with blowing wind and sand in the penultimate battle sequence, before providing a duel with the Fourth Prince's wicked general, played by the ubiquitous Lo Lieh. This one is great fun.

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There's a profound sense of loss in Hirokazu Kore-eda's Maborosi (1995), a film that is driven by mood rather than plot. The movie follows the life of a young Osaka woman (Makiko Esumi), whose husband inexplicably steps in front of a train. Five years later, she remarries and relocates to a small town on the northern coast of Japan, where she attempts to find meaning in her new life even as she's haunted by the old. This is a film filled with quiet moments and careful shot compositions. There's a touch of Ozu in this film, though this is more monochromatic than any of Ozu's color films. The final shot of the film is an empty room with an open window, looking out over the sea. It's worthy of Edward Hopper.

Henry Sellick's Coraline (2009) features a battery of cannons that fire cones of spun candy. This film, a delightfully sinister stop-motion film, is NOT spun candy. This seems to be the point of the cannons. Coraline is being ignored by her parents, so when she finds an alternate world where her parents are accommodating to her every wish, she's delighted at first, in spite of being creeped out by the buttons sewn over their eyes. When she discovers the cost of staying in this fantasy world, the film becomes very dark indeed. I think Roald Dahl would have liked this film. There's the same touch of the fairy tale in the structure of the second half of this movie that one finds in Pan's Labyrinth, and it reminds me once again that most horror stories are fairy tales of a sort. Plus, I'm bound to love any film in which Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders "appear" together.

As an aside, this is the second 3-D film I've seen this year, and, once again, 3-D was a distraction rather than an asset.

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About half way through the film, and not for the first time, I started wondering why Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) is so different from any given New World Pictures eco horror film from the same era. I mean, it's the same damned thing, when you get down to brass tacks. Murray Hamilton's mayor is a character type familiar to just about any revenge of nature film ever made: the venal politician who values the tourist trade more than human life, to cite one familiar archetype. Why this film? It's tempting to chalk it up to simple craftsmanship, but I don't think that's it. The obvious answer is that it matches image and archetype brilliantly. Spielberg matches a prosaic reality against a destroying force to devastating effect, in part because his scenes of domesticity are so carefully observed. The scene where Chief Brody's son mimics his actions is one good example. Obviously, Spielberg is a filmmaker of immense gifts, who, like many of the other so-called movie brats, has synthesized everything he's learned from watching movies into a formidable cinematic vocabulary. You have a mastery of overlapping dialogue that's the equal of Hawks (and very similar to Altman), you have striking mise en scene compositions that use receding planes of action that recall Welles and Truffaut. You have a Hitchcockian attention to objects. Plus, there's a mean streak that Spielberg subsequently lost somewhere along the line. I mean, he was willing to kill of a dog and a little kid in the space of a minute and a half in this movie. All well and good, but it explains nothing, except, perhaps, that this is one of the movie-est movies ever made. And maybe that's the key to its initial popularity, but it's not the key to why it remains fresh while other big hits from the same era have fallen by the wayside over time.

Ultimately, I think there's a level of mythmaking in the second half of the movie that pushes it out of the realm of the stock eco horror film. It abandons the tropes of the horror movie once Quint, Brody, and Hooper set sail to hunt the shark, and suddenly we're in the neighborhood of Melville and Jack London. The shark hunt is a crucible, and we have three characters to test to destruction here. The heart of the movie is Quint's monologue about the sinking of the Indianapolis. Here, we find a character stripped bare and examined in a way that no film ever produced by Roger Corman ever managed. Each of the three is examined in turn--Brody's cowardice, Hooper's intellect, Quint's obsession, all measured against a shark that isn't even a natural creature. It's a variant, instead, of the White Whale, and the Orca is the Pequod writ small. It's a striking transformation for a film that stands as the original summer blockbuster. It's a legitimately great film.

Beware, the Ides of March

A light week for me. In fact, I didn't see a single movie. This is a rare occurrence for me. I spent a lot of time reading Dan Simmons's new book, Drood (which I haven't finished yet), and I listened to a Ruth Rendell novel in the car on my commute to work.

I did, however, watch the last episode of the first season of Rome. Appropriate, given that the centerpiece of the episode is the assassination of Caesar on the floor of the senate. It was the Ides of March, after all. This last episode was a doozy. I can't imagine having to wait out the second season when there was a chance that it wasn't going to happen. My main thoughts: I loved the way Caesar's death was played, with out him saying "et tu Brute," but with an accusing and betrayed glare as he died. Also, Sevillia is picking the wrong enemy in Octavian. Yikes. That kid is going to run rings around everyone.

History porn at its finest.

Watching the Watchmen

Carrie (1976, directed by Brian De Palma). I wish my prom had been as much fun as Carrie White's prom.

Oh, more than that, I guess. I love, love, love the circling pan shot around Sissy Spacek and William Katt that starts out elegant then spirals out of control. It's a terrific symbolic shot. I also love how P. J. Soles goes from goofy to psychotic in a much more subtle way than Travolta does. Carrie's mom is a bit more of a caricature here than she is in the book, but it's fun watching Piper Laurie chew the scenery. I'm still of two minds about the very end of the movie, though. On the one hand, it completely annihilates any sympathy the audience might have had for Carrie, because the ending turns her into a monster at last. On the other hand, it's the most cunningly executed cheap shot in movies. I mean, NO ONE walks away from that sequence unaffected. There's some kind of magic there, of a black variety.

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I approached the movie version of Watchmen (2009, directed by Zach Snyder) with a fair amount of dread. This is a property that, done badly, has the potential to explode in the face of everyone involved. The filmmakers run a huge risk of appearing ridiculous, not least because the source novel itself will end up with the last laugh, to say nothing of its prickly author. My only real hope was that it wouldn't suck, but I still remember when I realized that the first X-Men film didn't, in fact, suck, and how I started demanding that it be good. The good news is that Watchmen doesn't exactly suck, and part of its awkward presentation might be smoothed over by the forth coming DVD extended cut. The bad news is that, while it hits the major plot points of the story, it misses the depths. It misses the density of metaphor, or, if it retains any of it, it doesn't communicate them because the viewer cannot stop to linger on them. This, too, might work on DVD, but that's an unfortunate qualification for a movie that is so obviously designed to be seen on the biggest available screen. In any event, this gets to the heart of what's missing from the movie. The book presents several levels of meta-narrative, and the movie is only able to pick out the surface narrative. This has a flattening effect.

As a movie, it's not bad, I guess. It's the kind of superhero movie someone like Robert Altman or P. T. Anderson would make--more Anderson than Altman, I think, given the needle-drop soundtrack--in which you have multiple characters with multiple storylines all converging at the end of the movie. It's the superhero equivalent of Nashville. Occasionally, Snyder indulges in his preferred action idiom, which marks the movie as a movie, but he's also added a fanboyish sadism to the action. This is more violent than it needs to be, though I think that might be a hollow complaint given that the end of the movie kills millions of people offscreen (more about this in a bit). I'll say this for Snyder, I much prefer his take on action filmmaking to Paul Greengrass (who was the director of record prior to Snyder). The slow motion might be annoying, but at least the viewer can tell what's going on and can get some sense of the geography of the scene. A Bourne-ish approach would certainly have annoyed me no end.

The performances are generally good, particularly Patrick Wilson and Billy Cruddup. One wishes that the filmmakers had included at least some of the wide swath of "ordinary" characters from the book, because omitting them results in a kind of hermetically sealed narrative that doesn't mean anything except to those within it. This is most evident in the way the movie ends, which presents a serious moral problem. Can the characters live with this? The fact that it all occurs in this bubble, to people in whom we have no vested interest, tends to moot the moral dilemma. Film audiences are used to seeing large scale disasters, so this one is just one more. This is exacerbated by Matthew Goode's performance as Veidt, which seems completely untouched by a shadow of regret. This is a serious failing.

Still and all, there's more of Watchmen on the screen than I ever expected to see. It IS interesting. Whether that's enough to balance the scales is something about which I haven't made up my mind. Plus, this might actually be the closest anyone comes to putting a Thomas Pynchon novel on screen, for whatever that might be worth.

I'm much less conflicted by Brad Bird's 2004 Watchmen knock-off, The Incredibles, which is a pure delight from start to finish. Whether it's the striking design sensibility, the retro spy-film score, or the gleeful and vivid showing-off of Pixar's animation capabilities, this fills every frame with some kind of marvel or some kind of witty take on the reality of having super-powers. I mean, what kind of windscreen does the Flash use to prevent himself from splattering bugs in his path? Where do they get their costumes? Things I picked up on this time: The drinking game Syndrome's lackeys are playing as they watch the news feed from the mayhem; the subtle and satisfied way Elastigirl looks at her ass in the mirror after donning her new supersuit (as if to say, yeah, it still looks good); the very subtle queer subtext derived from the film's superhero closet and the superhero advocate, Gazerbeam. I could take some issue with the film's pseudo-Randian subtext, but it doesn't spoil the fun.

As a side note, Watchmen is not my favorite graphic novel, not even my favorite Alan Moore graphic novel. I much prefer Moore's own From Hell, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Charles Burns's Black Hole, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Signal to Noise, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Jaka's Story by Dave Sim, The Death of Speedy by Jaime Hernandez, and probably a couple of dozen others. Actually, I don't have a favorite, so the favorite that I don't have isn't Watchmen

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Future fantasy filmmakers might do well to look at Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life (1998), which is the kind of fantasy that Hollywood used to make in the 1930s, along the lines of Heaven Can Wait, Between Two Worlds, or On Borrowed Time. Unlike those films, this one avoids obvious sentiment by fusing fantasy and documentary together. The premise is simple, the recently dead arrive at a way station to the afterlife where they are told they can take one--and only one--memory into eternity. The staff of the way station help them decide and contrive to film the memories for them. A lot of this film consists of people talking directly at the camera, a la Errol Morris, and the director has mixed in non-actors describing their own real memories with those the filmmakers have created. The film doesn't tell you which is which. The result is a surprisingly affecting meditation on memory, loss, mortality, and life. This is one of my favorite films.

Undistributed

I had hoped to get out to see Coraline this weekend, but that didn't happen. Instead, I was satisfied with a couple of undistributed movies.

One of the great tragedies of the copyright trouble in which Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues (2008) finds itself is that, outside of a few festival showings, it won't be seen by its audience on a big screen. I thought of this just after the halfway point, during a psychedelic freakout that had me floored even though I was watching it on a computer screen. Had this film been made in another era--at the height of the midnight movie era, for instance--this would have been one of the great "head" movies, in which audiences of teenagers and younger adults would drop acid before the show and find themselves in a seriously immersive alternate reality of sound and color. Hell, you don't even need the drug for this movie to transport you. Made in a variety of animations styles, and all animated by cartoonist Paley in Flash, this is a tour de force in imaginative juxtapositions. The copyright trouble stems from the use of blues recordings by Annette Hanshaw, which Paley puts into the mouth of Sita, wife of Rama in Hindu tradition, who is further interpreted as a woman wronged by a guy who's kind of a dick, even if he is a god. Paley further juxtaposes this story with her own autobiographical story of being dumped by a boyfriend who has taken a job in India. The whole thing is charming, wholly engaging, and occasionally visionary. One of the other thoughts that I had after I finished watching was that this is the kind of movie that shows up movies like Kung Fu Panda as creatively bankrupt, in spite of their lip service to a variety of styles. Highly recommended. You can watch it online here, if you're interested:

http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/blog/watch-sita-sings-the-blues-o nline/347/

The sixth annual True/False Film Festival rolled into our my fair city again this weekend, and, once again, the thing was packed. Last year, they drew 18,000 people. If they drew less than that this year, I would be shocked. The opening night film was Waltzing with Bashir, but there was no way I was getting in to that without standing in a two hour line in freezing temperatures and it was going to be playing at our art-house next week anyway. So I decided that my best bet were films on Sunday at the cavernous Missouri Theater. Surely those showings would have seats available? Famous last words. In any event, I barely got in to see a documentary called Pressure Cooker (2008, directed by Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman, which depicts a Philadelphia inner city high school class in culinary arts and their peparation for a big scholarship competition. I suppose you could equate this to Hoop Dreams--substitute cooking for basketball--but that would do the film a disservice. The film focuses on three students in particular, as well as their tough as nails teacher, and winds up as a striking portrait of ordinary people in post-industrial America. It's a surprisingly funny movie, and it's a stark rebuke to some images of inner city life as a gang-infested hell. That's not the world--and certainly not the people--you see here. Recommended, if it ever makes it to DVD. The filmmakers were present and discussed the film afterwards. As usual for filmmakers at the Missouri Theater, they looked a little shell-shocked at the size of the audience. Documentaries don't usuallly play to 1200 people at a time.

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High Sierra (1941, directed by Raoul Walsh) is arguably the movie that made Humphrey Bogart into Humphrey Bogart. It rescued him from a long string of gangster roles and marked him both as a charismatic movie star and as a really accomplished actor. The movie introduced Bogart to screenwriter John Huston, who would cast Bogart as Sam Spade later that same year (and the rest is history). High Sierra ain't no slouch, either. What we see here is a transitional film. It takes Bogart's Duke Mantee from The Petrified Forest and thaws him. Roy "Mad Dog" Earle is Mantee with a sliver of humanity retained. He has a consience. He's wonderfully conflicted, and the movie amplifies his inner conflicts with his relationships with both Ida Lupino's dance hall refugee and Joan Leslie's crippled teen-ager. In the broad continuum of film history, what we see in High Sierra is the Warner-style gangster film beginning to shade into the moral ambiguity of film noir. What the film lacks is the visual style of noir, but in its place, director Raoul Walsh has substitued a spectacular natural backdrop. The film hints at this when, fresh out of prison, Earle takes a walk to the park to "make sure that the sky is still blue and that the grass is still green." In the back end of the picture, this tendency becomes grandiose, as Roy Earle meets his demise in the shadow of Mount Whitney. On the whole a terrific film, and primo Bogart is ambrosia.

Heart of Midnight

Reprinted from my website:

The Midnight Meat Train , 2008. Directed by Ryûhei Kitamura. Bradley Kooper, Vinnie Jones, Leslie Bibb, Roger Bart, Brooke Shields, Tony Curran, Barbara Eve Harris.

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Synopsis: Leon is a photographer attempting to step up in the world. He's tired of snapping pictures for the tabloids; he wants to show his work in the gallery of hoity toity art dealer Susan Hoff, who tells him that he's got a good start, but that he needs to go further. There's something missing in his work. It lacks an instinct for the jugular. In search of new material that will cut the mustard, Leon photographs three young men in the act of harrassing a woman in a subway station. The next day, he finds that the woman has disappeared, and that he may have a clue to his disappearance. Investigating further leads him to a butcher who rides the late train every night, where he murders unsuspecting passengers on the way to an unknown, abandoned station. But the butcher is only the tip of the iceberg, Leon discovers. Who does he serve? To his horror, Leon finds out more than he ever wanted to know...

Commentary: The Midnight Meat Train is probably more famous for its troubled release than it is for its actual qualities as a movie. A victim of one of those internal studio power struggles, it found itself ignominiously dumped into dollar theaters for one week, then in a protracted limbo as Lionsgate figured out what to do with it. This is unfortunate, because in contrast with some of Lionsgate's other recent product--the 3-D remake of My Bloody Valentine, for one example, or the annual Saw sequel--The Midnight Meat Train is a striking departure from business as usual. Given a proper release, it may have found an audience. But that's a might-have-been. As it stands now, it will have to find its audience on home video just like countless other horror films, great and small, have done before.

That said, this movie has two primary virtues: a striking visual design, in which harsh, industrial surfaces filmed in a desaturating blue light serve as an abbatoir; and a mean streak a mile wide. Taking its cues from the Clive Barker story of the same name, this movie is interested in placing vivid and nasty images on the screen, images that go well beyond the usual spew and grue of the genre. Director Ryûhei Kitamura, best known for the splenetic zombie action film, Versus, and also for the equally splenetic Godzilla: Final Wars, reels in his more outrageous visual tics for most of the film, saving them for the nastier murder sequences, where his signature style sometimes gets the best of him. This is nowhere more evident than in the murder of Ted Raimi's character, a mix of practical effects and less successful computer images:

Kitamura is at his best when he finds new points of view for his mayhem rather than new kinds of effects. The POV decapitation in the same sequence is rather more successful:

Structurally, the film is problematic. After a strong first act, the film sags as the filmmakers pad the length of the short story. The movie doubles back on itself as the investigation of Mr. Mahogany, the butcher, is undertaken by Leon's girlfriend, Maya (Leslie Bibb), who basically finds out a bunch of things the audience already knows. The film's final act recovers to a degree, in so far as it doesn't veer away from Barker's Nietzchean conclusion that gazing too long into the abyss will make a monster of you. The impact of this is somewhat muted by the necessity of placing a Lovecraftian race of "Old Ones" on screen. The film doesn't adequately imbue them with an aspect of awe and terror equal to the crimes done in their name. Still, the images before this denouement are startling for their novelty. No horror movie I can think of has put similar imagery on screen. In this regard, The Midnight Meat Train actually manages the difficult feat of capturing what made Barker's intial splash with The Books of Blood so memorable.

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My partner and I are getting close to the end of the first season of Rome. Caesar has assumed power as absolute dictator, Vorenus has been installed as a magistrate, Pullo has fallen hard, and Brutus has alienated himself from Caesar, much to his mother's delight.

The thing I really like about Rome is its complete unwillingness to be shy about anything. The sheer amount of frontal male nudity--comparable to the female nudity--is a thing to see (Mmmm....naked James Purefoy). I love how they prefigure this in the animated graphitti during the credit sequence, which is full of phalluses and fellatio. I also love the brutality of the violence, and episode 11, which is where we stand right now, has a doozie of a violent set piece, as Pullo is sentenced to death in the arena and promptly shows that he's the deadliest son of a bitch in Rome. Arms are lopped off, legs are lopped off, there's decapitation by shield. There are hard-core horror movies that avert their eyes more assiduously. Pullo (Ray Stevenson) remains my favorite character, a status cemented a few episodes back when, tossed on the open sea in a storm, he shouts "If Triton can't keep us drier than this, he can suck my cock!" He's delightfully profane. And this ran on television? God, I love HBO. I can't wait to see their version of A Game of Thrones

Vampires, Pink Horses, and Counterfeiters

Let the Right One In (2009, directed by Tomas Alfredson) was a bit of a surprise to me. I had seen the praise here and elsewhere, but I really didn't know what to expect. An anti-Twilight, I suppose, but that's not what I got. Well, no, that IS what I got, but not in the way I expected. This is a film that draws from a deep well of loneliness. Visually, it's a bleak and austere movie, composed in the main of long takes and snowy drabness. It's a film where you can feel the chill of winter radiate from the screen. For me, though the surprise is in how it mixes it all up with a striking genderqueer ambiguity. I had no idea it was as queer a movie as it turned out to be, but it strikes exactly the right notes in this regard, too. Best of all, though, it functions as a horror movie on top of all of its other concerns; it plays by the rules of vampire mythology (including a ghastly demonstration of what happens when a vampire enters a home uninvited). The finale at the swimming pool is both ghastly and comic by turns, delivering the goods for the horror audience. And then...the movie demonstrates an admirable grasp of irony, though the irony is there from the outset (the scene with the dog is a good example). The very end of the movie seems hopeful and touching, but I found it utterly horrifying. After all, we saw what became of Eli's previous familiar. Did he start out as Oskar did? I think he might have. Longer review here.

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I wasn't very far into Robert Montgomery's Ride the Pink Horse (1947) before I realized that it was a tour de force in the very basics of the director's craft. At a basic level, the director of a movie is responsible for blocking the actors and supervising their movements, and collaborating with the cinematographer to compose the frame. At the outset of this movie, there is a long unbroken take in which a man arrives on a bus at a border town, gets off, walks into the terminal, puts a significant slip of paper in a locker, and hides the key. This is, perhaps, not as showy of a long-take opening as the one in Touch of Evil, but it certainly demonstrates a mastery of craft that used to be taken for granted in movies. This sort of thing is pretty much lost these days, as films are cut to mimimize the need for blocking or the creation of environments. Which is too bad. Ride the Pink Horse isn't an a-list classic, but it has more craft--more art--in that one sequence than can be found in the entire filmography of, say, Michael Bay. The story itself follows embittered veteran Montgomery as he attempts to blackmail a war profiteer. It's a stock, hard-boiled b-picture, though it adds some interesting flourishes, like the Mexican girl who thinks she's seen our hero dead, and the wonderful Thomas Gomez as a merry-go-round operator (which provides the pink horse of the title). After its opening, it doesn't feel the need for complex camerawork, and doesn't need it, really. It's enough to know that they COULD do it if they wanted to.

I could say much the same thing about the crime films of Richard Fleischer, which are models of narrative economy that often end with a flurry of noir stylistics. Trapped (1949) is such a film. It starts as one of those semi-documentary crime films that were popular at the time, complete with stolid narrator extoling the virtues of the agents of the Department of the Treasury, but that goes silent in short order as we engage the story, in which counterfieter Lloyd Bridges escapes from custody to track down the people who are using his plates to make funny money. It's a pretty standard crime-does-not-pay story, but the ending, in which the T-men track the bad guy to a trolley depot, dissolves into a dazzling abstraction of light and shadow. It's not a masterpiece, by any means, but it's a nifty little film.

Kink

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There was even one drunken American who, laughing, grabbed her, but when he realized that he had seized a fistful of flesh and the chain which pierced her, he suddenly sobered up, and O saw his face fill with the same expression of horror and contempt that she had seen on the face of the girl who had given her a depilatory; he turned and fled.

There was another girl, very young, a girl with bare shoulders and a choker of pearls around her neck, wearing one of those white dresses young girls wear to their first ball, two tea-scented roses at her waist and a pair of golden slippers on her feet, and a boy made her sit down next to O, on her right. Then he took her hand and made her caress O's breasts, which quivered to the touch of the cool, light fingers, and touch her belly, and the chain, and the hole through which it passed, the young girl silently, did as she was bid, and when the boy said he planned to do the same thing to her, she did not seem shocked.

But even though they thus made use of 0, and even though they used her in this way as a model, or the subject of a demonstration, not once did anyone ever speak to her directly. Was she then of stone or wax, or rather some creature from another world, and did they think it pointless to speak to her? Or didn't they dare?

--Pauline Reage, The Story of O

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One of the main reasons the best and most subversive erotic books and films stand out is because they don't settle for a mundane boy-meets-girl, boy-boffs-girl they-lived-happily-ever-after kind of storyline. Indeed, some of the best pieces of erotic literature are positively terrifying, chronicling love and obsession as parts of the same coin, and sometimes making the explicit connection between sex and death. In this, erotica sometimes bleeds into horror. The most terrifying erotic novel I've ever read is Pauline Reage's The Story of O. Oh, it offers up a rich panoply of polymorphous perversion, served up with such an economy of non-dirty words that it would make the Marquis de Sade weep in impotent envy. O loses herself to passion that becomes obsession. She loves so desperately that she loses her identity, her dignity, her self-will, and ultimately (if the hints at the end of the novel are to be believed), her life. I'm not entirely sure of how to take this, actually, but when I first read the book (mumble, mumble) years ago, I took it as both profoundly frightening and vaguely anti-erotic. It made quite an impression.

All of which is almost completely missed by Just Jaeckin's version of The Story of O (1975). Oh, it has more or less the same plot: O's lover, Rene--played by the deliciously creepy Udo Kier--takes her to the Chateau d'Roissy to be trained in the ways of submission. Here, she is dressed (or not) for the pleasuring of men (and women), is punished, etc. What the movie misses, however, is the alarming implications of O's willingness to partake, and it misses the darker aspects of the story's end. And instead of the book's elegant language, Jaeckin has substituted the cliches of soft-core Euro-porn, particularly the tendency to film through filters that look like someone has smeared vaseline on the lens. Still and all, the people in this movie are beautiful to look at. Corinne Cleary was an ideal physical match for O, sexual but naive, but she's not much of an actress. And it's not really boring, the way, say, some Emmanuelle movies are, either. Though I suppose that might depend on your own kinks.

A movie that totally "gets" what one finds in The Story of O is Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour (1967), which in style is completely deadpan (as are most Bunuel movies) but which in substance is totally subversive. Like many of Bunuel's films, this is an epistemological toybox that bobs and weaves between "reality" and "fantasy" at will until it detonates both the real and the unreal at the end of the movie. Here, we get the erotic obsession of O reincarnated as a destructive force and liberating force at the same time: Severine, a frigid housewife trapped in a sexless marriage, spends her days catering to the kinks of a high-end house of ill-repute. This ultimately destroys her, but on the way, we see her sexual hypocrisy crumble, and at the end, we are given to wonder if it's her kinks that destroyed her, or her unwillingness to share them with her husband. The most telling scene in the movie is when one customer is refused service by the other women in the house because of the awful thing he carries in a box; Severine takes him on and afterwards is shown to be completely satisfied, released temporarily by giving in to her baser needs.

But the thing I love the most about this movie is the way it deals with the Catherine Deneuve problem. The thing about Catherine Deneuve is that, left to her own devices, she has the potential to wreck a movie. She's so inhumanly lovely that everything else runs the risk of being completely upstaged by her. One solution to the Catherine Deneuve problem is to submit to her completely. This is the solution usually employed by Jacques Demy, whose Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Donkey Skin bow down and worship. Bunuel, on the other hand, defiles her. He spits in the face of her beauty and drags her through the mud--sometimes literally. The scene that gives this strategy its fullest expression finds Miss Deneuve dressed in a blinding white gown and tied to a stake while her husband throws shovels full of mud at her. I think this is the scene that cemented my own love for Catherine Deneuve for all time.

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Among more vanilla films:

Action in the North Atlantic (1943, directed by Lloyd Bacon) is a Bogart film that I've managed to miss all these years, and woe is me. This one's a corker, chronicling the wartime experience of the Merchant Marines as they brave the Nazi u-boat wolf packs. This starts with a bang, as Bogart's ship is torpedoed and the entire cargo of gasoline goes up in flames. This is a bang-up action sequence that lasts for the first half hour of the film. The film sags a bit when Bogart, his captain (played by Raymond Massey), and his crew are rescued and sent home. Things pick up again in the last third of the movie, in which all hands are back on duty as part of a convoy to Murmansk. We get a full-fledged naval battle here, followed by a game of cat and mouse with a u-boat and the Luftwaffe, all staged with aplomb by director Bacon and the Warner special effects department. Sure, the boats look like models, but they don't look more "fake" than the computerized boats in Pearl Harbor, really. And even though it was the result of the movie's slant as propaganda, there's a refreshing cosmopolitan attitude in this film, in which America still thinks that every allied country contributed to victory in the great war. Would that our contemporary nativist superpatriots remember that.

The first film version of The Maltese Falcon (1931, directed by Roy Del Ruth) is an interesting film. On the one hand, Bebe Daniels is a much more appealing femme fatale than Mary Astor, there's far more pre-Code sex and innuendo than in the Bogart film, and Sam Spade is the sleazeball one finds in the novel. On the other hand, Ricardo Cortez is a stiff as Spade. He's "acting" smarm, and it just doesn't work. Still and all, it's fun to watch. Otto Matieson gives almost exactly the same performance as Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, Thelma Todd is a knock-out as Iva Archer (with whom Spade is DEFINITELY having an affair), and we get a fun non-horror turn by Dwight Frye as Wilmer (for which he seems perfectly cast). What this lacks, though, is Bogart. Oh, Bogart. If there were ever any doubt as to whether Bogart had the "it" that makes great movie stars, the contrast between this film and his should put that all to rest. There's a weird kind of alchemy going on in the Huston film that this film never once matches. Oddly enough, this is a case where the Production Code did something good, because THIS version of The Maltese Falcon was totally out of bounds, so they had to make another one. And when that one didn't work so well, they made a third.

Rings and Monsters

I was home sick this week, so I took the opportunity to revisit an old friend: Pixar's Monsters, Inc. (2001, directed by Peter Docter and Lee Unkrich). This remains my favorite of the Pixar films, in part because it makes me laugh the hardest, but also because the door chase at the end is the most jaw-droppingly imaginative setpiece I've ever seen. It's Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd all rolled into one. Plus, my emotional investment in it grows every time I see it. Just as I'm coming down from the adrenalin rush of the door chase, the movie sucker-punches me in the gut as Boo and Sully are parted. And when the movie reveals its last shot, and we hear "Kitty!" on the soundtrack, I'm bawling. Oh, plus it's got fun monsters, and a sushi restaurant called "Harryhausen's." How cool is that?

In contrast, I maintain a cool emotional distance from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. I watched the extended editions of all three of them this week, and for the most part, I viewed them as formal exercises. In retrospect, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) is probably the most uniformly excellent of them. It really only strikes a false note with the council of Elrond, and even that's not bad. It loads the screen with terrifying menaces--it's very much the most monsterific of the trio--with my favorite of the monsters being the Watcher at the the gates of Moria. The Balrog was realized better than I could have imagined, but turns out to be something of a straw man (in the first film, at least). And the Ringwraiths seem like something that galloped out of The Tombs of the Blind Dead. I think a fair amount of the success of these films stems from having a director steeped in horror movies at the helm. Many of the film's set-pieces are palpably terrifying. Sean Bean arguably gives the most nuanced performance of the series as the doomed Boromir.

While The Two Towers (2002) is probably the most inconsistent of the three, it's probably my favorite. It's got the most Christopher Lee in it, and it throws in Brad Dourif for good measure, both terrific villains, both more comprehensible villains than the Great Eye of Mordor. A great villain makes for great fantasy. Jackson again gets to show off his horror chops as Frodo, Sam, and Gollum navigate the Dead Marshes, and shows a melancholy romanticism in Elrond's vision of Arwen's future, a vision worthy of the German romantics, Friedrich and Runge. This film begins an interesting escalation of scale in one half of the film (the battle of Helm's Deep) and an interesting narrowing of scale in the other half, in spite of the fabulous attack on the rangers of Gondor by the Nazgul.

The narrowing of scale continues in the third film, The Return of the King, even as the rest of the movie becomes so overstuffed that it's fit to burst. This one is all over the map, but when it comes down to it, the story devolves into a three sided psychodrama that, if one so desired, could probably be staged on a bare stage without any scenery. More than the other two films, this is a film that resonates with deep mythic images, from the reforging of The Sword that Was Broken, to Faramir's last ride, to Eowyn's battle with the Witch King and Theoden's heroic death, to Shelob, the cinema's all-time scariest giant spider. All of this, and the multiple maudlin endings, are emblematic of a director whose style is excess. Jackson doesn't know the meaning of restraint. Tell him that less is sometimes more, and he'll scoff at you because, by his lights, MORE is always more. Still, by the time Frodo sails into the West, the viewer is exhausted. This viewer, anyway.

I normally stay until the end of the credits when I see a movie in the theater, so when Taken (2009, directed by Pierre Morel) unreeled it's last few feet before me and the film's rating came up, I was shocked. PG-13? THAT was a PG-13 movie? Really? In retrospect, there's not really any bad language, and what sex there is isn't more revealing than your average episode of CSI, but, jesus, it's a brutal movie. This just goes to show that the MPAA, and Americans in general, are still ridiculously prudish when it comes to sex and language, and ridiculously permissive with violence. Disgusting. The movie itself isn't bad, though I daresay that the movie WOULD be bad if Liam Neeson wasn't playing the lead. He makes a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Like most Luc Besson movies (he wrote this one), the particulars are ridicuolous, but not moreso than your average Seagal or Van Damme movie. Neeson's conviction sells it all, and gives his role an extra cold-blooded malice that would elude a more regular action star. He's the reason to see it. No other. Certainly not director Pierre Morel's handling of the action scenes, which are clumsy even for being filmed in the run and gun, shaky-cam style.

Three Dimensional

For the Vincent Price Challenge:

The Oblong Box (1969, directed by Gordon Hessler) teams Vincent Price with Christopher Lee in a film that was supposed to be directed by Michael Reeves before his untimely death. Pity. Maybe he could have made more of the film's ridiculous plot, involving disfigured noblemen, body snatchers, and voodoo. As it is, it looks a lot like a television film. Not the best work of anyone involved.

The touchstone film to see for the 3-D process has always been Andre de Toth's House of Wax (1953), which, coincidentally, more or less turned Vincent Price into the next generation's Boris Karloff. This was a prestige production and it shows, not only in its production values, but in the lush Technicolor photography. It's more or less a remake of The Mystery of the Wax Museum--also a pioneering Technicolor film in its day--minus the Glenda Farrell reporter and the snappy dialogue. It's probably better for the focus on the main plot, in which disfigured sculptor creates disturbingly realistic wax sculptures from the bodies of his victims. There's a hint of the moral universe of the slasher film here, as good-time girl on the make Carolyn Jones (later Morticia Addams) is a victim while her virginal friend, Phyllis Kirk is the final girl. I've always been amazed that the most impressive display of 3-D was made by a director who only had one eye. Go figure.

The modern 3-D process is marginally more sophisticated, but the effects committed to celluloid are more of the same. Long things (sticks, guns, pointy tools) stick out of the screen at the audience. One hopes that more talented directors than Patrick Lussier will make better use of the process. All told, Lussier's remake of My Bloody Valentine (2009) is competent and agreeably mean-spirited. The 3-D got me into the theater, so in that way, it's a success. I might have seen it anyway, since it has Tom Atkins in it in a Tom Atkins-y role. Plus he gets a memorable and thorougly revolting death scene. I think it's also interesting for taking the convention of having 30 year old actors playing teenagers and advancing the plot until they're the right age for their characters. It also gets points for knowing what the audience for its sub-genre wants: gore and nudity. True, there's only one nude scene in the movie, and it's NOT starring scorching hot Megan Boone, but kudos to Betsy Rue for playing an extended scene completely starkers, full frontal. It's a doozy. Unfortunately, the movie plays its hand too early, and if anyone doesn't catch on to who the killer really is before the 40 minute mark, they just aren't paying attention. Plus, all of the really "good" stuff is frontloaded, and I spent the last 30 minutes of the movie waiting for it all to play out. The 3-D itself seemed more like a distraction than anything--I think they really needed to keep a deep-focus composition through out (they didn't)--and I wonder how the movie plays without it. I'm not going to pay to find out, though.

The Silent Partner (1978, directed by Daryl Duke) is one of those films that used to show up late at night on cable in the early 1980s along with stuff like Guyana: Cult of the Damned or The Evictors. It's always been hard to find on video, though it was in print on at least two separate VHS labels. It finally made it to DVD last year, and there was much rejoicing. This is a razor sharp thriller, in which nebbish bank teller Elliot Gould foxes vicious bank robber Christopher Plummer. Unfortunately, Plummer KNOWS he's been had, and a game of cat and mouse ensues. This film originally stuck in my mind for two scenes. The first, Plummer making dire, reasoned threats at Gould through a mail slot. The second, one of the nastiest decapitation scenes in film. I can only imagine how that last scene must have shocked an audience expecting a more genteel film based on its cast. Credit where credit is due: screenwriter Curtis Hanson gives a masterclass in suspense clockwork (Hanson later made L. A. Confidential) and Plummer and Gould make it tick. I need to apologize to Elliot Gould, too. I've never liked Gould, and I've said bad things about his performance in this film, too. But it was unwarranted. He's nearly perfect. I also didn't realize it back when I first saw it, but this film LOOKS Canadian. It never dawned on me how much this film looks like Cronenberg or any miscellaneous slasher film from the same era. Maybe it's the light. In any event, this comes highly recommended.

Poe, Gangsters, Bogart

For the Vincent Price Challenge:

The Haunted Palace (1963, directed by Roger Corman). Long review here.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961, directed by Roger Corman). I used to think all of the Roger Corman Poe films were all alike. In terms of their subtexts, almost all of them ARE alike, but visually, they each have a unique identity. This one is very much the drabbest of them, a production heavy on the neutral colors and overall murk. It also has the most shocking ending of the Poe films, eschewing Corman's usual pyrotechnic displays in favor of a final shot worthy of E. C. Comics. Oh, Vincent Price essentially reprises his role as Roderick Usher for most of the film, before rampaging off into a more homicidal turn later. Les Baxter's score is suitably off-kilter, especially when it is first heard over the psychedelic colors of the pre-credit sequence. Not the best of the Poe films, I think, but the most fun of them.

The rest of the week:

It's no use for me to debate where GoodFellas (1990, directed by Martin Scorsese) ranks in the pantheon of Scorsese movies. It's not one of my favorites, but that's no big thing, because it doesn't need MY approval. For better or for worse, it's Scorsese's masterpiece, a film that distills everything Scorsese had learned about film to that point into 146 minutes of the director demonstrating what a motherfucker he is. As pure cinema, it's a joy to watch--no small feat for a film that relies heavily on a voice-over narration. It's so slick that it kind of mitigates it's aim of de-romanticizing the gangster archetype because the violence, when it comes, escalates over time into the operatic. The sequence late in the movie when we are given a tour of Jimmy the Gent's massacre of his collaborators is every bit the set-piece that the baptism sequence in The Godfather is.

Across the Pacific (1942, directed by John Huston) is kind of an anti-auteur movie, a gun-for-hire piecework that shows its director at his most anonymous, which is interesting given that the film re-unites three of the principles from Huston's version of The Maltese Falcon (Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, and Mary Astor). The story follows disgraced soldier/intelligence operative Bogart as he uncovers a plot to sabotage the Panama Canal on the eve of Pearl Harbor. It's propaganda, no doubt, and it shows how ugly propaganda can be: this is VERY racist, indulging in every negative stereotype of the Japanese one can imagine, while ALSO calling for the round-up of the Nisei because, of course, they can't be trusted, either. Ugly film, one that Huston himself had enough contempt for that he left it unfinished and insoluble for other hands to finish (in this case, the unfortunate Vincent Sherman, speaking of whom...).

All Through the Night (1941, directed by Vincent Sherman) is altogether more palatable, though no less propagandist. Made before America's entry into the war, this already warns of Nazi fifth columnists with villains Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre. Bogart is still in his gangster persona here, over-layered with a Runyon-esque veneer of all American tough guy. The character cast is deep, including Jackie Gleason, William Demarest, Phil Silvers, and Wallace Ford. Whatever else may be wrong with the film, it's fun to look at the faces on screen, and listen to that hard-boiled dialogue the Warner script department could churn out in their sleep. It's fun watching Bogart begin to turn the gangster persona into something else, a transformation he would complete in The Maltese Falcon.

Rome, Season 1

Episode 3: An Owl in a Thornbush
Episode 4: Stealing from Saturn

Things start to get fun--not that they weren't fun before--as Caesar crosses the Rubicon, Pompey retreats, Atia plots, and Pullo swipes the stolen treasury from Pompey's agents. I'm really digging Ciarán Hinds as Caesar--possibly the best Caesar I've ever seen (with the possible exception of Roddy McDowell in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes), and I'm really starting to like Ray Stevenson as Pullo. Polly Walker continues to steal the series, though. This is a serious porn-gasm for a history geek like me.

Into 2009.

This blog was never actually intended as a "blog" per se. I originally started it as a means of archiving the writing I've done on message boards (particularly at the IMDB). Somewhere along the line, it took on a life of its own. Right now, though, I'm pressed for time, so this week's posting is just a listing of what I've watched since the beginning of the year. I'll come back to all of this--perhaps even in this blog entry--and write something. I've already written about The Tomb of Ligeia and Laura on my stand-alone web site, and I don't really have much to say beyond what I originally wrote. I've included links. The rest? Maybe later in the week.

I'm not counting the movies I watch this year. I think I'll get more enjoyment out of them if I just watch them without worrying about making a quota. Anyway...

For the Vincent Price challenge on the IMDB Horror Boards:

The Tomb of Ligeia (1964, directed by Roger Corman)
Leave Her to Heaven (1945, directed by John M. Stahl)
Laura (1945, directed by Otto Preminger)
Vincent (1982, directed by Tim Burton)
While the City Sleeps (1955, directed by Fritz Lang)

Just for the fun of it:

The Last Life in the Universe (2003, directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang)

After Hours (1985, directed by Martin Scorsese)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, directed by Nicholas Stoller) Yay! Penis shots! Woo hoo!

Casablanca (1943, directed by Michael Curtiz)

Rome, Season One (2005)
Episode 1: "The Stolen Eagle (directed by Michael Apted)
Episode 2: "How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic" (directed by Michael Apted)

Agreeably violent, agreeably sexy, and loaded with the kind of palace intrigue that made I, Claudius so much fun to watch. This series rocks so far. Ciarán Hinds, they guy they got to play Caesar, is superb, but Polly Walker is in the process of stealing the show. Not hard to do when one gets that many nude scenes. Nice.

Cheers.

All Done for 2008. Happy New Year.

Wow. My last batch of films for 2008 certainly had a queer slant to them.

342. Gilda (1946, directed by Charles Vidor). The first hydrogen bomb was named "Gilda. " This movie is why. Rita Hayworth is the bombshell of all bombshells in this movie. The movie poster for this movie paints the dress she wears in "Put the Blame on Mame" as green, but in black and white, it becomes whatever color you like, so long as it's the color of sex. Incredibly, the two men in the story, Glenn Ford and George MacReady, seem to have eyes only for each other. This is just about the queerest movie the golden age of Hollywood ever produced.

343. Excalibur (1981, directed by John Boorman) is full of such obvious symbolism that it sometimes surprises me with how subtle it is. I mean, the interesting twinning effect that goes on at the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere never dawned on me before, as the camera follows Merlin and Morgana rather than the ceremony itself. Or maybe John Boorman realized that Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren were the two most interesting members of his cast, and decided that this was one of the best opportunities to take advantage. Nigel Terry and Nicholas Clay are pretty stiff as Arthur and Launcelot, though I took more notice of Cheri Lunghi this time round. Still, Boorman occasionally lets his half-assed mysticism get the better of him, even though the movie always looks fabulous.

344. All About My Mother (1999, directed by Pedro Almodovar) is the director's most heartfelt hymn to her, whether they be Madonnas or whores or both (Penelope Cruz play's a pregnant nun--you do the math). This is my favorite of Almodovar's movies, in part because it manages the not-inconsiderable feat of taking a character who starts as a cliche--Antonia San Juan's transsexual prostitute (sheesh, again?)--and gives her her dignity as just another woman. Oh, and Cecilia Roth is my favorite of Pedro's leading ladies.

345. Milk (2008, directed by Gus Van Sant) is a film that packs so much shock of recognition into its moral arc that it's hard not to see it through the lens of contemporary GLBT politics. The events of Harvey Milk's life seem to have replayed themselves writ large in 2008. One could very well mistake this as a VERY IMPORTANT MOVIE, but for the fact that it's too damned much fun as a movie. It would have been easy for Gus Van Sant, the commercial filmmaker, to phone this in. Instead, we get Gus Van Sant the eccentric filmmaker instead. Parts of this are playful. Parts of it are lovely. All of it is acted to the hilt. Sean Penn gets a new lease on relevence with this film. It's his most approachable role in years--if you don't mind watching guys kissing, that is. Pity that element alone will keep some audiences away. Alas. In any event, it strikes me that Milk's revolution is similar to the one kinda sorta going today, in which GLBT youth aren't satisfied with the status quo of either their place in the world or their place in the GLBT establishment and are taking to the streets to take what they want. More power too 'em. The change is coming.

346. A Christmas Story (1983, directed by Bob Clark). Y'know, this perennial chestnut isn't that great for great whacks of its running time, but when it clicks, it really clicks. My favorite episode? Ralphie's relationship with the "ef" word, and its consequences. I sometimes wonder about the deal with the devil Bob Clark made. It came partly due shortly after this movie hit theaters--Clark never made anything even remotely worth a damn afterwards.

347. "The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello" (2005, directed by Anthony Lucas) (via YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vORsKyopHyM) uses the same animation technique that Lotte Reiniger used in The Adventures of Prince Achmed, but it mixes in nearly a century of other animation techniques, too. It's a steampunk bitches brew of Jules Verne and H. P. Lovecraft that shouldn't work, but does. It's kind of wonderful. But see for yourself:



348. The Magnificent Ambersons (1941, directed by Orson Welles) remains the cinema's most interesting murdered movie. It's been a while since I saw it last and in the interim, I've read Booth Tarkington's novel. Welles knew Tarkington as a boy, and always thought that George Amberson Minifer was based on himself. Of course, he has his revenge, given that Tarkington is today remembered mainly because Welles made this movie. Such are the vaguaries of literary reputations. In any event, it strikes me that the studio may have had a point in appending a "happy" ending. Their ending more closely resembles the book. Mind you, I'd LOVE to see Welles's cut (come on South America! Yield up Welles's print!), but I can live with the current film. It really is lovely. And brisk! It rampages through the story without a pause. It's obviously a movie that's a masterpiece in some form or other--but maybe not at it's current 88 minute form. Or even maybe in that form at that.

349. Quills (2000, directed by Philip Kaufman) is remarkably sympathetic to the Marquis De Sade. He's the voice of freedom in addition to being the raging id of the Enlightenment. This is, make no mistake, a literary horror movie, in which the subject is not de Sade, but books: what it takes to make them, what books work upon the world, and who, ultimately, profits by them. Oh, it's about a lot of other things, too--particularly the notion that one can enjoy erotica without actually wanting to wallow in what it depicts, which brings me to...

350. Crash (1996, directed by David Cronenberg), which is the director's most misunderstood movie. Who in their right minds gets off on car crashes? The smart-ass in me wants to direct anyone who asks that question to a demolition derby, but it's really a moot point. The movie isn't about this particular (fictional) fetish, so much as it's about fetish in general. Car crashes are a stand in for whatever perverse thing turns your crank. It could be high heeled shoes or tightlaced corsets or furry animal suits. It doesn't matter. The characters in this movie are ensnared by their sexual pecadilloes to the point where they cannot function, cannot feel pleasure, without them. The ending of this movie--in which James Spader and Deborah Unger search for the next crash/orgasm--is the best instance I know where a movie shows the sexual impulse and the death impulse side by side with a clear eye. I think this movie is a masterpiece.

Finally, finishing up with The Chronological Donald Duck:

351. "Working for Peanuts" (1953, directed by Jack Hannah)
352. "Canvas Back Duck" (1953, directed by Jack Hannah)
353. "Donald's Diary" (1954, directed by Jack Kinney)
354. "Dragon Around" (1954, directed by Jack Hannah)
355. "Grin and Bear It" (1954, directed by Jack Hannah)
356. "The Flying Squirrel" (1954, directed by Jack Hannah)
357. "Grand Canyonscope" (1954, directed by Charles Nichols)
358. "Spare the Rod" (1954, directed by Jack Hannah)
359. "Bearly Asleep" (1955, directed by Jack Hannah)
360. "Beezy Bear" (1955, directed by Jack Hannah)
361. "Up a Tree" (1955, directed by Jack Hannah)
362. "No Hunting" (1955, directed by Jack Hannah)
363. "Chips Ahoy" (1956, directed by Jack Kinney)
364. "How to Have An Accident in The Home" (1956, directed by Charles Nichols)
364. "How to Have An Accident At Work" (1959, directed by Charles Nichols)
365. "Donald and the Wheel" (1961, directed by Hamilton Luske)
366. "The Litterbug" (1961, directed by Hamilton Luske)

The interesting thing to me about this bunch of ducks isn't the way they interchange Donald and the Park Ranger from cartoon to cartoon, or the fact that these take such a dim view of romance ("Donald's Diary" and "How To Have An Accident in the Home"), nor even the sometimes over-looked fact that Donald appears to have actually married Daisy at some point and had a kid with her, but rather, the way that Disney, like every other American animation studio in the 1950s, moved away from lush, full animation to a flatter, more abstract style. They mostly did it with their backgrounds, and they mostly did it in a very intelectual way. I mean, consider this landscape from "How To Have An Accident in the Home":



It reads as a landscape, but it's no more "realistic" than a painting by Cezanne (with which it shares some characteristics). Or take this shot from "How To Have An Accident at Work":



This still-frame has no acquaintance with mathematical perspective. It's completely abstract. Almost cubist. And yet, it works. Even at this late date, Disney's animators were master-designers.

The last batch of these cartoons have an educational bent to them, before Donald bowed out as a movie star in 1961's "The Litterbug." He would return, eventually, in such later features as Fantasia 2000 and Mickey's Christmas Carol, but they weren't HIS movies. Alas.

Closing in On Year's End

Catching up. Only two weeks to go on my little experiment.

John Adams (2008):
324. Join or Die
325. Independence
326. Don't Tread On Me
327. Reunion
328. Unite or Die

Interesting portrait of the crankiest of America's founders. Terrific production values and the kind of grittiness HBO likes to add to its historical mini-series give value to what could be a dry recitation of facts. Hell, this is downright exciting. But for one small thing: Paul Giamatti seems the wrong actor for Adams. Oh, he's probably historically accurate, but Williams Daniels pretty much owns the role for all time in the musical, 1776 (I saw Daniels in a traveling version of the stage show with my mother sometime in the mid-seventies, so there's a double-reinforcement). Unfair to Giamatti? Probably. He's a capable actor and his performance grows on you as the miniseries unfolds. And fortunately, Laura Linney is amazing as Abigail Adams. She's been knocking them out of the park for a while now, and this is the best I've ever seen her. Did anyone else ever have to read the letters between John and Abigail Adams for school? It's one of my favorite love stories. Other performances are equally good, particularly Danny Huston as Samuel Adams and Tom Wilkinson as a surprisingly unscrupulous Ben Franklin.

I'm listing the episodes as individual films because, for the most part, they feel like individuals--especially the long second episode--with individual dramatic arcs. Two more to go.

The Chronological Donald Duck:
329. "Let's Stick Together" (1952, Directed by Jack Hannah)
330. "Donald's Apple Core" (1952, Directed by Jack Hannah)
331. "Trick or Treat" (1952, Directed by Jack Hannah)
332. "Don's Fountain of Youth" (1953, Directed by Jack Hannah)
333. "The New Neighbor" (1953, Directed by Jack Hannah)
334. "Donald in Mathmagic Land" (1959, Directed by Hamilton Luske)

More Ducks. There are some standouts here. "Trick or Treat" features Disney's take on a benevolent cartoon witch (voiced by the great June Foray), while "The New Neighbor" is practically the same film as Norman McLaren's "Neighbors" from the previous year. I remember seeing "Donald in Mathmagic Land" in a math class when I was in grade school. I was delighted to see it again here. It's deliriously abstract, and is a primer for anyone who wants to excel at billiards. They don't make educational films like this one anymore.

335. An Actor's Revenge (1963, directed by Kon Ichikawa) has been retitled for video as "The Revenge of a Kabuki Actor" by Animeigo, the current distributor. Apart from this, I have no quibbles with the edition. It's not as good a print as the old Criterion laserdisc, but Animeigo's anal-retentive subtitling and cultural notes more than make up for it. And it's not a bad print, either way. The movie itself, about the revenge of an onigatta, and the web of thieves that surround the kabuki theater, is strikingly theatrical to the point where the viewer might not notice how playful it is as cinema. For example, having the same actor play two different characters who appear on screen at the same time is a feat beyond the theater. Mind you, the story is fascinating, but the film that surrounds the story is a tour de force in meta-cinematic legerdemain.

336. M (1931, directed by Fritz Lang). By all accounts, Fritz Lang was a complete bastard to work with, a man who epitomized the sadistic director. By contrast, his wife, Thea Von Harbou, was said to be one of the nicest of people. Lang, of course, fled the Nazis shortly after M was made. Von Harbou remained and joined the Nazi Party. You can never tell about people, I guess, which is part of the point of this film, one of the greatest of all films. This presents a world turned upside down, in which the criminals enforce the law and justice, in which a harmless little man murders children. It's a film in which Lang abandons the grandiosity of his previous productions (Metropolis, Siegfried, The Woman on the Moon) in favor of a stark, reportorial style that prefigures film noir. And it features one of Peter Lorre's greatest performances. Lorre completely steals the film, even though he's really only center stage for the last fifteen minutes. Even so, the movie is subtle. The tune Lorre whistles is "The Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt, which suggests he's spiritually a troll. He can't help himself. His crimes are what trolls do. It's in his nature. He throws this back at his accusers--and by proxy at the audience--who aren't trolls. What's THEIR excuse? They have a choice to be criminals or not.

It's not a surprise that the Nazis didn't much like this film.

As an aside, this was the last film at our local arthouse's Wild Weimar film series. I LOVED seeing these films with an audience. Watching them on video just doesn't do them justice.

The Godfather (1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

337. The Godfather Part II (1974, directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

338. The Godfather Part III (1990, directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

So, this time through the entire Godfather Trilogy, I was struck by both the absolute necessity of the third movie, and by it's relative failure. It's necessary from a structural point of view. If, as Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola clearly intend, the Godfather saga is collectively "The Tragedy of Michael Corleone," then leaving things as they stood at the end of the second film with Michael sitting on a bench completely alienated from his family doesn't work. By this time, Michael is such a cold fish that one might wonder what a shark feels for the fish that it eats. At this point, "The Tragedy of Michael Corleone" is that he once had a conscience and he loses it. His lack of a conscience is his tragic flaw. And while that's interesting, it's not very engaging on a gut level.

The major influence on The Godfather films is Luchino Visconti (want an example? Take a hard look at Rocco and his Brothers or The Leopard and see what I mean). From Visconti, Coppola developed a taste for the operatic. This is most evident in the Baptism montage in the first film, which is orchestrated like grand opera. And opera is an idiom of emotion. The end of The Godfather Part II has a dark chill to it, but it's as stoic as the expression on Al Pacino's face.

So the third film is necessary. Why? Because for the kind of tragedy Coppola and Puzo want, it is necessary for an innocent to die. This is the Shakespearean model--which is a model from the first film onward, too, given that Coppola initially viewed the saga as a variant of King Lear. And in order for the full force of the tragedy to take place, Michael Corleone has to thaw. So, in the third film, we find Michael wracked by guilt for the murder of Fredo, desperately trying to enter the legitimate business world, giving huge amounts of money to the Catholic Church as some kind of atonement. But, of course, his previous life won't let him escape. This is a sympathetic Michael. We see the Michael Corleone who volunteered for the Army here, the one who told Kay that he wasn't like his family. It's not completely without precedent in the series, and if one accepts it, the accidental death of Mary Corleone at the end of the movie IS the fulcrum of the collective "Tragedy of Michael Corelone."

I don't have much of an issue with the casting of Sofia Coppola as Mary Corleone, really. I don't believe that Sonny's bastard son, Vinnie would find her irresistible, but there's a level of suspension of disbelief in all movies. She's not on stage all that much. Where The Godfather Part III goes wrong is in thawing Michael Corleone too much. This is not recognizable as the same character who was so cold-blooded that he ordered the murder of his brother with a single glance. And that's the structural flaw in the third film. The first time I saw this movie, I bought it completely. These days, I have an uneasy relationship with it.

I think about these things too much.


339. Hero (2002, directed by Zhang Yimou) can be seen as a propaganda film. I suspect that Zhang had to slant the film just so to get it made. If one views it as such, one can still groove on the spectacle. Christopher Doyle's cinematography is still so beautiful that it bids fair to make one's eyes water. But I noticed something strange about it this time: All of the variants on the story told by the film's assassin are color coded, indicating that none of them is true, that all of them are stories. But then, so is the framing sequence! I never noticed it before because the code color for this sequence is black rather than the bright colors of the rest of the film, which is a clever way to hide it. What does this mean? Is the film to be trusted in any measure? Or is the film entirely about storytelling rather than about politics? It might be.

340. No Regrets for Our Youth (1946, directed by Akira Kurosawa). Relieved of the restrictions of wartime censorship, this early film by the great director turns its gaze on censorship itself. This is not the fully formed, robust director of the next decade, but he was already pretty good. The opening sequence, in which lead character Setsuko Hara is chased by her suitors reminds me of Bergman for some reason. Later Kurosawa seems to have no interest in women, so it's a surprise to see that he's fairly deft with a female lead. It doesn't hurt that Setsuko Hara is one of the great actresses in Japanese film, but details.

341. Voice (2005, directed by Ik-hwan Choe) is the fourth in the Korean "Haunted Girls School" series. This one eschews the horror show of the third entry (Wishing Stairs) and goes back to the second (Memento Mori) for its themes, though it approaches them from a fresh perspective. The point of view of the movie is that of the ghost. This might seem an awkward conceit, but it works well enough here, and it enables the filmmakers to examine what death really is in their minds. Mostly, it's loneliness. Oh, there's a big reveal of the plot mechanism at the end of the film, and it's not entirely awful, but the film doesn't really need it. The director, Ik-hwan Choe, was an assistant on Whispering Corridors, the first film in the series, so this brings things full circle, in a way.

The Two Faces of The Scarecrow

316. I don't believe I ever saw the full version of Walt Disney's The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (1964, directed by James Neilson) when I was a kid, but I remember its shorter theatrical version very well. That film was titled Dr. Syn Alias the Scarecrow. In truth, there's not a whole lot of difference between the two versions. Admittedly, the theatrical version is a bit brisker of pace, but at the expense of some characterization. In any event, this is variant of the Zorro myth, set in the England of George III. Patrick McGoohan plays saintly Dr. Syn, the vicar of Dymchurch, who, by night, leads a gang of smugglers as the terrifying Scarecrow to help the locals endure the burden of excess taxation. Of course, the king's men come to town to try to catch him and he outwits them in three separate episodes (or acts). It's rollicking adventure that works because Patrick McGoohan is terrific in the lead. As the Scarecrow, he adopts a terrifying, guttural voice that sounds like a bearing about to go bad. This voice is abetted by a striking character design by the costume department, with its twisted smile. As Dr. Syn, McGoohan is saintly, but with a sly twinkle behind his eyes. And he looks like a man who has and keeps secrets. And, oh, my! He was a looker in his youth (note to self: track down Danger Man). His supporting cast of British stalwarts lends the whole enterprise a gravitas that grounds some of the pulpier aspects of the story. This one was a favorite of mine as a kid. I'm glad to see that it holds up.

317. Hammer's competing version of the Scarecrow story changes a few key details for legal reasons--Disney having sewn up the rights to certain aspects of the story--and is a darker film over-all. Captain Clegg (1962, directed by Peter Graham Scott) was re-titled Night Creatures in the US and finally saw the light of day on Universal's Hammer box a few years ago. It, too, is carried on the strength of its lead performance. Peter Cushing's Dr. Syn (renamed "Dr. Blyss" in this version) has a good deal more menace in him as the vicar, and the movie retains the character's piratical past. The movie is a good deal more violent, too, and shows its hand right from the get-go with a memorable marooning sequence in which a man has his ears slit and tongue cut out before being imprisoned on an island. But the overall arc of the film is the same. Its one of Hammer's more handsome films from the period and the filmmakers have given some of Hammer's stock character actors their heads in this one, notably Michael Ripper as Mr. Mipps, who positively beams at the chance to show an impish sense of humor.

The new Disney Treasures tins include volume four of The Chronological Donald Duck. I love me some Donald Duck (you can blame Carl Barks for this). The current volume features cartoons that were a constant staple of Disney's television empire, so I'm very familiar with all of these:

318. "Dude Duck" (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)
319. "Corn Chips" (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)
320. "Test Pilot" Donald (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)
321. "Lucky Number" (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)
322. "Out of Scale" (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)
323. "Bee on Guard" (1951, directed by Jack Hannah)

In most of these, Donald contends with Chip and Dale, who always seem to cross his path. I always used to think that Chip and Dale were male and female, especially with the way Chip is sometimes drawn as the more effeminate of the two. Lately, I'm convinced that they're gay. But that has nothing to do with what's on screen. It's just my impression. That's all. We also get a Hewey, Dewey, and Louie appearance in a rare depiction of the trio as teenagers. And a bee. Donald has no luck with any of them. The weirdest of these cartoons is "Dude Duck", in which Donald hops off the bus after a gaggle of human women. I've always been able to accept the anthropomorphism in Disney's cartoon so long as it follows Barks's Duckberg model, in which everyone is an anthropomorphized character. Putting human characters in the frame is just weird.

324. There are a lot of things to dislike about the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace (2008, directed by Marc Forster). It's cut too fast. It has no sense of geography in the action scenes. It is fairly lacking in the series' signature humor. It lacks a baroque, comic-opera villain. This is all true. But I came out of the film liking it none the less. I really like the theme song by Jack White and Alicia Keys, which has a distinction that the last several theme songs have lacked: it actually sounds like a Bond theme. The credit sequence is much improved over Casino Royale--again, it seems like the credit sequence of a Bond film. And it has a pretty good story. An acquaintance of mine thought that the McGuffin--our villain is cornering the market on water--was pretty lame; but I grew up in Colorado where there's a saying that "Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting." So it made perfect sense to me. I LOVE that the filmmakers are re-inventing SPECTRE and SMERSH for the 21st Century (and in a way that seems all too plausible). Oh, and Daniel Craig is inhabiting the role of Bond quite nicely. Oh, my, yes. James Bond will return, the credits tell us. I'm looking forward to it.