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.

Two By Yoshitaro Nomura

It's Japan week here in my corner of the blogosphere. I thought I'd kick it off with a look at two movies from director Yoshitaro Nomura. This has been reworked slightly from a review I wrote on the occasion of Nomura's death in 2005.

Zero Focus (Zero no shoten), 1963. Directed by Yoshitaro Nomura. Yoshiko Kuga, Hizuru Takachiro, Ineko Arima, Koji Nambara.

The Demon (Kichiku), 1978. Directed by Yoshitaro Nomura. Ken Ogata, Shima Iwashita, Mayumi Ogawa, Hiroki Iwase.

---

It's a cruel twist of fate that the generation of Japanese filmmakers who survived World War II are dying off just as they are finally beginning to step out of the shadows of the titans of Japanese cinema. For decades, directors like Kihachi Okamoto, Hideo Gosha, Seijun Suzuki, Kenji Misumi, Kinji Fukasaku, and Yasuzo Masamura have been all but eclipsed by the all consuming shadows cast by Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi. Masamura didn't live to see a stirring of interest in his films; Giants and Toys, Manji, and Blind Beast are all gaining in stature in the West. Fukasaku got to enjoy a measure of success at the end of his life with the mammoth popularity of Battle Royale, which in turn has sparked a renewed interest in his great yakuza movies from the 1970s. Two years after his death, Fukasaku probably has more of his films available world-wide than any other Japanese director. Others have not been so lucky. Both Okamoto and Gosha are known primarily to a cult audience, though Okamoto's Sword of Doom has become a minor classic. Only Seijun Suzuki has been able to really enjoy the revival of his reputation and the global dissemination of his films. Both Okamoto and Yoshitaro Nomura died in early 2005. Nomura was just beginning to find an audience in the West. Home Vision put two of his films out in solid DVD editions at roughly the hour of his death. Many of these directors were genre specialists; Nomura's forte was film noir.

Zero Focus from 1963 could teach a lot of filmmakers something about economy of editing. A mystery in the mode of Hitchcock, this is a film that doesn't waste time on bullshit. Every shot counts. Every scene fits like the gears in a clockwork. Every edit moves the narrative forward. At first, this seems like it is wound almost too tight, but as the film unspools during its second half, as the mystery is played out against the spectacular landscapes of northern Japan, the film finds time to breathe. This is kinda sorta the same technique that Kurosawa used in High and Low (in which the strictly formal interior shots of the first half give way to the sprawl of Tokyo), but it works just as well here. This film was written by Shinobu Hashimoto and Yoji Yamada, so Zero Focus has a superb writing pedigree. The cinematography by Takashi Kawamata is austere and gorgeous.

The story itself is worthy of Cornell Woolrich. A woman's fiancée leaves Tokyo to tie up some loose business interests for his job in the north of Japan, where he promptly vanishes. No one knows where he went. No one remembers seeing him. His fiance` combs the countryside for a clue to his whereabouts. She is aided by her fiancée's employer and by his brother. When her fiancée's brother turns up dead, and when the police rule her fiancée's death a suicide, she heads back to Tokyo, but a year later, with time to work things out, she heads back North to verify her suspicions...

Crime fiction is often sociological fiction. In Zero Focus, Nomura is confronting certain societal roles for Japanese women and certain cultural weaknesses in Japanese men. Because of the nature of the mystery, I have to describe this in an eliptical fashion, because those roles for women and weaknesses of men are at the very heart of the mystery on display. I'm loathe to give this away, because it's best that the viewer approach the film knowing absolutely nothing.

Some of the same thematic concerns lie behind The Demon, from 1978, and it is perhaps best to discuss them in conjunction with that film instead. The Demon lays everything on the line at the outset, so it's less prone to being spoilt by indiscreet writers on the internet. Although the plots of these two movies are very different, in a lot of respects, they are the same movie. A critic with an auteurist bent could go to town on these two films.

The Demon isn't technically a horror movie, but it's plenty horrifying none the less. There are no actual supernatural shenanigans in the movie (the title is a misnomer of sorts). The film begins like a film by Mizoguchi or Naruse, then transforms into a Hitchcockian thriller: A woman burdened by her three children dumps them on her shirking lover (who is married to another woman). Their father is weak. His wife is incensed that he would cheat on her to the tune of three children. Their mother vanishes into the night. For the rest of the movie, the father and his wife contrive to rid themselves of the children.

I'm not entirely sure what it is about the Japanese that gives rise to this sort of psychodrama, but they do it better than anyone. Ken Ogata is superb in the lead role (I guess he's the demon of the title, but a more pathetic demon you will not find); his performance here reminds me a lot of the serial killer he played in Vengeance is Mine. Shima Iwashita is astounding as his wife--she's a fairly major actress, but I can't imagine any actress playing so cold-hearted and unsympathetic a role. As wicked stepmothers go, Cinderella's stepmom ain't got nothing on Iwashita. The two major set pieces in the movie consist of Ogata taking his daughter (the middle child) to the top of the Tokyo tower, and abandoning her there, and taking his son (the oldest) to the north of Japan with the intention of throwing him off a cliff into the sea. The trip to the north is excruciating, because we can see the father and son begin to form the bonds one expects of a father and son. Will he do it? This is the basis of the suspense. For anyone with children, or for anyone who remembers being a child, this film is a mine field. Anyone who feels uncomfortable watching children in danger or watching children (seemingly) harmed should stay far, far away from this movie.

The weakness of men and the vulnerability of women to exploitation by that weakness is the dominant theme in The Demon. It's possible that this is a theme that becomes prevalent in Japanese cinema at large because of the lingering defeat in World War II, but Nomura doesn't frame it that way. In both films, weak men are salarimen, not ex-soldiers. These films seem deeply suspicious of the men in charge of Japan's "economic miracle" in the sixties and seventies. The desperation of the women in these films in the face of that weakness is palpable.

I'll say this for Yoshitaro Nomura: he sure knows how to pick his writers. Masato Ide, his screenwriter for The Demon, wrote Kurosawa's Red Beard, Kagemusha, and Ran. Nomura also seems drawn to the cliffs in the north of Japan--Zero Focus, makes use of the same locations. The Demon does something interesting, though. Where Zero Focus presented the location in a stark black and white, The Demon drenches the sea in red light. A sea of blood? In the context of the film, oh yeah....

Rust

I'm late to the party on Superman: Doomsday (2007, directed by Bruce Timm, Lauren Montgomery, and Brandon Vietti). In truth, I didn't want to rent it and I didn't want to buy it. I had something of the same reaction to the comic book upon which the movie is based back in 1993. I was reading Superman at the time, but for some reason, I skipped the whole "Death of Superman" story. It remains a gap in the Superman section of my longboxes to this very day. The story that followed it was pretty spiffy. It was titled "The Reign of the Supermen" and it even had a cinematic legacy in so far as it introduced Steel, later to be portrayed on screen by Shaquille O'Neal. Regardless, this cover does not occur in my vast archive of comics:

I was pretty disenchanted with superheroes at the time. Still am, actually. And Superman: Doomsday is a good reason why. The original story was basically a punching match, and while Dan Jurgens was certainly an expert cartoonist when it came to all things pugilistic, I just didn't care. There wasn't really any suspense, there wasn't any sense of something at stake. You could tell that the character--and I use the word loosely--of Doomsday was intended specifically for one plot purpose and one plot purpose only. To beat Superman to death.

Fun, eh?

Well, this purpose is carried over to the movie. I suppose I could live with that if it weren't for the fact that what turned me off of superhero comics in the first place was the sense that the creators of them were weaned on WWF Wrestling on Saturday afternoons. That's what these comics became. And like the WWF, comics completely marginalize women. Women are a pair of boobs. This is a problem with this movie in particular, because the story features a prominent role for Lois Lane. You could argue that she's co-equal with Superman in this, and there's a long precedence for this in Superman stories. For the most part, Superman: Doomsday actually does get Lois Lane right, even to the point of advancing her relationship with Superman in a logical way. But why, then, does it seem like she's always dressed like a hooker in this? Super-low-cut tanks and skin-tight leather miniskirts are her workaday attire. I mean, really? There's a serious disconnect between the character as written and the visual. And it's infuriating.

Also infuriating is the maturity of Jimmy Olsen, boy photographer. Well, he grows up a bit here. He turns paparazzi for the tabloids and behaves more or less like the worst douchebag you've ever met.

Really.

Jimmy Olsen is a douchebag.

Oy.

That all said, the second half of the movie is interesting. They've scrapped the baroque "Reign of the Superman" story for a variant, in which Lex Luthor clones Superman to do his bidding. But the cloned Superman has an agenda all his own, one that mines the essential fascism of the superhero archetype for all it's worth. This part of the movie acts as an interesting exploration of the psyche of Lex Luthor, which is, frankly, the best part of the movie. Lex's plot to fill the sky with Superman clones under his command is one of the better evil plots. I also like the depiction of The Toyman, one of Superman's more ridiculous villains, here turned into a kind of deranged pederast. He's creepy as hell, but he also exists to demonstrate a point, and that point is very, very ugly. And then there's a big fight at the end. Yawn.

Thinking about the way this film resolves itself, I was struck by yet another thing that bothered the hell out of me about the reboot of Star Trek. Like this film, Star Trek's ending depends on the resolution of a fistfight. There are a LOT of movies where this is the gauntlet the hero has to run to save the day, in varying degrees of stupidity. Heroes never save the day through guile, cunning, or charm anymore. Fisticuffs it is. One longs for Dr. Doom as done by Lee and Kirby to show up and proclaim that "Doom does not engage in fisticuffs." Alas.

What really disappoints me about all of this is the fact that this is the work of Bruce Timm, whose earlier work with Superman (and Batman) was absolutely stellar. This is a sad come-down. The Superman Animated Series was easily as good as any depiction of the character and it's better than most. Best of all, that show didn't dress Lois Lane like a hooker.

Kind of a Drag...

Reprinted from my web site, my thoughts on Sam Raimi's return to horror:

Drag Me To Hell , 2009. Directed by Sam Raimi. Allison Lohman, Lorna Raver, Justin Long, David Paymer, Dileep Rao, Adriana Barraza, Reggie Lee.

---

Synopsis: Bank loan officer Christine Brown is feeling the her head bump against the glass ceiling at her bank. She's up for a promotion to assistant manager, if only she can demonstrate that she's tougher than her rival, Stu, who, though less experienced--Christine is still training him in some elements of the job--has ingratiated himself to her boss. Her boss tells her that she needs to develop a taste for the jugular, she needs to make the really tough decisions. Enter Mrs. Ganush, an elderly gypsy woman who is on the verge of losing her house because medical bills have caused her to get behind on her mortgage. Christine choses Mrs. Ganush as the recipient of her new-found ruthlessness. Bad move. Mrs. Ganush curses Christine and soon a demon is stalking her. That demon will drag her soul to hell in three days if she doesn't find a way to break the spell...

Commentary: Some years ago, a friend of mine observed that both of Sam Raimi's first two Evil Dead movies bore more than a passing resemblance to Robert Wise's The Haunting. True, Raimi added buckets of grue to the basic techniques, but in generaly, he's right. The Evil Dead movies get their most disorienting effects from booming noises on the soundtrack and distorted camera angles and movements. Clearly, then, Raimi had a respect for the classics.

Fast forward twenty some years. Now we have Raimi's long-awaited return to the horror genre, and lo and behold, Raimi has given us another set of reference points to a classic horror movie. This time, it's Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon. Oh, the details differ a little. The set-up may be lifted from Stephen King's Thinner, but its basic narrative structure is the same, as is its thematic pitting of reason against superstition. Christine even spends the last part of the film trying to pass her curse on to someone else, just as Dana Andrews tried to pass on the runes. In keeping with this particular influence, Drag Me To Hell actually doesn't really need the spew and grue of the Evil Dead movies. Raimi knows how to ratchet up the mood and the tension--he turns out to be pretty good at it--and in some ways, the spew that this film DOES include almost seems out of place. Still, Raimi has always been inventive with the gross-out, too, and he doesn't skimp on it here. How this film avoided an "R" rating, I can only guess. It might have been better off with one.

The most surprising thing about this film is that it more or less leaves behind Raimi's penchant for horror comedies. This is a determined and grim movie and what laughs there are are few and far between. Additionally, Raimi has provided us with a protagonist who is seriously flawed. She loses her moral compass repeatedly through the course of the film and does things that put her beyond the pale. She's almost the protagonist in an E. C. Comics vein, one who realizes her mistakes too late and gets everything that's coming to her. There's a certain amount of disconnect between the audience and Christine, which is pretty much deliberate on the part of the filmmakers. They've countered this portrayal a bit by casting cute-as-a-bug Allison Lohman in the lead. Cute aside, this IS a Raimi movie and Raimi loves to torment his protagonists. Christine, like Ash before her, is put through all kinds of hell.

Still and all, Raimi doesn't make deep movies, and this one is no different. What cultural subtext there is in this film is probably an accident (Raimi and his brother, Ivan, wrote the film in the 1990s). This is basically a funhouse ride, and on that count, it works wonderfully. It's also nice to see Raimi reasserting his own cinematic anima after sublimating so thoroughly for the Spider-Man films. And who am I to begrudge these things?

It's a fun movie.

10 Favorite Characters (or, I'm Just Wild About Harry)

I don't remember where I saw this particular blogging meme--it's not my idea, and I apologize to its originator for not remembering who you are--but I thought I'd try my hand at it. Ten of my favorite characters in film. Oddly enough, several of them are named Harry. Starting with:



Reverend Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter, a man with love and hate tattooed on the knuckles of his hands (cue The Clash's "Death or Glory"). This is one of Robert Mitchum's best roles. Mitchum always seemed a flawed hero, but as a villain, he was second to no one. Harry Powell is every child's nightmare parent, and the film around him seizes this bete noir and amplifies it with a dark poetry of shadows. I confess, though, that he's not the only villainous Harry close to my heart. There's also:


Harry Lime in The Third Man, a character who's mostly a rumor through the majority of the film's running time, but that just makes his introduction into the film that much more striking. Like Harry Powell, Harry Lime is a creature of the shadows, a monster from the chthonian depths of the earth--in the film incarnated as Vienna's sewer system. When Lime ascends into the heavens on a ferris wheel, it's to regale Holly Martins with his toxic philosophy of life.

"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

There's a touch of Cesare Borgia in Harry Lime, which I presume that Orson Welles brought to the role from his work on The Prince of Foxes the same year. He's known to have written his own dialogue in this scene. Like all of the monsters of middle Europe, Harry Lime is hounded to death by angry villagers.

But for sheer screen menace, I turn to another Harry:

Mr. Harry Roat from Scarsdale in Wait Until Dark, as played by Alan Arkin. At first, he's innocuous. Almost a buffoon. But the movie peels away that veneer over its running time until you have raw, murderous, id raging on the screen. Again, Harry Roat is a creature of shadows. During the last act of the movie (the movie is very much a filmed play), this is literally true, as champion blind lady Audrey Hepburn has smashed all of the lights in her house to put herself on an even footing with Roat. But she forgot one. And he finds it. For sheer, white-knuckled terror, it's hard to top the end of Wait Until Dark, and as hard as I search, I can't think of a more terrifying villain.

In a somewhat less sinister vein:


We have J. J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success, who never the less may be more thoroughly destructive than any of my villainous Harrys. Hunsecker's sadomasochistic taunting of lickspittle Sydney Falco is the kind of part actors drool over, and Burt Lancaster sinks his fangs deep and thrashes around a bit with it. As he says to Falco: "I'd hate to take a bite outta you. You're a cookie full of arsenic." Hunsecker is a walking, talking metaphor for the corruption of big media, and he's as relevant today as he was then. And he's more credible than similar characters like Lonesome Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd or Howard Beale in Network. This is partly because the filmmakers have based Hunsecker on real life columnist Walter Winchell, but in his conception, he's the equivalent of the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liasons, all wrapped up in one bitter, brutal, queer package.

And since I seem to be attracted to rogues, let me offer one more before moving on to my favorite female characters:

Tuco in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I'm not even sure Tuco is a villain, though he's certainly amoral and uncouth. But he's wise, too. Wiser than Angel Eyes, and possibly wiser than Blondie, who outwits him in the end. That's a matter of cunning, though. Not necessarily wisdom. In any event, Tuco's rule is something that all movie villains and some movie heroes should take to heart: "When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk." Which explains, perhaps, why Eli Wallach never played a Bond villain.

Moving on to women...


Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in the Alien movies is, of course, the great female action hero. She's a bit more than that, though, because, if she's an action hero, she's certainly not a typical action hero. I mean, in Hollywood parlance, action heroes are supposed to be loose cannons, who get their best results once they're off the reservations and the rules don't apply to them anymore (after they've turned in their badges, as it were). Ripley is the complete opposite. In the first film, she's the only character who demands that they run the ship by the book and she's completely right about it. This is positively unheard of. More than that, though, she's not weakened by her femininity, even though the first film would have you think that she is when she goes back for the stupid fucking cat. But her inherent femaleness is what really stands out, especially in the second movie, which is an ode to motherhood run amok. In Aliens, she comes into her own as a character that might have stepped out of a novel by Joanna Russ.

Still, I'm a sucker for villains:


Kathy Moffet in Out of the Past remains the gold standard for fatal femmes. You can have your Barbara Stanwycks and your Jeanne Moreaus, Jane Greer is a dame to kill for, and she devours Robert Mitchum AND Kirk Douglas. From the moment she appears, backlit by the Mexican sunlight, she's every promise ever made by duplicitous women. Men? They're pawns to her, and she plays them mercilessly. Here's the touchstone, though. One of my problems with Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity is that I have a hard time believing that sad sack Fred MacMurray would kill for her. With Kathy Moffet, though, you believe it from the instant you see her. Kill, sell your soul, anything she asks.


I think I might actually kill for either Green Snake or White Snake in Tsui Hark's Green Snake. Maggie Cheung plays the title character, with Joey Wang as her sister. Both are snake spirits who have assumed human form as a leg up on their spiritual development. Green is still very much serpentine, and she's my favorite from this movie for two reasons: one, the Indian serpent dance that the newly human Green Snake performs, naked (though you never see anything) is just about the sexiest thing anyone has EVER put on film. Two, I'm totally infatuated with Maggie Cheung. It's fun watching her character try to be human. Every time she tries to emote, it fails, and it's fun to watch, until she actually does find emotions at the end of the movie. This has been set up with expert rhythms, and when it happens, it's a stunning development amid the sturm and drang of the special effects maelstrom around her. If I'm honest, I'll admit that this isn't one of her best performances (for that, I would direct you to Wong Kar Wai or to Clean). But this is about favorite characters, not performances, and this is one of mine.


Lulu in Pandora's Box is another kind of femme fatale, though of a more benign temperament than Kathy Moffet. She's equally destructive, I suppose, leaving a trail of broken men (and women!) in her wake. But she's liberated, and that's very appealing. Incarnated in the person of Louise Brooks, you have an actress who more or less WAS the character she played. Sexually profligate and not caring what men think of it, she was not the kind of girl you introduced to society, but she was the girl everyone was drawn to in spite of that. And, of course, she's punished for it. She has an appointment with a serial killer, making the film, perhaps, a prototype of the slasher film. Be that as it may...


Finally, we have the irrepressible Poppy, from Happy Go Lucky. She's the kind of Polyanna-ish character that would ordinarily send me screaming from the theater, but this is a Mike Leigh film, so it's NOT all sweetness and light, even if Poppy is. Sally Hawkins gives the character just enough of a twist that she doesn't come off as saccharine at all, even if her foolhardy optimism drives those around her insane. But then something odd happens. She overwhelms those around her, the audience, and even her normally dour director. Anyone that can corner Mike Leigh into making a genuinely happy movie has something on the ball.

Grumpy Old Men

A light week for me, and no horror, unfortunately. But after gorging myself last week, I needed to get caught up with some real-world responsible adult-type stuff. Pesky responsibilities.



I did make it out to see the latest wonderment from Pixar. I mean, is Pixar for real? I don't know if I've EVER seen a run of quality from anyone the likes of Pixar's track record from Toy Story onward. Up (2009, directed by Peter Docter and Bob Peterson) is one of their very best films. It's like Pixar had to get the Disney monkey off their back before they hit their stride, because their last three films (Ratatouille, WALL-E, and this one) show a grace and ease of expression that only fitfully appeared in their early films. I would attribute this to the development of their technology, maybe, which is now fully deployed in a rich panoply of color and movement. I chose not to see this in 3-D, because I don't like the slight dimming of the color palette that goes along with it. I was amply rewarded for this. In any event, this is a film that throws out the animated feature playbook: its antagonists are two cranky old men. The kid in the story actually has a mother. The talking animals are fully justified while remaining, resolutely, dogs. But more than that, there's a breath of life animating this film that is unlike anything I can remember seeing in an animated film. There's an eight minute sequence, completely without dialogue, that shows where most ordinary lives lead. It's deeply moving. I always used to resist crying at movies, but lately, I've just ridden the tide through and let it all out. This sequence left me completely sobbing. It's beautiful. Maybe I'm just losing my cynicism as I age. In spite of this, this is still a boy's adventure (memo to Pixar: when is it a girl's turn?), and as such, it's a corker. While it may not rise to the insane genius of the door chase in Monsters, Inc., it still moves with the speed and manic invention of the great silent action-comedies. This is a movie that's as in love with the thrill of flying as any given Miyazaki film, and it's easily as endowed with vertigo-inducing vistas. Oh, and it's funny, too. Sometimes achingly so. It's like the filmmakers got a box, opened up their sense of wonder, and poured everything they had into it. If I see a better film this year, I'll count the year great.

My hostess over vacation let me know that I omitted one of the films we watched during my visit. And it's a big omission, too, because she had never seen Singin' in the Rain (1952) before. Just about everything I say about Up can be equally applied to this film. It's one of the great movies. She had no expectations of the film. She didn't know what it was about and was genuinely surprised at how funny it was. The "Make 'em Laugh" number, in which Donald O'Connor turns himself into a human cartoon character, and the title sequence in which Gene Kelly lets new love overwhelm the weather remain the highlights, but my own favorite elements of the film are the supporting performances by Jean Hagen as the shrill Lina Lamont, and Millard Mitchell as the head of the studio. The best moment for me was when my friend turned to me during the "Good Morning" number and says to me: "Okay, so Debbie Reynolds can dance, too." She can indeed. It's scary how much talent there was in that cast. Back then, you actually had to have talent to be a movie star, because they didn't hide you behind a clever editing scheme. Directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen insisted on showing their dancers from head to toe in long takes. Dance or die, I suspect was the watchword of their set. In any event, it's one of my very favorite movies.

Finally, there was "Partly Cloudy" (2009, directed by Peter Sohn), the short accompanying Up, which wasn't as funny as last year's "Presto," and was weirder than anything Pixar has appended to any of their previous features. It reminded me a little of those old Warner Brothers cartoons in which the stork that delivers babies is a bit of a lush. In this film, we find out where those babies come from, and we follow one particular stork whose source is a bit sadistic. It's fun, but it doesn't upstage the feature film in any particular.

Blogathon!

I haven't done one of these before, but I'm a sucker for Japanese film and there are a couple of Seijun Suzuki movies out on DVD this month that I haven't seen, so I think there's a certain amount of serendipity going on.


Also, my series on Robert Aldrich will resume in a couple of days, probably featuring Vera Cruz, although I've watched several other films that I could plug in. This project doesn't have a timetable, so I'm fine with occasional long layoffs. I just didn't expect one so soon after I started.

Finally, I'd like to give a shout out to The Horror of It All, which is new to my blogroll. I never intended to stick exclusively to movies, and here's an awesome comics site that features wonderfully salacious pre-Comics Code horror comics that have fallen into the public domain. Comics and horror were my first love when it comes to pop culture, so I'll probably feature more of this stuff as time goes on. In any case, I'm reminded of what Berni Wrightson said to me when I met him at a comics convention many years ago and presented him with a copy of Swamp Thing #6 to sign for me. With a twinkle in his eye, he said, "You know, this stuff will rot your brain." I'll pass that thought on in regards to The Horror of It All, which is high praise, sez I.

The Inevitable List

Just before I went on vacation, I got an email from Iain Stott at The One-Line Review inviting me to participate in one of those periodic "best of" lists. He asked for a list of fifty films, but allowed that that might be too few, and suggested a range of fifty to a hundred films. List making isn't really in my constitution--any list I might construct is subject to change at a whim--so I provided him with a mid-range list in alphabetical order. Listing is one thing. Ranking is another thing all together. THAT, I cannot do. In any event, here's the list I provided, arranged alphabetically:

• Ace in the Hole (1951, directed by Billy Wilder)
• All About My Mother (1999, directed by Pedro Almodovar)
• Attack! (1956, directed by Robert Aldrich
• Awaara (1951, directed by Raj Kapoor)
• Begone Dull Care (1949, directed by Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren)
• The Big Sleep (1946, directed by Howard Hawks)
• Black Narcissus (1947, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
• Black Rain (1989, directed by Shohei Imamura)
• Casque d'Or (1952, directed by Jacques Becker)
• Cat People (1942, directed by Jacques Tourneur)
• Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974, directed by Jacques Rivette)
• Chimes at Midnight (1965, directed by Orson Welles)
• Closely Watched Trains (1966, directed by Jirí Menzel)
• The Conformist (1970, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci)
• The Conversation (1974, directed by Francis Ford Coppola)
• Cries and Whispers (1972, directed by Ingmar Bergman)
• Dead Ringers (1988, directed by David Cronenberg)
• Duck Amuck (1953, directed by Chuck Jones)
• Duck Soup (1933, directed by Leo McCarey)
• Eyes Without a Face (1960, directed by Georges Franju)
• Fires on the Plain (1959, directed by Kon Ichikawa)
• Forbidden Games (1952, directed by Rene Clement)
• Frankenstein (1931, directed by James Whale)
• Girl Shy (1924, directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor)
• The Gleaners and I (2000, directed by Agnes Varda)
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966, directed by Sergio Leone)
• The Grave of the Fireflies (1988, directed by Isao Takahata)
• Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001, directed by John Cameron Mitchell)
• High Sierra (1940, directed by Raoul Walsh)
• The Human Condition (1959-1961, directed by Masaki Kobayashi)
• In a Glass Cage (1987, directed by Agustí Villaronga)
• In the Mood for Love (2000, directed by Wong Kar Wai)
• The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, directed by Don Siegel)
• The Invisible Man (1933, directed by James Whale)
• Jackie Brown (1997, directed by Quentin Tarantino)
• King Kong (1933, directed by Ernest Shoedsak and Merian C. Cooper)
• The Land of Silence and Darkness (1971, directed by Werner Herzog)
• The Last Life in the Universe (2003, directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang)
• Leave Her to Heaven (1945, directed by John M. Stahl)
• The Leopard (1963, directed by Luchino Visconti)
• M (1931, directed by Fritz Lang)
• The Man in the White Suit (1951, directed by Alexander Mackendrick)
• Man of the West (1958, directed by Anthony Mann)
• Manji (1964, directed by Yasuzo Masumura)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, directed by Maya Deren)
• My Brilliant Career (1979, directed by Gillian Armstrong)
• The Night of the Hunter (1955, directed by Charles Laughton)
• Night of the Living Dead (1968, directed by George A. Romero)
• Only Angels Have Wings (1939, directed by Howard Hawks)
• Out of the Past (1948, directed by Jacques Tourneur)
• Pandora's Box (1929, directed by G. W. Pabst)
• Pinocchio (1940, directed by Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen)
• Rififi (1955, directed by Jules Dassin)
• Rocco and his Brothers (1960, directed by Luchino Visconti)
• Running Fence (1978, directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin)
• The Searchers (1958, directed by John Ford)
• Seven Samurai (1955, directed by Akira Kurosawa)
• Seventh Heaven (1928, directed by Frank Borzage)
• Singin' in the Rain (1953, directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen)
• Some Like it Hot (1958, directed by Billy Wilder)
• The Spirit of the Beehive (1974, directed by Victor Erice)
• Stagecoach (1939, directed by John Ford)
• Sunrise (1928, directed by F. W. Murnau)
• Sweet Smell of Success (1957, directed by Alexander Mackendrick)
• Take Care of My Cat (2001, directed by Jae-eun Jeong)
• The Terrorist (1999, directed by Santosh Sivan)
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, directed by Tobe Hooper)
• To Be or Not To Be (1942, directed by Ernst Lubitsch)
• Touch of Evil (1958, directed by Orson Welles)
• A Touch of Zen (1969, directed by King Hu)
• Unforgiven (1992, directed by Clint Eastwood)
• The Unknown (1927, directed by Tod Browning)
• Videodrome (1981, directed by David Cronenberg)
• Viridiana (1961, directed by Luis Bunuel)
• The Wild Bunch (1969, directed by Sam Peckinpah)

Obviously, there are some old chestnuts in there that make most of these kinds of lists, while there are also some films that are idiosyncratic choices. I had a couple of things in mind while I was constructing this. One: I wanted to include animation. Two: I wanted to have at least a few short films. Three: I wanted to list favorites rather than movies that I merely esteem as "great." Which isn't to say that I don't think my choices ARE great--I think that they are--but I wasn't going to arbitrarily list Citizen Kane when there are two other movies by Orson Welles that I enjoy watching more (and I LOVE Citizen Kane, don't get me wrong). And, clearly, the seventy-five films I've listed above are insufficient. I could provide such a list without straying outside the confines of the horror movie (I've resisted that impulse, but it might have been fun). In general, these kinds of lists say more about the list-maker than they do about the films themselves. For my part, a couple of entries reflect the fact that I've seen them recently. Out of sight, out of mind, after all.

In any event, Iain will publish his compendium sometime in July or August. I'll be interested to see what other lists look like (I've already seen a couple of them).

Vacations from Hell

My spring vacation turned out to be one of the most intense movie-watching periods I've had in a while. This was planned--the friend I was visiting is as much of a horror movie nut as I am AND she has an absolutely GI-normous television AND she has some interesting foreign editions of movies that I've been salivating over from afar for quite some time. A number of these are rewatchings, so I'll be cannibalizing old material here. My apologies.

The week didn't start on a good note. My friend's partner likes big stupid movies, so we wound up watching Michael Bay's 1998 insult to everyone's intelligence, Armageddon, a film I hated on its first release and one that I still hate now. This film is loud, stupid, maudlin, incoherent, and just plain painful to watch. It's so hopped up on testosterone that you can smell the reek of it coming off the screen. When it was first released, I wrote of it:

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The only time the visual pace slows down is for character development that is so broadly drawn, so cliched, so maudlin, that one prays for the asteroid to strike and wipe everything out so the Earth can start over. In Armageddon's defense, it isn't boring--which is a step up from Deep Impact--but getting roughed up by a mugger isn't boring either. And after two and a half hours of this, the audience starts to show bruises.

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My opinion hasn't changed in the intervening decade. The only thing that amuses me about this movie is that it provides Monsters, Inc. with one of its slyest jokes, when it it swipes the famous slow astronaut walk and places Steve Buscemi's villainous Randall in the same spot Buscemi occupied in the shot in Armageddon. But that's no reason to see the movie.

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The real fun began with a triple feature of tourists-in-peril movies, starting with Stuart Gordon's Dagon (2001), which I haven't seen in a while, either. The only other time I watched it, it was on a considerably smaller screen and I missed some of the details of the production. I also missed the content of the chant of the Dagon cultists, which should bring a smile to the face of most Lovecraftians. As a fish out of water story (if you'll pardon the pun), this is most satisfying. I still think parts of it resemble Visconti's La Terra Trema as re-imagined by a lunatic. Heh.

We followed that with another re-watch, this time the director's cut of Carter Smith's The Ruins (2008), which I also like quite a bit. Last year, I wrote:

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It's not ambitious. It doesn't want to overreach its modest premise, nor does it pretend to deep philosophical underpinnings, and its lack of ambition will keep it out of the bright circle of horror's best movies. But for what it DOES want to do, it excels. This is a brutal little movie that distills horror down to a simple survival narrative. It doesn't pull its punches at all, either. The story finds a group of vacationing college kids trapped on an uncharted Mayan pyramid by hostile natives. Are they sacrifices? Is there some more sinister purpose? It all clocks in at about an hour and a half, which is exactly as long as B-Movies oughta run. While there is gore aplenty for those that want it, the most disturbing things in the movie to my mind are the flowers. This movie has the scariest inflorescent landscape this side of Oz.

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We had an interesting discussion of the alternate ending on the director's cut, as well as the Little Shop of Horror-ish ending that was discarded from both versions. My friend doesn't like the darker ending, and I can't say I fault her reasons. There's no precedent for it in the mythology established within the movie. But, on the other hand, it does lend the film a certain apocalyptic aspect that I kinda like. Either way works. I suppose which works best is a matter of individual tastes.

Finally, there was Rogue (2007, directed by Greg McLean), a leaner, more effective killer crocodile movie than I ever expected. This is a classic b-movie, one that you might have expected to see from New World Pictures in the 1970s. The premise is brutally simple: a tourist boat is marooned by a killer croc on a tidal island in a river through Australia's Northwest Territory. As the tourists try to figure out a way out of their dilemma, the croc picks them off one by one. The real surprise here isn't how effective the movie is--director Greg McLean already demonstrated an instinct for the jugular with Wolf Creek--but rather, how beautiful it is. There are a couple of shots in this movie that remind me of something Howard Hawks once said: "John Ford could command the skies; the rest of us have to use soundstages." After we finished this, I was struck by how similar the narrative is to The Ruins, though I think Rogue is a slightly better movie. I was also struck by how both films re-enact the Beowulf narrative. This is especially true in Rogue, which has a climax in which, having escaped the croc, our hero (Michael Vartan) ends up in the beast's lair. This lends the film a certain atavistic mythological element that lifts it over, say, Lake Placid or Alligator. Good film.

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The Korean DVD box of The Host (2006, directed by Bong Joon-Ho) is mighty spiffy. I'm hard pressed to think of a North American package that I would envy more. The Koreans know how to do right by their movies. The movie remains a favorite, too, and once again, it's fun watching it demolish the monster movie playbook point by point, all the while providing all the monster movie mayhem anyone could ever want. I'm still amazed at how chameleonic lead actor Kang-ho Song is. When I realized that he was the same actor who played the rich man in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, I was blown away. I can't wait to see him in Thirst.

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The rest of the week looked like this:

The Water Margin (1972, directed by Chang Cheh), in which the Shaws empty their casting department. This was introducing characters with on-screen text a full half hour into the movie. Confusing but fun, and lots of director Cheh's characteristic gore. I'm partial to the guy who gets a huge ax in the abdomen and still attempts to soldier on.

Have Sword, Will Travel (1969, directed by Chang Cheh), in which the weird buddy movie formula favored by Chang Cheh is enacted by Ti Lung (looking very young and very yummy) and David Chiang, complete with noble sacrifice and lots of arterial blood spray. The climax of this film finds the dual heroes fighting their way to the top of a tower in a sequence that bears a suspicious resemblance to the end of Bruce Lee's Game of Death, though this predates that film and doesn't have Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in it. Alas.

When we got to the end of Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky (1986), my main response was, "is that it?" Slight, though filled with the same enthusiasm for steampunk gadgets and the giddy rush of flight as most Miyazaki movies. In its defense, there IS some spiffy robot mayhem.

Finally, there's Frank Borzage's silent melodrama, Seventh Heaven (1928), which I've only ever seen in really crappy editions (longtime movie fans may recognize the words "Video Yesteryear" and grimace a bit). The new transfer for Fox's Murnau and Borzage box isn't pristine, but it's a quantum leap forward compared to what was previously available. This is one of my very favorite films, one that not only demonstrates the technical virtuosity achieved by the late silents, but one that demonstrates the high state of accomplishment of the great silent actors, as well. Janet Gaynor won an Oscar for this film and for Sunrise (made the same year, and a film I forever associate with this one), and never was the award more deserved. She gives a tour de force performance. Borzage's direction is always imaginative, even if his choice of symbols is a bit heavy-handed sometimes, but the movie carries such an emotional punch that it's hard to argue with it.

Oh, and I did fall asleep half way through Re-Animator, but that's no reflection on the movie--which I love--so much as it's a reflection of the fact that I was wiped out when we started it. Travel does that. As does sleep deprivation. My apologies to my hostess.

Lost Opportunites

Most of the people I've seen get all orgasmic over the new Star Trek movie (2009, no subtitle on this one) are mainly the same people that got all orgasmic over director J. J. Abrams's last movie, Mission Impossible III. Well, I detested Mission Impossible III, so I expected to be irritated with the new Trek. And for the most part, I wasn't, really, but I was never really sucked into it, either. I must be getting old. I'm getting tired of special effects movies. Of what use are really cool special effects when EVERY film has really cool special effects. I saw a film last year made by a friend of mine on her computer and the effects were almost as jaw-dropping as what I saw here (though, I should note, that she's a computer animator by trade). I shouldn't grouse, though. Special effects were always a part of movie-making dominated by people that first took it up as a hobby. Harryhausen worked in his garage for a while. I get more out of looking at the art on conceptart.org these days than I do looking at the results on a movie screen.

Look at that! I haven't even started to deal with the movie itself and I'm already off on a wild digression. Ah, well.

So. Star Trek. Rebooted with new actors as the characters from the original series. Things change in the history of these characters. This departs from the canonical history of Star Trek, though that's not a bad thing, and the various series themselves often did the same things. We have a parallel universe Trek here, which is a convenient excuse to rampage off into a different idiom, even though the familiarity of the concept remains. For the most part, I like the new actors, Karl Urban(!?!?) and Simon Pegg, in particular. Zoe Saldana's character, Uhura, gets more character development in the span of 20 minutes than she got in the entirety of the original series and six feature films. Good for her. There are some nice set-pieces: the poor slob sucked into the vacuum, where the sound vanishes from the soundtrack and the skydiving scene with Sulu being a badass are fun to watch, and the Enterprise emerging from the atmosphere of Titan with the rings of Saturn behind it is a cool, possibly iconic shot. But I found myself having to turn off my brain for this movie. This is, bar none, the SLOPPIEST screenplay this series has ever produced, one that would have been laughed out of the story meetings even on ST: Voyager (which had some doozies). Once the film relocates to the planet Delta Vega, hereafter known as Planet Coincidence, where Kirk just happens to run into the Old Spock (hereafter known as Mr. Exposition), the movie jumps the rails.

Feh.

I think the worst thing about this movie is that it's not really about anything except sound and fury. Even the most ridiculous of the Star Trek films and series intended to say something, even when they fell flat on their faces. This film, on the other hand, is about sensation, and while there's nothing wrong with that if it's done well, it's an approach that feels completely wrong for Star Trek.

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The Lost (2006, directed by Chris Sivertson), is another harsh film based on a novel by Jack Ketcham. I wonder what it is about Ketcham that compels filmmakers to make such unlikeable movies. They would seem to be a hard sell. Mind you, I love Ketcham to pieces. He writes spare, diamond hard horror stories that are untouched by either sentimentality or reticence in the face of the worst of human beings. These are aspects that usually frighten away producers and film studios. And yet, here's the first of several films based on Ketcham. Director Chris Siverston is clearly in awe of the book, and says so in the end credits. He translates it more or less intact. The Lost is a portrait of a sociopath. We get a front row seat as murderous douchebag Ray Pye flies off the hinges after his tidy little world comes apart. And it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. The film opens with a shocking crime, and ends with a shocking rampage. In between, we get the sordid lives of Pye and everyone he knows, and it's plain that he's a cancer on society. The film has a more arresting visual style than one usually sees in character studies, but it fits the jittery, coked up center of the film. Did I like this movie? Well, no. Not really. It doesn't want to be liked and it succeeds in not being likable. Am I impressed by it? Yeah. I kinda am.

The Coolest Thing on the Internet this Morning

That's Paul McCartney and Jack Kirby. That's your mid-century cultural nexus right there. Seriously. I found this via The Beat and then at The Cool Kid's Table. The latter offered Jack's daughter's recollection of the meeting.

Hugh Jackman's Magic Ass

Well, here's the thing about X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009, directed by Gavin Hood): it pretty much sucks as a movie, but it has lots of nekkid Hugh Jackman. I see that it opened huge, so one should never underestimate the power of Hugh Jackman's ass. Most of the story elements in this movie come from the period after I stopped reading the X-men, so I don't have anything invested in whether or not it's faithful to the comics. I do have some affection for the X-Men movies, so I am bothered by the gaping holes this movie pokes in the internal continuity of the series. I hated most of the action sequences here, especially the big fight at the end, which demonstrates just how boring it is watching indestructable antagonists duking it out, though it does improve on last year's Incredible Hulk insofar as there are actual actors duking it out rather than computer graphics. Feh. I will say this, though, Jackman, Liev Schreiber, and Danny Huston are all better than the material deserves. Honestly, I think Wolverine's origins were amply explained in X2, with a much greater narrative economy.

Past that, I watched a couple of films for my Robert Aldrich project:

Attack (1956), which covers a lot of the same thematic material as Paths of Glory. This takes Kubrick to school. A very pleasant surprise. Might be a masterpiece.

Vera Cruz (1954), which is agreeably cynical and totally subversive. Burt Lancaster oozes charisma in this, which tends to obscure the fact that his character is an evil m*f*. Essential to anyone who thinks the revisionist westerns started in Italy.

The Big Knife (1956) shows the director at his most pot-boilerish. A poison pen letter to Hollywood, this later had a deleterious effect on Aldrich's career. Aldrich never liked subtlety, and this film shows that in the scenery chewing of the actors, especially Rod Steiger (who was a world class scenery chewer).

I'll be doing more in-depth pieces on all three of these movies eventually.

The Films of Robert Aldrich: His early career and Apache

Robert Aldrich's career in Hollywood began in the early 1940s doing odd jobs for RKO as a production assistant, script clerk, and various other odd jobs. Eventually, Aldrich graduated to more substantial positions: assistant director to (among others) William Wellman (on The Story of G. I. Joe), Robert Rossen (on Body and Soul), Abraham Polonsky (on Force of Evil), and Charles Chaplin (on Limelight). A life-long liberal Democrat, Aldrich found himself associating with the Hollywood left during his early career. Although he was never a blacklistee himself, Aldrich would occasionally pay a professional price for this. Many of the themes that run through Aldrich's films as a director are informed by his politics, which is ironic given that many of his films are the kinds of films that Red-State viewers tend to like.

After cutting his directorial teeth in the very earliest days of television, Aldrich's first film as a director was Big Leaguer in 1953, a baseball drama starring Edward G. Robinson (which I haven't seen at this writing). His big break, however, came the following year, directing Apache for the production team of Burt Lancaster and Harold Hecht, with Lancaster in the lead. While there are great directors who are obviously great from the first frames of their first films, Aldrich is not among them. Apache is an ungainly film, and whatever craft Aldrich may have learned in television or on Big Leaguer isn't evident in Apache. The themes that carry through his work, however, are immediately apparent.

Synopsis: After the surrender of Geronimo, the young warrior, Massai, escapes from the prison train transporting the Apaches who followed Geronimo to internment in Florida. He journey's across the country, seeing the world of the white man, as well as seeing how another tribe, the Cherokee, have made their peace with the white man. A Cherokee farmer in the Oklahoma territory gives Massai a bag of seed corn and advises him to take up the plow rather than the tomahawk and rifle. Once back in the midst of what remains of his own tribe, Massai is appalled at what he sees. The remaining Apache men are being mercilessly exploited by the white business man, Weddle, and Nalinle, the woman Massai loved is being courted by the treacherous Hondo, who collaborates with the whites. Betrayed to the whites by the father of his lover, Massai escapes again and vows vengeance, only by himself, not on behalf of the Apache nation. But the calming influence of Nalinle urges him to try the Cherokee way with his bag of seed corn. Unfortunately, he's a hunted man, and the hunters find him eventually...

This is a fairly early film in the cycle of revisionist Westerns that re-examine the place of Native Americans in the mythology of the West, so it comes as a bit of a surprise that it's as subversive as it is. Massai, let's face it, is a terrorist. Add to that the depiction of American capitalism, incarnated in the weaselly Mr. Weddle (John Dehner), and you have a film that is questioning the very underpinnings of the Western film. This is not a film with clear-cut white hats and black hats. Also present in this film are the characteristic presentations of the protagonist as anti-hero and loner, contending against an indifferent system that is utterly corrupt. Unlike most of Aldrich's later films, this is largely free of the Gothic tinge of madness.

What really sets this apart from some of the subsequent films dealing with the sympathetic Native American is that this one still functions as an adventure. Aldrich never, ever lost sight of the fact that his films were first and foremost entertainment, and he was one of the most adept directors ever at smuggling subversive meanings into popular filmmaking. The revenge drama element drives the film forward, and it's compulsive. It almost rescues the film from its many faults. And it's faults are prominent and right in view for most of the film. Its most damning fault is no fault of the director's. Burt Lancaster's production company built the movie around Lancaster himself--in particular Lancaster's athleticism (see also, The Crimson Pirate), so this starts out as a vanity project. Unfortunately for Aldrich, this saddles him with a lead actor who is never really convincing as an Indian. Lancaster's Nordic features and blazing blue eyes are completely unconvincing:


Co-star Jean Peters suffers a similar fate. Combine this with the weird diction in all the dialogue the Native American characters speak--perfect English, but completely stilted--and you have a recipe for disaster. Massai's weird tendency to speak of himself in the third person becomes comedy gold after a while. One cannot look at the film from a 21st Century vantage and sidestep the essential racism in this depiction, but, on the other hand, I doubt Aldrich would have cared. He made what he made with the materials available and within the cultural imperatives of his time. One of the film's other problems stems from Aldrich's status as a novice director. The original script called for a much bleaker ending to the film, and you can see the first two acts setting up that ending, in which Massai must fight to the death with Hondo (Charles Bronson). Aldrich even filmed this ending, and one wishes it were still extant. The executives at United Artists asked Aldrich and Lancaster to film an alternate, more up-beat ending, and lacking his later clout to do what he wanted, Aldrich complied. This was the ending that the studio used, much to the director's chagrin. Aldrich later said: "(If) you shoot two endings, they will always use the other one, never yours". In a lot of ways the film was a learning process for the director, and there are a lot of puzzling editing choices and very often, the camera is just flat out in the wrong place. This is particularly evident in this shot:

This is the cornfield where Massai flees at the end of the film, hiding from his enemies. I mean, really? Aldrich couldn't have chosen a better vantage point to hide the fact that there's no way Massai would have been able to hide in that field?

In any event, the film is entertaining in spite of all of this--and occasionally because of it--so it's not a total loss. It's an interesting film even if it's not very good. There's a steep learning curve evident between Apache and Vera Cruz, which Aldrich directed the very same year, again for Lancaster and Hecht. I'll get to that film in my next installment.

Farewell, Marilyn Chambers

The Ivory Snow girl passed away last week, so I felt obligated to give her a fine send off, with two of her better known movies.

First up was Angel of H.E.A.T (1983, directed by Myrl A. Schreibman), one of her "straight" pictures, in which she plays a secret agent up against a plot to send an army of androids against the world. Yeah. It's pretty bad, but there is copious nudity, as you might have expected. The real surprise was the copious amount of skin the film shows on co-star Mary Woronov, who I love to pieces, so no matter how much the movie sucks, we'll always have that. And it DOES suck. It's incompetent on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin.

It almost seems strange that the Mitchell Brothers notorious Behind the Green Door (1972) is a step up, given that it's one of the cornerstones of hardcore cinema, but there it is. Where many exploitation films intend to shock, it's a rare one that actually manages the feat. 1972 is pretty early in the history of pornographic movies, and it's a period when the makers of such films still made an effort to make films rather than pointing the camera at the awful thing in motion. The Mitchells might have had the talent to make it in the mainstream if they so chose, but that wasn't their particular muse, so we get a disjointed film in which the gynecological close-up is a frequent intruder in the flow of the film. Pity. As for Marilyn Chambers herself? She's achingly beautiful in this, and so young. Watching the film defile her is disturbing, an effect amplified by the fact that she doesn't have a single line of dialogue.

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Having finished up the first season of Rome last month, my partner and I are taking on the first season of Six Feet Under this month. By pure coincidence, the fifth episode, which we watched this week, concerns a porn star who has been electrocuted in her tub. The porn star was played by Veronica Hart, a porn star from the golden age of porn. She appears to have been a pretty credible actress, though the episode itself is not particularly concerned with her place in the universe. As is the formula for the series, the corpse acts as a counterpoint to the various relationships in the Fisher family. The highlight of this episode was the visit Claire and Ruth pay to their Stepford Wife-y cousins, but the developments between Nate and Brenda give the episode (and, for that matter, the show as a whole) that uncomfortable sense of intruding on intimate moments. HBO might just be the savior of television.

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I also watched Apache (1954) to start off my Robert Aldrich project. It's an awkward, ungainly movie that almost works, even if it does show that the director didn't yet have any kind of mastery of his craft. The development between this and the next year's Vera Cruz is dramatic. I'll have more to say about this in a day or two.

Train in Vain

I think I'm finally beginning to warm up to Hayao Miyazaki (Ghibli fans will excuse me for not falling deeply in love with his movies). I've been dealing with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) for two decades now, ever since seeing the New World Pictures recut of the film as "Warriors of the Wind" on cable all those years ago. That cut has some serious deficiencies. I've had the full cut released by Disney for a couple of years now. I think the last time through, I must have been cranky or something because I didn't have a very good time. This time, with no expectations, I was thoroughly transported. I mean, it was always plain to see that the world-building in Nausicaa was a triumph of imagination. That even comes through on the New World cut. But I've never really trusted the narrative until now. I don't know. Maybe it's a film I had to get used to to appreciate. Or maybe I had to overcome my own prejudices against Japanese animation and its idiomatic conventions. Whatever. In any event, one constant in Miyazaki is the joy of flight, and this is the film that gives the joy of flight its most unbounded expression. There are all kinds of fanciful aircraft in this, as well as the giddy rush of speed and wind (natch). It's got too many serious themes on its mind to be a "fun" movie, but it is a joyful one.

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The main difference between Patrice Chéreau's Queen Margot, and his follow-up, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1998) is that the wounds inflicted by the characters in Queen Margot actually shed blood, while those inflicted in Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train don't. Otherwise, they're equally deep. This film pretty much follows a Robert Altman-ish formula in which a large cast is assembled for some central event--in this film, it's the funeral of Jean-Baptiste Emmerich, an artist who acted as a father figure for many of those in his personal and professional orbit--and they are examined as they interact. In the first half of the film, our sundry characters are transported from Paris on a train per Jean-Baptiste's wishes (hence the title), and from a stylistic perspective, it's striking. This is shot with a controlled run and gun hand-held style that moves through the corridors of the train with startling energy. It's certainly vivid. The restless camera moves through the train, introducing us to the characters and resisting any exposition that might provide a landmark for the viewer--this also similar to Queen Margot (which was also ambivalent about providing back-story). Among others, there are two couples, gay and straight, who are on the downward side. Several of the characters are Jean-Baptiste's ex-lovers (again gay and straight). And there's his estranged nephew. None of them seems to really love the man, and, really, after the opening where we hear his voice describing who he is, he's not really a player so much as he's a McGuffin. For the most part, the characters we meet in the first part of the film are pretty disagreeable. At one point, I asked myself if I was interested in meeting any of them in real life and the answer I gave to myself was "no." But they are intense, and intensely performed by a superior ensemble, especially Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as Claire, whose relationship is falling apart in spite of her pregnancy, and Pascal Gregory as François, whose boyfriend has met and fallen in love with his own ex-lover.

Fortunately, there are only two characters of any pith and moment introduced in the second half of the film (any more and the thing would burst, I think--Chereau includes a metaphor for his own movie late in the game when much is made of a pot of milk that has over-boiled). These are Lucien, Jean-Baptiste's brother (both are played by the terrific Jean-Louis Tritignant) and Vivane, who used to be Frederick, played by Vincent Perez. Both of them share a scene together towards the end of the movie in which the healing power of a pair of red pumps is demonstrated, but beyond that, they ground the film by providing a safe haven for the audience. I suppose it's possible that Vivane's character archetype was intended to be just as screwed up as the others--she is a transsexual, after all--but to my mind, she's the least screwed up person in the whole film. There's a short scene, also late in the film, where she lounges on a couch and it's clear that she's completely comfortable in her own skin while those around her are tearing their own personae to shreds.


Edited after the fact: One of my friends on the IMDB (who pointed me at the film) had this to say to me:

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I assume Viviane is meant to be a force for calm - she's not perfectly settled, certainly, since all that bakery fantasy is surely a way of describing the perfect peace that still seems hazy (and always will, who ever sorts their life out totally?).

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My response:

I think this is right, although I also think that Vivane's fantasy about being a baker woman is probably also intended to show her as, perhaps, the character with the sanest ambitions for her life. This is a difficult argument to make, given that the ambitions of the rest of the cast aren't made explicit. I would imagine that the disappointment that seems to inhabit them all are indicative of out-sized ambitions that have been thwarted. But then the movie doesn't really delve that deeply into the motives of any of the characters, beyond the surface of the present. For a while, I suspected that Vivane was a kind of "magical other," but the movie does an admirable job of deflecting that possibility. She's just as easily hurt as the other characters (when Claire says "You're not a woman or a man," the expression on her face is deeply wounded). Unlike the others, she takes it without retaliation.

I should also note that the movie gets one thing exactly, perfectly right in having Vivane relate her fantasy: many transsexuals long for a more mundane "normal" life, if only because most of us never have it.

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As a side note, the American disc for this movie from Kino sucks. It's an absolutely horrible transfer. I'd be interested to see the Region 2 version, because it's GOT to be better than this.

More Godzilla. Drinkin' Wine Spodee odee.

A pretty light week for me.

Horror and related:

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000, directed by Masaaki Tezuka), in which Godzilla is attacking nuclear power plants for their energy. The G force, tasked with taking Godzilla out, has a new toy that creates artificial black holes. Unfortunately, it goes haywire and lets something IN to our reality (well, the Godzilla reality, anyway). Monster mayhem ensues. Frankly, I don't like the design of the Godzilla suit in this movie. It never truly looks like Godzilla. At least, not to me. Still, it has an interesting premise, and it's always fun to watch guys in rubber suits wreck model cities. I always thought that building those model cities would be a fun job.

Civilian:

Bottle Shock (2008, directed by Randall Miller) is an amiable recounting of the so-called "Judgement of Paris," a 1976 wine tasting in which a panel of France's elite wine snobs blindly picked a California wine as the best of show, to the horror of French wine snobs everywhere. The movie follows wine snob Stephen Spurrier (Alan Rickman) to the Napa valley, where, expecting vinegar, he finds ambrosia. He also finds struggling vintner Jim Barret (Bill Pullman) and his underachieving son, Bo (Chris Pine), and the various characters in their orbit. They don't make these characters "quirky", thank god, but they do spend an ungodly amount of time on sweeping panoramic shots from helicopter fly-overs of the Napa valley. Alan Rickman is always fun to watch, so my partner and I had a fine time watching this. Minor, but fun.

My New Annual Project: The Films of Robert Aldrich

I've been scouting around for a movie-related project ever since I finished up my last movie-related project (last year's march through a field of broken glass to watch 366 movies). I think I may have found my muse.

A few years ago, I had an interesting discussion with one of my online friends about the films of Robert Aldrich. Aldrich is one of my favorite directors, but he's not a filmmaker who often comes up when film nuts talk about the great filmmakers of the American cinema. And why should he? He never catered to critics, really. He just made great movies. Lots of them. Many of them in disreputable, or downright seedy genre idioms. I mean, look at just a short list of his best films:

Kiss Me, Deadly
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
The Flight of the Phoenix
The Dirty Dozen
The Longest Yard
The Emperor of the North Pole
Attack!
Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte

There's many a critic's darling that doesn't hold a candle to that resume. Plus, I propose to show that Aldrich was a true auteur in the original meaning of the word. There's an overriding thematic similarity in his films that show his hand as the guiding force behind them. There's clearly a personal statement being made over the course of his career. The conversation that sparked this project hashed out some of my own thoughts on the matter. I think Aldrich's films are generally Gothics, even when they're disguised as something else. This comes fully to the fore when there's a "hysteric" quality to the films, but it's there, too, in Aldrich's films about men. Sometimes, it manifests itself in genre (some genres--like film noir--being derived from the Gothic), other times it's an unusual combination of elements over-layered on top of other generic forms.

My friend kind of scoffed at the idea that a film like The Dirty Dozen is a Gothic, but look at the elements: confinement and microcosm, insanity, the Byronic anti-hero, the manor house as object and setting. In my view, this is Gothic to the core. You can apply the same paradigm to The Flight of the Phoenix and The Longest Yard, too, to say nothing of lesser-known films like Twilight's Last Gleaming.

Aldrich on the set of The Dirty Dozen (1967)

Of course, I'm saying all of this without actually having seen all of Aldrich's films. I've seen most of them, I think, but I'm going to rewatch them all in the coming months--probably not in chronological order, though I may try for that--and I'm going to make an effort to track down the ones I haven't seen. Some may take me longer as I try to lay my hands on films that are not conventionally available, though surprisingly few of Aldrich's movies are unavailable. I sincerely hope that I don't have to rely on 20 year old memories of ...All the Marbles or The Choirboys to do them any kind of justice. We shall see. In any event, these posts will alternate with my normal weekly postings about the movies I'm watching, and I sincerely hope that others will chime in with their own ideas about Aldrich's films, because, believe me, this is going to be a learning experience for me. Meanwhile, all interested parties are encouraged to go read Alain Silver's excellent overview of Aldrich's life and career over at Senses of Cinema. And check back here next week when I'll kick things off with Burt Lancaster in either Apache or Vera Cruz.

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Also in the mean time, check out this catalog of women in film over at House of Mirth. It's a welcome respite from movies designed to appeal to teen-age boys.