The Empire Strikes Back Thirty Years Later

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I originally saw The Empire Strikes Back (1980, directed by Irvin Kershner) on the day it opened. I saw it again three days later. It was the first film I ever saw more than once in the theater and it was the first film I ever went to by myself. Over the course of that summer, I watched it again several times. I was already a movie addict by 1980, but 1980 was really the first year that I went overboard with my addiction and Empire is partly to blame for this. Oddly enough, I can only remember going to see four movies in the theater in 1980. The other three were Superman II, Oh God! Book 2, and My Bodyguard. In scanning through all the movies released in 1980 on the IMDB, I note that I've seen most of the ones that are still in print, and a goodly number of others to boot, but I saw them all on cable or video. For what it's worth, 1980 was a pretty crummy year for movies.

They say that the golden age of science fiction is 12. I was 13 when Empire came out, so I was right in the sweet spot for it, but watching it again as an adult on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of its release was instructive. Virtually alone of the Star Wars movies, Empire takes a huge detour into the realm of high drama and high tragedy. Oh, the whiz-bang element is still there, especially in the film's first act, but at about the one hour mark, it transforms itself. It is no longer about boys playing with toys. It's about love, betrayal, guilt, generational conflict, epistemology, and spiritual transformation. It's heady stuff. That it does all of this without sacrificing the high adventure narrative is one of the better juggling acts in movies.There are two things that really drive home the difference between this film and its predecessor. The first is the introduction of John Williams's "Imperial March", which probably gets more airplay to this very day than any other piece of music in the Star Wars series. It sets the tone early. The other is the way cinematographer Peter Suschitzky films Darth Vader. In the first film, Vader never really got any special treatment beyond the sinister design of his costume. In this film, he becomes a terrifying apparition.

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Vader as a demonic figure.

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It's set up beautifully: we see Vader going through subordinates like they're popcorn, followed by a brief glimpse of what he looks like underneath the mask. Vader figures prominently in the turning point of the film, when Luke is tested by the Dark Side. Here, Vader is milked for all that he's worth: lit from behind, he's a shape punctuated by sinister lights, when Luke "defeats" this vision, he sees his own face beneath Vader's mask. This prefigures his appearance when Luke arrives at the carbonite chamber on Bespin. Vader is again a backlit shape looming against the background of smoke. This encounter, of course, ends with the revelation that Vader is Luke's father. This kind of cinematic doubling is something the other films in the series never come near.

This is the first time I've seen Empire since the 1997 re-release. In the interim, I've heard countless complaints about how horrible the performances are in the prequels, but to my eye, they aren't any worse than the performances in the original films. The second half of Empire is an exception, and it, too, has a cinematic function. During the first half of the film, Han Solo and Leia bicker like schoolyard children. Their by-play isn't the banter of adults. Seriously, it's not. And you get the feeling that the actors know it, because they overplay it. Again, at roughly the halfway point, when Han and Leia start to develop a more adult relationship, the performances suddenly change tenor. The broad nature of the first part of the film causes this shift to jump out in stark contrast. Suddenly, you're watching adults with adult problems and the actors seem to recognize this and dial it down accordingly. This is most evident in Mark Hamill's performance, which takes him from brash young man into the depths of despair. The terror manifested on the actor's face in his final confrontation with Vader is a tour de force.

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Skywalker in the underworld.

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The two new most important characters introduced in this film are Lando Calrissian, the morally compromised administrator of Cloud City, and Yoda, the ancient Jedi master. Neither of these characters would have fit in the universe of the first film. Lando, in particular, is weak-willed and unprincipled in a way that Han Solo never was, while Yoda is a deep mystic who has no patience for young Skywalker and his schoolboy image of what a Jedi Knight actually is. He gets my favorite line in the series, too, when he notes that "luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." I don't actually believe this (the atheist in me rebels), but it's the ONLY time that this series ever comes near actual poetry and transcendence.

Also new to the series is the feeling that there's an actual war going on. The first film's battle against the Death Star is all well and good, but it's mostly models and it's mostly ships flown by characters to whom we haven't been introduced. The battle of Hoth, on the other hand, is a ground battle, where you see human beings rather than model ships: it's a slog of infantry against tanks in a shitty environment. It feels more like a war film than a swashbuckler, which makes the swashbuckling later in the movie take on greater dramatic weight. Even the space battles in this film are better, in part because they're choreographed with a greater sense of three dimensions. The dimensional aspect of the scenes where the Millennium Falcon tries to evade the Empire and then navigate an asteroid field have a giddy rush of speed that is largely absent in the other films.

It's common wisdom these days among people that claim that Empire is the best of the Star Wars movies--and I'm certainly among them--that this is so because it's the one that George Lucas had the least involvement. I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly feels different than the others. Certainly, director Irvin Kershner's pronouncements on the matter suggest that the look and feel of the movie is more his doing than Lucas's. I think you can find supporting evidence in the special edition enhancements that came along for the 1997 re-release and afterward. This is the edition that I watched this time out. First: the alteration of Vader's dialogue with the Emperor harms the movie a little bit by telegraphing the film's shocking revelation at the end. Second: the visual design of Cloud City is marginally harmed by taking out the walls and putting in windows. The original interior design of Cloud City was an excellent art-deco space, and changing the lighting throughout hides a little bit of its beauty. On the flipside of this, though is the addition of the Wampa, which was only half-seen in the original. The new scene (which is significantly NOT CGI) is pretty good. In any event, this film is probably the one that is least harmed by Lucas's after-the-fact noodling, perhaps a testament to the fundamental soundness of the original item. It's a pretty great film.

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The things you notice when you scan for screen caps. The flaming black blob on the left side of this explosion looks to be the unfortunate pilot of the first TIE fighter destroyed by the asteroids. This is kind of a neat touch that went by too fast while watching the film.

A Boy's Best Friend...

If I tell you the plot of Bong Joon-ho's new film, Mother (2009), without spoilers, you might be tempted to make assumptions. Here it is, for all that it might be worth: Mentally handicapped Do-Joon is arrested for the murder of a young teen-age girl. His mother, completely convinced of his innocence, sets out to clear his name in spite the airtight case the police have assembled. And do you know what? I haven't told you ANYTHING about the movie, because any assumptions you might bring to this particular plot are dead wrong. This movie unfolds with an ever more surprising sequence of events, until it climaxes with a scene that shocks the audience out of their preconceptions completely. It's a dazzling high wire act. In thinking about this movie, it strikes me that this is what Strangers on a Train might have been like had Hitchcock kept Patricia Highsmith's ending. It reminds me, too, of Max Ophuls's The Reckless Moment and of Cornell Woolrich's The Black Angel. It dwells firmly in the same kind of indifferent cosmos. This is film noir at its blackest.

Even more amazing, though maybe not too amazing to filmgoers who have seen the director's other films, is the way it sneaks up on this. The opening movement of this film is a wry social comedy, much as the opening of Memories of Murder is broadly comic. Bong is a humanist, I think, one in love with people and particularly one in love with his characters, but he's not too in love with them that he won't murder his darlings. What's the point of having characters in a thriller if not to put them through the wringer? This movie does that in spades.

At the heart of Mother, oddly enough, is not the crime itself, but rather a jaundiced view of familial relationships. Certainly, our title character's relationship with her son is deep, but it's also completely bonkers. The image of Do-Joon, an ostensibly grown man, sleeping in the same bed with his mother, hand on her breast, speaks volumes about how completely dysfunctional this family is. It's kind of creepy, actually. With this family, as with the family in The Host, the ties that bind aren't necessarily ties of love, so much as they're ties of necessity. Without them tethering these characters together, they would be adrift.

South Korean filmmakers, perhaps more than any others, put a high gloss polish on their films, and Bong is no different. This is a beautiful film to look at. As a plot construction, this is all over the place, providing all kinds of red herrings and narrative dead ends. This would ordinarily be a failing of the conventions of the mystery genre itself, but in this film, they serve as texture. Most of the loose ends tie themselves up eventually, though not in the way that you expect. As a cinematic structure, rather than as a plot structure, this is as pleasing a composition as you could like. The repetition of its opening shot late in the movie provides a satisfying symmetry, even as the implications of it sink in. The last shot of the film, however, is a marvel, in which our heroine finally lets herself become untethered from her son and joins the dance of all the other lunatics in the world. It's set against the sun in the same way as Leatherface's final dance in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The world, it seems, is spinning WAY out of balance.

Talking a Blue Streak

"Language is a virus from outer space" -- William S. Burroughs

The variations on Rio Bravo as filtered through Night of the Living Dead continue to spread through pop culture like a virus, which is interesting, given that "infection" is the chosen vector for most zombie movies and their close cousins. Personally, I think the fever has run its course, but that doesn't stop other people from continuing to make zombie movies, and I'm still occasionally surprised by them. Case in point is Pontypool (2008, directed by Bruce McDonald), which has an interesting infection vector and an agreeably creepy cinematic structure.

The story follows down on his luck DJ Grant Mazzy through his workday at a flyspeck talk radio station in the basement of a church in Pontypool, a flyspeck town in rural Ontario. He's obviously used to a bigger market than rural Ontario, because he chokes on the podunk local interest stuff that makes up his show. One hilarious example is a family of faux Middle Eastern singers who come on the show to perform, but he also has a man in the air doing traffic that is faking the helicopter sounds from his car and lost pet reports. As the movie opens, and just before the film strikes its first uncanny note, he's bitching to his agent on his drive to work. On this particular day, something weird is afoot, as reports from his man on the street describe outbreaks of riots and murder. As the day progresses, Mazzy and his two-person staff find themselves increasingly isolated from news, and increasingly alarmed at the information that IS coming in. As the film enters its last act, as a doctor who is an eyewitness to the mayhem makes his way to the station to provide Mazzy with information, it becomes increasingly clear that it is elements of language that are the infection vector, that "infected" words are driving people into a homicidal frenzy.

It comes as no surprise that Pontypool is based on a play. You have, essentially, four characters, a limited set, and a conservation of time and place. This follows Aristotle's unities faithfully, which intensifies the tension during the film's first couple of acts quite nicely. The unity of place in particular emphasizes the claustrophobic sense of being trapped by a universe gone mad, and here, Pontypool is a true descendent of Night of the Living Dead. It even samples some of its imagery even though, for the most part, the "zombies" are a threat described at second hand and kept off-screen.

Because this is essentially theater, it has to rely on its performances, a potentially fatal flaw for a movie from this sector. Fortunately, it has a couple of corkers in Stephen McHattie as Mazzy, and Lisa Houle as his impatient producer, Sydney Briar. This is a rare horror movie in which the characters--and importantly, the sound of their voices--is more compelling than the monster or the gore. Indeed, it's a rare horror movie in so far as big chunks of it consist of McHattie talking to a microphone without boring the audience. Kudos to him. The nature of this film's infection vector (and the quality of its actors) allows the film to indulge in some delirious verbal gymnastics towards the end, particularly when Mazzy convinces Sydney that the word "kill", which has infected her, is really "kiss." When she ultimately says "kill me," is about as startling a moment that has ever been put in a horror movie using that line. On the whole, the movie makes dazzling use of its sound design. Parts of it are an arresting sound collage, and the whole thing is a showcase for McHattie's voice. I've seen McHattie in a LOT of things, but I never noticed how smooth his voice is. Has it always been like that? If so, I don't remember it. The film's play on languages is suggestive, too, of why this could NOT have been set in the United States, given that part of its plot turns on both of its lead characters being bilingual. Also appropriate: it ends with a voice-over collage of news snippets that function as an audio analogue of Night of the Living Dead's closing photo montage.

Zombie movies mostly act as metaphors, and this one functions as one, too, if you're sensitive to that kind of thing. Without actually lampooning talk radio, it suggests that it is an incitement to violence, which is an obvious conclusion. More interesting is its flight into semiotics and how language as a symbology is inherently dangerous. The metaphor for an infection is particularly apt. Heady stuff, really, and not the sort of thing you expect from a movie like this. It makes it a lot better than it might otherwise be with a different Maguffin.

But, of course, it's not perfect. Once the movie gets into its third act, it becomes pretty clunky. The arrival of Dr. Mendez at the 50 minute mark or thereabouts is a deus ex machina. His only function is to deliver exposition and theory to point the leads out of their predicament, and just like the gods from the machine of old, he's yanked off-stage just as soon as his function is complete. The "talking cure" that Mazzy develops seems absurd on the face of it, regardless of the scenes it allows to happen. The shift in relationship dynamics between Mazzy and Sydney at the end of the movie seems contrived, too, but it's not cringe-worthy (I think the doctor's entrance and exit probably are cringe-worthy, but be that as it may...).

In any event, Pontypool is evidence that, however tired I'm becoming of zombie movies, they aren't anywhere near played-out. While this is partially an academic exercise (which is a sign that the whole sub-genre is nearing the end), it functions just fine as a horror movie even if you don't care about the deeper levels, and not a bad horror movie, either.

Houses of Cards

By an odd coincidence, all three of the movies I watched last week are built on shaky structural experiments.

Appleseed (2004, directed by Shinji Aramaki) is an experiment in combining the visual hand-drawn aesthetic of traditional animation with 3-D CGI and performance capture. It has some cool action sequences punctuated by long stretches of so much talky exposition that it makes one want to scream. The story, such as it is, surrounds the integration of the next generation of artificial humans with the original model. There are cyborgs and warrior chicks aplenty here. For the most part, I'm not very impressed by the amount of CGI and motion capture in this, even if it is mostly made to look hand-drawn. Disney and the Fleischers experimented with rotoscoping almost eighty years ago. Disney never made much use out of it because he thought it looked wrong. There's a reason that classical animators exaggerated movement and anatomy, and one misses it here. Only the robots seem really, ahem, animated. Ah, well. Mostly sterile, but okay if you have a fetish for mecha, I guess.

Passage to Marseille (1944, directed by Michael Curtiz) is just a mess. It has a great cast--Bogart, Lorre, Greenstreet, Claude Rains--but it also has an arcane flashback within a flashback within a flashback structure that short circuits any kind of narrative motion. Bogart plays a hard boiled Devil's Island escapee who becomes a pilot for the Free French. That sounds pretty good on paper. Sydney Greenstreet is the evil Vichy lackey commanding a transport boat. That sounds good, too. But none of it coheres because you lose track of how everything relates to each other chronologically. I mean, it's watchable--there's always something interesting going on, and Curtiz was a great director for creating cinematic unreal estate--but, sheesh, what a waste of a great cast.

Melinda and Melinda (2004, directed by Woody Allen) is one of Allen's bifurcated movies (kind of like Crimes and Misdemeanors). It tells two versions of the same story, one tragic, one comic, with two different casts except for Rhada Mitchell, who plays the catalyst in both halves, and occasional other characters, who cause the stories to intersect. But really, none of this matters, because it's the framing material that the movie is REALLY about. It's about two playwrights basically bouncing ideas off of each other at dinner, with the comedy and the tragedy as the ball being bounced between them. As a result, one gets the feeling that we're watching Allen detail and deconstruct his writing method. He even puts a version of himself in the movie--played by Will Ferrell of all people. This all might be very interesting, I suppose, but it's not much of a movie. Also, Allen's stock New Yorkers make me want to take him on a drive out through fly-over country to find new (arguably less self-involved) characters to play with.

Quiz Time

Final exams are over in my fair city now, but in the spirit of the season, I found this quiz on Susie Bright's blog. It originates on my old favorite, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Heck, I'll play.

1) William Demarest or Broderick Crawford?

Broderick Crawford. I love a heavy and I can't remember ever seeing William Demarest as a heavy. Plus, you have Highway Patrol vs. My Three Sons. So Crawford it is.

2) What movies improve when seen in a state of altered consciousness?

As a matter of pure speculation, I imagine that The Giant Claw would improve with an altered state of consciousness. As a lifelong teetotaller, I don't have first-hand knowledge.

3) Favorite studio or production company logo?

I like the old AVCO/Embassy logo, mainly for the abstract designy-ness of it.



4) Celeste Holm or Joan Blondell?

Oh, Joan Blondell for the win. Mainly for this:



5) What is the most overrated "classic" film?

My usual response to this sort of question is "there's no such thing as an overrated film, just films that other people like that you don't." My current answer is "Citizen Kane," because calling something "the greatest x ever made" is by definition overrating it. And I LOVE Citizen Kane.

6) What movie do you know for sure you saw, but have no memory of seeing?

I have no memory of Now, Voyager. I've seen it at least twice.

7) Favorite Hammer Film?

For the nonce, it's Kiss of the Vampire, because it gave Roman Polanski the idea for The Fearless Vampire Killers and because it's batshit insane on its own.

8) Gregory Itzin or Joe Pantoliano?

Joe Pantoliano is my favorite Steve Carrella in movies based on Ed McBain. Plus, he was Guido the Killer Pimp. So there you go.

9) Create a double feature with two different movies with the same title. No remakes.

Spellbound (the Hitchcock movie and the documentary about spelling bees)

10) Akiko Wakabayashi or Mie Hama?

Mei Hama for me. Mainly because "Kissy Suzuki" is one of my favorite Bond names.

11) Can you think of a (non-porn) movie that informed you of the existence of a sexual act you had not known of prior?

I can't think of one. I'm almost tempted to say Shortbus, but that's cheating.

12) Can you think of a black & white movie that might actually improve if it was in color?

Jezebel with Bette Davis. I mean, come on! That red dress is a freaking plot point! Screams to have been made in Technicolor. Sigh.

13) Favorite Pedro Almodovar Film?

All About My Mother because it's the one where Almodovar finally "clicked" for me (plus, I LOVE Antonia San Juan's character). I was tempted to say Broken Embraces, but I need to see it some more times.

14) Kurt Raab or Udo Kier?

Oh, Udo Kier definitely. One of these days, I'm going to write a slash porn story teaming Udo Kier's Baron Frankenstein in a love triangle with Helmut Berger's Nazi from Salon Kitty and John Phillip Law's Diabolik. It'll be epic.

15) Worst main title song

The main title song from Aldo Lado's nasty Night Train Murders, which sours me on an otherwise sterling Ennio Morricone score. Morricone should have done the title credits.

16) Last movie you saw in a theater? On DVD, Blu-ray or other interesting location/format?

a. Iron Man 2 with my brothers. Before that, it was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I'm hoping to see Bong Joon-ho's new film, Mother, tonight or tomorrow.

b. Lucretia Martel's The Holy Girl. Martel might be a legitimately great director.


17) Favorite movie reference within a Woody Allen movie?

I liked all of the quotes from German expressionism in Shadows and Fog. Hated the movie, though.

18) Mary Astor or Claudette Colbert?

The difference between an "actress" and a "star." I don't know that I have an opinion. I love Mary Astor in Act of Violence, but that's about it (for what it's worth, I hated her Brigid O'Shaughnessy; I thought she was all wrong for the role). I love Colbert in Torch Song and The Sign of the Cross, but I can't say that I like the movies. Call it a wash.

19) Favorite trailer (provide YouTube link if possible)?

Psycho, hands down. I love that it's Vera Miles at the end of it, not Janet Leigh. Hitch knew how to screw with an audience's head.



20) Oddest double bill you either saw or saw listed in a theater

Hmmm...that's a toughie. One that I saw, I guess: Conan the Destroyer and Iceman, which might actually have been a triple bill with either Gymkata or Red Sonja, but I don't remember. We left halfway through the second feature, in any event.

As a side note, this is a double feature I'd like to see on a marquee (but not necessarily in the theater): The Godfather Part III and Not Without My Daughter!

21) Favorite Phil Karlson film?

Hmm...Probably Kansas City Confidential, but I like The Phenix City Story and Scandal Sheet an awful lot.

22) Favorite “social problem” picture?

Um...Do the Right Thing, maybe? I don't know that I have one.

23) Your favourite Harryhausen film/monster?

Speak of the devil: the statue of Kali/Shiva

24) What was the first movie you saw with your significant other?

Life is Beautiful.

25) John Payne or Ronald Reagan?

John Payne, hands down. Reagan never defended Santa Claus.

26) Movie you feel a certain pressure or obligation to see that you have not yet actually seen.

I occasionally feel the pressure to see Fight Club. I'll pass.

27) Favorite “psychedelic” movie (Hey, man, like, define it however you want, man…)

"Begone Dull Care", methinks.

28) Thelma Ritter or Eve Arden?

Thelma Ritter, mainly for Pickup on South Street and Rear Window.

29) Favorite iconic shot or image from a film?

Oooh. That "iconic" is a qualifier, ain't it? Probably the last shot of The Searchers. My favorite shot in movies, though, might be the last shot in The Conversation.

30) What is the movie that inspired the most memorable argument you ever had about a movie?

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, of all things.

31) Raquel Torres or Lupe Velez?

Lupe Velez's life had a tragic ending, so I remember her better. But Raquel Torres was in Duck Soup and wasn't driven to suicide by her religion. So thee you go.

32) Favorite adaptation of Shakespeare to a film?

Chimes at Midnight. Followed closely by Throne of Blood and Kozintsev's King Lear.

33) Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (in 3D)-- yes or no?

Oh, sure. Why not?

34) Favorite movie rating?

X, because it's not copyrighted by the MPAA and anyone can use it. That seems kind of democratic, don't you think?

35) Olivia Barash or Joyce Hyser?

Joyce Hyser for genderfucking in Just One of the Guys and STILL flashing her boobs (no binding!).

36) What was the movie that convinced you your favorite movie genre was your favorite movie genre?

The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (horror, not sci fi). Man, that film makes an impression when you see it at ten years old.

37) Favorite Blake Edwards movie?

Victor/Victoria. The runner up is S.O.B.

Rust Never Sleeps

As franchise blockbusters go, the first Iron Man movie was pretty surprising. It was anchored by strong character work from all involved, and it reached beyond its canned thrills for some surprisingly deep subtext. It was almost inevitable that a follow-up would lose some of the original's lustre, and so it has. The new film, Iron Man 2 (2010, directed by Jon Favreau), reunites most of the principals of the first film (exceptions are Jeff Bridges, who got killed off in the first movie, and Terence Howard, who got the ax after feuding with Marvel), and adds a bunch of other supporting characters, including Sam Jackson's Nick Fury, Scarlett Johansson's Natalie Rushman, Sam Rockwell's Justin Hammer, and Mickey Rourke's Whiplash. This is, all told, the makings of a pretty good indie drama, but we get the canned superhero thrills instead.

That might sound overly harsh, because, on the whole, Iron Man 2 isn't bad at all. It mainly suffers in comparison to its predecessor.

The new movie is still built around Tony Stark, as played by Robert Downey, Jr. What was only hinted about his character in the first movie emerges full bore in this one. He's his own worst enemy, a self-destructive playboy with serious guilt complexes and a boundless ego. He's a pretty complex character, and it's telling that Stark, unlike say Bruce Wayne, can carry the movie all by himself. Watching Downey inhabit the role is a pure pleasure. If ever there were a character and an actor more perfectly suited to each other, I don't know who it is.

Where the movie trips itself up is in its plotting. This has three distinct major plotlines and a couple of minor ones that vie for the viewer's attention, with none getting enough time to be wholly satisfying on their own. First: We have Stark's self-destruction, in which he bears the burden of saving the world with a weapon that is slowly killing him. Second: We have the machinations of Stark's enemies--mainly Mickey Rourke's Ivan Danko/Whiplash, but also Rockwell's incompetent industrialist and Gary Shandling's grandstanding Senator. Finally, we have the Avengers, being orchestrated by Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. Although all of these threads do eventually intersect, it gives the movie the feeling of being overstuffed. And, really, the only one of these threads that's really interesting as narrative is the first one. The other two are fun, but seem perfunctory, like the movie HAD to do these things. As a result, they don't really resonate, even though individual elements will tickle the fancy of fans of the character. Maybe that's what's wrong. It bends over backwards to include a ton of elements from the comics whether they advance the narrative or not (and don't get me started on the credit cookie at the very end). This seems like pandering.

Some general thoughts on elements of the movie:

I've been hyper-critical of Scarlett Johansson in the past. I've never thought she was much of an actress. Surprisingly, she brings an "A" game to her role in this movie. She's really good in a part that could have been a disaster. Thankfully, they chose not to give the character an accent (a possibility, given the character's origins). She's well-conceived, and visually well-designed. Kudos to the costume designer.

Even though Mickey Rourke's supervillainous persona is Whiplash, the character himself is another supervillain, The Crimson Dynamo, and at the end the movie conflates the two. This is an interesting solution to the demand of fans to see the various rogues galleries on film. This also makes the character a LOT more interesting than he is in the comics. Hell, he doesn't really bear a resemblance to either character, so he might as well be sui generis. Rourke does a terrific job of humanizing him while still making him seem like a really bad guy to know.

Sam Rockwell's character is interesting, but I wish the actor could have toned down his "Sam Rockwell"-ishness. Of the major cast members, he's the one that doesn't quite "get" what the movie is trying to do. Ah, well.

The movie gives thanks in the credits to numerous comics writers and artists who have worked on Iron Man over the years. For the most part, Stan Lee's contribution to the character was pretty much covered in the first forty minutes of the first film. Almost none of what's in this film comes from Lee. It mostly comes from David Michelinie and Bob Layton's version of the character, which, for the most part, is probably the definitive comic book Iron Man. Still, it's nice to see Gene Colan get a shout out in the credits (he is Whiplash's co-creator, after all).

The Iron Man movies seem like they have a fair chance of supplanting the James Bond movies for depicting day-after-tomorrow high tech. These films are basically science fiction, and as science fiction, they do a fine job of imbuing their world with a "wow, when can I have THAT!" sort of mindset. The Bond comparison isn't totally frivolous, either, given the heavy presence of Marvel's Bond knock-off, S.H.I.E.L.D. In any case, this movie is a gadget-lover's wet dream.

Where one could argue that the Tony Stark in the first film is a reconstructed neo-con (and, in fact, I argued exactly that in my review of the film), I think this film falls more on the side of a Randian fantasy. (No secret here, given that the superhero archetype is inherently fascist.) This film is arguably conservative in its outlook, venerating a wealthy man who is getting results while the Government is the problem. On the other hand, the primary thrust of this is to show how irresponsible that man is when given the weight of this responsibility, and how self-destructive it is to even attempt it. This is cunningly constructed to speak out of both sides of its mouth.

Stark's relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) continues to be modeled on a romantic comedy, which is fine and appealing, but there's way too little of it in this movie. It's the one element of the first film that I really missed this time out. On the other hand, Happy Hogan (director Favreau) gets a somewhat bigger part this time out. On balance, I'd rather more of Pepper Potts.

The action sequences in this film were storyboarded by animator Gennedy Tartakovsky, and sometimes this is evident (the scene where the droids drop from the sky to surround Iron Man and Warmachine is the most obvious instance). Sometimes, though, what works in animation doesn't work so well in live action (or, at least, live action plus digital effects). Most of the battle at the end of the film happens at such a distance from the camera that it's mostly a light show where you can't really see what's happening. This is something of a flaw. On the other hand, the Grand Prix sequence is a bravura piece of filmmaking, but it happens too soon. It's the first action sequence in the movie. The filmmakers should have contrived a way to place it later in the film. Given the plot mechanics, though, I think they were kinda strait-jacketed.

Anyway, as I said about another equally "plot-compromised" recent movie, the real key here is whether or not one wants to spend any more time with these characters once the screen fades to black. At this point, the answer is still yes, but the desire is a little bit diminished.

Stranger than Fiction

Because they take so long to make, it's hard to trace patterns of influence among documentaries. In spite of that, it's also hard not to see the widening influence of Capturing the Friedmans. What once was played for shock is now stripped down to raw emotions. This is especially true in two (relatively) recent entries into the transgender documentary subgenre. This is a welcome development, even if it hasn't completely erased the cliches of the form (you can still play the transgender documentary drinking game with these movies if you like), but it has greatly diminished them (so you won't get sloshed). There's an uncanny similarity between them, too.

Red without Blue (2007, directed by Brooke Sebold, Benita Sills, and Todd Sills) was first out of the gate, documenting the lives of a pair of identical twins, one of whom is gay and one of whom is a transsexual. Mark and Clair Farley are clearly close, but, as the film unreels, they were also clearly unhappy as young people. The film describes their upbringing in Missoula, Montana with a raft of home movie footage and photographs, intercut with footage of the principles as they were when the documentary was made. Rather than focus on Clair's transition from Alex (which is the elephant in the room), the film is more interested in exposing the wounds that make their family what it is. As such, it gives each member equal weight. When their mother admits that she doesn't think of the twins as her children anymore, but rather as young people she knows, it speaks to a kind of estrangement that most families can't endure. And, of course, theirs doesn't. It's a raw film that touches on a suicide pact, molestation, and the alienation of queer youth. The movie frames all of this in a kind of dream narrative, a film collage accompanied by languid indie pop that kind of takes the edge off of some of the emotional charge, but it might be hard to watch otherwise. Even so, that both Mark and Clair seem to emerge as relatively happy people is kind of miraculous.

All of this seems like a warm up for Kimberly Reed's Prodigal Sons (2008), though. Reed is herself the subject of the movie, and like the Farley twins, she hails from Montana and returns there during the course of the movie. Like Red without Blue, Prodigal Sons is about siblings, in this case Reed and her adopted brother, Marc. But where a screenwriter might have been able to come up with the story of the Farleys, there's no way one could have come up with the story of the McKerrows.

Reed used to be a golden boy when she was growing up as Paul McKerrow: uncommonly handsome, the quarterback of the football team, the dream of every parent. Marc, who was adopted at the time that Kim was conceived, always dwelt in her shadow. Both siblings underwent life altering transformations later in life, Kim underwent gender transition while Marc had a horrific car accident that resulted in the removal of part of his brain. All things considered, Kim was by far the luckier of the two. And after all of that is established, and after we've seen Marc rage at his sister who remains a golden girl after her transition, even after we've seen that Kimberly is fundamentally well adjusted even in the context of a potentially awkward high school reunion in Montana, the narrative drops a bombshell concerning Marc's biological parentage. All the while, Prodigal Sons, like Red without Blue, is documenting the relationships involved with a striking and uncomfortable intimacy. It's a bitches brew, to be sure, and if the film ultimately leaves a ragged end, well, that's life I guess. It doesn't necessarily provide a tidy narrative. It's a bracing film.

Reeling and Rocking

A year or so ago I reviewed the Japanese girl rock movie, Linda Linda Linda, or rather, kind of reviewed it, while linking to a YouTube clip of the title song. I love that movie to pieces. So when one of my correspondents told me that they liked another Japanese girl rock movie better, I was intrigued. The movie in question is Nana (2005, directed by Kentarô Ôtani), which is based in turn on a manga. The movie itself isn't especially concerned with the healing power of rock and roll as an object unto itself (as Linda Linda Linda was), so much as it uses music as a plot device. It could be anything, really.

Anyway, the plot of the movie follows two girls who are named Nana who meet by happenstance on a train to Tokyo. The first Nana, who we first meet in a pre-credit concert sequence, is an aspiring rock star.  She is world weary and jaded already even though she's only 20. The other Nana is going to Tokyo in pursuit of a boyfriend who went off to art school there. The second Nana is a gushing schoolgirl at first. Naive is putting things mildly. Things end badly with her boyfriend, who clearly doesn't want her around him. Also by happenstance, the two Nanas wind up as roommates. It's a mutually beneficial relationship: rocker Nana teaches schoolgirl Nana to be independent, while schoolgirl Nana plays matchmaker for rocker Nana and her ex-boyfriend (now a successful rock star in his own right).

This all sounds fun, but it turns out limp. I think I knew it was going to be limp when it got into the habit of starting songs as diegetic musical numbers and then truncating them, almost like the filmmakers didn't actually have complete songs to play with (it eventually gets out of this habit, but the damage was done early; it's also likely that this was a casualty when the run-time of the film got long, unfortunately). I didn't dislike the movie, which should relieve my friend who recommended it, but I did resent that it wasn't better, and I wish it was more in love with rock and roll, and in love with better rock and roll at that. That's NOT a problem that Linda Linda Linda had.

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The three men profiled in It Might Get Loud (2008, directed by Davis Guggenheim) don't have a problem with loving rock and roll. They are, respectively, Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. The movie opens with White cobbling together a one string guitar from a board, a couple of nails, a coke bottle, and a pick-up. White is endlessly inventive. All three are endlessly inventive in their respective ways, about which the movie goes into in great depth. The conceit is that they've all three been assembled into a warehouse to talk about playing guitar and maybe to play some, too, which is the promise that the movie makes. Then it fails to deliver on it. Oh, there's a ton of guitar. True. But you don't really see the three of them come together and jam until they play The Band's "The Weight" under the closing credits. It's a good way to keep the audience in their seat during the closing credits, I guess, but it seems like a cheat. You never really have a sense of them interacting. One wishes that White's prediction at the outset, that "there might be a fist fight," had come true.

Still, it is a fair portrait of each guitarist in turn, with Jimmy Page coming off the best--he's really turned into a lovely old man with a twinkle of a boy still in him--as evidenced while watching him play air guitar to Link Wray's "Rumble" or playing air guitar with a theremin. It's White, though, that makes the strongest statement about the nature of his art, when he plays a Son House song and then declares that he's spent his entire career trying to play that song. In one other respect, the movie is a success: it makes me want to go home and play guitar.

Dribs and Drabs

I'm getting a little backlogged on reviews, so here are some quick hits to get caught up.

Horror and related:

I Sell the Dead (2008, directed by Glenn McQuaid), in which amiable grave robber Dominic Monaghan recounts his life of crime on the eve of his execution. Not really a narrative, per se, so much as a collection of vignettes; the horror movie equivalent of a picaresque. It has an interesting production design that recalls the roots of the horror film in the graphic arts, and a striking artifice that's the product of being filmed in front of a green screen. It's intrusive some of the time, but it works well enough. It's certainly better than some of the cheaper productions of the past (Ed Wood's cardboard sets for instance). The filmmakers obviously spent their money on the cast rather than on sets, including Ron Perlman as the confessor, Larry Fessenden as Monaghan's partner, and Angus Scrimm as the Doctor Knox figure. It has some good moments, particularly after our erstwhile resurrectionists start dealing in the undead, but on the whole, it's kind of lackadaisical. It takes a while to get where it's going. Still, parts of it are pretty funny, particularly the first encounter with other worlds.

Christine (1983, directed by John Carpenter) is one of Carpenter's most underrated movies. It's stripped down from Stephen King's ungainly novel into a lean, mean horror film, though it is perhaps let down by at least two of its leads. It has some terrific character work by Robert Prosky, Roberts Blossom, and Harry Dean Stanton, and it makes fun use of old rock and roll songs to boot. Still, the real star of the movie is the car, a menacing 1958 Plymouth Fury, which is appropriate given the eponymous title. The story itself strikes me as a masculine version of Carrie, though it's a bit more sinister than Carrie. It kinda sorta borrows the ending of Carrie, but only if you squint your eyes. It dispenses with the ghost story element of the book, and suggests that Christine was just born bad (which it accomplishes in a droll assembly line sequence to start the movie), much to the betterment of the whole. Unfortunately, I streamed this from Netflix and the print they have for streaming is in the wrong friggin aspect ratio and it's WAY noticeable. Note to self: revisit this sometime soon.

Civilian:

I'm sucker for a swashbuckler, and there was a LONG drought for swashbucklers in the last quarter of the 20th Century, so The Mask of Zorro (1998, directed by Martin Campbell) was a welcome return. The mantle of Zorro is passed from Anthony Hopkins to Antonio Banderas in the course of this movie, and there's a hint of The Count of Monte Cristo in the way Hopkins's elder Zorro goes about taking his revenge on the enemy who imprisoned him for 20 years. It's not canon, but it works. The film is so much fun to watch that I'm not inclined to be a stickler. What this film restores to the action film is charm and romance, a model adopted in part by the Pirates of the Caribbean films a couple of years later (they also borrowed Zorro's screenwriters). This is the film that made Catherine Zeta-Jones a star, and she was gorgeous in it, but the real pleasure for me was watching Anthony Hopkins, dressed all in black, snuffing out candles with a bullwhip. I started thinking wicked, wicked thoughts about that, and I can't remember the last time an action movie had that effect on me. But that's just me. The film's not without its faults, but it's at least in the neighborhood of the great Zorro films with Fairbanks and Power.

Chasing the Dragon

Taken on the level of its plot, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009, directed by Niels Arden Oplev) is not particularly distinguished from other similar crime thrillers. Disgraced journalist Michael Blomkvist is hired by a wealthy capitalist Henrik Vanger to find out what happened to his missing niece, who vanished some forty years in the past. The investigation brings Blomqvist into contact with professional computer hacker Lisabeth Salander, a goth girl savant with deep scars from her past, and in contact with a series of related crimes that appear to be motivated by the Vanger family's old ties to the Nazis. Pretty stock stuff, truth to tell--Agatha Christie would recognize its outlines--but expertly rendered. That's only the plot, and movies are often so much more than their plots. This one certainly is. The plot here serves mainly as a crucible in which to test its characters, and how those characters react is what makes the movie fascinating.

The original Swedish title of this film is Män som hatar kvinnor, literally "Men Who Hate Women." This is the major theme of the movie, and it's a narrative thread that brings Lisabeth out of the shadows of what would normally be a supporting role into the lead. The movie may nominally belong to Michael Nyqvist's Blomkvist, but it's Lisabeth who holds the screen against all comers. Played with brittle rage by Noomi Rapace, she's dramatically different from most movie heroines. Bisexual, pierced and tattooed, possibly an Aspie, she is a fundamentally damaged woman who nevertheless turns the tables on the narrative, just as she turns the tables on the rapist who abuses her. Rape and violence towards women are rampant in this movie, including at least two pretty graphic depictions, and it is tempting to class parts of the film as a rape/revenge fantasy. The movie is too smart for that, though. It weaves its rape content into a broader theme about misogyny on a far more sinister scale. This movie almost has to have a female protagonist, because putting a male protagonist amid these elements might seem apologetic.

The character arcs the film pursues for both Blomqvist and Lisabeth are essentially redemptive. Blomkvist seeks to recover the muse he has lost in the process of losing a libel suit, while Lisabeth is trying to live with a violent past. By the end of the film, both seem to have found their way back from the wilderness. Watching them work through their demons is the real pleasure of the film, and it's what keeps the audience watching--never bored in the least--as the movie unreels its longer than usual running time.

I have to say, though, that I was a bit disarmed when the credit for the Swedish Film Institute came onscreen at the beginning. It was like I was starting a Bergman film. Parts of the film look like Bergman, but that may be an unavoidable consequence of filming in the same light, because the filmmaking on display here is very different. This is the computer age, after all, and Lisabeth is a computer savant--the film actually shows what she's doing, which is unusual for hacker's in movies--and the movie takes its cues from multimedia, often providing exposition in layered images superimposed on one another. The obsession with images is descended from Blow-Up, if you want a reference point for this film's structure, but it doesn't look much like that film, either. I like, too, the way it inverts the gender dynamics of its final confrontation with the murderer, by making Blomkvist the loose cannon who goes poking around inadvisably and by making Lisabeth the knight errant. It's a neat trick on genre conventions. Finally, I like the relationship that develops between Blomkvist and Lisabeth--lovers, eventually, but an odd coupling. Lisabeth knows everything about Blomkvist, as he notes, but he knows almost nothing about her. She leaves him that way, too.

One measure of a good movie is whether or not the characters wear out their welcome. Do you want to spend more time in their company after the credits roll? For me, for this film, the answer is yes, and fortunately, this is the first film of a trilogy. The other chapters, The Girl who Played With Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest have already been filmed. I'm looking forward to them.

Seeing Red

On the whole, I'm glad I didn't take in the Red Riding Trilogy all in one go. I could have. My local theater ran them all at a special discount on one night. I think that might have been a bit much to take. One a night was just fine.

Red Riding 1974 (2009, directed by Julian Jarrold) sets things in motion. Someone is abducting and murdering young girls in Yorkshire. The police claim that they haven't any leads, but that doesn't stop young crime reporter Eddie Dunford from picking at the threads of the case and unraveling it. It's a story that leads him straight into a swamp of police corruption and shady real estate deals, to say nothing of s paedophile who sews the wings of a swan to the back of one of his victims. Pretty soon, the police take an interest in Dunford and begin pointing him in directions that serve their interests. They certainly don't serve Dunford's or the public's.

Red Riding 1980 (2009, directed by James Marsh) picks up the pieces of the first film, some six years later when the case of the Yorkshire Ripper opens the Yorkshire police up to scrutiny. The central figure in this film is one Peter Hunter, an investigator brought in from Manchester to sort things out. Hunter had his investigation of the Yorkshire police interrupted after the events of 1974, and he's looking to pick up where he left off with this case. This is complicated by dissension in the ranks of his own hand-picked squad of investigators, among whose number is an old girlfriend.

Red Riding 1983 (2009, directed by Anand Tucker) splits its purview to two protagonists: Maurice Jobson, a cop who we've seen in the previous two movies turning a blind eye to corruption that disgusts him, and John Piggott, a lawyer who is hired to represent the feeble-minded patsy that was framed for the child murders in the first film. Another child abduction sets off the action in this film, but the movie is constructed of the invisible elements of the first movie, and hinges upon it.

These movies were made for the UK's Channel 4 and in addition to being made by three different directors, none of whom is known for gritty, miserablist noir like this, they were filmed on three different film stocks. This has the effect of giving each of them a certain visual "feeling." The first film, for instance, has a distinctive visual murk resulting from filming on 16mm film, while the second film has the merciless clarity of deep-focus 35mm and the third makes use of high-def video to play with exotic lighting patterns and effects. Yet, in spite of the visual diversity of the filmmaking, there's also a visual unity that stems from the setting itself. It's a dour, dreary place, the north of England, even in the sunlight.

The movies are populated by some truly scabrous characters, and one strains at the thought that any police department in the developed world could possibly be as corrupt as the West Yorkshire police. Still, it has the ring of truth, even in a fictional setting. Our various protagonists are a mixed lot. Eddie Dunford is the purest of these characters, given that he's young and uncorrupted and given that Andrew Garfield plays him as a fairly likable crusader. Paddy Considine's Hunter is a bit more world weary, weighed down by his own personal transgressions and by a sense of failure regarding the events of the first film. Piggott and Dobson in the third film, played respectively by David Morrisey and Mark Addy, are both completely tarnished.

On the matter of filmmaking, these are made by expert hands, but there's a disconnect between the elan of the films and their narratives. The screenplay--all three films are adapted by Tony Grisoni from the novels by David Peace--takes some awful turns. Most disconcerting is the tendency of our various protagonists to become sexually involved with witnesses on very short acquaintance. This is most jarring in the first one, in which Dunford falls into bed with Rebecca Hall's grieving mother after she is clearly offended by him and the way he goes about his profession, but the way Jobson hooks up with the medium in the third movie is almost comical in comparison. Do real people behave like this? Probably not. And, while on the whole it is the second movie that seems under the tightest narrative control, it still asks us to believe that a hit squad of cops can get away with a mass shooting at a nightclub. More globally, the movie posits a universe in which the cops protect a child murderer as a matter keeping corrupt business propositions viable, one of which is a trade in pornography. This, even after the initial case is resolved. For the most part, it's best not to think about the narrative. If you do, the whole house of cards might come tumbling down. Best to groove on the moods and moral ambiance of the whole project, because as a mood piece, Red Riding is a piece of work.

Juvenile Delinquency

Every time I read something by comic book writer Mark Millar, I get the vague feeling that he's kind of a douchebag. I got this while reading The Authority. I got this while reading Ultimate X-Men. I got this reading a scattering of Civil War. I haven't read Kick-Ass, but I got that feeling again from watching Matthew Vaughn's 2010 movie version. It's a troubling film. It's an amoral film. It's a film that is undeniably fun to watch.

Now, I realize that I'm not this film's target demographic. This film wasn't made for middle-aged women. It was made for adolescent and just post-adolescent boys, and that's part of what troubles me about it. I'm not particularly troubled by the beating Frank D'Amico, Mark Strong's villain, delivers to Hit-Girl near the end of the film, as some critics are. I'm more troubled by the sexualization of Hit-Girl in the sequence immediately prior to that action mayhem. The movie puts eleven year old Chloe Moretz into a sexy schoolgirl outfit as a means of getting into D'Amico's headquarters. And just prior to that, we get some of the secondary high school boys lusting after her after seeing her capacity for violence. Seriously, this is just sick. We also get the dubious pleasure of watching that same eleven year old character watch her father burned to death. This is all part and parcel of Millar's playbook. He likes outrageous ideas like this for their shock value, and don't give me any bullshit about it being satire. It's an extension of trends in comics since Frank Miller uncorked the grim and gritty superhero archetype in the early 80s and protests of "realism" are going to fall on deaf ears when it comes to a movie in which our teen-age hero ends up donning a rocket pack and wasting a raft of bad guys with mini-guns mounted on his back. At its most basic, this is a more explicit, more virulent version of the superhero wish-fulfillment power fantasy, one that feeds both fanboy sensibilities of "cool" and their sense of entitlement to groove on even the most reprehensible imagery so long as it feeds that sense of "cool."

But does this matter?

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."--Oscar Wilde

In the interests of full disclosure, some of my favorite movies include the likes of Dirty Harry and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Dirty Harry is an even more troubling power fantasy than Kick-Ass could ever dream of being, and TCM's only reasonable justification for existing is the very force of its film making. So I need to own up to the fact that while I was watching Kick-Ass, I was grooving on how it was made. It's an accomplished movie that knows how to provide the kinetic thrills that are the stock in trade of action movies. It gets the adrenalin flowing. Not only that, but it's almost classically austere in the way it films action. It's not a run and gun movie. You see the geography of the scene. You see every loving bullet impact. You see bodies in motion, sometimes in slow motion that renders the action balletic in the manner of John Woo's best films. Since this is becoming a lost art, it's exhilarating to watch it executed well. Further, the various characters in Kick-Ass are performed with aplomb: Both Aaron Johnson and Chloe Moretz are destined for stardom (Moretz in particular is one of those preternaturally gifted child actors a la Jodie Foster or Dakota Fanning). It's reassuring to see what a fine actor Nicolas Cage can be when he's put in the right situation. Hell, hearing Cage affect a combination of William Shatner and Adam West as the voice of Big Daddy is kind of a hoot.

In any event, while I watched it, I was immersed in the world it was presenting and that's the aim of movies like this, after all. Shall I take the film to task for accomplishing exactly what it sets out to do?

If I apply Oscar Wilde's dictum, this is very well made, not badly made at all, and that's pretty much all she wrote. Right?

Right?

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As a side note, here's a further opinion on Mark Millar. Thought I'd share.

Hit to the Body

Audiences going in to Jennifer's Body (2009, directed by Karyn Kusama) expecting a quirky comedy horror lark on the evidence of screenwriter Diablo Cody's Juno can probably be forgiven for balking at the jolt delivered by this film's second murder sequence. This isn't what they were buying tickets to see. They got an actual horror movie. Likewise, teen age horror fans can be forgiven for balking at the film, baited by the promise of a topless Megan Fox (which doesn't happen) and a fun horror movie that delivers boobs and blood. What they got is a female-centric movie about women and the relationships they form. Again, not what they were buying tickets to see. It's a movie that's neither fish nor fowl. But it's pretty good at what it's trying to do.

The story involves two friends: Anita, whose nickname is "Needy," and Jennifer. They're an unlikely pair, with Needy being kind of a nerd while Jennifer is a wet dream of a cheerleader. But, as the movie rightly notes, playground friendships can be deep. One night, Needy is dragged away from her boyfriend to go see an indy band at a roadhouse with Jennifer. The band is looking for a break and they've decided on a pact with the devil. They need a virgin to sacrifice and they've chosen Jennifer. Unfortunately, Jennifer isn't a virgin, and even though the band gets the success they crave, Jennifer becomes a demon in the bargain, one hungry for human flesh. So she begins preying on her male classmates, with a special eye for the ones Needy is friends with.

Structurally, this is a distaff slasher movie, but there's a striking difference between this and a standard slasher movie: none of Jennifer's victims "deserves" it. The moral judgement is absent. The guys she kills aren't rapists or stoners or even womanizers. They're just normal kids. The movie compounds this by giving them quirks that show them to have normal interior lives. This is pretty good writing (and nevermind the Diablo Cody-speak that some people can't get past). There's a point to this: it's a repudiation of the moral universe of the slasher movie. By inverting the gender dynamics of the victims, it takes away the planks of that morality, because, when you come down to it, the victims in most slasher movies don't deserve what they get, either. This film is careful not to turn its monster into a hero, too. All of this has the perverse effect of amplifying the horror quotient in a way that a gorier boobs and blood opus might miss. Plus, it defuses the horror film's usual veneer of misogyny. This is important, because, as I said, this is a movie about women and their relationships. True, it's abstracted through the lens of the horror movie, but Jennifer's Body is still about two best friends who become estranged. The "BFF" (a grouping of letters explicitly referenced in the movie) is a kind of relationship that boys generally don't enter.

Amanda Seyfried's character, Needy, is an interesting variation on the slasher film's 'final girl' archetype. She's totally the type: socially awkward, nerdy. In another movie, it would be plain to see that she's the final girl the minute she walks on screen. But this movie twists things a bit. Needy, unlike Jennifer's man-eater and unlike every other final girl ever written, has what seems like a normal adult sexual relationship with her boyfriend. She doesn't pine for someone unobtainable to a girl of her social stratus. If there's a misstep with her character, it's the fact that no amount of frumpy clothing can hide the fact that Amanda Seyfried is gorgeous, though that too may be an intentional commentary on the usual frumpy girl who turns out to be beautiful behind her glasses.

Jennifer herself is a pathetic monster and by the end, the audience has some sympathy for her. This is accomplished mainly in the scene where she's sacrificed to the Devil. Give Megan Fox some credit here, she performs this scene perfectly: no longer the bombshell, she's a victim and a teenage girl who is in way over her head. She joins a long list of sympathetic monsters with whom audiences relate.

What really seals the deal for me regarding this picture's bona fides is the second murder scene, in which Jennifer lures Colin, one of Needy's gothy friends--a nice kid in spite of all the black clothing--to the killing floor. This is cross-cut with a sex scene that goes horribly bad in which Needy senses the awful things that Jennifer does even as her boyfriend enters her. It's a bravura scene that pushes the film out of the realm of the comic. It's a feel-bad scene and there's nothing funny in it. It goes for the throat.

Blast from the Past

One of the downsides of having a voracious movie habit is that you'll over-fish the waters eventually. I'm running out of good films noir, for example. I mean, I enjoy looking at the second tier noirs--some of those are even my favorite films in the idiom, but eventually you're into third and fourth-tier films and you find that the thrill is pretty much gone. Still, there are unearthed gems, so I keep poking around. I think that's the way that the Criterion people do it, too. How else to explain their interest and love for such forgotten films as Overlord or, more germane to my film noir problem, Blast of Silence. Blast of Silence (1961, directed by Allen Baron). This film is pretty obscure. While it was released by Universal (in their "Universal International" days), it comes out of the dawning New York underground movement. It also comes at the tail end of the classic noir period, and you can see the self-consciousness of post-noir filter into the way it's constructed. The voice over narration ties it to the classic noir, while the way it is shot ties it to the neo-Realists, and the French New Wave, who constructed their films in part from classic noir and the neo-Realists. It looks like a nouvelle vague film. Note the softness of this image:

That's not the kind of image that you find in the abstracted world of the classic noir. It looks more like one of Truffaut's shots of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows.

The story is mostly banal. We follow hitman Frankie Bono out of Cleveland on a job that takes him to the Big Apple at Christmas. Once there, one of the suppliers of the tools of his trade identifies what his job is and tries to shake him down, meanwhile, Bono runs across old acquaintances who don't know what he does for a living. He's torn between the ruthlessness of his job, the alienation it entails, and a desire for a "normal" life. These conspire to suck him into the bleak downward spiral of a classic noir protagonist. This narrative is accompanied by an interior narrative, delivered in voice-over by Lionel Stander, that's a portrait in anomie and psychopathology. This is a counterpoint to the documentary-style adopted by the camera, which portrays the hustle and bustle of Christmastime New York, from Rockefeller Center to Harlem to the bleak swamps to the east where generations of criminals have dumped bodies.

The beginning of the film is arresting, all right: the soundtrack tells us that all routs into New York are shrouded in darkness and that emerging into the city is like being born, full of piss and vinegar and hatred. This immediately marks Blast of Silence as an art film of sorts, rather than a stock genre exercise. Unfortunately, it never quite shakes off the genre, and it suffers for it because it doesn't trust the genre to cover its ass. There's a whiff of pretense in this movie. Still, it's better to take a swing at the fences than the alternative, I suppose. Plus, it's short at 77 minutes, so it doesn't collapse under its own weight.

In any event, this film can be seen as a kind of bridge between the classic noir films and the urban alienation film of the 1970s. It's hard to watch this movie and not see a bit of Travis Bickell in Frankie Bono.

Seriously...

It's always dangerous to take the Coen Brothers at their word, so when they say in the DVD supplemental material that the fake Yiddish folktale at the beginning of A Serious Man (2009) has nothing to do with the film that follows--that it's essentially a cartoon short before the feature--that should be an alarm bell right there. It has everything to do with the movie that follows. Or maybe it doesn't. And that's the point. Nothing in this film is certain. How appropriate is it, then, that when we first see our protagonist, Larry Gopnik, he is explicating the story of Schrödinger's Cat.

The opening scenes of A Serious Man concern a man on his way back from market who is helped on the road by a man who his wife claims has been dead for three weeks. He is a dybbuk, a ghost, and to invite one into your home is to invite ruin. This man shows up as invited and the wife stabs him with an icepick. Consequently, he wanders back into the night. Now, the question here is this: is this man actually a dybbuk? The movie doesn't say so conclusively. Do the actions of the wife curse their house? The movie doesn't say. Are the movie's actual protagonists related to these people, and are they therefore cursed? The movie doesn't say. The filmmakers invite you to make your own connections, and that's at the heart of the movie, because they've set things up such that you can never know what's actually going on. Is Larry Gopnik's wife having an affair? It doesn't say conclusively. Is his brother some kind of idiot savant, a mathematical genius? It doesn't say conclusively. Is God actively destroying Gopnik's life? The movie doesn't say. Without opening the box and killing the cat, we can't know. The Coens like this sort of thing. It's the box at the end of Barton Fink stretched out to feature length.

All comedies are predicated a little bit on schadenfreude. Mel Brooks once described the difference between comedy and tragedy thusly: "I cut my finger. That's tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That's comedy." The Coens know this, and push the envelope. This movie doesn't evoke gales of laughter. It's more interested in the nervous variety, the "thank God that's not me" variety. The movie darkens considerably as it goes, until there's nothing funny about the ending at all, except that it's not happening to the viewer. The film's casting is just about perfect for this, because everyone on screen is vaguely familiar, but not overly so. Michael Stuhlbarg as Gopnik in particular navigates a tricky performance that requires him to be sympathetic and pathetic at the same time, while raging against an indifferent cosmos. He's the lynchpin of the movie. But this is not a movie-star driven movie.

A Serious Man takes from Fargo the virtue of a seeming verisimilitude, drawn, as Fargo is, from the Coen's upbringing in Minnesota. This effect is amplified by the fact that it's a period piece, set just far enough in the past to cement the place and time in the mind's eye. I don't think this would work in a contemporary setting, but it works beautifully in the late sixties. The film's sense of verisimilitude is further cemented by the ethnic details, also presumably from the Coen's upbringing.

The ethnic details are more important than the time period though.

For all the Judaica on display in this movie, it might very well be an atheist's movie. You can't really tell. God, if he exists in the film's universe, is silent on the matter, and his representatives on Earth, in this film a series of ever "wiser" rabbis seem to be talking out of their asses. Gopnik, for his part, understands the math of the universe--he says so to a Korean student who may be bribing him or may be blackmailing him--but he doesn't understand the consequences. The student's father, who threatens to sue him for defamation, tells him to "accept the mystery." The end of the movie consists of two cross-cut sequences in which Gopnik caves to an act of "moral turpitude" then receives an ominous call from his doctor, while his son waits to get to shelter as a tornado touches down just beyond his school. Is this the hand of God showing itself? Or is it just a bunch of random disasters? More than one critic has likened the film to the Book of Job, because the film really goes out of its way to heap shit on our hero, but even at the end, it doesn't say for sure. And for a comedy, even a dark one, it sure does deliver a shuddering chill as it cuts abruptly to black.

Harried and Harryhausened

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977, directed by Sam Wanamaker) is very much the least of the Sinbad movies. It's woefully miscast. Patrick Wayne (son of The Duke) is WAY too white American to be a credible Sinbad, and it gives the juicier female lead to Taryn Power (daughter of Tyrone Power), rather than to Jane Seymour, who blows her off the screen. This is more or less the same movie as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, in which an evil sorcerer has disfigured the rightful ruler and Sinbad must convey that ruler to a magical wellspring. Along the way, monsters are battled, and at the end, our heroes look on as two monsters battle each other. Unlike that movie, this movie shows our heroes to be complete morons, especially the wise man, Melantheus (played by former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton). The heroes keep just telling evil queen Zenobia their plans, which is irritating in the extreme. If they keep mum about it, the movie has no drama. This kind of special pleading is a hallmark of bad screenwriting. Ray Harryhausen's monsters remain a delight, but there's not enough of them to sustain the movie, and even these show some flagging invention on the part of the artist. The first monsters we get are these demonic insect men:

These are pretty good. But it's downhill from there. The giant walrus seems thrown in just to have an encounter during a slow part of the movie (which, unwittingly pads its length).

And the final monster is this sabertooth tiger, which is not one of Harryhausen's finest creations. It looks like a stuffed toy rather than a threatening monster.

For the most part, you can see the roots of how modern blockbusters are made in this film: you have a monster encounter at the end of every reel--approximately every ten minutes--to keep the kids' attention from wandering. Unfortunately, that doesn't work any better as drama here than it does in more recent fare. Unfortunately.

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Speaking of Harryhausen, the new Clash of the Titans (2010, directed by Louis Leterrier) is surprising in at least one respect: it satisfies the Alison Bechdel rule. There are more than two women in the film with speaking parts. Two or more women speak to each other about something other than a man (in this case, Cassiopeia to her daughter, Andromeda, on the subject of defying the gods). Rah, rah, feminism. Otherwise, this sucks all kinds of ass.

This film is stitched together from bits and pieces of the original film without borrowing its overall design. Some elements seem thrown in just for the sake of echoing the old movie. Calibos, for example, seems like a throw in excuse to make giant scorpions. The contempt for the original film exhibited in this one is manifested in a throwaway bit, in which Perseus finds Bubo the owl in a bunch of scrap and tosses him aside. Mind you, the original is no great shakes and the owl was ridiculous, but why antagonize the people who grew up with it by trashing it. Feh.

Allegedly, the whole reason this exists is to update the special effects from Harryhausen's charmingly homemade stop-motion puppets to state of the art, photoreal CGI. But what, I ask, is the point of state of the art special effects if the film is edited so fast that you can't see anything? I challenge anyone to tell me what this film's harpies actually look like (apart from having wings). There were two points during this film where I said aloud "Hold. The camera. Still." If I say anything during a movie, I'm usually having a bad time, so this is telling of my experience. The way the film plays fast and loose with mythology is irritating, too, but not nearly as irritating as the way it wastes relatively good actors in the background in favor of Sam Worthington and Gemma Arterton, neither of whom exactly holds the screen. Polly walker gets four minutes of screen time? Elizabeth McGovern is even in this? Really? I almost gave this points for having some background extras at the palace in Argos dressed in the Minoan snake goddess outfit (sadly no boobs are visible), but screw it, it's anachronistic. Ralph Fiennes must have done this without preparation during some down time on the set of Harry Potter, because his performance is basically Voldermort in mythological drag. Lazy.

In a nutshell: Loud, pummeling, illogical, incomprehensible, pointless. Tremendous resources misapplied wholesale. A great steaming pile.

Silence is Golden

There's something wintery about the anti-Western. Altman felt it in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Sydney Pollack felt it in Jeremiah Johnson, and you get it full-bore in Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence (1968), a film that razes the Western to the ground and sows salt in the soil.

The movie is set in Utah somewhere during the period thought of as the Old West. I can't pinpoint it any closer than that, because the movie is strangely anachronistic. Utah is a territory in the film--Utah became a state in 1896--but our hero, Silence, carries a broomhandle Mauser rather than the stock guns of Western gunfighters. The broomhandle Mauser was first manufactured in Germany in 1896. So there's a disconnect. Further, the events of the film are based in part on the Mountain Meadow Massacre of 1857. As with most other Westerns, I prefer to think of this film as an abstraction of history, but this one seems even more anachronistic than most. Silence's gun of choice also Europeanizes the film, which may have been its intent.

In any event, our hero, Silence, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant without any dialogue, falls in with a group of "outlaws" who are being hunted by bounty killers. And by "outlaws", I mean Mormons, though the movie never uses the word. The bounty killers are led by Klaus Kinski's Loco, who'd rather bring 'em in dead than alive. It's a pretty stock set-up. What happens at the end of the movie is NOT stock. At the end, Loco draws a wounded silence out into the open by holding the captured outlaw families hostage. Silence has been sheltering with Vonetta McGee's Pauline, a widow whose husband was killed by Loco, presumably as part of the same bounty on anyone who wasn't a white Christian. She follows him to try to stop him. In the showdown, Silence, Pauline, and all of the "outlaws" are massacred. The end.

Sergio Corbucci's spaghetti westerns are all laced with with a Marxist point of view, and this one is no different, though it's more pessimistic than most. This movie is a critique of the Western's notions of heroism, when in Corbucci's worldview, the West was settled at gunpoint by genocidal murderers. This, at least, has some basis in history, and it may be why the rest of the movie is so ahistorical as a means of softening the blow. The heroic gunfighter prevailing against all odds, Corbucci seems to be saying, is bullshit.

As if to emphasize the point, the landscapes in this movie are bleak snowscapes. We first see Silence on his horse struggling through snowbanks, which eventually unhorse him. This is a kind of fimbulwinter for the West, a prelude to the twilight of the gods. It's the end of the world. The movie it most reminds me of is Hideo Gosha's Goyokin, which indulges in the same motifs of bare trees, snow, and crows. The symbolism is the same in both movies.

The silence of our main character, and his European-ness, are presumably both representative of Europe at the time the film was made. America was indulging in massacres anew in Vietnam in the name of its ideal of democracy, and Europe didn't have a voice in the matter. I could see Corbucci making the same film again in the 2000s.

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For what it's worth, the studio behind The Great Silence compelled Corbucci to film a "happy" ending for the film, which is included (appropriately without a soundtrack) on the Fantomas disc. This ending just goes to show that an ending doesn't need to be happy to be satisfying, because it's just ridiculous.