One Froggy Evening

I really wanted to like The Princess and the Frog (2009, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker), Disney's return to hand-drawn 2-D animation (it was actually drawn on a computer, but details). I did. It's certainly a good-looking movie, and the comedy bits mostly work. And, sure, I'll give it props for finally providing an African princess, but there's some animating spark that's missing.

The story here reinvents "The Frog Prince" fairy tale in 1920s New Orleans, and the movie is drenched in a vision of that city that's more fantasy than reality. But this is a fairy tale, and at least it's not an obnoxious fantasy. There's jazz, and there's food, and there's a hint of the hothouse in its depiction of its characters. Tennessee Williams is in the bones of this movie. As are Marie LeVeau and Baron Samedi. Our heroine is Tianna, a young black woman who is saving to buy a restaurant, to no avail from the dismissive real-estate men who agent the place she wants. Her friend, Charlotte, is a princess wannabe in the worst Southern Belle way, and when New Orleans is visited by Prince Naveen of Maldonia, she holds a ball. Meanwhile, Naveen and his treacherous retainer, Louis, have run afoul of Doctor Facilier, a voodoo shadowman with debts to pay to his supernatural allies. The prince finds himself turned into a frog, and subsequently mistakes Tianna for a princess. The subsequent kiss doesn't work out quite the way anyone intends, and the game, as they say, is afoot.

For the most part, this is fun. Hell, there's a lot to like about this. The visuals are nice, and the character design is excellent. I LOVE the voice work by both Anika Noni Rose and Keith David (Keith David needs to voice more cartoon villains; he's amazingly suited to it). But there's definitely something "off" about the whole enterprise. It occurred to me some hours after I finished watching it that what's dragging the movie down is its music. Randy Newman provides the songs, and, well, they're not his best work. I can't honestly recall any of the music, even at a relatively short remove from watching it, and this seems wrong for a movie set in New Orleans in the 1920s. This movie should breath jazz and zydeco, and even though it makes the attempt, there's no electrical charge in it, and no authenticity. Where is Louis Armstrong when you need him?

As I say, I want to like this--and in some ways I DO like this--because I think the notion that traditional animation is passe is completely wrongheaded. (I'm glad nobody at Disney told that to Hayao Miyazaki or Sylvain Chomet). And if someone really needs to be making animated films of this sort, it's Disney. I mean, Disney without cartoons is like jumbalaya without hot sauce. It's just wrong. It just is. But, as I say, it somehow doesn't work, which just sucks.

Hot Buttered Fuzz

Although it's billed as a parody of the supercop genre, there's a secret agenda at work in Hot Fuzz (2007), Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's follow up to their cult hit, Shaun of the Dead. The giveaway is an actor tucked in among the various vaguely familiar English character actors who inhabit the film's sleepy country village. Simon Pegg's supercop has been consigned here for making his fellow officers look bad, where he encounters local populace that includes Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Billie Whitlaw, Bill Nighy, Edward Woodward, Paul Freeman, and Paddy Considine, among others.

Ever the meta-filmmaker, Wright name checks his main points of reference in-movie, with Point Break and Bad Boys II making appearances, but this is really a horror movie send-up in disguise. The film even tells you this early on when Dalton's character, the weasley grocer Simon Skinner tells Simon Pegg's character that he needs to be locked up as a "slasher." Sure enough, there's a mad slasher about, who decapitates a lawyer and his mistress, blows up a developer and his awful McMansion, crushes a nosy reporter with a piece of a flying buttress, and takes out the local florist with a pair of garden shears. The murders are more sanguinary than you might expect from a comedy, but maybe they aren't too far outside the tradition of British comedy; they recall Monty Python and their occasional jabs at Sam Peckinpah, actually. Horror and humor go hand in hand, as Wright and Pegg well know.

It's not hard to imagine a white board in the production office for this movie, on which there's a list of cliché action movie tropes from cop movies without number. Wright owns up to using Roger Ebert's Big Little Movie Dictionary for just such a purpose. Maybe because this is British and very twee countryside British to boot, the clichés don't read as well as they should. Maybe that's why the film leans more heavily on horror tropes than on cop movie tropes. Mind you, they're there. Just look at this shot of Simon Pegg going all Starsky and Hutch:

The filmmakers certainly port over the gun fetish of American action movies (including, improbably, a sea mine). When the bullets start flying at the end of the movie, it comes into its own as a cop parody. I'm kind of amused that no one actually gets killed in the fireworks at the end (the movie's not shy about racking up a ghastly body count otherwise). But then, it doesn't really spare the main baddie. His fate is positively wince-inducing.

It's entirely possible that Wright is too distinctive a visual stylist to be an effective parodist along these lines. Oh, his movies are funny, sure, but they are manifestly his movies, and tend to sever the umbilical between his source material and what ends up on screen. This happened in Shaun of the Dead, too. That's not a complaint, really, because it does tend to make Wright's movies more genuinely surprising, if only for the visual panache and the delirious invention of his editing schemes. The man knows how to put together a movie.

Fright Night, 25 years later.

This was originally published on the Wildclaw Blood Radio Blog.

Fright Night turned 25 last week. I didn't see anyone mark the anniversary, so I thought I'd raise my own glass. You don't look a day over 20.

Well, that's a lie, actually. Fright Night hasn't aged particularly well. The combination of eighties fashions, Spielbergian idiom (horror comes to suburbia), comedy relief, and gooey special effects is very much of its time. More than that, it's a kind of nostalgia piece in itself, one that pines for the late-night horror show and the classical horror movie (in reaction, I suspect, to the shasher films that were dominating the genre at the time of its release). All of that is receding in time.

Still, it has its pleasures. Prime among them is a barnstorming performance by Chris Sarandon as our urbane vampire, Jerry Dandridge. Is Dandridge the first movie vampire who's smart enough to lock his coffin from the inside? He might be. But he's still dumb enough to play the talking killer with poor hapless Charley Brewster. The rest of the cast isn't up to his screen presence, not even Roddy McDowell, playing a gentle homage to the old school Gothics of the 50s and 60s.

What Fright Night does well is update the vampire archetype into the idiom of the special effects film. Oh, vampires have always had some interesting effects--the resurrection of Dracula in Dracula: Prince of Darkness is particularly creative--but not to the extent of this film. The story is almost incidental, given that the last forty minutes or so are a carnival of prosthetic monsters. The actual action sometimes grinds to a stop in order to watch the effects play out. It's almost as if writer/director Tom Holland looked at a list of the legendary abilities of vampires and picked them a la carte for their effects potentials, then, having paid for the gags, made damn sure he got them on camera, whether it made logical sense or not. The most obvious instance of this is the disintegration of Dandridge's familiar, at which our heroes stand and gawp while Dandridge makes good his escape:

The end result of all this is that we get some pretty good monsters, including one of the movies' first really convincing vampires in monstrous bat form (which the movie emphasizes in its parody footage from one of Peter Vincent's movies depicting a toy rubber bat on a string), a terrific werewolf transformation, and the first real attempt to reconcile the various divergent cinematic images of vampires: the sexy, Byronic anti-hero and the foul ratlike creature of the night; between Dracula and Count Orlock, if you will. As an aside, a friend of mine really resents the fact that the werewolf effects in Fright Night are better than the werewolf effects in just about any actual werewolf movie made since Fright Night was in theaters.

This is also a strangely gay horror movie, not that it's overt about it. I mean, Dandridge and his familiar seem like a gay couple moving into an old home to gentrify it. Amanda Bearse was one of the first prominently "out" lesbians in Hollywood. And Stephen Geoffrey went on to a long career in gay porn. I suppose you can't really blame the film for the later careers of its actors, but the plot asks us to believe that our teen-aged hero is more interested in the two guys across the way than he is in his willing girlfriend. Mind you, I'm perfectly aware of the fact that this last element is cribbed from Hitchcock's Rear Window (which asks us to believe that James Stewart is more interested in his neighbors than he is in Grace Kelly, but I digress). None of it may be intentional, but it still trips the ol' gaydar.

In any event, my experience of Fright Night back in the day was that it was a nice change of pace--the other prominent vampire movies of the 1980s, The Lost Boys and Near Dark, were still two years in the future when Fright Night was released--and that it was a pretty good summer popcorn movie. It works best with an audience, I think, and as a first-time viewing experience, too. I just wish I didn't feel so old knowing that I saw this when it was first released. 25 years went by fast.

Grave Matters

My mother wasn't a film buff in any sense of the word. She didn't like any particular directors as such. I doubt she could have named any, except for Hitchcock, who had been on television. In spite of this, she had exquisite taste in movies. One of her favorite movies that I remember watching with her was A Matter of Life and Death (which was titled Stairway to Heaven at the time), one of the fancier flights of fantasy from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It's a kind of film that had a brief period of popularity from the mid thirties to the mid forties: the near death fantasy. Other films that utilized similar plots include On Borrowed Time, Between Two Worlds, Heaven Can Wait, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, A Guy Named Joe, Death Takes a Holiday and (most famously) It's a Wonderful Life. This last bears some of the stamp of Powell and Pressburger's films. A Matter of Life and Death starts with the stars and planets, drifting in the void. Capra does the same, but, ever the sentimentalist, anthropomorphizes the stars at the beginning of It's a Wonderful Life, turning them into angels. It's not an improvement, really, but my appetite for Capra is at a low ebb these days.

There's a bit of a difference between A Matter of Life and Death and the other films of its ilk, in so far as its a skeptic's version of this fantasy. I hadn't remembered that from my long-ago viewing of the film with my mom. The story has British pilot David Niven having to jump from his burning plane without a parachute. He's scheduled to die, but the "courier" charged with escorting him to the next world loses him in a fog bank and he survives to fall in love with Kim Hunter, the air controller who talked him through his final moments. In the afterlife, the balance must be reasserted and a trial is arranged in order to decide Niven's fate. In this world, a doctor examines him for neurological distress due to his visions of the other world. Is the whole thing an hallucination due to injury to the brain? The movie strongly suggests this, and it doesn't get cute with equivocation. On the whole, the plot of the film is kind of silly, but that's not what makes the film memorable.

Lest I've fallen down on the job, let me reiterate my complete devotion to The Archers. Michael Powell (with and without Emeric Pressburger) may very well be my favorite British director. His films have a kind of playfulness to them that eludes the more austere formalism of Hitchock or David Lean. Plus, his films are ravishingly beautiful. The Archer's long collaboration with cinematographer Jack Cardiff occasionally resulted in images that burn themselves into your retinas. Cardiff was able to manipulate the ultra-saturated colors preferred by Technicolor busybody Natalie Kalmus like no other cinematographer.

Yet for all its visual grandiosity, it winks at the audience. There's a shot of an eyeball's view of a surgical procedure, when the eyelids close on the camera. There's a Coke machine in the arrival lobby in heaven. Ever interested in metacinema, the filmmakers include an in-movie metaphor for the movies in the form of Roger Livesey's camera obscura, which also doubles as a God's eye view of the town where the movie is set and mirrors the great holes in the heavens where the afterlife gazes down.

(Short digression: I'm developing a huge crush on Roger Livesey. In this film and I Know Where I'm Going, his voice makes me kind of weak in the knees. That's just me, though.)

I mentioned that this is a secular movie. Certainly the brain surgery plot device is evidence of that, but there's an even more subtle element that reinforces this. The Archer's film the afterlife in black and white, and this life in a blazing Technicolor (one character notes that there's not enough Technicolor in the afterlife, another meta wink at the audience). This suggests a deeply existential worldview, where this world is experience, while the next is colorless. Live for today, this color scheme intimates, because living for afterward isn't worth it.

There's a broader political dimension to the film, too, in which there's a jockeying for post-War relevance between Britain and the US, in which both sides tweak the other on the nose. The movie openly admires the American melting pot, and the trial sequence when the American jurors are chosen is something I wish I could show every nativist know-nothing in America these days. The movie is fairly critical of the British Empire, too, which raised some hackles when it was released. Of course, the movie pokes fun at Yankee exceptionalism, too, in the person of Raymond Massey's blowhard colonial lawyer.

Of course, it's the delirious romanticism of the movie that has kept it in the minds of film audiences, not all of the meta elements and political subtexts. Certainly, this is the element that most appealed to my mother all those years ago. Everything else is icing on the cake. This is a movie in which the world and the afterlife come to a halt over a single tear shed in the name of love, in which love will not be denied even by death. Everything in the movie is focused on this one idea.

Omnia vincit amor.

Marriages and Infidelities

This was originally published in a slightly different form at The Second Awakening. Our local art house picked this film up after it tanked at our multiplex, so I took the opportunity to see it again.

I'm a bit late to the party when it comes to The Kids Are All Right (2010), Lisa Cholodenko's comedy of manners about a lesbian couple whose children seek out their sperm donor. It's a droll movie that shades into painful drama with deceptive ease. It's good. Very good. You should see it if you haven't already. It's a film that begs the question of why doesn't Annette Bening have an Academy Award yet? All well and good. But it does raise some questions.

From my perspective, there are two elephants in the room in regards to this movie. First: For a decidedly queer movie from a queer filmmaker, there are surprisingly few queer people in front of the camera. As in none. Second: The plot twist that drives the second half of the movie, in which Julianne Moore's character, Jules, has an affair with Paul, Mark Ruffalo's character, is a cliché, and an obnoxious one at that. The movie actually does deal with both of these issues, but it's debatable whether it deals with them successfully.

Taking them one at a time:

While I don't demand that gay characters be played by gay actors, its galling to see an entirely straight cast playing gay characters in an era when Newsweek magazine is decrying the "fact" that gay actors can't play straight characters (and why doesn't this impediment flow the other way? Hmm?). The timing of the movie is unfortunate in this, and it's compounded by the fact that Cholodenko is herself a lesbian and would presumably have no blinders on when it came to straightwashing the movie. It's obvious that she's aware of the problem because she comments on it directly in the text of the movie: When quizzed by their son about why they prefer gay male porn, Jules explains that in lesbian porn, the actresses are all played by straight women. "It's so inauthentic," she adds. This is probably the funniest line in the movie, given the casting, but it's also kind of a bitter pill. On the other hand, the actors Cholodenko does have are so good that it suggests that there were no better choices available.

The second issue is more vexing, given the underlying patriarchal meme that all a lesbian needs to turn straight is a good fucking from the right man. Fortunately, this is demolished by the movie--Jules repudiates the idea that she is somehow straight and she repudiates Paul in the end, too--but should it have been raised in the first place? I don't know. In the context of the movie, it does rise organically from this particular story and these particular characters. Jules is demonstrably having a mid-life crisis even before Paul shows up, and such people often do stupid things. This is compounded by the fact that some lesbian women actually DO occasionally have sex with men, even once they're in touch with being lesbian, and this is NOT indicative of some latent heterosexuality (or even bisexuality), so the movie could claim some level of verisimilitude if it wanted. I just wonder if it couldn't have explored Jules's crisis in some other way. It might not have, given the film's plot for Paul: he wants a family and he wants Jules and Nic's family. This comes to a head when Nic rages at him that it's HER family and he can bloody well go out and get his own. It's a terrific moment, and it wouldn't be possible without Jules's dalliance with him.

In any event, it's a lot to think about. Fortunately, the movie grounds all of this in a very closely observed depiction of Nic and Jules's marriage, the details of which suggest that the movie as it actually plays probably could NOT have been made by a straight filmmaker. The way Jules and Nic behave with each other betrays too much knowledge of lesbian culture, from the therapy-speak they sometimes use to the details of their sex life together. The second funniest moment in the film comes when Nic pulls a big comforter over herself while Jules is goinq down on her: "I'm cold," she says. "I'm suffocating!" Jules replies. The sexual relationship throughout the movie has a hint of bed death, which happens to gay couples just like it happens to straights. Oh, and there's the vague disappointment visible when they realize that their children are totally hetero. Mostly, though, it's a celebration of marriage, and a timely one at that. It suggests that Jules and Nic's marriage is exactly like anyone else's marriage, which is to say that it's like no one else's marriage. Because no two marriages are alike.

Burn, Baby, Burn

One of the things that sucks about being a pop culture junkie is that, over time, it sets up an echo chamber that becomes inescapable. EVERYTHING starts to remind you of something else. Genuinely surprising books or movies or comics become rarer and rarer. A case in point is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Shortly after I wrote about it in the spring, it occurred to me that it was a variant on Holmes and Watson, with Lisabeth Salander as Holmes, near-psychic leaps of intuition included. I had this firmly in mind when I sat down to watch that film's first sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009, directed by Daniel Alfredson), which strikes me as one of the mid-period Rathbone and Bruce Holmes films--The Spider Woman, perhaps. (Yeah. That fits.) Of course the analogy breaks down on inspection. Lisabeth is less like Holmes in this movie, and Blomqvist is cast in the role of the lead detective this time. For the most part, it's more conventional than its predecessor, both cinematically and in its plot construction, and it's probably not as good, but it does illuminate some of the choices that film made.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably own up to the fact that I haven't read the books and don't intend to until I've seen all of the movies (if then).

One persistent conversation I've had about the first film concerns the rape scene. More than one of my correspondents thought it was gratuitous (Tenebrous Kate over at the Tenebrous Empire suggested that though it was a necessary scene, the filmmakers chose too many shots in which Noomi Rapace seems to be "posing" too much). On the evidence of that film only, an argument can be made. Little did I realize that that scene would become central to the sequel. Nor is that the only trauma from the first film that becomes central here.

The plot of The Girl Who Played With Fire finds Lisabeth framed for multiple murders. Blomqvist, ever the knight errant, is convinced of her innocence and sets out to prove it. There's a lot of other plot about sex trafficking and Cold War defectors, too, but these serve the main plot. The plot of this movie is a little bit more interesting than its predecessor from a psychological point of view; I hope it doesn't give too much away to say that this ultimately turns into a more sanguinary version one of those Bergman movies about families tearing each other apart. It maneuvers itself into a memorable final sequence that wouldn't be out of place in a horror movie. (I approve!). But none of this matters.

As with the first film, the fun in watching the movie is in watching the characters. Blomqvist, again played by Michael Nyqvist, remains the second fiddle, in spite of a lot more screen time than Lisabeth, again definitively played by Rapace. The movie manages the neat trick of putting her in the crucible to see what makes her tick, not Blomqvist, in spite of the fact that she's often the Maguffin. The movie is a tour of her dark places. She herself is the central mystery, and the movie runs the risk of explaining her away. Fortunately, it stops just short.

Opening Shots #2: The Conversation

My admiration for the last shot of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 paranoia classic, The Conversation, knows no bounds. It's more brilliant than the entirety of many other films (including some of the director's own films). Re-watching the film last week, I noticed that the opening shot (and sequence) is kind of brilliant, too, given that it's THE central event of the film. Like the last shot, it's filmed from the point of view of surveillance operatives. The event in this shot, the taping of a clandestine conversation between Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams, is the film's primary obsession. It seems so banal, too: a street fair in which some garbled communications occasionally flare on the soundtrack. But it has a delicious creepiness to it, too, and it echoes through the rest of the movie.

Oh, and the movie? It's my favorite of Coppola's movies, bar none. You can have your Godfathers and your Apocalypses. I'll take this modest character study. A better depiction of alienation I have never seen on film. It might be my favorite movie of the 1970s. Here's to you, Harry Caul.

DIY Cinema

My posting has dropped off the cliff this month, but I have an excuse. I've been a screener for a film festival this summer and the past few weeks were crunch time (plus, I went to Dragon•Con last week, but that's another matter). I can't tell you which festival. I can't even tell you about the movies I saw. I can tell you about the experience, though.

For the most part, I saw short films. There were a scattering of features, but most of those were sent in on DVD and, since I don't actually live in the city where this particular film festival takes place, I missed out on those. The festival also used online screeners for their entries, presumably because wrangling a bunch of people into one place to watch a DVD is a bit like herding cats. The quality of the entries was all over the place, especially given that the preponderance of entries were student films. Here are some general observations:

1. Digital filmmaking rules the day. I don't believe I saw a single film shot on actual film. The quality of digital, like the films themselves, is all over the place. A goodly number of films looked like they were shot on consumer model cameras. A fair number of them looked to be shot on seriously high-end cameras. Most of the ones that were shot on high-end cameras were from outside the US and were presumably funded by government film institutes and whatnot. I won't say that the quality of the image didn't have an effect on my opinion--it did--but creative filmmaking works regardless.


2. The major theme of the movies I saw was "parents recovering from the death of a child." It got to the point where I wanted to throw up my hands and shout "Again? Really?" Not all of them were like this, nor even a majority, but there were enough to be annoying.


3. Animation is alive and well. Several animated shorts were included in the submissions. While the 3-d computer animation tended to be really stiff in these films, other forms of computer assisted animation--one film looked to have been made in Flash, for instance--make creative use of their limitations. One film was a small-scale knock-off of Miyazaki, and not a bad one, either.


4. Documentaries and film noir produced the best films among the entries. While not all of the films from these sectors were good, they hit on a higher percentage than other kinds of films.


5. Conversely, comedies were the most trying sector. Comedy is hard.


6. Feature films are hard to make. Of the features I saw, only one didn't seem like it was padded to make length. The others tended to meander with footage that didn't have much to do with the thrust of the film. An excess of establishing shots was a major problem with almost all of these films. I don't think many of them were well-thought out at the script stage. Mind you, there are plenty of films in the multiplexes that aren't well-thought out at the script stage, either, but they generally don't make the same mistakes as DIY features.


7. Only one queer-themed movie among the entries. Only one Western. Not the same movie, by the way. Only a small handful of truly experimental films (and these were generally not that good). A smattering of horror films, too, and a couple of these were very good indeed (though I'm sure that some varieties of horror fans would deny them the name "horror," given that there was no actual blood in them). The two horror films I really liked were both from Scandinavia. Go figure.


8. I tended to be really nice with my comments and ratings. I think I only rated one film below the middle rating. I think I still wound up with a bell curve and the best films still matriculated to the top, but I was told that the filmmakers themselves would receive my comments and I really didn't want to be a bitch about it to filmmakers who are doing it for love rather than money. I mean, each of these films represents some filmmaker's dreams, and who am I to stomp on that, eh? It's kind of a tightrope. I don't know that I have it in me to adapt Flannery O'Connor's dictum that the universities aren't suppressing enough young writers toward young filmmakers. Can you do this job without going for the jugular? I don't know. Only one film got a rise out of me, mainly for pointless sexism. The rest were trying really hard, and you could see that even in the films that didn't have many resources or, really, any talent behind them.

In any event, this was a great experience, and I hope to do it again next year. All told, I think I watched about eighty films. It was fun.

---

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by a transgender actress who is on my list of Facebook friends. She wanted to know if I would review her film. I said, sure, but I warned her that I have serious issues with most TG-themed movies. She sent it to me anyway (perhaps foolishly) and it arrived in the middle of my festival work. The name of the movie is Lexie Cannes (2009, directed by Tom Bertling), which is a pretty bad pun. The film follows a deaf transgender photographer who is being stalked by two men--one harmless, the other less so--and who is having issues with her girlfriend. Oddly enough, it looked a LOT like some of the festival films I've been watching: filmed on lower-end digital from the looks of it, it compensates for less than high-end equipment by including in-movie video footage from the point of view of the camera of one of the stalkers. This is a familiar technique to anyone who has seen, say, The Blair Witch Project. It's more or less silent (appropriate given the main character's disability, so it makes an asset out of a limitation), and has lots of extraneous footage (establishing shots out the wazoo toward the beginning).

I've said this before: when you're dealing with movies from this sector, you make allowances. In spite of the obvious limitations, the filmmakers make good use of their resources and Portland, Oregon locations. There's even a fair competence when it comes to suspense filmmaking. It's well-edited. I'm a little bit uneasy about the exploitation elements of the film. In the conversation I had with Courtney O'Donnel, the film's lead, she mentioned both the pressure for such elements from the film's backers and a desire to make a film that gives a positive depiction of its transgender heroine. It's a bit of a knife's edge the filmmakers are trying to negotiate. It's a conditional success with this. The film is set in a world mostly populated with sex workers even though its lead character is not one, so the exploitation elements tend to sexualize the movie (and, by inference, its lead character). But then the movie bends over backwards to present Lexie as a quasi social worker, who takes battered women to a women's shelter and who follows a man she suspects of being a serious creep to get the goods for the police. This last part is the most interesting storyline in the film, and I wish it had occupied more of the movie, but that's the fan of horror movies in me talking. The refusal to make Lexie a victim is laudable, even if they take it to a kind of extreme.

The movie does have a big structural problem, though. It contains, basically, three stories, but fails to integrate them. It's episodic, almost a picaresque. This is not an uncommon problem for super-low budget films. Could it have managed a feature length with any of these stories? Probably. Certainly, the central episode with the second stalker could have been greatly expanded. It probably should have been, but there may be a budgetary limitation at work here. Or the film might have been able to integrate them with some chronological reshuffling or judicious cross-cutting. Be that as it may, the whole isn't bad, but it's also kind of a curio.

On Vacation

I haven't died. I've been finishing up some other real-world projects. I'm going on vacation this week, too. I'll be back to my regular posting schedule next week.

Meanwhile, here's a trailer for Zhang Yimou's remake of Blood Simple:

Secular Myths

This was originally published in a slightly different form at The Second Awakening.

"Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril's parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint." --Carl Sagan, Cosmos

One of the things I've come to love about Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is the sheer effrontery of the way it re-writes the end of World War II. All movies about history are fiction, Tarantino seems to be (truthfully) saying, so let's wallow in that freedom. Anyone who watches movies for history lessons deserves what they get. Or to quote another film by another filmmaker, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

The Myth of Hypatia--and even though Hypatia was a real person, Carl Sagan relates a myth, not historical fact--is a kind of Rorschach test. Are you a bibliophile? Then this is a horror story. Are you a feminist? Then this is a portrait of the patriarchy at one of its lowest moments. Are you a scientist? Then this is a parable about academic freedom. Are you an atheist? Then this is your worst fears about religion made flesh. What you take from this is in large part what you bring to it. The atheist in me has a few problems with this, because one of the core questions an atheist needs to ask herself is this one: do you care that what you believe is true? As it turns out, this particular atheist does care, so The Myth of Hypatia is a bit of a disappointment to me. No matter how much I may want this story to arm me against the religious and the superstitious, it's bullshit and I can't in good conscience use bullshit as ammunition against bullshit.

This disappointment does not extend to Alejandro Amenabar's recounting of the myth in Agora (2009), however. Because, you know, it's a movie, and just like Tarantino, Amenabar is rewriting history for his own ends (though he rewrites considerably less than Sagan even as he adds romantic subplots). I don't have to care if a movie is true. I only care if it's good theater. By happy coincidence, one of the main themes of this particular movie involves the quest of Hypatia to determine if what she believes is indeed true. "Synesius, you don't question what you believe," she tells one of her disciples, "You cannot. I must." It's an interesting conundrum. Would a historically accurate depiction of the life and death of Hypatia allow the filmmakers to explore this theme? Probably not. Almost certainly not.

The word, "agora," has three meanings: 1. a popular political assembly. 2. the place where such an assembly met, originally a marketplace or public square. 3. the Agora, the chief marketplace of Athens, center of the city's civic life. Discarding the third definition, which is specific to a place and time, you can conflate the meanings thus: "A marketplace of ideas." The movie chooses this word for its title. Not "Hypatia" or "Alexandria" or "The Last Scientist" or somesuch, but "Agora," a word that's not in common usage these days (a choice that dismayed the film's marketers, I'm sure). The title is a tell-tale, indicative of a movie that wants to be about more than what it's literally about. The agora is an ideal, but it's also a pit for bloodsports. The movie mourns the latter.

Like the Myth of Hypatia, Agora touches on the pressure points of secular thought. It's a feminist film, an atheist film, and a paean to science. It's also a thriller and a spectacle. These last two are its qualities as a movie, but the themes and the form are inextricably linked.

As a thriller, the story is a freight train downhill. Anyone who knows the story will watch with mounting apprehension, because this comes to a bad, bad end. Its structure as a thriller encourages the viewer to become attached to its ideals even as it goes about the business of wrecking them. It's overt about its attack on fundamentalism and intolerance; it's crafty and subtle in the way it advocates for the opposite worldview. By the last act of the movie, the audience is so attached to these ideals that it can find thrills in the realization that the orbit of the sun is an ellipse as a ward against encroaching doom. As movie epiphanies go, this one is both esoteric and at the heart of the human experience at the same time. Among Agora's multifarious themes, its depiction of the march of human progress based on the solving of puzzles is its most subtle and most primal delight.

As a spectacle, the film takes the grandiosity of its idiom and expands it. Sure, it has lots of fantastic sets and costumes and scenes with crowds of extras and horrifying conflicts between groups of people, but it uses these elements with a purpose. The film's costuming is of particular note. You can see a clear demarcation between the classical ideal of knowledge, incarnated in Roman-ish robes, and the Christianized Dark Ages, represented by darker robes of indeterminate design. As a matter of production design, the Alexandria depicted here is a cosmopolitan polyglot of classical, middle-eastern, and ancient Egyptian. As part of the plot, the classical is slowly swept from the table by the know-nothing Christians. But it's the movie's shot selection that is most important. Pay close attention to the repeated shots of circles at a slant; they presage Hypatia's epiphany late in the movie. The most flamboyant shot in the movie occurs while the Christians are ransacking the library: the camera looks up from the mayhem to the occula of the central chamber as scrolls are unfurled in the air, then it tilts back level with the horizon line, upside down:

This accomplishes two things: First, it represents the overturning of the old order. The world of the film is briefly and literally upside down. Second, it suggests that people aren't going to fall off the Earth just because they are on the "bottom side" of it. This is important, because it's a question that's explicitly asked during the course of the film, even though the visual shorthand of the film has already answered it. More than this, though, every so often, the movie pulls back its gaze to a broader viewpoint. There are numerous shots of the Earth and the city of Alexandria from space. In another movie, these shots might be superfluous, kind of like those plunging aerial shots in the Lord of the Rings movies. In THIS movie, however, the shots are deployed with a very specific purpose. It sets up this shot:

...in which human beings are put in perspective. The scurrying of people in this shot resembles the scurrying of ants, an effect exaggerated by speeding up the film. In the grand scheme of things, we're all ephemeral and the whole lot of us will eventually be boiled from this rock by an aging sun. The last shot of the movie travels backwards to show us a planet that continues to hurtle through the void even after Hypatia meets her fate.

The movie isn't without its faults, of course. Prime among them is Hypatia's trio of suitors, Orestes, Davus, and Synesius, played respectively by Oscar Isaacs, Max Minghella, and Rupert Evans, who moon after her. None of them is her equal, and none of the performances is the equal of Rachel Weisz's Hypatia (when Hypatia rejects one of her suitors with a used menstrual cloth, it doesn't seem as harsh as it could, because the recipient is kind of a wet blanket). More cumbersome is the way the movie arranges to spare the audience from the horror of Hypatia's method of execution. The way the movie plays it out is an elaborate game of averting one's eyes. It seems a bit of a cheat, particularly given that it's folded into the romantic parts of the movie that just don't work that well. There are other nits I could pick, I suppose, but on balance Agora is splendid. And I'm not just saying that because I share its worldview.

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A short addendum. My friend, Ali Smith (who is an academic, not a blogger), has a countervailing opinion, which she shared with me on the IMDb's message boards. I asked her if I could reprint it with my own opinion, and here it is, presented without further comment from me:

1) This is a feminist film? It has one female character. One. Count her. Plus a couple of ghostly figures who drift into a couple of shots as her ladies-in-waiting/maids/figures-in-background-kneeling-over-chests. This in a film with almost as many extras as an Italian 50s peplum, and the whole population of a classical city in its scope. And what does it do with that one female figure? It circles around her like a planet round its sun - if you want another of those cinematographic tricks of mimicking the cosmos and kicking us in the shins to look at the pretty diagram - , as she stands gazing up at it, practically inexpressive. Around her 15 or 20 years pass, and the years take their effect on her assorted suitors, while she remains untouchable in her marble perfection, unlined, ungreyed, impervious to crow's feet. That's not feminism, that's a Madonna.

2) As far as social hierarchies are concerned, at least, it's with the historical Hypatia all the way. Good slaves know their place, staking out the terrain for experiments, listening, keeping silent. A slave who looks beyond his slavery is at best impertinent and doomed to disappointment, at worst a potential public danger. As for taking an interest in the social injustice of such a vast and hierarchical city, it's a sure sign that those who take notice are opportunists and not to be trusted. As a piece of reactionary defence of privilege, I've rarely seen better.

3) Sorry, but it lays those cinematographic tricks on so heavy, it feels like a textbook collection of textbook diagrams, exaggerated a bit so that the beginner can understand. This is how you use low-angle shots to give a small person importance. This is how you use high-angle shots to make people look small. This is how you use circular camera movement to make one figure the centre of the world. No wonder it takes so long.

And for the rest similarly. It's so un-nuanced that credibility withers. Which is not the same thing as complaining that it's not historically accurate - I agree that no film is, and that it's probably best not to make any pretence, and I wholeheartedly agree with your incidental assessment of Inglourious Basterds. But Inglourious Basterds doesn't mess up history in order to make it digestible; all its major characters are complicated and their motivations are mischievously confused, and the audience's allegiance and their approval don't necessarily always go together, whether they like it or not, and it's carefully so engineered. Result, you may be exasperated with them or horrified by them, but you never feel browbeaten by them, you're free to go with your loves or your hates. Agora on the other hand doesn't think it possible that it may be ambiguous in any detail, and by the time it ended I was heartily sick of Hypatia, something I would never have imagined I ever could have been, at least in imagination. In real life possibly yes, but then in real life she would have been, precisely, ambiguous.

The World is Not Enough

Edgar Wright's adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) has charm to burn and a boundless energy. Of the films released this summer that are intended to be "fun," it's the one that delivers on its promise. The premise is fun: Slacker Scott Pilgrim falls for new girl in town Ramona Flowers and has to contend with her seven evil exes. The notion that someone has a League of Evil Exes is pretty funny. The execution is fun, too, a collision of special effects, clever editing, animation, music videos, and video games. It's a coming out party for an entire cadre of up and coming young actors. This is the next generation of filmmaking.

It's also kind of exhausting, but that comes from exhilaration rather than abuse.

Surprisingly, the two lead characters aren't exactly the most likable people on the planet. Scott is a congenial freeloader and indifferent boyfriend when we meet him. He's dating Knives Chau, a Chinese teenager who is still attending a Catholic high school. He lives with his gay friend, Wallace, in a tiny fleabag apartment. He doesn't have a job, but he does play in a band. He's the bassist for Sex Bob Omb, and garage band culture gives the movie an excuse to mount an absolutely killer soundtrack. Ramona, for herself, is gorgeous, but indifferent and aloof, the kind of girl who always does the dumping. The people around Scott are all finely drawn characters: His impatient younger sister is exasperated that he's still an arrested adolescent. His bandmates, Stephen Stills (an eager sellout of a lead guitarist/singer), Young Neil (Scott's understudy on bass), and Kim Pine (formerly one of Scott's girlfriends and completely sarcastic about their band and their lifestyle). Wallace turns the gay best friend on its head, in so far as he actually gets laid--frequently--while the rest of the cast languishes. And then there are the evil exes: Matthew Patel, gets his own Bollywood number complete with demonic hipster chicks for backup (did I mention that the film is a mash-up? Oh, yeah). Lucas Lee is the epitome of the clueless action actor who lets his stunt team do the heavy lifting. Todd Ingram derives his evil powers from his insufferable veganism (which proves his undoing). Roxy Richter is the living avatar of a woman scorned, surprising Scott with Ramona's bi-curious phase (Roxy is "bi-furious"). The Katayangi twins are Scott's nemeses at a battle of the bands. And the big boss at the end--to use video game parlance--is Gideon Graves, a smarmy music promoter who corrupts everything he touches and everything that Scott loves. This all almost too much for the movie to hold, given that it's condensed down from six graphic novels.

One wishes that Michael Cera would have overreached himself for this movie, but he's more or less playing the Michael Cera character, though he's less passive than usual. It helps that Scott Pilgrim is an action hero. It's a credit to the filmmakers that they're able to more or less effortlessly convince the audience that, yes, Cera can actually be an action hero. This is possibly the filmmaker's best sleight of hand. Everyone else in the cast is pitch perfect, though. Allison Pill provides my favorite performance as Kim Pine, but only slightly behind her is Brandon Routh, looking all superheroic as Todd Ingram. I suppose it befits an actor who made a splash playing superman. He gets the insufferable veganism right, too. Hell, there's not really a bad performance in the bunch, and not really a bad character, either. The villains all get to chew scenery with abandon, but the movie is so outlandish that it would see wrong if they DID dial it back.

For his part, Wright has more or less put whatever he's wanted on screen. The trope whereby the evil exes turn into piles of coins when they're defeated comes right from video games and it's silly as hell, but Wright charges on with it with a Godardian "fuck it." The matching edits are almost all unexpected and witty. Wright doesn't feel constrained by naturalism, and bully for him. One of the mistakes that a lot of movies based on comic books make is to try to shoehorn themselves into some kind of realistic presentation. This movie doesn't even pay that approach lip service, and it still manages to get to the core of its characters (and, for that matter, to the core of comics), and it still manages to approximate a longing for love that's entirely beyond many more conventional romantic comedies. I mean, while it's all really silly, its take no prisoners love conquers all narrative is unstoppable.

The Woman in Full

It took a long time for filmmakers to recognize the droll comedy in Elmore Leonard's novels. They were always in love with his plots, but lacking the comedy, most movies based on Leonard are but pale shadows. For Leonard himself, the plots are an excuse to study his characters. Once asked about his top five crime novels, Leonard listed George V. Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle five times. That book is ALL character study. In any event, sometime in the mid-1990s, someone discovered the comedy, but it wasn't until Quentin Tarantino's 1997 adaptation of Rum Punch, retitled Jackie Brown, that anyone discovered the character study. Perversely, this breakthrough came from Tarantino's decompression of the book's plot, which he films from multiple angles (both chronologically and from points of view). The plot is still there, but the plot is secondary to watching the characters interact and it grows from these interactions. This is the kind of movie that takes time out to watch its characters have dinner or shop for clothes (this last in the midst of its most difficult plot points). A lot of movies tell us what its characters do for a living. This one tells us how much they make and even how much money they have saved in their 401k plan. It's rich with details, a fact that surely contributes to complaints about its length, though not from me. I wouldn't want this to be any shorter. Hell, I could spend another hour with these characters without noticing the time.

Of Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, I wrote: "and Shoshanna, as played by Melanie Laurent, is basically Marlene Dietrich to Tarantino's Von Sternberg." In retrospect, that honor properly belongs to Pam Grier as the title character in Jackie Brown. Tarantino is in love with all of his actresses, to be sure, but I think he held a special fondness for Grier, the action star and baddest mother fucker of his fondest imaginings. When he read Elmore Leonard's book, in which the character is a blond white woman, he imagined it for Grier. She responded in kind with the best performance of her career. She's Foxy Brown and Coffey fading into middle age, still holding her looks, but having to rely increasingly on her brains. Fortunately, she's also smarter than anyone around her. She's smarter than Ordell Robie, played with amiable menace by Samuel L. Jackson, for whom she smuggles money from Mexico. She's smarter than Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton), the ATF agent on Robie's trail who views Jackie as an instrument to trap him. She's probably smarter than Max Cherry (Robert Forster), her bail bondsman, but she never has to match wits with him given that he's smitten with her from the moment she walks out of jail and into his life. This is something pretty rare, actually. It's a movie about a 44 year old black woman and a 56 year white old man who have a relationship and plan a caper. I mean, has there ever been another character like Jackie Brown holding the center of a movie? Honestly, I can't think of one. Tarantino's willingness to stop long enough to really look at his actors enhances their performances. It doesn't hurt that all of them have interesting faces, none more so than Robert Forster, who, like Grier, also does career-best work here.

As cinema, this is Tarantino's most assured movie. He's not trying too much. He no longer needs to make a splash--he did that with his prior two films--so he doesn't have to overreach himself. One wishes that he had learned something from this experience, because in his subsequent films, he loads his palette almost to the point of bursting. In Jackie Brown, he's content to observe. A director noted for scenes of graphic violence, he keeps all of the violence in this film out of the frame or at such a distance as to cushion the blow. More than that, though, he's willing to let his lead characters fall in love. This is the only one of Tarantino's films in which the characters realistically relate to each other in the ways that adult men and women relate to each other, and he does it independently of the plot, too. Oh, the plot uses this, sure, but it doesn't depend on it. It also slows down to let its characters think things out. Action, in this movie, is no substitute for thought. The actions that occur without thinking--the scene where Robert DeNiro's character shoots motormouthed Bridget Fonda after she nags him a couple of words too far, for instance--precipitate disaster.

This is also the least "meta" of Tarantino's movies. Oh, the meta level is still there--it makes me smile every time I see Sid Haig play a judge sending Pam Grier to jail, for instance--but the director elides most of it, as if it doesn't matter to the movie. Most of it is in soundtrack cues. Oh, and my, heavens, does this have a killer soundtrack, from the opening shot scored with Bobby Womack's "Across 110th Street" to the diegetic appearance of The Delphonics to a catalogue of heavy soul from soul's golden era. Some of the soundtrack cues come from Pam Grier's other movies. None of this really advertises itself the way that, say, the red light and soundtrack cue from Ironside mark the Kill Bills.

In any event, it's disappointing to me that Tarantino hasn't gone back to this mode of filmmaking. He's gone back to being a provocateur, which is fine, I guess, but on the evidence of Jackie Brown, that impulse squanders an immense reservoir of talent. For Jackie Brown's part, it remains the director's best film, even if it's the one that fans of his more outre films tend to ignore.

Shameless Self-Promotion #4

I have a new post up over at the Wild Claw Theater Blog, in which I wish Fright Night a happy 25th birthday. It begins like this:

Fright Night turned 25 last week. I didn't see anyone mark the anniversary, so I thought I'd raise my own glass. You don't look a day over 20.

Well, that's a lie, actually. Fright Night hasn't aged particularly well. The combination of eighties fashions, Spielbergian idiom (horror comes to suburbia), comedy relief, and gooey special effects is very much of its time. More than that, it's a kind of nostalgia piece in itself, one that pines for the late-night horror show and the classical horror movie (in reaction, I suspect, to the shasher films that were dominating the genre at the time of its release). All of that is receding in time.

Read the rest over there. They're good folks and they deserve the traffic.

Olé

Once upon a time, Pedro Almodovar was an enfant terrible. His early films were exercises in provocation and stylistic excess. Sometimes, they were pretty hard to put up with. A case in point is Matador, from 1986, which starts with a man masturbating to the violence in Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, then proceeds to tell a story of psychos in love. Diego has a problem: forcibly retired from the bullring after being gored by a bull, he still hungers for the kill. He satisfies this urge by murdering women after he's had sex with them. One of his students, Angel, has been driven mad by both crippling vertigo and his overly religious mother. After attempting to rape Eva, Diego's girlfriend, he claims responsibility fo the murders. Maria, the lawyer who takes Angel's case, has similar appetites as Diego, only her taste is for murdering matadors after having sex with them. Soon, Diego and Maria are circling each other in a deadly mutual attraction.

Early in his career, Almodovar took a LOT of heat for his cavalier approach to rape imagery, and this film is one of the ones that fuels that criticism. Angel's attempted rape in this movie is kinda sorta played for laughs. The character further faints at the sight of blood and is ridiculed by his victim for premature ejaculation. Still, this is all of a piece with this movie, in which every character has some kind of destructive sexual peccadillo. I think it's more destructive to the movie that it occasionally seems to pull elements out of its ass. For example: Late in the movie, Angel is shown to be psychic, which is how he knows the details of Diego's crimes. When this started to play out, all I could think was: "Wrote yourselves into a corner, did you?"

Still and all, Almodovar always mounts attractive films, whether through the design elements or through his choice of actors. You get both here, although the design of the film is very much of its time. Very 1980s. This movie is very much in love Antonio Banderas, who seems impossibly young (he was 26 at the time), but it's Asumpta Serna who walks away with the movie as the predatory Maria. The nominal lead, Nacho Martinez, kind of gets overwhelmed by this, but Almodovar has never had a lot of interest in middle-aged straight guys, so this might be inevitable.

Almodovar is also totally in love with movies, and like many of his other movies, this one is appointed with cinematic points of reference. I mentioned Bava already. There's also the scene where Diego first pursues Maria: they end up in a movie theater that's showing the end of Duel in the Sun, an equally deranged portrait of sexual obsession that foreshadows the end of this movie.

A Fractured Fairy Tale

This originally appeared on the trans feminist blog, The Second Awakening.

While it doesn't indulge in the same kind of thematic miserablism of other movies about transgender sex workers, Olaf de Fleur Johannesson's The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela (2008) still can't avoid the fact that at least part of its narrative--arguably the dominant part--is constructed from a cisgender man's preconceptions of who transgender people are. The conceit of the movie is that it's half documentary and half fiction, mixed together in such a way as to obscure the lines between the real and the fake. The director himself calls this shambolic portmanteau structure a "visiomentary." You can probably see the flaws in this approach without even seeing the movie, but I'll elaborate anyway.

The movie begins with its central character, a trans sex worker in Cebu City, The Philippines, speaking directly to the camera and swearing to tell the truth and the whole truth. This is Raquela Rios, essentially playing herself. The filmmakers spend a good deal of time following Rios through her life, which includes interactions with her family, attempts to find employment outside of the sex trade, clubbing with her friends, and generally walking around the city. This is where the film is heavy on the documentary and while it's letting Raquela speak for herself, the movie is on pretty firm ground. Raquela is bright, funny, optimistic, and gregarious. Were she in different circumstances, she would undoubtedly be a success at whatever she did. The same might be said for her friends, Aubrey and Olivia, who also make their livings as "ladyboy" sex workers. Unfortunately, the filmmakers can't leave well enough alone. They also start the film with a title card that says, "Raquela is transsexual. A chick with a dick," and once the movie acquires a narrative, the attitude behind that pronouncement seeps into the whole enterprise.

Slowly but surely, it becomes the task of cis white men to explain the lot of the ladyboy, and with that shift in focus, the movie begins to patronize its subject. The mouthpiece for all of this is Mike, an internet pornographer who makes his living with ladyboy porn from places like The Philippines and Brazil. In a memorable pronouncement on how trans women live their lives, he compares them to cicadas, dormant for the early parts of their lives only to bloom for a short and intense period in which their longing to be something they can never be leads them into risky behaviors. There's a troubling essentialism to the pronouncements the film puts in this guy's mouth, and the filmmakers wisely make it clear that he's a douchebag, but he also carries himself like an authority figure (there's that white male privilege asserting itself) and the movie doesn't quite shake that off.

In the movie's defense, some of the individual scenes here bring Raquela to life as a living, breathing human being just like the rest of them. The audience is invited to share her heartbreak at being denied entrance into nursing school and to share her mounting apprehension as she waits for the results of an AIDS test. Her defense of the kinds of risky sex she uses to validate her gender identity surely comes from the actress rather than the filmmakers. Her candor in sharing these moments gives her performance in the fictional portions of the film a degree of verisimilitude. When she concludes that Mike the Pornographer is kind of an asshole after he regales her with ugly Americanisms all through Paris, it rings true even though Mike himself is a part and she's talking about someone who doesn't really exist.

The sex trade hangs over all of this, though. It's the elephant in the room, and the movie plays to it rather than offering a critique. As a counterpart to Raquela's failure to get into nursing school, for one example, is a scene shortly afterward that dresses her in a latex nurse outfit for the benefit of her webcam chat business. This seems almost cruel in context, and there's definitely a fetishistic gaze involved in the director's choice to make the film in the first place that makes me wonder if he's not a chaser himself. Meanwhile, there's no real acknowledgement of the human cost of the sex trade and its attendant relationship with human trafficking. The movie itself bills itself as a kind of Cinderella tale, in which Raquela is given the chance to live her dream of visiting Paris, but the film blithely creates this plot without realizing that the scenario it constructs is disturbingly similar to the modus operandi of slavers: provide the money to travel, indenture the victim to the money. The movie omits the indenture. One of the film's more unbelievable elements is the notion that Mike the Pornographer takes Raquela to Paris out of the goodness of his heart, especially once the movie establishes that he's kind of a prick. This casts a sinister pall over the director's assertion that the film is about globalization and the commodification of human beings, because he seems to be oblivious to what he's portraying.

Marginally less troubling is the persistent enforcement of a gender binary worldview and the fixed social roles it portends. The movie already indicates that it thinks that Raquela will never inhabit her desired gender (never mind that the movie categorically depicts her doing exactly that). There's a shot--surely staged--of Raquela and her two friends standing at urinals with their skirts hiked up; this is obviously a shot that enforces the film's essentialist ideas of gender identity. The world of this film is also a world without social mobility, where in spite of Raquela's jaunt to Europe, she still winds up back home with no prospects, walking arm and arm down the street with her girlfriends. While there's an inherently humane element to this shot, friends being friends and all, it indicates that Raquela has been running in place. She's never going to move out of her current social role, the movie suggests, and the shadow of dangerous sex, crushing poverty, and (perceived) self-delusion looms large in the end.

As a postscript, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the packaging for this film. Here's the DVD cover:

THAT'S not a prejudicial image. Not at all. Sheesh.

The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela is available on DVD from E1 Entertainment for purchase or rent from the usual suspects. Also, I need to give a shout out to Gina over at Skip the Makeup, who pointed me at the movie in the first place.

Opening Shots #1: Contact

This is the opening shot of Robert Zemeckis's 1997 movie, Contact. I have a LOT of issues with this movie, but the opening shot is one of the best I've ever seen. It's initially cold and dispassionate and incomparably vast, but it ends up with a striking note of humanity. I wish the rest of the movie were up to it. Alas.

Shameless Self-promotion #3

Aaron Christensen was my editor for Horror 101. In addition to being a super nice (and super handsome, grrowl) guy, he is also involved with Chicago's Wild Claw Theater. He asked a handful of 101 contributors, including yours truly, if we would contribute to the Wild Claw blog about all things horror. He asked so nicely that I couldn't refuse. My initial offering is online now. It begins:

"The seminal item in question for today's symposium is Stephen King's Danse Macabre, originally published in 1981. Technically, I'm a little bit early with this, but as it so happens there's a new edition this year for which King has added a new essay called "What's Scary," so this turns out to be topical. People have been calling for King to write a follow-up to Danse Macabre for years, given the explosion of the genre since its publication. I doubt that this new essay is going to quiet those demands."

Read the rest there.

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Currently on my iTunes shuffle: "I'm Waiting for The Man" by The Velvet Underground

Wicked City

The Phenix City Story (1955, directed by Phil Karlson) makes a strong first impression. I originally saw it on some fly by night cable channel in the 1980s and I've never forgotten it. It's one of the most hard boiled crime films of the 1950s, a period not short on hard boiled crime films. It's also a true exploitation film, one rushed to theaters on the strength of a topical story where the principle actors were still going through the legal system. It's also brutal as hell.

The movie follows the inhabitants of the titular city, which is across the river from Columbus, Georgia. On the evidence of the film, Phenix City seems like it was Columbus's secret sharer, the id where all of its darkest impulse are lived out. It's a cesspit of rigged gambling dens, quick loan joints, dope peddlers, and whores. The city's vice is run by a network of good ol' boy crime lords, and enforced by good ol' boy thugs. Into this mix is thrown lawyer Albert Patterson and his family. His son, John, has returned from Germany in search of a nice place to raise his children. John is a crusader and a war hero, and he slowly but surely draws his father into opposition to the "syndicate" that runs the town. Patterson embarks to run for Attorney General to clean up the town, but it all ends badly.

The structure of the movie is awkward at first, prefaced by interview material with the real people of Phenix City. Everyone is awkward in documentary footage, so this section of the film is not promising. Once the actual movie starts, things improve. It still has a documentary structure along the lines of the other pseudo-documentary crime films of the period, but as the film progresses, the shadows grow longer and the compositions get more stylized until we're smack in the middle of the film noir dark city. The cast is an excellent assortment of familiar faces. John McIntyre is probably the most recognizable actor, promoted from the character ranks into the forefront of the movie. Richard Kiley is ostensibly the lead. The smiling Edward Andrews, a familiar face from a generation of TV guest appearances and commercial roles and cast against type here, makes for a dandy villain. All well and good. There are other similar films littering the noir period. Director Phil Karlson even made a couple of them.

What really distinguishes this film is its willingness to take the next awful step. It's not squeamish about throwing the good and virtuous characters it has into the meat grinder. It has its villains abduct a black child in order to throw her corpse on the lawn of our heroes as a warning. It has young lovers who never get together and wind up dead. It has a jaundiced view of human nature. It gets away with it all under cover of its documentary pedigree, in the best tradition of exploitation filmmaking. Karlson would go to this well again twenty years later with the very similar Walking Tall. It works there, too.

One sour note, though: this has a certain veneer of Hollywood liberal guilt. It presents a relatively noble black character, shows our heroes being friendly and upright in their friendship with him, and lies through its teeth about it. It's a whitewash, of course. The "real" story is suggested on the IMDB's trivia page for the movie:

In the film, John Patterson (Richard Kiley) is depicted as supportive of African-American Zeke Ward (James Edwards) and his family. In real life, following his term as Alabama attorney general (1954-1958), he ran for governor in 1958, ran an openly racist campaign and won. One of his opponents, George Wallace, had run as a racial moderate and told his friends after the election, "John Patterson out-niggered me, and I'm never gonna be out-niggered again." Four years later, in 1962, Wallace won the governorship of Alabama as an open racist.

Hollywood can't tarnish its heroes with racism. Nope. John Patterson can't be Ethan Edwards. Pity.