The Way of All Flesh

Star Trek: First Contact (1996, directed by Jonathan Frakes) finds the Next Generation crew coming into their own. Unburdened by establishing a linkage with the previous series (and with accomodating William Shatner's ego), it has more room to breathe, establish the narratives for its characters, and generally tell an unforced narrative. It's one of the best of the Star Trek films; it's the Next Gen crew's Wrath of Khan. You cold make a case for First Contact as the best of the Star Trek movies. While the previous films have always had a level of rollicking adventure, this one tackles more existential themes. I like that it doesn't have an allegorical ax to grind, which has often been the Achilles Heel of Star Trek. Instead, it tackles science fiction qua science fiction, as a crucible for examining the human heart in conflict with itself rather than as a sociological funhouse mirror.

The story finds the Borg invading human space at last. The Enterprise had already encountered the Borg, a race of cyborgs who destroy whole races in order to absorb their technology and biology into their own collective, six years earlier. In that encounter, Captain Picard was captured by the Borg and assimilated into them. Star Fleet, understandably, doesn't trust Picard and relegates the Enterprise to patrolling the Romulan Neutral Zone while it does battle with the Borg cube ship. Picard, sensing that the battle is going badly, ignores his orders and joins the battle anyway. His knowledge of the Borg turns the tide, but they escape into a time warp. The Enterprise follows. The Borg's intent is to travel back in time to prevent the inventor of warp technology, Zefram Cochrane, from making his maiden flight, which is the lynchpin to the founding of the Federation. The Enterprise's dual task is to make sure that history is maintained, and to fight off a Borg invasion of their own ship...

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Happy Birthday, Luis Buñuel

Some years ago, I showed an acquaintance of mine Luis Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid. She didn't get it. At all. And even though she reckoned herself a film fan, she didn't see what was so special about Buñuel's style, which she regarded as flat and boring. I realized then that true love could never bloom between us. Alas.

Anyway, today is Don Luis's birthday, and to celebrate, here's a short documentary on the director from the 1964 French series, Un Cineaste De Notre Temps. Enjoy.

Shuttered Rooms

This concludes my participation in the Film Preservation Blogathon: For the Love of Film (Noir). This is a fundraiser, folks, so send a few bucks to this link. Proceeds benefit the Film Noir Foundation and will help fund the restoration of The Sound of Fury (1950).

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Let's get this out of the way first. Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010) is ridiculous. Now, I knew that going in. I listened to an audiobook version of Dennis Lehane's novel a couple of years ago. Others who are not so forearmed may feel a little pissed off when they get to the end of the movie.

Here's what happens in the movie: US Marshalls Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have been summoned to Shutter Island, a psychatric compound off the coast of Massachusetts that houses the dangrously, criminally insane. One of their patients, a woman who drowned her children, has mysteriously escaped from her cell and cannot be found. Once there, they run into obstruction at every turn from the sinister administrator of the island, Dr. John Cawley. The hospital, it seems has secrets. Daniels, too, has secrets. He's a veteran of the war, in which he was present at the liberation of Dachau. It haunts his dreams, waking and otherwise. His ulterior motive for taking the case is to confront the man who set the fire that burned his wife to death. His wife haunts his dreams, too. Getting anything done is a challenge, however, as the island has been isolated from the world by a raging hurricane.

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It's a Bitter Little World

Continuing my participation in the Film Preservation Blogathon: For the Love of Film (Noir). This is a fundraiser, folks, so send a few bucks to this link. Proceeds benefit the Film Noir Foundation and will help fund the restoration of The Sound of Fury (1950).

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I sometimes have difficulty writing about movies that I love. Often, I don't know where to start, but other times, I don't have a firm grasp of what ineffable quality makes me love some films over others that are equally well made. I also run the risk of gushing. I can be an undiscriminating viewer when a movie tickles my pleasure centers just so. It's why I love so many movies that, objectively speaking, aren't particularly good.

Sometimes, though, I can identify exactly what makes me love a given movie. One such movie is The Scar (aka Hollow Triumph, 1948, directed by Istevan Sekely), a low, low budget dream fugue of a movie that has no acquaintance with realism. It's a film that follows the logic of nightmares, and most of the film instills a feeling of being pursued not just by the forces of law or by evil companions, though there's some of that, but by the hand of fate itself. This, in spite of the fact that the story is absurd on its face, and that some of its key set pieces have been "borrowed" from other movies. But none of that matters to me, really, because this movie hits the erogenous zones of my cinematic joy like few others.

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Riding the Wave

Continuing my participation in the Film Preservation Blogathon: For the Love of Film (Noir). This is a fundraiser, folks, so send a few bucks to this link. Proceeds benefit the Film Noir Foundation and will help fund the restoration of The Sound of Fury (1950).

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Most of my favorite films noir are minor films. I mean, it's easy to love the big name movies--your Double Indemnities, your Maltese Falcons, your Sweet Smells of Success--but the little films? The throwaway b-pictures? That takes some effort. It's easy to dismiss them as cheap and tawdry. And yet, film noir is built on these movies. One of my own favorite "minor" films is Crime Wave (1954, directed by Andre de Toth). Crime Wave is a damn near perfect B-movie. It's tightly wound and starkly beautiful in spite of being cheap as hell, and it's exactly the right length at 73 minutes. There's not a single ounce of fat on this film, and yet it still provides a vivid gallery of characters and a complete dramatic arc.

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The Lamentations of the Women

My first thought when I started thinking about The Trojan Women (1971, directed by Mihalis Kakogiannis) was that I would use the line "Euripides? I rippa dose" as a title. All hail Chico Marx and all, but it doesn't really fit, especially considering how utterly bleak both the play and this movie version actually are. The Greeks could ladle on the misery. I thought about writing about this as a variant of film noir--certainly many of the characters are engaged in film noir's sexual obsessions and downward spiral--but I think that more properly applies to Electra, which Kakogiannis filmed ten years prior to this film. THIS film, on the other hand, has interesting circumstances.

It was made in the late sixties/early seventies, when national cinemas of all kinds were in a state of upheaval. Nationalities were in a state of upheaval, as well, and the strong anti-war theme of The Trojan Women is very much of its time. In its formal qualities, it is the product of a decade of New Waves. The jump-cut is one of its most effective cinematic tools. It's also the work of an exile. Kakogiannis made the film in Spain; his native Greece was under an authoritarian thumb at the time. The international nature of the production gives Kakogiannis a once in a lifetime cast. All of this seeps into the warp and weave of the film.

The story is bleak, and it's the story that echoes down the millennia. Everything else is set dressing. In the aftermath of the fall of Troy, the women of Troy wait in the ruins to see how the victorious Greeks will dispose of them. It focuses on four women, mainly: Hecuba, the queen of the city state; Andromache, the widow of Hector, the great Trojan hero; Cassandra, the mad prophetess who has been raped by the Greek hero Ajax; and Helen, the woman whose face allegedly launched a thousand ships. Each gets their turn to wail their lamentations to the desolate hills around the smoking wreck of their city.

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Down with the Dead Men

Continuing my participation in the Film Preservation Blogathon: For the Love of Film (Noir). This is a fundraiser, folks, so send a few bucks to this link. Proceeds benefit the Film Noir Foundation and will help fund the restoration of The Sound of Fury (1950).

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I discovered Cornell Woolrich shortly after I graduated from college. I was already edging deep into the hard boiled crime writers, having gone on a tear through Jim Thompson and Richard Stark as I was finishing my degree and afterward. But Woolrich...Woolrich rocked my world. My first acquaintance with Woolrich was in a Harlan Ellison story, oddly enough. This was during my SF New Wave phase in my late teens. The story was "Tired Old Man" in Ellison's book, No Doors, No Windows. In truth, I wasn't looking for crime stories when I bought the book. Ellison's long introduction apologized for the inevitable bait and switch involved. I gobbled it all down anyway. Ellison's fictionalized account of meeting Woolrich is impassioned and infectious. It took a while to find the books, though, because Woolrich is only a rumor these days. That's a literary estate that's in serious disarray and it's one of the great shames of publishing that Woolrich remains mostly out of print.

I knew the movies, of course. Rear Window. The Leopard Man, The Bride Wore Black (which I hated, actually), a handful of episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. But the books themselves? No. Not until I found a cache of the Ballantine reissues of the Black Novels at a dissolute used bookstore. The first one I read was The Phantom Lady (not technically one of the Black Novels, but Ballantine expanded the purview of the series to include all of Woolrich's major works). The second was The Bride Wore Black. From there, I was hooked.

I have a pretty good collection of Woolrich novels, including such mathoms as Strangler's Serenade and Beyond the Night. I'm still missing some major novels, but Woolrich is one of those writers like Philip K. Dick, who never seems to show up at used bookstores. People don't part with his books. The crown jewel of my Woolrich shelf is I Married A Dead Man, written under Woolrich's famous William Irish byline. Of all of Woolrich's books, it's the one that's easiest to find. It's one of the masterpieces of the roman noir. And, my, oh my, is it bleak.

There are three movie versions of I Married a Dead Man. I haven't seen the 1983 French version. I wish I could un-see Mrs. Winterbourne, which inexplicably turns the story into a comedy. I've been looking for No Man of Her Own, the 1950 version with Barbara Stanwyck, for years. When it showed up on Netflix instant a couple of months ago, my heart almost stopped. I knew the Film Noir Blogathon was coming up, so my forbearance in NOT watching until now was a serious test of will. For the most part, I'm not disappointed.

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Half in Shadow

This kicks off my participation in the Film Preservation Blogathon: For the Love of Film (Noir). This is a fundraiser, folks, so send a few bucks to this link. Proceeds benefit the Film Noir Foundation and will help fund the restoration of The Sound of Fury (1950).

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So when I was gearing up to write about some of my favorite films noir this week, I was shocked to discover that I've never written about Out of the Past (1948, directed by Jacques Tourneur). I couldn't name a favorite film noir, but Out of the Past is nevertheless one of those movies that I would never, ever part with if consigned to the proverbial desert island. When I think of the archetypal film noir, chances are THIS is the film I'm thinking about. So I decided that Out of the Past would be the subject of my first post for the blogathon. Then I got sidetracked.

A couple of years ago, my partner bought us one of those DVD burning combo players, and for the first several months I had it, I spent a lot of time transferring my laserdiscs and old VHS recordings from cable, etc., to DVD. Shortly after we got the combo player, we got a new puppy, a very sweet labrador retriever named Daisy. Daisy, like most puppies, was destructive, and she ended up destroying the remote for the DVD burner, which sat for a year before I got around to replacing the remote. I finally got the new remote last week. There was also a stack of tapes next to the burner that had been waiting to be copied, and on the top of that stack of tapes was Robert Wise's Western, Blood on the Moon (1947). Blood on the Moon is sometimes classified as a Western noir, and as I was copying it to disc, I was shocked to realize that, in a LOT of ways, Blood on the Moon seems like a companion piece to Out of the Past; a dry run for Out of the Past, if you will. It certainly LOOKS like film noir, and the comparison of the two suggests the essential foolhardiness of defining what is and isn't film noir on the basis of visual idiom alone, because in spite of the similarities between the two movies, I can't decide if I think Blood on the Moon actually IS film noir, even though it play the notes. The moral quagmire is absent. The essential optimism of the Western holds sway in the end, in spite of the downright nihilistic elements that the movie brings to bear (Walter Brennan's character, for instance, is the bitterest role the actor ever played). There's no downward spiral here. Mitchum's character is too morally strong for that. There's only the visual poetry of noir.

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The Law is A Ass

Sometimes, I wish I could unplug my brain while I'm watching movies. I know that a lot of people have mastered this particular trick, but it's not something I've ever managed. My dad could do it. Give him a tricky plot and a sense of comeuppance at the end, and he was happy, or, failing that, tell him dirty jokes. He was, shall we say, undiscriminating. He would have seriously dug Law Abiding Citizen (2009, directed by F. Gary Gray). Hell, while I was watching it, I was grooving on it, myself. It's slick and well-mounted; it unfolds with the precision of fine clockwork. Unfortunately, I started thinking about it long before it ended. As a piece of pop cinema, it's not bad. It's exciting, intricate, and provides a sense of justice for the audience. As a moral exercise, it's horrifying.

The problem with this movie is the nature of its villain and the direction of its character arc for its hero. It's one of those movies whose political motives are pitched to appeal to a broad spectrum, without any strong conviction of its own. It lets itself be led astray by its nature as a crowd pleaser.

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Sounds Like a Fish!

I was conversing with a friend of mine about living a life with movies this week. He's becoming deeply involved with a film festival in his native Belgium, and I noted that it's funny how, the deeper you go into movies, the more they insinuate themselves into your life. I used as an example a short film that I made a couple of years ago with my friend, critic and filmmaker Kevin Lee, for his now-concluded Shooting Down Pictures project. My friend naturally asked where he could see it and I realized that I hadn't posted it here. So here it is.

A few months after Kevin posted this on his site, he sent me an email:

Dear Kristin, Jonathan, Girish, Nicole and Christianne,

I'm happy to share the exciting news that the video essays that I produced with each of you have all been selected for an ongoing series of "Films About Films" at the Arsenal Theater in FilmMuseum Berlin. The monthly series also includes works and talks with folks such as Harun Farocki, Alexander Horwath, Alain Bergala, Tag Gallagher and Jean Douchet. The program that features our work is focused on video criticism and internet culture. It takes place April 17. You can view the program here: http://blogs.indiewire.com/kohn/archives/kevin_lee_and_matt_seitz_to_screen_films_in_germany/

I'm incredibly pleased with the recognition of this work and your specific contributions to it. I hope we'll have the opportunity to collaborate on others. Thanks again for taking a valuable role in this work as it continues to evolve.

Kevin

I wrote on another blog: "I am, to say the least, gobsmacked. "Jonathan" is critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Kristin" is film historian Kristin Thompson. In film circles, this is fairly rarefied company. Frankly, I'm shocked that they chose to screen my film from amongst all of the video essays Kevin has made. I mean, it's purely an accident that I did it at all. Be that as it may, something I made is showing in an actual theater and is being examined by a discriminating audience. This is both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Anyone who is as deeply immersed in film as I am dreams of this sort of thing, and now, for me, it's real."

Kevin subsequently posted video of his Berlin experience. It's good video, though the trouble he has with pronouns when referring to me makes me cringe.

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These days, I'm kind of ambivalent about the Garp video. It's had a fairly significant effect on my life. It outed me in the film communities I frequent, though that has turned out to be an enormously positive thing. It's insured that, should I ever want to, I'll never be able to live my life in stealth. I don't know that that's a bad thing, actually, because it's not something I ever intended, but there's still a certain feeling of loss. I've also had to rethink a lot of the things I say ex cathedra in that video. Queer theorist Julia Serrano doesn't much like Roberta Muldoon. In her book, Whipping Girl, she uses Roberta as an example of the "pathetic transsexual" stereotype, and further implies that she's an example of the hyperfeminine fallacy. I can't say that I disagree with her, only that I love Roberta Muldoon in spite of this. I'm also uncomfortable with the way I seem to be speaking on behalf of transsexuals as a community and how I seem to suggest that trans people have a uniformity of experience. They don't. There are as many ways to be trans as there are as there are trans people. There's also not even an inkling that there are female to male transsexuals in my commentary, which is a fault.

Still, as I say, this is something I made. It's something that I'm proud of. I've been negligent by not posting it on this blog. In some ways, it's responsible for me committing more fully to movie blogging in the first place, so this blog is built in part on this video.

Blogorama Part IV

So I've thrown my hat in the ring for The White Elephant Blogathon. This one will be fun. The premise is that the participants throw the name of a bad movie they'd like to see reviewed in a hat, and get a bad movie someone else has suggested in turn. Preferably something readily available. I'm down with this. I've been drifting too far from my roots lately and I need to get back to some crap cinema to balance all the hardtop movies I've been reviewing lately. The game's afoot.

Tongue Tied

I was chatting with a friend of mine yesterday before heading out to the movies. Our conversation partly went like this:

Me: I'm going to see The King's Speech today.

Friend: That looks good.

Me: It looks like Oscar bait to me.

Friend: Granted.

Let's get this out of the way: The King's Speech (2010, directed by Tom Hooper) is totally Oscar bait. It's the kind of movie the members of the Academy LOVE. High-minded, pedigreed, slightly irreverent, historical, "significant." It's all of these things. It's also middlebrow, cinematically conservative, and uncontroversial. Hell, it features a lead character dealing with a disability. If that's not Oscar bait, nothing is. If I had to guess, it'll take six of the twelve Oscars for which it's nominated, including Best Picture. But I don't really care. Oscar has never been a benchmark of excellence. Just ask Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick.

In spite of all of this, The King's Speech is a pretty good movie. As I say, it's totally middlebrow, but that doesn't mean it's bad. In fact, it's fun to watch. John Ford once said that the most interesting thing in the world was the human face, and that's something that this movie understands implicitly. It helps that it has a sterling cast of British (and Australian) worthies and it spends its running time looking them in the eye. It's effective.

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Hair Tonic

A couple of weeks ago, I ran across this tutorial on facial expression in animation and cartooning, which featured this piece of information:

Clearly, cartoonist Tracy J. Butler knows what she's talking about. According to the commentary on this piece over at The Beat, this is also known as "Dreamworks Brow" and "'Tude." Note to cartoonists: Please stop. Seriously. Just stop. Please? Because I REALLY don't have the patience for characters like this one and shots like this one anymore:

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Switch Witch

Here's the thing about contemporary bad movies. They're as likely to look FAN-tastic as good movies. Think about this for a second: when someone tells me that they like a movie because it has good special effects these days, I have to take that with a grain of salt, because almost ALL movies that make it to the multiplexes have good special effects. Ditto for production design and overall film craft. We are living in the golden age of film as a burnished ornament. We are living in the golden age of the polished turd.

I didn't really know what to expect of Season of the Witch (2011, directed by Dominic Sena). For the most part, it looked like a train wreck, an ill-advised medieval horror movie that was so bad that it had been more or less orphaned by its distributor. Director Dominic Sena was fired from the film after poor audience reactions and the film was "doctored" by studio hack Bret Ratner. Nicolas Cage, for his part, is taking anything that comes along to forestall the wolf at the door. His financial problems have been well documented in the press. This is another movie for which he is probably ill-suited. Lionsgate shelved the film in 2010, and it ended up being released by Relativity Media, the outfit that funded the film. This is their first dip into film distribution. Also, the reviews have been pretty dismal. What did I expect? A polished turd, of course. But then someone in my social networks posted the following image of Christopher Lee, and I knew that, regardless, I was going to plunk down my money to see it. In the theater.

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Hell and Back

Ida Lupino once described herself as "a poor man's Don Siegel." She should know. She hired Siegel to direct Private Hell 36 (1954), the last film from her production company, The Filmmakers. It must have been an awkward set. The film was co-written by Lupino with her ex-husband, Collier Young, and Young was listed as a producer. Further, Lupino had remarried by the time this went before cameras and her new husband, Howard Duff, was her co-star in this picture. Siegel, for his part, wasn't sleeping with anyone on the set that I know of, but I think you can see a certain amount of discomfort in his direction.

The story here follows Cal Bruner and Jack Farnham, two cops investigating some money from a year-old heist that has surfaced in their bailiwick. The trail leads them to Lilli Marlowe, a nightclub singer who is the only witness to what their suspect looks like. She's reluctant to help. She doesn't like cops. Bruner, on the other hand, likes her, and dreams of buying her affections. When the trail leads them all to the money, Bruner contrives a scheme where he and Farnham can pocket the dough. Farnham, reluctantly, agrees. It's a downward spiral from there. For Bruner, it progresses to murderous thoughts. For Farnham, it's more complicated. He's a family man, and the crime weighs on his conscience for their sake. He gets to a point where he can't even look at his new baby anymore. Eventually, he resolves to come clean, but Bruner has different ideas...

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Tales from the Office of Unforeseen Atomic Events

So I was searching the net for appropriate screen grabs from Matinee (1993, directed by Joe Dante) and I came across the above still over at The Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind. I commented on Bob's post a couple of months ago, but I neglected to comment on the still. It's the perfect summary of the kind of nostalgia at work in Matinee. In the movie, John Goodman's character, one Lawrence Woolsey, is a huckster, a small time b-movie producer along the lines of William Castle. He's got creditors after him, his girlfriend is fed up with his eternal adolescence, and he's opportunistically taking advantage of the fears generated by the Cuban Missile Crisis to prime the pump for his new movie. While the movie views him with a great deal of affection, he's not a particularly admirable character. He's a small fry in a big pond. Except, that is, when his shadow is cast on the movie screen. Then, he becomes huge. As a metaphor for how the romance of grade-z monster movies lured an entire generation of kids to the old movie palaces, it's ideal. The movies? They were crud. But in our MEMORIES of those movies, whether seen on the big screen or half seen on late-night TV, they were always bigger and better.

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Brief Encounters

Sometime last week, I wrote the following: "Note to self: watch more deliriously subtle surreal romantic movies." One of my friends popped up in the comments and suggested I watch some Wong Kar Wai movies. I love my friends, and it's a good suggestion. My favorite of Wong's movies is In the Mood for Love (2000), and because it's been a few years since I've seen it, and because I don't think I've ever written about it, I decided that I needed a revisit.

The story here follows two neighbors in 1962 Hong Kong who slowly realize that their respective spouses are having an affair. This shared experience draw them together, but it also keeps them apart. Mrs. Chan is played by Maggie Cheung. She works in a travel office as an executive assistant. Mr. Chow is played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai. He's a journalist who wants to write martial arts novels, an interest he shares with Mrs. Chan. During the course of the movie, they play-act the meeting of their spouses in an attempt to understand and come to terms with the affair. Later, they play act the confrontation with their spouses. This acts as a kind of long courtship, and, inevitably they fall in love. But they don't consummate it. "We're better than them," Mrs. Chow says. Eventually they part and their paths continue to almost meet again, but it's not to be. "That era has passed. Nothing that belongs to it exists anymore," the movie tells us near the end. The feeling of loss is palpable.

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For the Love of Film (Noir)

The Film Preservation blogathon is coming up in a couple of weeks, so expect things to turn cynical and dark around here for the month. I'm probably going to blog way beyond the boundaries of the blogathon because I LOVE film noir. I thought about posting a noir film every day of February, and I may still do that. Meanwhile, here's a trailer for the event.

Your hostesses for this are The Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Film, two blogs you should be following anyway. The trailer I've posted here was put together by Greg Ferrara over at Cinema Styles. Oh, and this blogathon is a fundraiser. The organizers are trying to round up the scratch to restore The Sound of Fury, a noir film from 1950 starring Lloyd Bridges (I haven't seen it, unfortunately, but it's a remake of Fritz Lang's Fury, so I have an idea of what it's about). Donations to The Film Noir Foundation are tax deductible, so consider opening your pocketbook.

Along the Scenic Route

Y'know, I'm not even sure of where to begin with Stagecoach. It's one of those great movies that seems pretty straightforward on the surface, but gives way to bottomless depths once you begin to examine it. In some regards, it's like Citizen Kane or Persona, in so far as people have been writing about them since they first debuted, and yet people still return to them time and again. Its director, John Ford, used to introduce himself like this: "I'm John Ford. I make Westerns." He was being entirely too modest. The great period of the American Western movie begins with Stagecoach. You can pick any end point you like. Stagecoach encapsulates the Western in one sprawling, beautiful package. It has everything. No wonder Orson Welles screened it repeatedly when he was starting to make films.

So, I repeat: I don't even know where to start.

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“Mister, I was made for it...”

Film noir and the horror movie are kissing cousins. Both derive from the Gothic novel. Both derive their visual sensibilities from German expressionism. Neither sets out to reassure the audience or stroke their convictions that all is right with the world. Sometimes, as in The Leopard Man or Alias Nick Beal, the line between them is completely blurred. One of the movies from this twilight area between horror and film noir is Nightmare Alley (1947, directed by Edmund Goulding), one of the cinema’s blackest beasts. It's a film that plays like a lost Tod Browning film, with Tyrone Power in the Lon Chaney role. The film’s dramatic arc follows an irredeemable carny as he rises from the sideshow into high society, then back down as far as possible. Along the way, there are hints that there are sinister powers at work. Joan Blondell’s sideshow mentalist seems to have a real gift when she reads Tarot cards in private and Power’s Stanton Carlisle, a con-man in most respects, occasionally sees beyond what he can legitimately guess from cold reading of his marks. The film stages striking scenes that would work as horror set pieces were we not privy to the con behind them.

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Feet of Clay

I've been looking for a way to write about Mary and Max (2009, directed by Adam Elliot) for a few weeks now. It's a movie that seems like it's universally loved--certainly my correspondents have sang rapturous praises for it--but frankly, I hated it. I've been puzzling through my reasons for a while now, particularly in the face of the near unanimous praise the movie has received.

The movie itself is a claymation account of the long correspondence between two miserable people. Mary is a lonely eight year old in Australia with a "poo-colored" birthmark on her forehead. Searching for friends, she picks Max's name at random from a New York phone book and writes to him. Max is an obese New Yorker with Asperger's syndrom, who gets panic attacks from Mary's letters. Even so, he writes her back. Mary and Max never actually meet. Circumstances conspire against this. Each goes through surprising life changes. Max is institutionalized at one point; the air conditioner of his apartment falls from the wall and kills a mime; he wins the lottery. Mary for her part grows up, marries a man who leaves her for a sheep rancher, writes a book on Asperger's Syndrome, and attempts suicide. The movie obviously goes into dark places, and it refuses an easy accommodation with audience expectations.

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Mubi Roulette

So I was poking around on Mubi--formerly The Auteurs--today, and I was struck by the complete randomness of how it displays my preferences. If you'd like, you can see my Mubi profile here. Feel free to follow me and invite me to follow you if you're there, too. It's the location of my ever elusive list of favorite films.

What I'm seeing right now, having just clicked over to my profile, is four movies I've designated as favorites (out of a completely freely associated selection of 284 movies I've added to that list), ten favorite "auteurs," and ten "style" keywords.

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Because a Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother

1968 was a watershed year for horror movies. Two events occurred that would shape horror movies for decades to come. The first was the release of Night of the Living Dead, naturally. The second was the trial of Ed Gein. Gein was apprehended in 1957, but was found mentally incompetent to stand trial at the the time. By the time of his trial, Gein had already made inroads into the horror genre--Psycho is famously based on Gein, and the children of Psycho are legion--but the Gein's trial shook something loose in the minds of filmmakers, and soon the grislier details of Gein's crimes began to filter into the genre. The supernova of films based on Gein is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre from 1974, of course, but another film based on Gein appeared the same year. Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormbsy's Deranged sticks closer to the facts of the case than any other film, and while it may not have the pile-driving horror of TCM, it has a weird ambiance all its own.

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Götterdämmerung

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I recollect that the "look" of contemporary depictions of the middle ages originates with Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky. Gilliam conceived of a great unwashed age, in which everything is covered in mud, shit, and blood. Even movies that still indulge in the mythology of chivalry and the romance of history seem to have adopted this aesthetic these days, and it's the main feature of movies that deliberately deconstruct them both. Mud and blood are prominent features in Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising (2009). I'll assume that shit is a component, too. Fortunately, cinema doesn't convey smell to the audience.

Valhalla Rising is a period piece that presents history as a kind of terrifying dream fugue. It's not about facts. It's deliberately vague on the facts. It's about mood and texture. It's pretty damned creepy, actually. The story here is pretty simple: a one-eyed pit slave whose name we never learn escapes from his captors and exacts his revenge. Afterward, he falls in with a band of Christians bound for the holy land, but get lost on the journey and land, instead, in the New World, where they come to believe that they've actually landed in Hell. It's the way it's filmed that renders all of this portentous. Refn seems to be channeling an action movie through the sensibilities of, say, Michelangelo Antonioni by way of Apocalypto. This is all about figures against landscapes. Some of this film's shot composition have a kind of stately classicism about them. Every so often, these shots are interrupted by outbursts of outrageous violence. There's a stillness throughout most of the movie that amplifies the violence when it comes. It reminds me a bit of one of those Philip Glass pieces in which one note is repeated over and over again until it becomes a shock when it changes.

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A Tale of Two Cities

The original film version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974, directed by Joseph Sargent) is a pretty good genre piece that benefits greatly from the specific time and place where it was filmed. The plot is preposterous, but the way it was filmed displayed a kind of unforced naturalism that sold the whole enterprise. It's one of those rare gimmick movies (Die Hard on a battle ship!) in which the gimmick is almost incidental to the real pleasures the movie provides. It doesn't hurt that Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau aren't conventional movie stars. This has been a minor favorite of mine for a long time. I originally saw it on the late show with my mom back in (mumble mumble). Certainly, the circumstances of when I saw it influence my opinion of the movie, but when I saw it again years later, it still held up. What's really interesting to me at this distance is its portrait of a grimy New York in decline. The seventies were rough on the Big Apple and you can get a sense of collapse throughout the movie, a collapse accompanied by a tired sense of resignation among New Yorkers. This snapshot quality is something it shares with it's 2009 remake, retitled without spelling out the numbers as The Taking of Pelham 123 and directed by Tony Scott, but the New York of 2009 is very different from the New York of 1974. For that matter, the conventions of moviemaking are very different, too.

The plot of the remake is more or less the same. A group of four armed men hijack a subway train and their leader makes their demands to the dispatcher, who they insist stay as their contact rather than the police negotiators. They want ten million dollars (in the original, it was only one million; inflation, I guess) in one hour or they'll execute one hostage every minute. The lead hijacker is played by John Travolta in the new movie. The dispatcher is played by Denzel Washington. Washington is fine. Travolta's performance is seriously overripe. He should be quietly sinister. Instead, he's a ranter. It may be apropos, given the other changes they've made to the nature of the crime and the nature of the criminals--I'll get to that--but it's seriously annoying. The movie adds John Turturro as the police negotiator, James Gandolfini as the mayor, and Luis Guzman as the disgruntled ex-motorman who aids the criminals. It's not a bad cast, Travolta not withstanding.

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The Spice Must Flow

David Lynch's 1984 version of Dune is a magnificent folly. You can see the vast resources lavished on the screen in the costumes and the sets and in an absolutely stellar cast, but like most of Dino De Laurentis's attempts at grand-scale science fiction, this all turns to ashes in the end. Dune is one of the most interesting bad movies ever made. It's compulsively watchable. You can't take your eyes off of it, even when it makes you wince. I like to think that Dune is the movie equivalent of Afghanistan, in which great empires break themselves in spite of vast treasures pissed down the hole. That's appropriate, I think, given the ethnic model on which Frank Herbert based the Fremen of Arrakis. And somehow, some way, the film made it into the collective meme pool of pop culture. I saw a tee shirt a few years ago that modifies the mentat chant: "It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion." Fatboy Slim samples the line "If we walk without rhythm, we won't attract the worm" for "Weapon of Choice." Dune is a weird, weird vortex in the meme pool.

The story in Dune follows the fortunes of the Atreides family, who in the movie's mythology have developed a new weapon technology and have a charismatic leader in Duke Leto. The Emperor of the Galaxy is afraid of the Atreides clan, and conspires with their arch rivals, the Harkonnens, to set them up as the governors of Arrakis, the desert world that produces the Spice, Melange, the substance that makes interstellar travel possible, with the intent to betray them and wipe them out. Unfortunately for the Emperor, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood has different plans for the Atreides. They've been selectively breeding humans for millennia in a quest to produce a superman, who they would of course control. Lady Jessica, Duke Leto's consort, gave birth to Paul in defiance of her sisterhood, who demanded that she only bear female children. Is Paul the end product of their plan? After the Emperor's plot plays out, Paul gets to test the idea. He and his mother escape and find refuge with the Fremen who shortly begin to think that Paul is the messiah promised by their mythology. Paul vows to lead the Fremen in revolt against the Harkonnens first, and then the rest of the galaxy...

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The Same, Only Different

I was reading some of the reviews of Different for Girls (1996, directed by Richard Spence) last night after I finished watching the movie, and I was stopped up short by Roger Ebert's write up. At the beginning of his review he asks:

"The unexamined mystery at the heart of Different for Girls is--what, exactly, does Paul see in Kim?"

...which, to my mind is the wrong question. He should be asking, rather, "What, exactly, does Kim see in Paul." Unfortunately, given the subject matter, Paul is going to be the default protagonist, because Kim, a transsexual, is going to freak some members of the audience out. This, in spite of the fact that she's far more "normal" and sympathetic than the rootless Paul could ever be. I mean, in ANY other romantic comedy, Ebert would be asking MY version of the question, but that's cisgender privilege for you, I guess.

The story here finds old schoolmates Paul Prentice (Rupert Graves) and Kim Foyle (Steven Mackintosh) literally running into each other years afterward. Paul is a motorcycle messenger who seems perpetually on the verge of losing everything he has, while Kim leads a quiet life as a writer for a greeting card company. They seem like oil and water, but Paul finds that he feels...something...for Kim. Curiosity, maybe, or maybe a proprietary fondness, given that he is shown in flashback defending Kim--then Karl--from bullies at school. After suggesting that they "get together," he winds up having a disastrous lunch with her, then takes her to a club gig by the Buzzcocks (!!!), then teaches her to ride his motorcycle. Basically, he's trying to draw her out of her shell. Unfortunately, his good intentions lead him into a conflict with the cops (which terrifies Kim), and he needs her to testify on his behalf to get him out of his predicament. Kim, for her part, would rather not out herself to a courtroom.

This is a movie built on the bones of the romantic comedy, but there's always a wall of separation between its cool detachment and the passion you might want in such a movie. I think the mismatch between Paul and Kim is to blame for this. Graves and Mackintosh don't really strike any sparks, even though I can't really fault them for trying. Graves overplays Paul. For the first half of the movie he's kind of an annoyance. Mackintosh, on the other hand, gives a marvelously understated performance. The movie's conception of Kim Foyle is refreshing, actually. She's one of the few really convincing transsexuals to grace the screen. She's normal to the point of squareness, actually, and shy to the point of withdrawn. In a movie where most of the other characters have a forced exuberance to them, she's an island of calm. The hurts the movie does to her sting. You can hear the wistfulness in her voice when she answers Paul's "I'm straight, you know," with "So am I." There's a world of romantic disappointment in Mackintosh's line reading of this exchange, one that I know all too well myself.

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The Darkseid of the Street

I have a bit of a beef with the animated Superman/Batman: Apocalypse (2010, directed by Lauren Montgomery). This can be summarized by the director herself, in an interview with AWN, in which she talks about projects she'd like to make:

"I would love to do a Batgirl: Year One. That would be my dream to do that as a movie. But they're not pushing for the female stories, because they don't seem to make money. It's a business. If they can't make money on female stories then they won't make them."

Except, of course, for the fact that Superman/Batman: Apocalypse IS a female story. Superman and Batman are NOT the leads in this movie, but they get top billing. That strikes me as wrong. I mean, I get it. As Montgomery says, it's a business and the marketers at Warner Brothers and DC know what they're doing, but it still strikes me as a raw deal that potentially cuts off a potential female market. Seriously, girls read comics, too.

The story in this finds Superman's cousin, Kara Zor-El, falling to Earth in Gotham bay, where she's found by Batman. Unlike Superman, Kara is a teen when she comes to Earth, and has no mastery of her Kryptonian powers. This makes her dangerous. Wonder Woman and Batman conspire to take Kara to Themyscera where the amazons train her to control her powers and use them to defend herself. Meanwhile, Harbinger has disturbing visions of Kara's future. Kara, it seems, has come to the attention of Darkseid, the dark god who rules the world of Apokalips. He has been searching for a new captain of his honor guard, the Female Furies, since the defection of Big Barda. He launches an attack on Themyscera to divert Batman, Superman, and the amazons, and abducts Kara. He entrusts her to the loving care of Granny Goodness for indoctrination. Superman will have none of this. He enlists Barda to take our trio of heroes to Apokalips to effect a rescue mission, but is it too late? Has Kara become a minion of Darkseid?

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Food Porn

One of the things that really bothered me about The Incredibles, Brad Bird's first feature for Pixar, was the muddled Randianism it takes as its theme. I mean, the superhero archetype is inherently fascist, so I'm not surprised to see it. I WAS surprised that it formed a dominant theme, with the film making a case for the exceptionalism built into the archetype. The film's refrain, "If everyone is special, then nobody is," is kind of stupid on the face of it, because it presupposes that "specialness" is uniform. This is an absurd proposition in a world where every creature in it has a unique genetic code and in which the "specialness" of individuals is the driving force in the evolution of life, civilization, and culture. In any event, it stuck in my craw, especially given that the movie is otherwise an amazement. I like to think that Bird made Ratatouille (2007) as a kind of explanation of his original meaning, because the thesis at the heart of it is somewhat different and more to the point: "Not everyone can be a great artist," the film says, "but a great artist could be anyone." Of course, it's possible that I'm giving Bird too much credit for influencing the message of the movie, given that the original driving force behind it was Jan Pinkava, who Pixar relieved in favor of Bird mid-production.

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If You Can't Stand the Heat...

It's always a shock for me to see some of Glenn Ford's darker performances. I mean, my image of Ford is as Jonathan Kent, Clark Kent's dad in the 1978 Superman, and there are a lot of other movies that reinforce that image of the wholesome American dad. I don't know anything about Ford's biography, so I don't know how true it was to the man, but it doesn't matter, I guess. When I see Ford in something like 3:10 to Yuma or Gilda (surely one of the most homoerotic films of Hollywood's golden age), I get a case of cognitive dissonance. This is NOT the Glenn Ford I'm comfortable with, but he's certainly a lot more interesting. The film that really plays up this duality is Fritz Lang's brutal noir, The Big Heat, from 1953.

You get both sides of the coin in The Big Heat: the devoted father and family man, and the cold, relentless cop out for vengeance. The movie even codes it with its leading ladies. The light side is Jocelyn Brando's devoted, doomed wifey, while the dark is Gloria Grahame's gangster's moll (who, herself, has an interesting level of duality, one made physically manifest in the course of the movie). There's so much emphasis on dichotomies that it almost obscures the fact that the movie isn't so cut and dry. The Big Heat is good at hiding its hand.

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