Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
May 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
The wild beasts know no mercy. They wait for us in the wood, in the shadows.
The Week of the Wolf continues with Neil Jordan's 1984 fantasy The Company of Wolves, based on the story by Angela Carter, who also co-wrote the screenplay. More than just a retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood" with an emphasis on the psycho-sexual subtext, it's also a tale about a young girl's awakening sexuality -- several tales, in fact. The film starts in modern day, where Sarah Patterson dreams about a pack of wolves attacking her hated sister, then we enter her dream, which takes place in a fairy tale world, but never fully. Jordan periodically cuts back to Patterson tossing and turning in bed to remind us that everything we're seeing is being generated by her subconscious. (In a way, it would make an excellent double feature with Labyrinth.)
The cast includes Angela Lansbury as her granny, who tells her stories full of warnings about men whose eyebrows meet and wolves that are hairy on the inside, David Warner as her father, who's at a loss with his daughter in both the real and the dream world, Brian Glover as the father of the neighbor boy who takes a liking to Patterson (who, of course, has no time for him), Graham Crowden as the kindly old priest, Kathryn Pogson as the young bride in one of Lansbury's tales, who marries traveling man Stephen Rea, who "answers the call of nature" one night and doesn't come back, an uncredited Jim Carter as the man Pogson marries in his stead, and an uncredited Terence Stamp as the Devil, who appears in a flashy car to tempt a young man in the forest. If that last part doesn't seem to make sense, remember it's in a story being told by a girl in her own dream. With all the different levels of fantasy and reality, things are bound to get a little mixed up.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
A scream at the right time may save your life.
Vincent Price's second film for producer/director William Castle was 1959's The Tingler, in which Price plays a pathologist who seeks to discover the physical creature that causes fear in all vertebrates. Kind of a far-out notion for a '50s horror film, especially since Price experiments with injecting his test subjects (namely, himself) with LSD, but one gets the idea that Castle and screenwriter Robb White (who wrote all of Castle's films from this period) weren't too worried about realism. In fact, certain plot elements (like the fact that one of the characters runs a silent movie theater with his deaf-mute wife) are introduced just so Castle can cut to a black screen and have Price announce, "The Tingler is loose in this theater!" Naturally, the only way to neutralize the Tingler is to scream your head off -- something audiences in 1959 may have already been predisposed to do, regardless of how many seats Castle had rigged with buzzers.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
My family's always been in meat.
I recently acquired The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Companion, a book that was published in 2004 to mark the film's 30th anniversary, so the time seemed ripe for me to revisit the film. (I am speaking, of course, of Tobe Hooper's 1974 original. I had the misfortune of getting a free pass to the abysmal remake when it was in theaters a few years back and have no intention of ever revisiting it.) Now, if there is any one film in the history of cinema that has had enough written about it in print and online, it is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so I will keep my write-up brief.
Chain Saw is the film that both launched Tobe Hooper's career and forever limited what he would be able to do with his considerable talents. It is a rite of passage for hardcore horror fans -- there is the time before you saw Chain Saw and the time after. It is a film that puts one of its characters in a wheelchair -- which would normally make them sympathetic -- and then makes him such a whiny, obnoxious chatterbox that you can't wait for a maniac to come along and slice him up. Most of all, it still manages to be shocking and unsettling even after all these years. Today's audiences may be jaded when it comes to gore and special effects, but what Chain Saw has working for it is an atmosphere steeped in dread and evil portents that never lets up. I've seen it several times on home video, but never in a darkened theater with an audience. That is one thing I definitely want to do at some point down the road.
Monday, May 5, 2008
In their eyes, you are the savage.
When people discuss the great werewolf movies of the early '80s, they tend to forget 1981's Wolfen and with good reason -- because it's not actually about werewolves (despite what the Mooninites think). Directed by Michael Wadleigh (whose previous film was, ahem, Woodstock), the film stars Albert Finney as a police detective called out of retirement to investigate a series of unusual slayings. One of the victims is a super-rich real estate developer with political connections out of the wazoo, so there's concern that terrorists may be responsible, but with the help of criminal psychologist Diane Venora, coroner Gregory Hines and zoologist Tom Noonan, Finney comes to believe that they're actually the work of wolves -- or wolf-like creatures. Eventually militant Indian and high steel worker Edward James Olmos explains to him about the Wolfen, but not before he strips down and freaks Finney out by pretending to "wolf out." Anybody going into this film expecting those kinds of effects will come away disappointed. However, fans of Steadicam shots -- which are used throughout when Wadleigh cuts to "Wolfen-cam" -- will find a lot to like here.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
No man could tear a person apart the way the beast that butchered those people did.
The '90s were less kind to werewolves on film than the '80s (which, it must be said, also produced dreck like Silver Bullet and the Howling sequels, along with weak comedies like Full Moon High, Teen Wolf and Teen Wolf Too, My Mom's a Werewolf and, umm, Curse of the Queerwolf). Case in point: 1996's Bad Moon, which came between such "classics" as Project: Metalbeast (which, I shit you not, is about a secret military plan to create armored werewolves) and An American Werewolf in Paris (a misbegotten sequel which I have no intention of wasting my time on). Under normal circumstances I wouldn't have wasted time on this, either, but it was sent by the same friend who provided me with my own copy of Wolfen (thank you, Migs), so I felt duty-bound to give Bad Moon a look. Plus, the thing's only 79 minutes long. How torturous can it be?
The answer is not very torturous at all. Bad Moon is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but it's ridiculous enough to be laughable for long stretches of time -- even when the filmmakers are trying to play it straight. It was written for the screen and directed by Eric Red, who deserves an award for adapting a novel called Thor and not filling it with references to Norse mythology. Rather, Thor is an überprotective German shepherd owned by high-powered lawyer (is there any other kind?) Mariel Hemingway and lovable moppet Mason Gamble, who have moved to the Pacific Northwest to get away from the big, bad city. What they end up doing is moving next door to the big, bad wolf when Hemingway's brother Michael Paré returns from the jungle, where he was attacked by a werewolf, and takes up residence in their backyard. Thor knows what's what, though, and does what any dog would do to protect the family.
Werewolf films live and die by their transformation scenes. In the olden days, they were accomplished with the use of time-lapse photography (as in 1941's The Wolf Man) or simple cutaways (as in 1935's Werewolf of London, which is featured in this film). During the wolf's '80s resurgence the order of the day was in-camera make-up effects (which were pioneered in The Howling and An American Werewolf in London). By the '90s, however, the standard was CGI "morphing," which in the case of Bad Moon looks about as cheesy as you would expect. The werewolf itself isn't half bad and Paré's performance as its human side is reasonably credible, but one wishes the effects crew had skipped the part in-between.
P.S. - The '00s haven't exactly been the werewolf's decade, either. I should know, having been suckered into seeing Wes Craven's Cursed in theaters. (I should have known something was amiss was I found out it was rated PG-13.) With any luck, though, the remake of The Wolf Man with Benicio Del Toro as Lawrence Talbot (now that's good casting) will turn things around for the misunderstood creatures.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
I think you agree family loyalty cuts both ways.
Well, this is a relief... of sorts. I've had a perfect record of seeing Woody Allen's films in theaters since 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery (my first was Alice when I was 17, but I missed out on Shadows and Fog because I didn't have a car my freshman year of college and I skipped Husbands and Wives because that came out during his notorious split with Mia Farrow and I wanted to be able to judge the film on its own merits), so I was chagrined when his latest opus, Cassandra's Dream, came and went this winter and completely bypassed Bloomington. Once again, though, the Ryder Film Series comes riding to my rescue -- and to the rescue of the 20 other people who joined me for the first local screening this evening. Too bad the film itself was fairly mediocre.
Cassandra's Dream is Allen's third film in a row (after Match Point and Scoop) to be shot in England and I believe it's time for him to come home to the States. It stars Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as brothers with financial woes (McGregor is running the family restaurant for their ailing father, but he wants to get the money together to invest in some hotels; Farrell is a compulsive gambler in debt to loan sharks) who are asked to do an unusual favor for their uncle, a wealthy plastic surgeon played by Tom Wilkinson. Seems he's done some shady business deals in his time and would like his nephews to eliminate a potential whistle-blower. McGregor is quick to see it as an opportunity to get ahead in life, but Farrell is a lot more shaky about the whole thing.
Complicating matters are the brothers' love interests. McGregor is smitten with stage actress Hayley Atwell, who apparently thinks their relationship is more open than he thinks it is, leading to jealousy and recriminations. Not only that, but he's deceiving her about how much money he really has, which is another reason why he's willing to do his uncle's dirty work. Meanwhile, Farrell's relationship with the more down-to-earth Sally Hawkins reaches a plateau when they move into a flat together, which he frets about paying for when he loses big at a high-stakes poker game. He's also constantly popping pills and drinking, which the other characters frequently upbraid him for. Allen the writer used to be a lot more subtle about this sort of stuff. And there was definitely something off-kilter when laughter greeted Wilkinson's suggestion that a second murder may be required to cover up the first. Somehow I doubt that was the reaction Allen was going for.
I don't want to make the film out to be a total failure. It has a nice rhythm for the first half as Allen sets his characters in motion, and he makes good use of the Philip Glass score, the first dramatic score he's ever commissioned and the CD of which I picked up weeks ago. (Of course, until now I had to avoid looking at the back cover of lest I read the spoiler-ish track titles.) The main problem is the way he has his characters repeat themselves over and over, as if we didn't pick up on what they said in earlier scenes. Farrell fretting once or twice over the fact that there's "no going back" after they commit a murder is fine. Having him do it in scene after scene just gets tedious. The same goes for McGregor's mistrust of Atwell. Maybe what Allen needs is an editor who's willing to cut his films to the bone, because he's clearly unwilling to let go of anything himself. It also wouldn't kill him to shoot a second or third take of some scenes.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
You went pretty far. What kind of game is this?
The first film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was René Clément's Purple Noon, which was made in 1960 and -- along with Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers -- made a star of Alain Delon. Unlike Anthony Minghella's 1999 remake, this film jumps right into the action with Tom Ripley already living it up with Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet), the American playboy Ripley has been hired to bring back to San Francisco. Clément doesn't spend as much time on exploring Ripley's psychology as Highsmith or Minghella, preferring to watch without comment as Ripley drives a wedge between Greenleaf and his fiancée Marge (Marie Laforet) and then, once she's out of the picture, assumes his identity. If Ripley has a talent for anything, it is for improvisation and knowing how to make a narrow escape, but the law still catches up with him in the end. The film world of 1960 wasn't ready to present a criminal that gets away with it.
Friday, May 9, 2008
There is no situation you cannot turn to your advantage.
It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that my personal tastes and those of the people who determine what is "popular" culture had little overlap. This has become even more pronounced since my move to Indiana, which is why when, say, a new David Mamet film opens at the local multiplex, I jump on it without hesitation. Hence my presence at the five o'clock showing of Redbelt today, which was attended by three other people who kept getting up and wandering in and out of the theater. I don't know how much Mamet thought a film about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (a fundamentally reactive form of martial arts) was going to electrify audiences, but even if it doesn't it's really just the window dressing for yet another one of his expeditions into the world of con men.
Mamet has a great affinity for the long con, having employed them in films ranging from his directorial debut House of Games to Homicide, The Spanish Prisoner and Heist. Even more lighthearted fare like his comedies Things Change and State and Main involve one (or more) characters having the wool pulled over their eyes. In Mamet's world it's possible for just about anybody to be fooled as long as there are enough conspirators lined up against them. The subject of the con in Redbelt is martial arts instructor Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose Jiu-Jitsu academy is perpetually in financial trouble, much to the consternation of his wife Alice Braga, a clothing designer whose business has to pick up his slack. I won't go into too much detail because the joy of watching a Mamet film is in discovering along with the main character how they got in deep and who engineered it, but there does come a time where Ejiofor, who is too principled to fight in martial arts competitions, is coerced into doing so.
As always, Mamet employs a terrific supporting cast, with numerous actors who have been mainstays in his plays and films since day one. These include the great Ricky Jay as a fight promoter, Joe Mantegna as a movie producer, David Paymer as a loan shark, and Matt Malloy as a crooked lawyer, with Mamet first-timers Emily Mortimer as a more upright lawyer who comes to Ejiofor's aid when the chips are down and Tim Allen as an action movie star (who's actually quite credible in the role) whose wife is played by Rebecca Pidgeon (who also co-wrote and performed three songs for the film). If Allen's casting seems peculiar, there's something about appearing in a Mamet film that lends gravitas to just about any actor. Even Ed O'Neill, who had a more substantial role in Mamet's Spartan, shows up in a brief cameo. If nothing else, one can count on Mamet's films to be filled with familiar faces -- even if you can't always place the names.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
I don't worry about being caught because I don't believe anyone is watching.
Patricia Highsmith's third Tom Ripley novel, Ripley's Game, was actually the second to turned into a film (and then later on the fourth). Made in 1977 and retitled The American Friend, it was adapted and directed by German New Wave filmmaker Wim Wenders, who changed the locale to Hamburg and cast the unpredictable Dennis Hopper as Ripley (complete with a cowboy hat). The basic plot is still the same, though: Ripley is slighted in public by a picture framer (Bruno Ganz) who has a terminal disease, one of Ripley's underworld contacts (Gérard Blain) asks him to recommend someone who can carry out the murder of two mafia men who are muscling in on his business interests, and Ripley offers up the insolent picture framer as a sacrificial lamb. Of course, to get Ganz in the correct frame of mind to accept the job Ripley puts around the rumor that his condition is a lot worse than he thought, thus leaving him with nothing to lose and quite a bit of money to gain for his wife (Lisa Kreuzer) and young son. Ganz is hard-pressed to explain to his understandably suspicious wife where the money is coming from, though.
The theme of an innocent being seduced into murder is one that Highsmith returned to frequently in her writing and the novel Ripley's Game illustrates it quite persuasively. Wenders doesn't have the time to capture all of the nuance of the character's descent, but Ganz conveys so much with his eyes and the way he carries himself that voice-over would have been superfluous. Wenders also gives the character of Ripley a much different demeanor than what he has in the book. It's hard to tell how much of that was in his script or if it's something that Hopper brought to the part, but this Ripley is a lot less sure of himself and his reasons for doing certain things are harder to pin down. As if to make up for skipping over the second book, Ripley Under Ground, Wenders brings in legendary director Nicholas Ray to play the presumed-to-be-deceased painter Derwatt, whose works Ripley brings to auction as they're "discovered," and he has Samuel Fuller play an American mobster who comes after Ripley. (In the book, it's the Italian mafia, but Wenders made them Americans.) A most satisfying thriller.
Two and a half decades later, and in the wake of the success of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Italian director Liliana Cavani brought Ripley's Game back to the screen under its original title -- this time with John Malkovich in the role. Working with screenwriter Charles McKeown (best known for co-writing Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), Cavani makes Ripley much more self-assured, quicker to violence (a brutal opening scene demonstrates this) and extremely articulate. Malkovich sells all of these qualities marvelously, but he also plays up the character's wry sense of humor, which hadn't been seen in any of his previous incarnations. He's an actor clearly having fun with playing a genial sociopath and relishing every minute of it.
The able supporting cast includes Dougray Scott as the terminal picture framer who invites Ripley to a party and then makes the mistake of insulting him when he's in earshot, Ray Winstone as a thuggish Brit operating out of Berlin who has some Russian mobsters he'd like to see eliminated, Lena Headey as Scott's dubious wife, and Chiara Caselli as Ripley's wife (a character left out of The American Friend but reinstated here), who has no problem accepting his criminal past as long as it doesn't intrude on their present. Of the two films, the later one sticks closest to the novel, but both capture its spirit quite nicely. Sadly, despite excellent production values Ripley's Game never received a theatrical release in the United States, a fate that also befell the 2005 adaptation of Ripley Under Ground with Barry Pepper in the lead. Maybe someday that will come to DVD and I'll get to see it. One can always hope.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Long, long ago, when people still believed in witches...
Soon after director René Clair set up shop in Hollywood he made the delightful fantasy comedy I Married a Witch, which starred Fredric March as a candidate for governor of an unnamed New England state whose distant ancestor once burned a witch and her sorcerer father. Before she was condemned, though, she was able to curse his family to be unlucky in love. So it is that 270 years later March is due to be married to harridan Susan Hayward the day before his election, but the witch is magically reincarnated as Veronica Lake and she does everything in her power to make him fall in love with her instead. At first she does this just to wreck his life, but when she falls for him herself it's a completely different story. The film also features Robert Benchley, in fine form as a prominent doctor backing March, and Cecil Kellaway as Lake's incorrigible father, who's more interested in getting revenge against his old foe's descendant than seeing his own daughter happy. It's slight, but it's just the kind of escapist fare than audiences flocked to during wartime, and it established Clair as a director with a light touch in any language.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The story you are about to see is about violence and immorality -- teenage violence and immorality.
It's tempting to call The Delinquents the work of a talented amateur, but when Robert Altman made it in 1957 he didn't display much of the talent that would be present later in his career -- and he was most definitely an amateur. Written, directed and produced by Altman in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, The Delinquents was one of many films about the tragic plight of misunderstood teenagers that followed in the wake of Rebel Without a Cause (it even features a sequence at an abandoned house, just like Rebel) and it would be utterly forgotten today if it weren't his first stab at a feature film. (Ironically enough, it was the last of his features that I had to see; I have to thank Turner Classic Movies for finally giving me a chance to do so.)
The Delinquents isn't even notable for giving Tom Laughlin (a full decade before he created the role of Billy Jack) his first starring role as nice guy Scotty White, who falls in with a bad crowd after his girlfriend's father breaks them up because he disapproves of them going steady. If you ever wondered who Laura Dern's model for her role in Blue Velvet was, I'd say it was probably Rosemary Howard as the totally whitebread Janice, especially during her crying scenes. And lead delinquent Peter Miller (as "Cholly") was pretty convincing, but after a while the tough guy voice grated on my nerves -- and this film is only 72 minutes! As for Altman, after trying his hand at a documentary (The James Dean Story, also ineptly done) he spent the next decade toiling in television, learning his craft and generally figuring out what the hell to do with a movie camera. At least he had the good sense to start out with a number by a swinging jazz combo. Too bad those darn delinquents have to show up and start the movie.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
This is a business, and our bodies are our merchandise.
It's amazing the sorts of things mainstream Japanese filmmakers were able to get away with long before their Western counterparts. Seijun Suzuki's 1964 film Gate of Flesh is an unflinching look at the lives of a group of prostitutes in postwar Tokyo -- and there is a lot of flesh on display throughout. The film takes place while Japan was still occupied, so there are plenty of American G.I.s around and the first things we see are M.P.s rounding up prostitutes and fighting with looters. For a time there are two separate plot strands -- one about innocent girl Yumiko Nogawa falling in with a trio of independent streetwalkers led by fiery Satoko Kasai (who's always in red) and the other about ex-soldier Jo Shishido, who has a stash of penicillin -- but they converge when Shishido is wounded after killing a G.I. and holes up with the prostitutes while he recovers. Naturally this leads to dissension in the ranks as Nogawa and Kasai vie for his affections.
The film can be quite brutal at times, especially when the women punish one of their own for breaking their cardinal rule (never go to bed with a man for nothing -- it devalues the product). And there's a fairly gruesome scene of an actual cow being slaughtered and butchered on film. It's nothing I haven't seen before (in Georges Franju's documentary short Blood of the Beasts, which predates this film by 15 years, and Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation, which came along four decades later), but it's one thing to know about it in advance and another thing to be completely blindsided by it. It's as if Suzuki decided his film wasn't shocking enough and needed the extra jolt that only a live animal killing could give him. Well, consider me jolted.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
I am pursued, always pursued by something.
Thanks to the Criterion Collection I have a fairly good grounding in Japanese samurai films, but even I have a hard time keep up with some of their plots, figuring out who is allied with whom and why X is double-crossing Y and Z. Masahiro Shinoda's 1965 film Samurai Spy (included as part of the "Rebel Samurai" set) is a perfect example because it involves multiple clans all after one man for different reasons and half the characters are spies, so it's difficult to figure out their motivations. Caught in the middle is Koji Takahashi, a spy for the Sanada clan, which has not allied itself with either of the main ruling clans, but isn't exactly neutral, either. It has been 14 years since the last war and some would like to keep it that way while others would like to hasten its return -- and somehow it all hinges on government official Eiji Okada, who is in hiding for obvious reasons.
The film is structured like a detective story, with Takahashi trying to figure out who is responsible for two murders that were pinned on him, while occasionally getting bailed out of jams by a mysterious man in white (Tetsuro Tamba). (I guess that would make Tamba kind of like the cop who pulls the hero aside and tells him to drop the case, only Tamba wants to find Okada as well.) The moment when Takahashi lays out his evidence for the benefit of the killer who believes his guilt can't be proved is the kind of scene that has appeared in countless mysteries and detective films, but how many of them have continued with a samurai duel in a fog-enshrouded field? My guess would be "not many."
Friday, May 16, 2008
One doesn't choose the time one gets into trouble.
Readers of my comic strip Dada may know of my predilection for Roman Polanski's more offbeat films, best exemplified by 1972's What? -- a film so bizarre that it defies any and all rational explanation. For me the Holy Grail of his absurd streak, however, has always been 1966's Cul-de-sac, which until now I've never had so much as a hope of seeing. Little seen in this country since its original release, it was never released on home video and is only available on DVD in other regions, but thanks to Plan 9 (of course), I have finally filled this gaping hole in his filmography. (There are other gaps to fill, but I simply haven't been as eager to catch up with Pirates or Frantic.)
Made at the epicenter of Polanski's early hot streak (after Knife in the Water and Repulsion and before The Fearless Vampire Killers and Rosemary's Baby), Cul-de-sac is most reminiscent of his idiosyncratic shorts, many of which involved power struggles between characters pushed to the extremes of human behavior. It stars Donald Pleasence and Françoise Dorléac as a bourgeois couple living in a remote castle in Northumberland whose defenses are breached by ill-mannered criminal Lionel Stander, who takes refuge with them after a job gone wrong. We never find out what the botched job was, but when he's introduced Stander already has his arm in a sling and he's pushing a stalled car being steered by Jack MacGowran, who's nursing a mortal stomach wound. And, if that doesn't sound desperate enough, when Stander goes off in search of a phone he leaves MacGowran in the car, which happens to be below the tide line.
Written with Gérard Brach, who was Polanski's most frequent collaborator until the early '90s, the film takes the situation of a criminal imposing himself on a terrified couple and wrings a great deal of tension and black humor out of it. As an example of the latter, when Pleasence investigates Stander's intrusion, he's wearing one of Dorléac's nightgowns and some makeup that she has playfully applied to his face. This makes a distinct impression on Stander, who doesn't really need an excuse to exert his dominance. He may only have use of one arm, but the gun that he carries still gives him the upper hand. Whether Pleasence and Dorléac manage to turn the tables on him I leave to you to discover -- that is, if you can.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
What a rotten film. All we meet are crazy people.
As I finally got to see Cul-de-sac this weekend, I figured I would also tackle Jean-Luc Godard's similarly challenging (but more readily available) Week End. Made in 1967, it represents Godard at his most playful and anarchic, with characters constantly breaking the fourth wall, screen-filling titles that only occasionally relate to what's happening in the story, and scenes that threaten to erupt into violence at a moment's notice. According to the opening titles, it is both "a film adrift in the cosmos" and "a film found in a dump." Clearly Godard wanted to be ahead of the curve, whether the critics chose to glorify his film or consign it to the garbage heap.
At the start of the film, bourgeois couple Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne witness two people beating the crap out of a third over a minor collision -- the first of many such incidents. Then he has her describe in graphic detail a kinky three-way, much like the married couple in David Cronenberg's Crash does three decades later. Then, after a second altercation over a crumpled fender, Darc and Yanne depart for their weekly trip to the country to visit her rich parents, but they run into a massive traffic jam which Godard shows in a series of super-long tracking shots. (The sheer number of cars -- both on the road and pushed off to the side -- is staggering.) After breezing past the horrific accident that was the cause of the delay (no rubberneckers, they), the couple turns off the main road and finds their car hijacked by a man with a gun which has a seemingly endless supply of bullets. Eventually they get into an accident of their own (which causes Darc to bemoan the loss of her handbag, never mind the human beings trapped in the fiery wreckage) and continue on foot, occasionally stopping to ask a dead person in the road for directions to the nearest town.
I fear I'm going through the motions of describing the strange things that happen in the film without conveying the impact that they have. This is a film that doesn't let the audience off the hook, no matter how much Godard distances us from the action. At one point the couple encounters two literary figures who are of no help with practical matters. At another point they meet a man (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) who monopolizes a phone booth with a call while he sings every one of his lines. Then there is a traveling pianist who interrupts his performance to lecture his listeners about music, and two garbage men -- one from the Congo and they other from Algeria -- who stop the film dead to harangue the audience about the evils of colonialism. Finally the couple winds up in the hands of a group of cannibalistic revolutionaries, who Godard shows slaughtering a live pig and a chicken on screen. (I wonder if he ever saw Gate of Flesh.) As the leader of the revolutionaries says, "The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome by more horror." If by "overcome" he means "made to faint," then they may very well have been successful.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
A cheap, empty restaurant is dubious.
Seeing Week End yesterday put me in mind of Luis Buñuel's 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which if I'm not mistaken was the first film of his I ever saw when it was re-released in theaters in 2000 to mark the centenary of his birth. It follows a sextet of well-heeled Parisians (Fernando Rey's thin-skinned Latin American ambassador, couple Paul Frankeur and Delphine Seyrig, her sister Bulle Ogier, and their hosts Stéphane Audran and Jean-Pierre Cassel) as they try and repeatedly fail to sit down to dinner together. No matter what their plans are they get loused up somehow, whether it's by the guests arriving a day early for a dinner party, the hosts climbing out the window because they don't want to interrupt their lovemaking, or the invasion of an army regiment on maneuvers. And the second half is even stranger than the first, with a series of interlocking dreams that grow more and more surreal with each sudden awakening.
Written Buñuel & Jean-Claude Carrière, the film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, a belated honor for a cinematic iconoclast in his autumn years. In addition to the superb main cast, the film also features supporting turns by Buñuel regulars Julien Bertheau as a bishop who harbors a secret desire to be a gardener, Muni as a peasant who seeks him out to give comfort to a dying man, and Michel Piccoli as a government minister who intervenes when the party is arrested. (It seems they've been using Rey's diplomatic immunity as a means of smuggling drugs into the country.) Buñuel also uses Rey's position to smuggle in some commentary on the dealings of dictatorships. (At one of the abortive dinner parties he endures insult after insult about his country's policies -- simply everybody has an opinion that they must share with him.) Rarely has a comedy of manners been so biting.
Monday, May 19, 2008
What use is grief to a horse?
It's strange to think that the same year he embarrassed himself in John Boorman's woefully misbegotten Exorcist II: The Heretic, Richard Burton also turned in a commanding performance in Sidney Lumet's film version of Equus. Made in 1977 and based on the hit play by Peter Shaffer (who also wrote the screenplay), the film stars Burton as a psychologist who specializes in problem children -- and what a problem child is dropped in his lap. Sensitive 17-year-old boy Peter Firth has blinded six horses with a metal spike (a pretty gruesome effect when we finally get to see it) and it's up to Burton to figure out why.
He gets little help from Firth's bewildered parents (although father Colin Blakely puts much of the blame on mother Joan Plowright's religion) and the cold shoulder from stable owner Harry Andrews, so Burton has to rely on a variety of tricks to get the boy to open up to him. (At first all he does is sing commercial jingles, but he eventually becomes more forthcoming.) When he finally does, it appears that a lot of it has to do with Jenny Agutter, the posh girl who invited Firth to work at the stables in the first place, but it turns out he had an intense (some would say unhealthy) bond with the beasts long before then. As for why it led to such an extreme end, well, religious fervor and sexual repression are rarely a good mix.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
It doesn't show anything. All's it shows is the horse... doing something.
Apart from Equus, the only other film about a man who has a physical relationship with a horse that I know of is the 2007 documentary Zoo (and if there are others, I'm sure I don't want to know about them). Directed by Robinson Devor (who is also credited, along with Charles Mudede, with "story & research"), it is based on an incident that happened in the Pacific Northwest where a Boeing engineer and family man who went by the nickname "Mr. Hands" died from internal injuries sustained while having intercourse with a horse (of course, of course). The film features audio interviews with some of the zoophiles who knew him (and who go by handles like "Coyote," "The Happy Horseman" and "H") and the self-proclaimed "horse rescuer" who got involved after the story came out, but since two of the interviewees wouldn't allow themselves to be filmed and the main subject is dead, Devor employs actors to recreate the events surrounding the incident while tactfully sidestepping the incident itself.
Along with presenting the story of Mr. Hands, Zoo also uses the interviews to establish the role that technology played in the development of the "zoo" subculture. As with a lot of other fringe lifestyles, zoophilia was a very solitary practice before the Internet came along and facilitated communication and the gathering of like-minded individuals. (One of the subjects even talks about how friends fronted the money for his relocation from rural Virginia to Washington, presumably because the state lacked bestiality laws at the time.) The film doesn't spend a lot of time putting it into historical perspective, though, and the way it handles the facts in the case of Mr. Hands is also pretty spotty. Then again, the only participants who know exactly what happened that fateful night are Mr. Hands and the horse -- and neither of them is in a position to talk.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
How much of your body can you lose and still recognize yourself?
There's no horsing around in it, but it seemed fitting to follow Zoo with Peter Greenaway's A Zed & Two Noughts (or A Z00 for short). Made in 1985, it's the sort of scenario only Greenaway could dream up: the wives of twin zoologists die in a freak car accident involving a swan, after which both twins get involved with the driver, who has had one leg amputated and is contemplating the other. (She's the zed, they're the two noughts.) Unsurprisingly, the film is mostly comprised of carefully-arranged compositions with symmetry as the guiding principle, and there is much in the way of doubling, echoing and mirroring. In a Greenaway film, this sort of thing can practically be taken for granted, but it's pleasing to know that his acute attention to detail was already firmly in place well before his breakthrough film, 1989's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (which I saw years ago and can go another several years before seeing again).
Greenaway cast brothers Brian and Eric Deacon (who were actually born a year apart) as twins Oswald and Oliver Deuce, who have different ways of dealing with their grief. Oswald makes time-lapse films of animals decaying and Oliver obsessively watches nature documentaries (the kind narrated by David Attenborough) and starts a campaign to set zoo animals free. Meanwhile, the driver of the car (Andréa Ferréol) pines for her home in the country and makes the brothers promise to take her there someday. The cast also includes Frances Barber as a seamstress and aspiring writer who tells stories about animals for a fee, Joss Ackland as the leering zoo keeper trying to get her into the zebra pen, Geoffrey Palmer as a zoo official who disapproves of the brothers' methods, and Ken Campbell as a zoo employee whose function was unclear to me. In many ways, though, the most important character is Michael Nyman's score, which perfectly complements Greenaway's visuals. Theirs was surely a collaboration for the ages.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
I thought that he was the prophet of the future of music.
When I rented Zoo from Plan 9, I also picked up Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey because it was the only documentary on the Employee Picks display that interested me. Written, produced and directed by Steven M. Martin, the 1994 film covers the early career of Leon Theremin, a Russian scientist and inventor (called the "Soviet Edison") who created the first electronic instrument, which was quite understandably named after him. He achieved great success in America in the late '20s and early '30s until he was spirited out of the country by Soviet agents and, by the end of World War II, presumed dead. He turned up alive decades later, though, having been imprisoned for seven years and then put to work creating spy apparatus for the KGB. Meanwhile, Hollywood saw the instrument's potential to create eerie moods for films like Hitchcock's Spellbound, Wilder's The Lost Weekend, The Day the Earth Stood Still and even The Delicate Delinquent with Jerry Lewis (who manipulated one onscreen).
In addition to interviews with a 90-something Theremin (who has to be subtitled a lot of the time, even when he's speaking English), the film also features interviews with virtuoso Clara Rockmore, who was Theremin's star performer and sought to legitimize it as a serious instrument, and Robert Moog, who built many homemade theremins before creating his own electronic instrument, the Moog synthesizer. (Unsurprisingly, Moog got his own documentary a few years after this one.) The film also hauls out a spacey Brian Wilson, who discusses the use of the instrument on the song "Good Vibrations," and Todd Rundgren, who does an impression of what sounds like (which seemed odd to include since there are so many examples of people playing actual theremins in the film). The climax of the film, though, is Theremin's return to New York City and his reunion with an apprehensive Rockmore. A little contrived, maybe, but I'll give Martin a pass because how else are you going to wrap up a fantastic story like this?
We can't stop here. This is bat country.
Ten years ago today, Terry Gilliam's film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson was unleashed upon multiplexes across the country and I was right there on the front line. It was the first time I ever felt like I got a contact high off a movie screen. Staggering out of the theater afterward, I doubted my ability to operate a vehicle in a safe fashion. I went back to see it two more times -- once in June and then again in July just before it left theaters -- but nothing could quite match that initial exposure.
Looking back, I'm astonished that the film managed to stick around as long as it did. For one thing, it opened the same weekend as Godzilla, which probably had as much, if not more, to spend on marketing as Fear and Loathing did on its entire production. For another, it took a long, hard look at a dark time in America's past and one thing this country does not like to dwell on is its failures and shortcomings. But mostly it comes down to the fact that its main characters are a couple of miscreants who do an untold amount of damage to a vast amount of property while under the influence of every controlled substance under the sun (and then some). Hardly the sort of behavior that would endear them to the general populace. Still, I have to admire the go-for-broke commitment in Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro's performances and Gilliam's direction. I know it's not everybody's cup of tea and it's hard to argue with people who find it to be a scattershot, self-indulgent mess, but I'm greatly cheered by the knowledge that it got made in the first place and that it was able to reach the audience that it did. I am proud to count myself among that number.
Friday, May 23, 2008
I have no idea why she would make up all that. Pure fantasy.
In the latter half of the '70s, Laurence Olivier sporadically presented a series of great plays on British television, the first of which was a production of Harold Pinter's The Collection, broadcast in 1976. Directed by Michael Apted (before he made the jump to feature films), the hour-long drama starred Olivier as an older chap who lives with his protégé, a dress designer played by Malcolm McDowell, and is disturbed when the young man starts receiving vaguely menacing calls from a man who refuses to identify himself. When the man eventually turns up it is Alan Bates (who had just appeared opposite McDowell in Royal Flash), who has left his wife, played by Helen Mirren, at home while he confronts the man he believes had a liaison with her at a hotel in Leeds. It turns they're all in the same business, but that is about the only thing that can be definitively established. Stories change and are confirmed or denied based on who's doing the telling and to whom, and just when you think you've got a handle on what the truth is the enigmatic closing shot throws it all up in the air again. It's the sort of intellectual gamesmanship that Pinter excelled at and Olivier and company are more than up to playing at his level.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
I've lived again to lose you twice.
Following the defection of Roger Corman, AIP continued to churn out exploitation films for another decade or so. One of the better ones was 1972's Blacula, which starred William Marshall as a noble African prince who visits Castle Dracula in 1780 to protest the slave trade and gets a pair of fangs in the neck for his trouble. Fast forward to modern day, when two blatant homosexual stereotypes buy up the contents of the castle to sell as antiques -- including the coffin containing Marshall, who Dracula himself helpfully dubbed "Blacula." The movie glosses over any culture shock he could have experienced and jumps right into him turning various Los Angelenos into the undead. Unlike some vampires, he's not averse to drinking champagne, but he still doesn't take a good photograph (and he can turn into an animated bat when the occasion calls for it).
Directed by William Crain (whose only subsequent entry in the blaxploitation horror genre was 1976's Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde), the movie is mostly concerned with Blacula's pursuit of Vonetta McGee, who is the spitting image of his long-dead wife. He doesn't wish to force himself on her, which is gentlemanly of him to say the least, but he doesn't have a whole lot of time to waste since police pathologist Thalmus Rasulala is hot on his trail. In the end, though, Blacula decides to give it all up and strides purposefully past a "No Smoking" sign into the sunlight and his certain doom. Geez, can't the guy read? And who does he think is going to clean up after him?
The following year, unperturbed by Blacula's immolation at the end of the first movie, AIP rushed out Scream, Blacula, Scream, which brought back Marshall and teamed him with Pam Grier as a voodoo priestess he hopes will be able to lift Dracula's curse. Directed by Bob Kelljan (who previously made the Count Yorga movies), the movie also featured Don Mitchell as an African art collector and former detective brought in on the case after Blacula is raised by a rival cult leader. Curiously enough, for someone resurrected from a pile of bones, Blacula comes back fully clothed -- and the less said about the coffins that appear out of nowhere, the better. I was also amused that one scene took place at the same outdoor restaurant that was used in Black Caesar the same year. Knowing AIP's penny-pinching ways, they may have even shot them on the same day.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Seize the day, Camp Firewood, because it's your last.
Memorial Day used to be the traditional start of Summer Movie Season (even if the studios seem to keep moving it up), so tonight I watched my first of the year: 2001's Wet Hot American Summer. I haven't sought it out before now because I was never a big fan of The State, which director/co-writer David Wain and co-writer/actor Michael Showalter (as well as a good portion of the cast) hailed from, but since the Onion AV Club is going to be adding it to The New Cult Canon in a couple weeks I figured I owed it to myself to check it out.
Set on the last day of camp in 1981, which doesn't engender as many '80s jokes as one would expect (this was before VH-1's I Love the '80s, remember), Wet Hot American Summer both goofs on and aspires to be the ultimate summer camp movie. To this end, it is overstuffed with characters and subplots, some of which get a fair bit of play and some that seem to get forgotten almost as soon as they're brought up. (I haven't watched the deleted scenes yet, but I suspect Wain and Showalter had an overabundance of material to choose from.) It is the very definition of scattershot, but some bits -- like the subversion of the "climactic baseball game with the snooty summer camp" cliché -- are downright inspired. The slow clap that greets the final entrant in the talent show is less so.
Now, let's get to that overstuffed cast, shall we? There's Janeane Garofalo as the camp director with a crush on astrophysics teacher David Hyde Pierce, who's worried about getting tenure, Michael Showalter as the counselor with a crush on Marguerite Moreau, who is already taken by super-jerk Paul Rudd, Michael Ian Black as the counselor with a secret (spoiler alert: he's gay!), Christopher Meloni as the overbearing cook and Vietnam vet (with H. Jon Benjamin as the voice of the can of mixed vegetables only he can hear), Molly Shannon as the divorced arts and crafts teacher who leans on her kids for moral and emotional support (with Judah Friedlander as her wayward husband), and Amy Poehler as the overly critical director of the talent show. I'm barely scratching the surface here, but if you recognize any of these names and think you would enjoy watching them cavort around a summer camp for one very hectic day, then you probably will. Just watch out for Spacelab. You never know where that's going to land.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Today will be the day that the Fleshapoids sin!
The underground film movement of the '60s produced a number of influential and, quite frankly, ludicrous works of art, but few are able to match the sheer audacity of 1965's Sins of the Fleshapoids. Photographed and directed by Mike Kuchar, who also co-wrote the film with his twin brother George (a filmmaker in his own right), Sins is set "a million years in the future," after a nuclear war has not only brought civilization to a standstill, but sent it hurtling back to the decadence of Roman times (or an approximation thereof). Made on a shoestring budget, it's like a 43-minute-long home movie, with opening credits drawn in crayon, cheap sets and acting that borders on nonexistent. None of this matters, though, because the sort of person who seeks out a film like Sins generally knows what to expect going in. It's not for nothing that it's one of John Waters's biggest early influences.
The plot, such as it is, concerns the human survivors of "the great war," who indulge all of their carnal desires (which include consuming Clark bars and Wise potato chips) and have mechanical slaves -- the Fleshapoids -- to serve them. One of the Fleshapoids, Xar (Bob Cowan, who also narrates the film), develops emotions, rebels and kills its master, and seeks out its mate, Melenka (Maren Thomas), who serves the prince (George Kuchar). When Xar and Melenka touch, sparks fly, and the prince who wishes to destroy their love is vanquished, but it takes a lot longer to watch than it does to describe. Even for such a short film, you have to have a certain amount of patience with it.
In many ways, this is like a dry run for Michael Crichton's Westworld, which was made eight years later (on a more substantial budget, naturally) and coincidentally featured a "Roman World." (Or maybe it's not so coincidental.) One thing that sets them apart (besides the lack of Yul Brynner) is the fact that none of the dialogue in Sins is spoken. Rather, it appears as painted-on speech bubbles superimposed onto the screen. I'm also fairly certain that Crichton didn't include any robot procreation in his film. (The robot whores and slaves in Westworld were merely there for recreation -- and not with each other.) Another key difference is that Westworld is due to be remade in 2009 and Sins of the Fleshapoids isn't. Some films are simply meant to be one of a kind.
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