Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
August 2008
Friday, August 1, 2008
The hardest thing to do on a Kennedy campaign is to properly harness the enthusiasm he generates.
Watched the 1960 documentary Primary, which is about the fight between Democratic candidates John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for the state of Wisconsin. Written and directed by Robert Drew, who was an early proponent of cinema verité, the film follows both candidates in the days leading up to the election. While Humphrey shores up his rural base, Kennedy consolidates his appeal to urban voters, and both use the medium of television in their own way. At 53 minutes the film is on the short side, and the Wisconsin primary turns out not to be quite as pivotal as it's initially made out to be, but it's still a fascinating look at the political process back in the day.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Isn't it easier to go forward when you know you can't go back?
In the '60s, John Frankenheimer was in a league of his own when it came to ushering challenging projects through the Hollywood system. He moved freely between political thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May and popular entertainments like The Train and Grand Prix. All were technically daring and used Hollywood stars to their best advantage, but the film that really showed what he could do and entailed the most risk was 1966's Seconds, which stars Rock Hudson as a man given a second chance at life. Actually, I should say John Randolph is the one given the second chance since he's the "before" picture and Hudson the "after."
After one of the creepiest opening titles ever devised (by Saul Bass, of course), Frankenheimer plunges us straight over the edge with some extraordinarily disorienting camerawork (courtesy of director of photography James Wong Howe) as bank manager Randolph is pursued by a strange man in a train station. The man hands him a piece of paper with an address, much to Randolph's bewilderment, although later shots of him on the train let on that he seems to know what it's about. That night he takes a call from an old college friend who has apparently been through the rebirth process and has recommended him. His curiosity piqued, he goes to the address and, through a bewildering chain of events, arrives at the offices of The Company, where he finds out there is no second-guessing and no turning back.
With the aid of The Company's kindly old owner Will Geer, up-and-coming executive Jeff Corey and psychiatrist Khigh Dhiegh, Randolph is outfitted with a new identity (while his old one is given an appropriately gruesome demise) and occupation (after his first choice of tennis pro is shot down, he opts for being a painter) and, once the bandages from his plastic surgery come off, the face of Hudson, who carries the rest of the picture. If Hudson's goal in taking the picture was to prove that he was more than just a pretty face, then he succeeded admirably. He finds life as a Reborn hard to adjust to, though, and eventually returns to The Company, where he runs into his college pal (Murray Hamilton), who similarly had a rough go of his first second chance. Turns out The Company has a recidivism rate that's on par with the average prison.
Frankenheimer gets some outstanding work out of his collaborators on the film. In addition to James Wong Howe's black-and-white cinematography (which was nominated for an Academy Award), Lewis John Carlino's unrelenting screenplay and Jerry Goldsmith's creepy score help to sell the horror (as well as unearth a rich vein of black humor) and reveal the deep regret underlying the main character's actions. Frankenheimer also includes some extremely long takes, such as the one where Geer gets Randolph to realize how much of a lie his life has been. It's no surprise that once Geer gets Randolph to sign his contract, Frankenheimer immediately cuts to a surgeon making the first incision on his face. As soon as Randolph put pen to paper, his old life was over and a new one awaited. Too bad it didn't work out too well for him.
The trouble with obsession is it disrupts people's lives.
For many years I've been meaning to catch up with Nicolas Roeg's post-Witches work, and one of the clerks at Plan 9 has obliged me by placing his 1995 film Two Deaths on the Employee Picks rack. Set in an unnamed Eastern European country where there's heavy fighting in the streets and civilians are being shot left and right, the film takes place during the reunion dinner of a group of school friends that is being held at the opulent residence of doctor Michael Gambon. Gambon eagerly welcomes his friends (Patrick Malahide, Ion Caramitru and Nickolas Grace) and in between courses regales them with the story of how he "destroyed" the love of his life, housekeeper Sonia Braga. The other men have stories of their own, but they're both enthralled and appalled by Gambon's, which seemingly has no choice but to end tragically. Roeg certainly has a thing for tragic endings.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
He was about the worst racketeer that ever made a dirty living in this city.
It's difficult to find a more perfect film than 1949's The Third Man, the apex of director Carol Reed's collaboration with writer Graham Greene. Set in postwar Vienna, a city divided and in ruins, it combines a palpable sense of place (anchored by the location shoot) with a noir-tinged story of friendship and betrayal, love and destruction, and a corrupt system that thrives on people looking the other way. Joseph Cotten stars as Holly Martins, a penniless writer of cheap western novelettes who has come to Vienna at the behest of his school chum Harry Lime, who turns up dead the day he arrives. The more Cotten looks into the circumstances surrounding his death, though, the more he comes to believe that his friend was the victim of foul play. Alida Valli plays Lime's lover, an actress of Czech descent who's in danger of being repatriated by the Russians, Trevor Howard is the British major who keeps trying to get Cotten on the next plane out of the city, and Orson Welles has the star part, namely the character that everyone else in the film talks about for over an hour before he shows up. His reveal is one of the greatest moments in movie history, matched only by the devastating closing shot. I dare not say any more for fear of spoiling one of the most cunningly-devised stories ever brought to the screen. A film to be cherished for all time.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Is there such a thing as a beautiful death?
Until 2006's Black Book, the last film Paul Verhoeven shot in the Netherlands was 1983's Hitchcockian thriller The Fourth Man, based on the novel by Gerard Reve, which is also the name of the main character in the film. As played by Jeroen Krabbé, Reve is an alcoholic Dutch novelist with an overactive imagination, able to conjure up bizarre fantasies at will, which should come as no surprise to anybody who knows that reve is the French word for dream. He's also an unrepentant homosexual, but is able to go through the motions with a woman if he thinks it will get him closer to the strapping young man he's really interested in. What he doesn't realize is that the woman (Renée Soutendijk), the treasurer for the literary society that invites him to speak at one of their meetings, is manipulating him as well.
The film opens with a fly trapped in a spiderweb that has been spun on a crucifix, the first example of the over-the-top symbolism that permeates the entire film. All of Reve's frequently gruesome visions have symbolic meaning and he's constantly assaulted with portents of death and doom, not the least of which is a particularly harrowing castration dream. Really, though, he should know better than to sleep with a woman who wears high heels in bed or to let a woman who sells Delilah brand beauty products cut his hair. Perhaps he thinks it's worth it when he finally gets to be alone with the object of his desire, a working-class plumber (Thom Hoffman) who is ostensibly Soutendijk's lover, but is really the ultimate piece of bait (or should I say beefcake) that she uses to lure him into her lair. Oh, did I forget to mention that she's been married three times before and that all of her previous husbands have met with violent "accidents"? That might be important.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
This is how the Perfect Human makes a film, watch him now...
It's hard to pin down what The Five Obstructions is precisely. Is it a documentary? It is a series of short films? Is it a travelogue? Is it a cry for help? Is it a deliberate provocation? I'd say it's a little bit of something from every column, with a certain emphasis on the last one. This is no real surprise since the instigator of the project is infamous Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, who charges fellow countryman Jørgen Leth with remaking his 1967 short The Perfect Human five times over, each time with a different set of obstructions that must be overcome. As von Trier finds to his chagrin, Leth is more than up to the task.
Having never seen The Perfect Human before, I was glad that the DVD included it as a special feature. It's an extremely clever short, just 13 minutes long. Shot entirely against a stark white background, it depicts the Perfect Man (Claus Nissen) and the Perfect Woman (Maiken Algren) as they go about their business, with a narrator describing them as if they're in some kind of nature film. The narration is frequently given to Beckett-like repetitions and ultimately comes to no conclusions about what it means to be the Perfect Man (or Woman). As von Trier says at the beginning of the documentary, it's "a little gem that we are now going to ruin."
For the first obstruction, von Trier decides that Leth is limited to 12 frames (about half a second) per cut, he has to provide answers to the questions posed in the narration, he has to film in Cuba, and he can't build a set. When Leth is able to get around each of these limitations, von Trier decides that the second obstruction must involve shooting in a miserable place (Leth opts for Bombay's red light district), Leth must play the man himself, and he must include the scene with the meal. Dissatisfied with Leth's solutions to his challenges, von Trier gives him complete freedom the third time around (because sometimes there's nothing worse than having no restrictions), and forces him to make a cartoon for the fourth (despite the fact that they both hate cartoons). Of course, Leth enlists the help of Bob Sabiston (best known for his work on Richard Linklater's Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly) to help with the latter, resulting in a better film than either he or von Trier anticipated. Finally, von Trier takes it upon himself to make the last obstruction, using footage of Leth shot during the making of the documentary and forcing him to read a narrative script that von Trier has written. It's a fitting conclusion that manages to humanize them both, and shows that neither of them is perfect.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
I still don't fully understand how all this came about, and the sequence it came about.
As it is the sixth of August, tonight I watched the 1993 film Six Degrees of Separation. (For those who haven't cottoned onto what I've been doing the past few days, that's my equivalent of when Adrian Belew sings "These are words for a D this time" in the middle of the fourth verse of King Crimson's "Elephant Talk.") I suppose I could have gone with The Sixth Sense -- and last night I could have watched The Fifth Element -- but I've seen those films already and Six Degrees -- and The Five Obstructions -- were completely new to me. I have no problem with re-watching films after a few years, I just have to have a good reason to do so. Something tells me I'll have cause to revisit Six Degrees again in the future.
Directed by Fred Schepisi from a screenplay by John Guare, based on his own play, the film stars Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland as an upper-class couple that falls prey to con artist Will Smith (in his first major dramatic role), who passes himself off as the son of Sidney Poitier and claims to know their children at Harvard. He charms his way into their lives for an evening, cooking a meal for them and impressing their dinner guest (Ian McKellen, playing a rich friend from South Africa), and then makes a dramatic exit the next morning. They soon discover that they're not his only victims, though, when they run into some friends (Mary Beth Hurt and Bruce Davison) who had an almost identical experience the night before, and the police put them in touch with a doctor (Richard Masur) who was similarly taken in.
Throughout the film we follow Channing and Sutherland as they regale people at various social functions with their ever-deepening story, which expands to include Anthony Michael Hall as an MIT student and Heather Graham as half of a young Mormon couple, and which takes on the air of a mystery as they try to learn the identity of their enigmatic house guest. Even though it's about the lives of the extremely rich, the film is grounded by its New York shooting locations (I've actually been to the Strand Bookstore where Sidney Poitier's biography is found and checked for verification of Smith's story) and buoyed by its philosophical underpinnings (what connects us to other people and how can those connections be exploited by people looking to improve their station in life?). A very thoughtful and thought-provoking film.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Whoever heard of farmers hiring samurai?
If any one film can called Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, it is Seven Samurai. Released in 1954, it is his definitive samurai film, filled with enough action, character and bravery for ten other films (and I'm just saying that because it's three and a half hours long). And there's also a great deal of levity, which probably surprises first-time viewers. The well-respected Takashi Shimura may be the leader of the samurai, but Toshirô Mifune is their gung-ho mascot, desperate to impress Shimura and the others any way he can, even at the occasional expense of his dignity. The other one of the seven out to prove his worth is the youngest (Isao Kimura), who goes from revering Shimura to worshiping the highly-skilled Seiji Miyaguchi. In many ways, Kimura is the audience's surrogate since his inexperience requires him to stand back and observe much of the action -- and there is plenty of that for him to observe in the second half of the film.
Unlike the previous Criterion release, which squeezed the film onto one disc, the 2006 remaster spreads it over two, using the original intermission as the break-point. And as far as extras were concerned, the previous edition had a lone commentary track. This one has two of them, as well as a lengthy documentary on the making of the film and other supplements. Some may complain that Criterion goes back to the well too often, re-releasing titles from its back catalog that previously came out in bare-bones editions, but I doubt anyone could object to this film's crystal-clear transfer (or the one that High and Low recently received). Until I get the chance to see it on the big screen again, this will do quite nicely.
Friday, August 8, 2008
To the vector belong the spoils.
As it's 08/08/08 -- and that's not the sort of date that rolls around every day -- I determined that's tonight's entertainment should entail a trio of mathematically-inclined films. First up was the 1965 Academy Award-winning animated short The Dot and the Line, based on the book by Norton Juster. Directed by Chuck Jones and narrated by Robert Morley, the film tells the story of "a romance in lower mathematics" between a line and the dot that he's madly in love with. The trouble is she's only interested in an undisciplined squiggle -- that is, until the line learns how to be less rigid.
The title The Dot and the Line is a reference to Edwin A. Abbott's novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which inspired my second film, the 2007 computer-animated short Flatland, directed by Dano Johnson and Jeffrey Travis. This time the celebrity voices are provided by Martin Sheen as a square who works in the Ministry of Regularity (which is run by autocratic circles) and Michael York as a sphere who brings him word from the third dimension, a concept unheard of in two-dimensional Flatland. Kristen Bell voices Sheen's hexagon granddaughter (who comes up with the concept of a cube without any assistance -- and without any idea what to call it), with his brother Joe Estevez playing his square brother and Tony Hale (Buster from Arrested Development) as the daffy King of Pointland. Amazingly enough, there is another computer-animated version of Flatland floating around that managed to stretch the story to feature length. Maybe this is just me, but I think spending 34 minutes in Flatland is more than enough.
My third and final film of the night was, appropriately enough, the 1997 Canadian science fiction/horror feature Cube (although I suppose Jim Henson's 1969 telefilm The Cube could have also fit the bill). Directed and co-written by Vincenzo Natali, it features a motley group of individuals trapped inside a malevolent maze with death around every corner. Each room is a cube and each door leads to another cube exactly like it -- only some are booby trapped and it's up to the characters to figure out which ones are safe and which aren't. Good thing they have a math student with them, although there is a point where the numbers are even beyond her.
As befits a low-budget film that has had a certain amount of success, Cube has spawned a sequel, Cube 2: Hypercube, and a prequel, Cube Zero. I've heard mixed things about both, so I think I'll leave my exploration of the Cube film series to just the first one. Incidentally, two-thirds of tonight's numerological triple feature was provided by Kevin Pease, who gave me Flatland and Cube for my birthday last year. Sorry it took so long for me to get to them, Kevin, but as I said at the top, a date like this doesn't roll around every day.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
I don't think evil grows out of madness. I think madness grows out of evil.
Back to the hard numbers with 1980's The Ninth Configuration, a psychological thriller set during the Vietnam War about a castle in the Pacific northwest being used to house insane soldiers and the military psychiatrist sent there to determine whether the soldiers are faking or not. Written, produced and directed by William Peter Blatty, based on his novel Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane, the film stars Stacy Keach as the soft-spoken psychiatrist, whose primary objective appears to be getting through to astronaut Scott Wilson, who freaked out on the launchpad and refuses to go to the moon. The staff includes helpful doctor Ed Flanders, disciplinarian Neville Brand and guard Tom Atkins, and the crazy soldiers include Exorcist star Jason Miller (who is adapting the works of Shakespeare for dogs), Joe Spinell (as Miller's put-upon production assistant) and Robert Loggia (who believes he's on the surface of Venus).
Overall it's fairly confusing and, at times, noticeably slow-moving (despite having been cut at one point from 140 minutes to 118), but once it becomes clear what's actually going on at the castle the film gains a certain amount of traction and momentum. And it really comes to life during a tense encounter in a bar overrun by tough bikers. If only Pee-Wee Herman had been there with his platform shoes and "Tequila" on the jukebox, he could have defused the situation handily. Then again, that's not exactly what Blatty was going for, I don't think. Incidentally, Blatty has said that he considers this the "real" sequel to The Exorcist. I don't know about that, but I do know it's a far sight better than Exorcist II: The Heretic.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
I've got the Ten Commandments over there and I'm going to give you ten stories.
There have been a fair number of films made about the Ten Commandments over the years. Some of them have been pious epics like, well, The Ten Commandments, while others have been more like the Aidan Quinn/Courtney Cox romantic comedy Commandments. Heck, Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski even made ten separate television films based on them called The Decalogue. And then came The Ten, director David Wain's fitfully amusing follow-up to Wet Hot American Summer (hereafter WHAS). Co-written by Ken Marino, a fellow alumnus of MTV's The State who had also appeared in WHAS, The Ten is a motley collection of shorts -- one for each of the commandments, complete with introductions by a frequently distracted Paul Rudd (who, it turns out, is cheating on wife Famke Janssen with vapid party girl Jessica Alba).
The cast is practically a who's who of alternative comedy, with a few ringers thrown in like Winona Ryder (as the fiancée of a careless parachutist who is permanently embedded in the ground after a bizarre accident), Ron Silver (as said parachutist's talent agent), Gretchen Mol (as a virginal librarian who takes up with the second coming of Jesus, played by Justin Theroux, in Mexico), Liev Schreiber (as a tough cop whose coveting of his neighbor's CAT scan machine leads to a vicious CAT scan machine-off), Oliver Platt (as... you know, it's probably too complicated to get into) and Bobby Cannavale (ditto). Some characters show up in multiple stories (like Ken Marino's goofy doctor, Ryder's wayward newlywed and A.D. Miles's sabbath-shirker/nudist) and others make one-off appearances (like State/WHAS alumni Kerri Kenney, David Wain, Thomas Lennon, Joe Lo Truglio, Janeane Garofalo, Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter). The Daily Show's Rob Corddry even pops by for the one about coveting thy neighbor's wife, which turns out to be a tender tale of prison ass-rape. And the film finds the time for the animated story of the Lying Rhino, voiced by the instantly recognizable H. Jon Benjamin.
As a whole, The Ten doesn't exactly hang together, but with so many disparate stories to tell (plus Rudd's ever-evolving romantic entanglements) that's not too surprising. There are a few actors who rise above the fray, like Michael Ian Black's Shakespeare-quoting prison guard and the just plain unflappable Ron Silver, but with so much noise it's hard to figure out what's signal. Wain's inability to fully commit to any of his conceits is reflected in the three story-summarizing songs that close the film and play over the credits. One I can dig because it brings all of the characters together for one big blowout. A second, maybe, but was the rap version really necessary? Probably not. I'll be curious to see what Wain comes up in the future, but I hope he decides to train his satirical sights on a more manageable set of targets (or just one, even) next time.
Monday, August 11, 2008
This is probably the least-accessible vault ever designed.
Well, this is just fine. I was all set to watch Ocean's Eleven tonight (in memory of Bernie Mac, who died over the weekend), but my DVD player flat out refused to read the disc. Switching to my computer worked for about 70 minutes or so, but then the movie started freezing up. Finally, I moved to the DVD player downstairs, which was able to read the disc and start the movie just fine, but when it got to the 70-minute point it started artifacting like crazy and eventually stopped playing altogether. Now, I'm not some schmuck who abuses his DVDs. I take good care of all of my CDs and DVDs and this one has been taken out and played on exactly three previous occasions -- once to watch the movie soon after I bought it, once to watch it with director Steven Soderbergh's commentary with screenwriter Ted Griffin, and once to watch it with the commentary by actors Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Andy Garcia. The thing does not have a single scratch on it, so what's the problem? Do DVDs spontaneously deteriorate? Because if they do, I'm going to regret having bought so many.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
How can I save you? This already happened.
It seems fitting that my "By the Numbers" series* ends with Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys since that is a film about the end of the world. (It might have ended with William Castle's 13 Ghosts if I hadn't jumped the gun and watched it a few months back, but I have something else entirely in mind for tomorrow night.) Shot in and around the City of Philadelphia, which can be made to look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland without too much trouble, I've long considered it something of a missed opportunity. Not the film itself; I think it's one of the boldest, most intelligent films to be released by a major studio in the '90s. No, I'm talking about missing my chance to meet one of my personal heroes.
See, I was a massive Gilliam fan at the time (still am, actually) and the knowledge that he was shooting a film practically in my backyard would have almost certainly led me to seek him out, maybe try to wangle a P.A. job on the film or something. (I was a Television/Theater Production major, after all, so I could have even tried to get college credit for it.) Instead I spent that semester in Chester, England, playing exchange student (and being terribly homesick most of the time). Of course, how was I to know that my England trip -- something that I had been planning for years -- would correspond almost precisely with Gilliam's Philadelphia shoot? Heck, I didn't even find out about it until after he had been and gone. It's hard to get too worked up about something like that after the fact. And hey, at least I can still enjoy the film.
* Did you know I was calling it that? Well, I am.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
It's almost a shame to smoke it. It's like killing a unicorn... with, like, a bomb.
If I may make what many would probably call an arbitrary distinction, there are stoner comedies and there are comedies about stoners. I don't claim to be an expert on either, but having seen Pineapple Express I feel fairly safe in putting it in the latter camp. The latest vehicle for unlikely leading man Seth Rogen (who has yet to put a foot wrong career-wise as far as I can tell), it pairs him up with fellow Freaks and Geeks alum James Franco, casting the two of them as amiable potheads on the run from vicious drug dealers after Rogen witnesses a murder. Written by Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg (with a story assist by producer Judd Apatow), the film was helmed by indie filmmaker David Gordon Green, whose choice as director was one its many strokes of genius.
After a brilliant opening set in 1937 in an underground bunker where the military is testing a substance called "Item 9" (which makes private Bill Hader less than respectful toward his superiors), the film introduces Rogen as a process server who dons a bewildering array of disguises in the line of duty. In between he visits his girlfriend, high school senior Amber Heard, who gets him to agree to have dinner with her parents, and buys some weed from his dealer (Franco), who turns him onto an extremely rare strain of marijuana that puts the bad guys on their trail. Said bad guys include drug kingpin Gary Cole, who's at war with an Asian gang, dirty cop Rosie Perez, and hit men Kevin Corrigan and Craig Robinson. Caught in the middle are Franco's connection, mid-level dealer Danny McBride, and Heard's parents, a hysterically apoplectic Ed Begley Jr. and a considerably more reasonable Nora Dunn. Even if he didn't bust in on them while on the run from drug dealers (not the best way to make a first impression), I doubt Rogen would want them for in-laws.
I haven't seen many advertisements for this film, so I don't know if it's being sold as a straight comedy or not, but Grosse Pointe Blank aside, it's not often that one sees a comedy with a body count. (A more recent analogue is last year's Hot Fuzz, another action-comedy that leaned heavily on the action side of the equation.) I'll be curious to see what Rogen and Goldberg are cooking up for their forthcoming adaptation of The Green Hornet. If this film is any indication they shouldn't have too much of a problem with the action scenes. And it'll be nice to see Rogen branch out and play a character who isn't a stoner.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Could anything be sweeter than desire in chains?
I'm here at the home of Joe Blevins, where we have just finished watching the bizarro cult porno Café Flesh, which Danny Peary featured in Cult Movies 3 (and which I was amazed to find on the shelf at Plan 9). Made in 1982, it was directed by Rinse Dream (not his real name) and written by Dream and Herbert W. Day (the non de plume of future ALF scripter Jerry Stahl), who were abetted by such pseudonymous luminaries as F.X. Pope, Pez D. Spencer, Polly Ester and, shockingly enough, an uncredited Richard Belzer. And now I shall turn the floor over to my host so he can share his thoughts on the film. Take it away, Joe...
Café Flesh has what I'd call a high PFT factor. That's Points For Trying. Clearly, the makers of this film were trying for something more than just your average stag film here, and they kinda sorta almost succeeded a little bit. I liked it better than Juno but not quite as much as, let's say, Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield. There's plenty of pornographic business in this flick, of course, but that seems to be a secondary priority. Job #1 seems to be making a doomy, expressionistic, boy-is-the-future-gonna-suck, post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick, the kind that used to come out on pretty much a weekly basis in the 1980s. Stylistically, the whole thing plays like a Reagan-era music video but done on the cheap with a cast rounded up from the local community theater. Remember those clips from the halcyon days of MTV where weirdly lit people in ugly clothes would wander listlessly around neo-noir sets while mugging to the camera? This movie is full of that kind of stuff. Café Flesh would have been a good date movie for a semi-adventurous 1980s Yuppie couple who had progressed beyond the likes of Micki & Maude. Significantly, since this film takes a controversial stance against thermonuclear war, they could claim they were watching it for the social satire and not the naughty bits.
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Oh, but what naughty bits. (This is Craig again.) The tableaux, which are introduced by the way over-the-top Max Melodramatic, range from a housewife getting it on with a milkman/anthropomorphic rat (while her three babies -- played by grown men in bibs -- look on), a pencil-headed executive giving his secretary the business while oil derricks pump away in the background, and the most literal example of phone sex ever devised. And there is a plot as well, concerning a Sex Negative couple that patronizes Café Flesh despite the fact that they can no longer experience the joy of sex themselves. Of course, that is the entire point of Café Flesh. The cutaways to the patrons reacting to the performers on stage are almost if not more important than the money shots. As for the performers themselves, we only ever get to see the faces of the women. The men are all masked and anonymous, largely because their sizable members are their main attractions. Even the legendary Johnny Rico (who looks like John Sayles in Brother from Another Planet), never takes off his sunglasses. That's highly appropriate for a film about a woman who learns to embrace her Positivity and take the stage. In the post-apocalyptic world of Café Flesh, everybody has to play their part.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Imagine... Almost 36 feet tall... Wow.
Joe and I had a double feature of big hairy monster movies this afternoon, starting with A*P*E (which was, I believe, the first movie I ever got from Jeff). South Korea's preemptive answer to Dino De Laurentiis's overhyped 1976 remake of King Kong, A*P*E managed to beat Dino's monkey movie to theaters and was in 3-D to boot. And its director, Paul Leder, aped the Italian producer by casting himself as the director of a film-within-the-film whose name just so happens to be Dino. Part of the plot revolves around an American starlet (played by a pre-Growing Pains Joanna Kerns) making her first film in Korea. Kerns also has a smarmy love interest, but the movie is stolen outright by Alex Nicol's testy Col. Davis, who has a series of interminable phone scenes where he alternates between John Wayne-style swagger and whiny petulance. (Every time the movie cuts back to him, you keep expecting him to say, "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit being a whiny ass.") Between giant ape attacks (which are scored by no more than six musical themes, which rotate), there is quite a lot of business about cigarettes. Col. Davis even asks for one right before he's about to have a press conference about the giant ape problem and, when he's told that they're waiting for him, he says, "The hell with the press. I'm gonna smoke this goddamn cigarette." There's a guy who knows how to appreciate the good things in life.
Our second feature was 1962's Invasion of the Animal People, which was Jerry Warren's horrendously padded-out version of the 1958 Swedish monster movie Terror in the Midnight Sun. That one is about a 20-feet-tall wooly creature that knocks down lots of huts and buildings in Lappland until it is brought down by a horde of angry torch-bearing villagers on skis. I saw the original version several years back and while it was padded in its own way -- mostly by helicopter shots and skiing sequences -- at least it had the good sense to include a nude scene that was of course cut out of Warren's version. The original, incidentally, was directed by Virgil Vogel, who had previously helmed The Mole People and went on to a long career of directing for television. For his part, Warren went on to desecrate several Mexican films before writing, directing and producing his magnum opus, The Wild World of Batwoman, which would likely be forgotten today if it weren't for MST3K. Joe tells me that a fan group called Mystery Fandom Theater 3000 has even given the MST treatment to Invasion of the Animal People, which gives me the perfect excuse to hand the reins over to him...
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Well, folks, here we are, reporting live from the Downmarket Movie Olympiad. Our event today is Big Lumbering Creatures, Fuzzy Division. Our competitors are Korea and Lappland, neither known to be a powerhouse in this sport but both showing a lot of pluck, grit, and determination here today. For you novices, I must explain that Fuzzy is an entirely different event than Scaly or Insectoid. With those last two, there's no real obligation to wring any pathos out of the monster's rise and fall. It's possible but not compulsory. But with Fuzzy, since the creature is a mammal, the audience's heart will go out to him even when he's tearing through subdivisions faster than a greedy kid unwrapping his presents on Christmas morning. Your fuzzy monster is warmblooded and has those soulful, almost human eyes, so he gets more of a character arc. Both nations clearly have the basics down. We have a fur-bearing bohemoth, a dame for him to fall in love with, a studly hero type, etc. So in the end it comes down to execution, and here the advantage clearly goes to Korea. Taller beast, cuter dame, smarmier hero, you name it. And when it comes to pacing, forget about it. Invasion's more padded than a Georgia beauty pageant contestant, while A*P*E is relatively lean and mean. Plus, in the Korean film, the monster actually flips the bird at one point. Game, set, and match.
It's about why love is so hard to define.
It's been a couple years since I've been able to enjoy a Woody Allen film in the company of a friend, so I was glad that Joe readily agreed to go see Vicki Cristina Barcelona tonight. One of his most breezily entertaining films in years (and I would know since I've seen them all), it stars Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson as two friends who spend the summer in Barcelona while Hall works on her masters thesis and Johansson tries to find her artistic voice. Hall is the more conservative of the two and Johansson more of a free spirit, so naturally they have diametrically opposite reactions when swarthy Spanish painter Javier Bardem propositions them one night. That they both end up going to bed with him -- despite the fact that Hall is engaged to another man -- is something of a given, but how they deal with the situation is more complex.
The film also features supporting turns from Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Dunn as Hall's relatives, who are putting Vicki and Cristina up for the summer, and Penélope Cruz as Bardem's unstable ex-wife. (It is remarked early on that theirs was a messy divorce and that's easy to believe when she shows up out of the blue and forcibly re-enters his life.) The film turns on the moral and ethical quandaries faced by Vicki and Cristina as they travel in and out of Bardem's orbit, and both of them are very different women at the end of the summer than they were at the start. Not necessarily happier or sadder, but it's clear that they've been changed by their dalliances.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
It's amazing you're still alive considering who you're working for.
For our final film of the weekend, Joe and I picked 1980's The Stunt Man, which Danny Peary wrote about in Cult Movies 3 and which Joe had never seen. I, on the other hand, have a long history with it going back to college, when I first saw it in one of my film classes. Directed by Richard Rush, who went through hell and high water to get the film financed with his preferred stars (Peter O'Toole and Steve Railsback) and had an even harder time getting it released (which he chronicled in the feature-length documentary The Sinister Saga of Making 'The Stunt Man' two decades later), it's one of the best movies about moviemaking out there. (This is not to say that it's the most realistic. Like A*P*E, it has a way of presenting a great deal of continuous action and making it seem like it's all being done in one take when an actual movie would have broken it up, especially the big action/stunt sequences. That's just one of the conventions of movie-movies that is accepted, though, simply because the alternative would likely be too tedious for words.)
O'Toole stars as a tyrannical director making a World War I film who has a way of manipulating everyone around him to get what he wants. Railsback is a fugitive from the law who poses as a stunt man for him after the lead's double has a fatal car accident. And Barbara Hershey co-stars as the lead actress who gets involved with Railsback without really knowing who he is. Of course, that's what going to the movies is all about: audiences (hopefully) getting involved with the actors and actresses onscreen without knowing who they really are. The film also features veteran actors Allen Garfield as the screenwriter who's constantly having to rewrite his script to cater to O'Toole's every whim and Alex Rocco as the local police chief looking for an excuse -- any excuse -- to kick O'Toole and his crew out of his (normally) quiet coastal town. As Joe says, it's always a pleasure to see their names in the opening credits of a movie because it means you're in good hands, for at least as long as they're onscreen.
Monday, August 18, 2008
It's a simple shot. I swear we're going to get it.
Now this is what it's really like to make a movie. From the moment I first heard about Tom DiCillo's 1995 film Living in Oblivion I knew that it was one that I had to see. For one thing it starred Steve Buscemi, who had made an indelible impression as Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs. For another it was about the making of an independent film, which was something that I aspired to do (and, in fact, still aspire to do 13 years on). Mostly, however, it promised to be a smart comedy and when it came out it didn't have a whole lot of competition in that arena.
Steve Buscemi stars as Nick Reve, a frazzled director trying to shoot a pivotal scene for his low-budget indie and coming up against every conceivable technical gaffe and creative setback. He's far from the only bright spot in the cast, though. Catherine Keener is his fragile leading lady, playing a difficult scene with an older actress (Rica Martens) who has trouble with her lines. Dermot Mulroney plays Wolf the strong-headed cinematographer who's in a tempestuous relationship with the assistant director (Danielle von Zerneck). James LeGros plays fatuous Hollywood actor Chad Palomino, who is gracing the film with his presence and is a major pain in the ass from the word go. Peter Dinklage plays Tito, the disgruntled dwarf who bristles at being cast in a dream sequence. And indie fixture Kevin Corrigan plays the focus puller whose attention isn't always as focused as it should be. That's what I loved about these kinds of movies in the mid-'90s: I could go in knowing only one of the actors and walk out with half a dozen more to be on the lookout for.
I also walked out thinking that Tom DiCillo was going to be a director to watch. I caught every one of his films as they came out and also went back for his debut, 1991's Johnny Suede, which starred a then-unknown Brad Pitt, but none of them ever reached the heights of hilarity or the depths of emotion that Living in Oblivion did. After a few years, his films even stopped getting distributed theatrically. I had to buy 2001's Double Whammy when it was ignominiously dumped direct to DVD, and last year's Delirious had such a severely limited release that it might as well have gone the same route. I always hold out hope that DiCillo will capture lightning in a film camera twice and make something that works for me on as many levels as Living in Oblivion, which is why I bought Delirious sight unseen. I'm more than willing to give it a chance.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
That's typical Hollywood. No respect for its own past.
As it's exactly one week after I'm supposed to have reviewed the 2006 horror anthology film Trapped Ashes, I figured it was time for me to bite the bullet and check the thing out. When I came across it in Wal-Mart I was intrigued because the cover promised "5 Tales of Terror" "from the Biggest Names in Horror." I should have known something with amiss, though, because of the five directors listed, only three of them -- Joe Dante, Ken Russell and Sean S. Cunningham -- are actually known for their horror films. Sure, Monte Hellman has directed a couple (1959's Beast from Haunted Cave, 1989's Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!), but I doubt he puts those on his resume, and John Gaeta is best known as the visual effects supervisor for the Matrix movies and the Wachowski Brothers' Speed Racer (although he also wrote the animated sequences for Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror, so I guess that's something).
The whole shebang was written by Dennis Bartok, who traps a sextet of Hollywood types (a screenwriter and his actress girlfriend, an architect and his wife, a long-retired director and a goth film programmer) in a spooky mansion with Ultra Studios tour guide Henry Gibson, who informs them that they must all tell a scary story from their own lives if they want to escape -- just like in acclaimed horror maestro Desmond Hacker's Hysteria. The wraparound segments were directed by Joe Dante, who brought in Dick Miller for a wordless cameo as a studio security guard, and the first segment -- "The Girl with Golden Breasts" -- was helmed by Ken Russell, who has never needed much of an excuse to fill movie screens with boobs (including his own). Sean S. Cunningham, who's best known for inaugurating the Friday the 13th series, directed the Japan-set "Jibaku," which is about a monk who returns from the dead and takes a woman back with him to Hell. (This segment also includes some anime inserts for the tentacle porn crowd.) Monte Hellman tackled the third segment, "Stanley's Girlfriend," which is narrated by John Saxon, who tells of his friendship with Stanley Kubrick in the late '50s and the succubus who came between them, and John Gaeta took the reins for "My Twin, The Worm," which is the second story that includes a scene of a woman being pleasured in bed by an otherworldly creature. I don't know where Bartok gets his ideas, but it's not a healthy place, that's for sure.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
I'm a minor character in my own story. This is a film about the music.
With Hamlet 2 (a.k.a. Steve Coogan's latest attempt to break through in America) currently making the rounds in the cinemas (and hopefully making it to at least one of Bloomington's 23 screens in the next week or so), I have gone back and watched the first film that brought him a modicum of attention over here -- 2002's 24 Hour Party People. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, it stars Coogan as Tony Wilson, the Granada Television presenter turned club owner who founded the Manchester-based Factory Records and launched the careers of Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio and Happy Mondays, among others. Spanning the years from 1976 -- when the Sex Pistols first played Manchester -- to the dissolution of Factory Records in 1992, it's an unconventional biopic to say the least, with Wilson constantly breaking the fourth wall to comment on the action and identify many of the major players.
Those players include Sean Harris as Ian Curtis, the doomed lead singer of Joy Division, who commits suicide on the eve of the band's first American tour; Andy Serkis as dictatorial producer Martin Hannett, architect of the early Factory sound who bailed when Wilson moved operations to the infamous money pit the Hacienda; and Danny Cunningham as Shaun Ryder, unreliable leader of Happy Mondays whose drug consumption was legendary. And behind the camera Winterbottom has Robby Muller, the frequent director of photography of choice for Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch. So far this is the only film he's shot for Winterbottom, but since Winterbottom makes at least one a year there's always a chance that they'll work together again. For his part, Steve Coogan would return three years later for Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Take a guess what I'm going to be watching tomorrow night.
Monday, August 25, 2008
I think you can sleep easy at night about the prospect of being cast as a leading man.
As rambling and discursive as 24 Hour Party People was, it's a walk on the straight and narrow compared to Michael Winterbottom's 2005 film Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Based on Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a novel long considered unfilmable, only about a quarter of the running time is given over to scenes from the book before we're plunged into the story behind the making of a film based on the novel. If that seems like a lot of levels for a film to be working on, consider that Steve Coogan, who stars as both the title character and his father in the film-within-the-film, is also playing Steve Coogan the actor, which is not the same thing as saying he's playing himself. (For example, he's given a girlfriend and a newborn son in the film when in actual fact he was married at the time of filming.)
Coogan has a lot of fun playing with his image, especially in his game of oneupmanship with Rob Brydon, who's playing his Uncle Toby in the film and insists that his part is a "co-lead." In fact, as shooting wears on, it becomes clear to Coogan that Brydon's part is expanding while his is being marginalized. This is hardly surprising since, in the book at least, Tristram doesn't even get around to describing his own birth. (His oft-repeated line is "I'm getting ahead of myself. I am not yet born.") Coogan and Brydon's double act is ably supported by the likes of Jeremy Northam as the film's director, the real Tony Wilson as a TV interviewer who sits down at one point with Coogan, Ashley Jensen (Maggie from Extras) as Coogan's agent's assistant, Stephen Fry as a literary scholar who plays a parson in the film, and Gillian Anderson as a fan of the book who's enticed into playing the part of Widow Wadman, a character who wasn't in the shooting script until she agreed to do it. One has to wonder if Winterbottom's writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce (who also wrote 24 Hour Party People), was made to jump through similar hoops during the making of this film. The fact that Boyce chose to be credited under a pseudonym (and that he hasn't worked with Winterbottom since) leads me to believe that he was.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
I think the cameraman makes the choice himself. And he's out there to get the blood and guts.
Quick history lesson: 40 years ago today the Democratic Party convened in the city of Chicago to pick its presidential candidate -- and ace cinematographer Haskell Wexler was there to shoot footage for the climax of his film Medium Cool, which featured Robert Forster as a local TV news cameraman covering the convention. As many people know, the 1968 Democratic Convention drew massive protests that quickly turned violent, with Wexler just one of many media people on the scene capturing the chaos for posterity. The difference was the others were there to get stories for their television and radio stations and newspapers; Wexler already had his mostly in the can.
This was a highly personal project for Wexler, who wrote, directed, produced and was director of photography for the film (as well as one of its camera operators). He establishes what kind of character Forster is right off the bat by showing him getting coverage of a horrific car accident; it's only after he's gotten all of his footage that he tells his sound man (the pricelessly named Peter Bonerz) to call for an ambulance. Later on Forster shoots the Illinois National Guard as they conduct a "war game" with people playing protesters, prefiguring the riots that break out during the convention, and an interview with gun clinic manager Peter Boyle, who explains why so many average citizens are packing heat.
It is to Wexler's credit that one of this seems like it's staged for the camera and that sense carries over to the tentative love affair that Forster strikes up with West Virginia transplant Verna Bloom, who comes complete with a fatherless 13-year-old son (Harold Blankenship) who's rather fond of pigeons. No matter how much he comes to care for this ready-made family, though, the essence of Forster's character is expressed when he passionately declares, "Jesus, I love to shoot film." As it's one of the few times we see him get emotional, one can't help but get the impression that he's also speaking for the director.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
It was stupid, but it was also theater.
"Where do dreams go to die?" asks the narrator at the outset of Hamlet 2. The answer the film provides is Tuscon, Arizona, where failed actor/wannabe inspirational drama teacher Steve Coogan puts on plays based on Hollywood movies like Erin Brockivich and Mississippi Burning that regularly get trashed by the school paper's diminutive drama critic. Coogan's home life isn't much better since he and his wife, ex-pot dealer Catherine Keener, find themselves unable to conceive and she can barely tolerate their boorish boarder (David Arquette). And to top it off, hard-ass principal Marshall Bell has decided to cut the drama department, but not before dumping a couple dozen insolent Latino students in Coogan's lap. So what's the solution? Why, all they have to do is put on a show! Namely Coogan's misconceived sequel to the world's most famous play -- in which the melancholy Dane hops in a time machine and, with the help of Jesus, prevents all of the characters from dying (during a montage set to Elton John's "Someone Saved My Life Tonight"). How could that not work?
Written by South Park scribe Pam Brady and director Andrew Fleming, Hamlet 2 seeks to be an equal-opportunity offender, taking potshots at inspirational teacher films like Dead Poets Society, Mr. Holland's Opus and Dangerous Minds, and drawing inspiration from the likes of The Producers (especially in songs like the show-opener "Raped in the Face" and "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus") and Waiting for Guffman. Coogan gives the film his all, whether he's doing pratfalls on roller blades (his only means of transportation since his license was suspended) or putting up with abuse from his unruly students, who somehow manage to get the theater bug from him. He also gets to play off Elisabeth Shue, who has given up on acting and moved to Tucson to be a nurse, and Amy Poehler as the ACLU lawyer who takes an interest when Coogan's controversial play becomes a cause celebre. It even manages to get the attention of the New York Times, which is something Corky St. Clair was never able to do. Even if the end result isn't the non-stop laugh-fest the creators were probably shooting for, there are much worse ways to pass 92 minutes -- and I'll bet few of them feature a closing credits song entitled "Gay as the Day is Long."
Thursday, August 28, 2008
They can make me do anything, Ben, can't they? Anything.
As this is the final night of the Democratic National Convention, when Barack Obama will be accepting his party's nomination for President of the United States, I saw fit to watch John Frankenheimer's 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, which likewise reaches its climax at a political convention during the presidential nominee's acceptance speech. Not that I expect the same outcome in Denver tonight, but I couldn't help making the connection. Besides, any excuse for me to revisit this classic American film is a good one.
The film starts in Korea in 1952, when Army major Frank Sinatra and less than lovable sergeant Laurence Harvey are ambushed along with the rest of their patrol, but somehow manage to escape their captors. Back home Harvey is awarded the medal of honor, but chafes under the attention of his domineering mother (Angela Lansbury, giving a career-defining performance) and buffoonish stepfather, a Red-baiting senator (James Gregory) being lined up for the vice presidency. Sinatra, meanwhile, has been transferred to Army intelligence, but keeps having the same disturbing dream about what really happened back in Korea. Seems the entire patrol was subject to conditioning by the Russians and Chinese for the purpose of turning Harvey into the perfect assassin and rather than saving them, well, let's say Harvey's actions were less than heroic.
I don't want to go into too much more detail because the joy in a film like The Manchurian Candidate is in the discovery of its secrets and the way its well-oiled machine of a plot is put together. I will say that it features one of the greatest meet-weirds in movie history, when Sinatra is approached by Janet Leigh, who has an extremely peculiar way of making conversation. The film also features Henry Silva as the patrol's Korean translator, who delivers them into enemy hands, Khigh Dhiegh (who played essentially the same role in Seconds) as the endlessly self-amused brainwasher, and an uncredited Whit Bissell as an Army medical officer who is slow to take Sinatra's misgivings seriously. It is also, without a doubt, Frankenheimer's masterpiece and a must-see for anybody who considers themselves a film buff.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Approach her with extreme caution as she is considered to be... homicidal.
Following the enormous success of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, it didn't take long for other filmmakers to jump on the psychotic killer bandwagon, and one of the first out of the gate (naturally) was William Castle, whose Homicidal came out exactly one year later. It's the rather convoluted story of a young man named Warren who's due to come into a great deal of money ($10 million to be exact) when he turns 21 and the people who surround him. There's his half-sister Miriam (Patricia Breslin), who owns a flower shop that doesn't seem to stay open enough to stay in business, her boyfriend Karl (Glenn Corbett), a druggist who likewise has no compunction about closing up shop just for the heck of it, and emotionally disturbed murderess Emily (Jean Arless), who cares for the mute, invalid Danish woman who raised Warren after his parents died in a car accident. (If you think I've given anything away, Castle makes no bones about who the murderer is, although it takes a while for her true nature to be shown.)
To reveal any more of the plot would be detrimental to the nifty little shocker that Castle and writer Robb White have fashioned, although it must be said that the 45-second "fright break," which gave audiences the chance to flee the theater if they were too scared to watch the climax, is a completely unnecessary gimmick. And they hew rather too closely to the Psycho formula by having the plot overexplained by a humorless authority figure after all is said and done. A movie like this lives and dies by its scares, though, and there are at least two moments that actually deliver the goods. William Castle may have been no Hitchcock, but he knew his shock effects and when to deploy them. That's more than a lot of modern horror filmmakers can say.
What I'm out for is a good time -- all the rest is propaganda.
The British cinema of the early '60s specialized in stories of working class blokes just trying to get by. 1960's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was in the vanguard of that movement, winning the BAFTA for Best British Film and paving the way for films such as Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life, John Schlesinger's Billy Liar and Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Directed by Karel Reisz from a screenplay by Alan Sillitoe (based on his own novel), the film made a star of Albert Finney, who works the lathe in a factory during the week so he can earn the money to get dressed up and go out every weekend. With Finney, though, a night out usually consists of him drinking until he's literally falling-down drunk.
Finney's other extracurricular activities include running around with a married woman (Rachel Roberts), who presents a problem when she announces she's pregnant, chatting up a pretty young bird (Shirley Anne Field) who's more available, but less apt to put out, and getting up the back of the local busybody. The film also features Norman Rossington (who went on to play Norm, the Beatles' manager in A Hard Day's Night) as Finney's drinking buddy, and Bryan Pringle as the cuckolded husband who's not as unsuspecting as Finney and Roberts think. The film belongs to Finney, though, who rightfully won the BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles. It would be the first of many.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Everyone walking this Earth has a secret closet he'd rather left closed.
Riding high on the success of 1971's Get Carter, writer/director Mike Hodges and star Michael Caine reunited the following year for Pulp, a bizarre black comedy about a writer of lurid paperbacks working in the Mediterranean who's tapped to ghostwrite the autobiography of a former big-time screen mobster played by Mickey Rooney. The problem is there's somebody who doesn't want Rooney's story to be written and it's up to Caine to figure out who -- and why.
Shot in Malta (just like the Joe Don Baker vehicle Final Justice), the film features Lionel Stander as Rooney's right-hand man, who first approaches Caine with the offer, film noir fixture Lizabeth Scott as one of Rooney's ex-wives, who has since married a prominent political figure, and Dennis Price as an English tourist who's fond of quoting Lewis Carroll. Not all of the comedy works, but Hodges gets a lot of mileage out of having Caine narrate his own story like it's one of his novels. And it was quite prescient of him to tap George Martin to write the score just one year before he did the same for Live and Let Die.
Back to July 2008 -- Onward to September 2008
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