Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
January 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Beware, evildoers, wherever you are!
If there's a better movie with which to see in the new year than Woody Allen's Radio Days, then I don't know what it is. His most overtly nostalgic and episodic film, it too -- like Interiors -- has a trio of sisters (Julie Kavner, Renée Lippin and Dianne Wiest) at its center. The difference, of course, is in this film they all live together in one house as one big, extended (and unmistakably Jewish) family. One feels a definite warmth and affection from every member, too, which is a far cry from all the frigid WASPs in the earlier film.
There are far too many great actors -- in parts both big and small -- for me to mention them all, but I do want to single out Wallace Shawn for his improbable role as the Masked Avenger, which deftly illustrates how powerful the medium of radio was and how little one's looks mattered as long as they had a commanding voice. Were I an evildoer, I would certainly beware if I knew the Masked Avenger was after me.
Friday, January 2, 2009
You taste of sleep.
With Tom Tykwer's latest film, The International, set for release on February 13, I have decided to spend the month and a half leading up to it reacquainting myself with the rest of his body of work. Well, maybe not all of it. 2006's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is still quite fresh in my mind, and his first feature, 1993's Deadly Maria, has never received a proper release in the States. (Maybe someday it will appear on DVD, but I'm not holding my breath.) That leaves Winter Sleepers -- which was made in 1997, but not released in the U.S. until 2000 (after the runaway success of Run Lola Run) -- to start me off.
Based on a novel by Anne-Francoise Pyszora, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Tykwer, the film follows a quartet of twentysomethings whose lives intersect in unexpected ways over the winter holidays (specifically the week between Christmas and New Year's). Nurse/aspiring actress Marie-Lou Sellem and translator Floriane Daniel live together in Sellem's villa, Daniel is seeing self-centered ski instructor Heino Ferch, and Sellem takes up with cinema projectionist Ulrich Matthes, who suffers from short-term memory loss thanks to a head injury and has to take pictures and record conversations on tape to maintain some semblance of a life. This comes into play when Matthes is involved in a freak car accident with farmer Josef Bierbichler, whose daughter is critically injured in the crash, and neither of them are able to clearly remember what happened -- or who was at fault.
If that plot strand sounds vaguely reminiscent of Memento, remember this film was made three years earlier than Christopher Nolan's breakthrough. And instead of jumbling the chronology, Tykwer emphasizes the interconnectedness of his characters by cutting between them at crucial moments, as if they had a weird kind of low-level psychic bond. He also relies on the propulsive score (which he composed with Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek) to move the action along and pieces by minimalist composer Arvo Pärt to get at the sadness and melancholy of the story. It's a combination that makes for an extremely compelling film about the ways coincidence shapes life, a theme to which Tykwer would return with a vengeance the following year...
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Where, where, where does he come from, the Golden Bat? Only the bats know.
In between the underwater sci-fi/horror flick The Terror from Beneath the Sea and the totally inexplicable Goke: Bodysnatcher from Hell, Japanese director Hajime Sato took a low-budget stab at the costumed superhero genre with 1966's The Golden Bat, in which Nazo, the self-proclaimed ruler of the universe (who looks like a four-eyed, felt teddy bear with a flipper and a huge, metal claw), sets the Planet Icarus on a collision course with Earth. In the hopes of destroying the rogue planet, a U.N. scientific team, which is headed by Sonny Chiba and operates under the aegis of old white guy Andrew Hughes (who later appeared in Destroy All Monsters and was a regular in Japanese monster movies of the period), is working on the Super Destruction Beam Cannon, and it is while searching for a vital component on a newly exposed island of the lost continent of Atlantis that they stumble upon the sarcophagus of the Golden Bat, an Atlantean superbeing awakened from a 10,000-year sleep by the team's requisite child mascot Emily, who revives him by pouring water on his chest.
If that doesn't sound loony enough, in addition to his horde of anonymous black-clad minions, Nazo also has three bosses (to use video game terminology) that the Golden Bat has to defeat in order to get to him: the horribly scarred Keloid (who is also a horrible over-actor), the womanly Piranha (because you just can't trust a woman), and the hirsute Jackal (who has a face like a werewolf and a fur suit that must have been a real bear to wear under the hot studio lights). Not only do they have the ability to beam from place to place, they can also turn invisible at will, defy the laws of gravity, take the form of just about anybody, and shoot sleep beams out of their eyes. Were it not for the intervention of the giggle-happy Golden Bat and his Baton of Justice, humanity would surely be sunk.
This is sure some hunk of jungle. I never realized what I was getting into.
Soon after I bought the "Chilling Classics" 50 Movie Pack, I went back to Borders to pick up another one called "Drive-In Movie Classics" that was put out by the same company. Despite this, they still managed to repeat four films (and if I continue to buy these 50 Movie Packs, I'm sure there will be even more doubles and triples), but that leaves 46 for me to watch and attempt to enjoy. Repeating my plan of attack from the first set, I went with the oldest film in the collection, 1944's Nabonga, in which erstwhile Flash Gordon star Buster Crabbe ventures into the jungle to find a stolen fortune. There he meets the comely Julie London, who is called the "Great White Witch" by the fearful natives. Seems she crash landed in the jungle years earlier with her embezzler father and has been under the protection of a great gorilla named Samson ever since.
Directed by Sam Newfield, who made a dozen or more films a year in his prime and brought the similarly themed White Pongo to the screen just a year later, Nabonga is a pure programmer, padded out with copious nature footage and two knock-down, drag-out fights between Crabbe and opportunistic swindler Barton MacLane, who's also after the fortune. The film also features the wonderfully named Fifi D'Orsay as a heavily accented would-be femme fatale, Prince Modupe as a stereoptypical native guide (the kind who calls an airplane a "house with wings") and veteran serial star Ray "Crash" Corrigan as the overprotective gorilla. Corrigan was something of an ape/gorilla specialist, having previously played an ape in the original Tarzan the Ape Man, a gorilla in Tarzan and His Mate and the title character in the 1940 Boris Karloff vehicle The Ape, among others. And he would go on playing them (even portraying the aforementioned White Pongo) until 1952's execrable Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, which is the sort of film that would convince anybody to hang up the monkey suit.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
No one's ever really ready for Paranoid Park.
One of my biggest disappointments of 2008 was not getting to see Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park in theaters because it never came to my area, but now that I have the Independent Film Channel (thanks, digital cable!), I have rectified this. Written for the screen and directed by Van Sant, based on the novel by Blake Nelson, the film is set in and around the affluent suburbs of Portland, Oregon, and has a nonlinear structure much like the films in his long-take trilogy. With its high school setting and frequent shots of the main character walking the hallways in slow motion, though, the one it resembles most is Elephant (as opposed to Gerry or Last Days, which are just as lyrical, but take place in very different locales).
Evocatively photographed by Christopher Doyle (re-teaming with Van Sant for the first time since Psycho) and Rain Kathy Li, the film stars newcomer Gabe Nevins as a disaffected teen whose parents are divorcing and whose virginal girlfriend (Taylor Momsen) is pressuring him into having sex. Those are the least of his concerns, though, since his involvement in the accidental death of a security guard near the titular skate park, which brings police detective Daniel Liu to his high school to talk to the skateboard crowd about who may have been around that night and what they might have seen. The film dances around the event, largely because Nevins is the one telling the story (which he writes in a journal) and he isn't exactly anxious to relive it. He also doubles back a few times to scenes we've already seen (a la Elephant), usually as a way of shedding more light on them, but eventually he gets around to spilling all the gruesome details, which would be enough to get to even the most jaded individual.
Monday, January 5, 2009
What do you know about it? You only talk to people.
One of the first things I woke up to on Christmas morning (apart from the sound of my three-year-old niece noisily opening her presents) was the news that legendary British playwright Harold Pinter had died the day before. This threw something of a damper on my holiday, but I was heartened by the knowledge that I had spent the year and a half previous watching a good number of his film adaptations, so I didn't have to suddenly start playing catch-up. One film of his that I initially passed over, though, was 1966's The Quiller Memorandum, which I had seen some years earlier on TCM, but since my library has acquired it on DVD, I figured it wouldn't hurt to give it another look.
Based on a spy novel by Adam Hall, the film stars George Segal as a vacationing American agent whose time off is cut short when the British secret service (in the guise of the amiable Alec Guinness) taps him to investigate neo-Nazis in Berlin (who are headed by an equally amiable Max von Sydow). Sometimes it seems like Segal is just bumbling around and other times he appears to be in complete command of the situation. The trouble is Pinter doesn't do much to distinguish between them, and things get further muddled by the occasional cutaways to "guest stars" George Sanders and Robert Helpmann as two high-ranking government officials whose conversations seem at best tangentially related to the business at hand. I don't know whether the problems stem from Pinter's downplaying of the thriller aspects or from the fact that this kind of nuts-and-bolts spy story had already been done exceptionally well the year before by both The Ipcress File and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In comparison, The Quiller Memorandum plays its cards a little too close to the vest.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
I prefer bad manners in the theater to active violence on the streets.
Following the one-two punch of Deathdream and Black Christmas in 1974, Bob Clark was determined to distance himself from the horror genre, and after making the crime drama Breaking Point he produced his highest-profile film to date, 1979's Murder by Decree, which pit Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper. Written by John Hopkins, the handsomely-mounted film traffics in some of the high-reaching conspiracy theories that later informed Alan Moore's massive graphic novel From Hell (and its subsequent film adaptation) and shows that Clark hadn't completely abandoned his horror roots, particularly when he uses a subjective camera to depict some of the Ripper's attacks. For the most part, though, he refrains from dwelling on the blood and guts, instead relying on his actors to convey how horrific the murders were.
And what actors he had! The film features an all-star cast headed by Christopher Plummer as the indefatigable Holmes and James Mason as the good Dr. Watson, with David Hemmings and Frank Finlay as two police inspectors investigating the Whitechapel murders, Anthony Quayle as the head of Scotland Yard, who wants Holmes to stay out of the case (probably because he knows Holmes is liable to solve it), John Gielgud as the prime minister, who has a similar interest in maintaining the status quo, Donald Sutherland as a psychic who has disturbing visions of the Ripper's murders before he commits them, and Genevieve Bujold as the seemingly insane woman who holds the key to the whole mystery. I also recognized Teddi Moore (who later played the teacher in A Christmas Story) as Sutherland's wife and Chris Wiggins (who went on to star in Friday the 13th: The Series) as the doctor at the asylum where Bujold is being kept.
Of course, compelling as this film may be, I'm still partial to another explanation for who Jack the Ripper really was.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
'Twas the way the bang-tail was done that cries out for a man of your talents.
With Murder by Decree fresh in my mind and Watchmen (hopefully) just two months away, I thought I'd have another look at From Hell, which was the first film adapted from one of Alan Moore's graphic novels (and based on the subject matter, it is most graphic indeed). Directed by the Hughes Brothers, who took many of their compositions straight from Eddie Campbell's original illustrations, the film stars Johnny Depp as the opium-addicted police inspector assigned to the Ripper case who sees visions of the murders while he's "chasing the dragon." During the course of his investigation he encounters (and becomes smitten with) streetwalker Heather Graham, consults with royal surgeon Ian Holm, is assisted by sergeant Robbie Coltrane (who knows which opium dens to pull him out of when his services are needed), and is occasionally browbeaten by Ian Richardson, the head of Scotland Yard. One character he doesn't run into, though, is Jason Flemyng*, who plays the coachman who ferries the Ripper around and quickly loses the stomach for his work.
To date, From Hell is probably the best Alan Moore adaptation out there, despite the fact that it occasionally plays like the Cliff Notes version of the book, which is so densely written and full of incident -- all of it meticulously researched -- that it simply can't be contained in a two-hour movie. When I get to worrying about all the things that are going to have to be left out of the Watchmen movie in order to keep it to a somewhat reasonable length, all I have to do is remember that From Hell is about twice as long and it turned out just fine. Now all I have to do is keep my fingers crossed and hope that Fox and Warners come to some arrangement that allows the film to come out as planned on March 6. If it does, I'll be first in line at the multiplex.
* Flemyng, incidentally, went on to play Jekyll and Hyde in The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, the second Alan Moore film adaptation and one that I have no intention of revisiting, either before or after Watchmen.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
It's my duty as a human being to be pissed off.
There are other Jack the Ripper films out there, but I'm moving on from the blood-soaked streets of London to the nominally safer street corners of SubUrbia, which was Richard Linklater's fourth feature film (well, fifth if you include his one-man Super-8 feature It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books) and his fourth in a row to take place over a single night and day. Written by Eric Bogosian, based on his play, SubUrbia follows a group of disaffected teens who are all a year out of high school with little to show for it. This is thrown into sharp relief by the return of a former classmate who has made it big as a rock star and, since he's in town for a show, wants to spend the night hanging out with his friends at "the corner" for old time's sake.
The group's resident intellectual is college dropout Giovanni Ribisi, who takes suburban alienation to the extreme and is in danger of losing his girlfriend, performance artist Amie Carey, who wants to move to New York City to go to art school. Steve Zahn is the perpetually wasted stoner who likes to raise hell and Nicky Katt is the former star football player who takes out his ample hostility on the Pakistani couple (Ajay Naidu and Samia Shoaib) who own the convenience store where they congregate. And Dina Waters is the nurse's aide who spent some time in rehab and, after a roll in the communal van with Zahn, may be headed back there when he takes an interest in the record label publicist (Parker Posey) who tagged along with the aforementioned rock star (Jayce Bartok).
Since it came out just before the introduction of DVD and wasn't a huge success in its theatrical release, it's no wonder SubUrbia is the only Linklater film (not counting his most recent, Me and Orson Welles, which was screened at last year's Toronto Film Festival and has yet to receive a general release) that hasn't come out in digital form. And now that I've finally seen it -- thanks to the Independent Film Channel -- I can sort of understand why Warner Bros. (which released it on videotape) has been dragging its feet. Coming as it did at the end of the wave of mid-'90s Gen-X comedy-dramas, it couldn't help but come off as warmed over and more than little late to the party. Maybe it was a different story with Bogosian's original play, but the transition to the screen was not a smooth one.
Friday, January 9, 2009
I'll just keep on running, okay?
Ten years ago this month, Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run was screened for the first time in America at the Sundance Film Festival, where it handily won the Audience Award. And no wonder since it's such an inventive crowd-pleaser, making the international reputation of Tykwer and an instant star of Franka Potente, the red-haired runner of the title. (It also swept the 1999 German Film Awards and received awards and nominations from festivals and critic's groups the world over, not to mention the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film.)
A stunning technical achievement, the film uses its very basic premise (Potente has just 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 marks to save boyfriend Moritz Bleibtreu's skin) to illustrate how much of a role chance plays in people's lives and how, with such a short window of time, Potente has very little margin for error. When things inevitably go south, the film winds back to the start of her journey and shows how it would play out with minor (and, in some cases, major) variations. If this sounds at all tedious, bear in mind Tykwer uses every editing and camera trick in the book -- and then some -- to keep the action moving, aided in no small way by the score, which he composed with Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek. And it does hold up to multiple viewings, as I can personally attest to. Seeing it again tonight (for maybe my third or fourth time), it's easy to remember why I added Tykwer to my list of directors to watch.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
This is not a pleasure trip, captain. This is a mission.
Before I start in earnest on my "Chilling Classics" and "Drive-In Movie Classics" 50 Movie Packs, there's one that I feel the need to get out of the way: 1950's A Passenger to Bali, which isn't actually a movie or even a TV movie. Rather, it's an episode of the CBS series "Studio One" (and as such, no screenshots from it can be found online, and I find myself singularly unable to figure out how to make my own). "Studio One" was sponsored by Westinghouse, which means the show is interrupted periodically for lengthy pitches for products such a refrigerators, counter tops and -- my favorite -- a console with a TV, AM/FM radio and a phonograph (because the one thing a consumer who has already gone to the trouble of buying a television set in 1950 wants is a television that has a record player attached).
As for the show itself, it starred Colin Keith-Johnston as the captain of a cargo ship in the Dutch East Indies that has the misfortune to take on board shifty passenger Berry Kroeger, who claims to be a Dutch missionary, but is actually a revolutionary and thus unwelcome in any port -- as is any ship that he is on. What follows is a somewhat lopsided battle of wits as the captain tries to find a way to rid himself of his troublesome passenger, who rather smugly asserts his superiority at every turn. Incidentally, if you're wondering why I've included a picture of E.G. Marshall next to the map of Bali, that's because Marshall is listed on the back of the box as "STARRING" in this show, but he wasn't listed in the credits and I wasn't able to spot him at all, so I don't know what to think. Could it be that Mill Creek Entertainment's packaging is... misleading?
You must forgive me for coming so late. I was working.
My next "Chilling Classic," which happens to tie in nicely with the Jack the Ripper films I watched earlier in the week, is 1953's Man in the Attic, which stars Jack Palance as a research pathologist suspected of being the Ripper by his landlady. The film is based on the same Marie Belloc Lowndes novel as Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger (in fact, it's the fourth such film adaptation, with another due out later this month), but director Hugo Fregonese is no Hitchcock. Still, he manages to eke a few moments of suspense out of the story, even if Palance's intense performance leaves little doubt as to his true identity. (Hitchcock was able to leave things a little more ambiguous.)
Another black mark against the film is the way it holds up the action to include three songs, two of which are big production numbers featuring dancer/actress Constance Smith, the pretty niece of the couple Palance is lodging with. It's also difficult to get too wrapped up in the affairs of stuffy police inspector Byron Palmer, Palance's would-be rival for Smith's affections. And while I thoroughly enjoyed the back and forth between Frances Bavier and Rhys Williams as her constantly bickering aunt and uncle, the less said about hysterical maid Tita Phillips, the better. Unsurprisingly, this was her only screen appearance.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Heretic! Bringing a beastly thing like that into Christian England.
As 2009 is the year of Universal's remake of The Wolf Man, it only seems fitting for me to assess the studio's werewolf films of the '30s and '40s. 1935's Werewolf of London may not be the earliest werewolf film on record (there was an 1913 short, considered lost, called The Werewolf and a 1925 silent melodrama called Wolf Blood), but it was the first to feature a two-legged wolf-man, making it the clear forerunner of the 1941 classic starring Lon Chaney Jr. That one I've seen before, but I was new to Werewolf of London (or, rather, I should say it was new to me). In retrospect, it's easy to see why the later film spawned numerous sequels and this one remained a one-off.
Directed by Stuart Walker, who had a short and largely undistinguished tenure in the director's chair before he moved into producing, the film stars Henry Hull as an English botanist intent on finding a rare flower that only grows in the mountains of Tibet (and which only blooms by the light of the moon) when he is attacked by a werewolf, thus sealing his fate. Upon his return home, he works feverishly in his laboratory trying to perfect a moon ray with which he hopes to artificially cause the phosphorescent moon flower in his possession to bloom. In the process he neglects his wife (Valerie Hobson), who begins seeing quite a lot of her childhood friend (Lester Matthews), who just so happens to be the nephew of the head of Scotland Yard (Lawrence Grant), who has some very puzzling murders on his hands when the full moon arrives.
That said, it actually takes a while for Hull to actually become the title creature, and this isn't until after he has been warned by rival botanist Warner Oland (from the University of Carpathia), who tries to tell him that the bloom of the flower with which he's working is the only thing that can suppress the transformation from man to beast. Oland also throws around terms like "lycanthrophobia" and "werewolfery," and claims that "the werewolf instinctively seeks to kill the thing it loves best," which leads me to believe the movie's writers were making things up as they went along. (Another example: Hull reads in a book that werewolves change between the hours of 9 and 10 p.m. during the full moon, which barely gives him enough time to throw on his scarf, hat and coat before going out to claim his first victim.) Oh, sure. The Wolf Man also invented much of its werewolf mythology, but at least its makers had the good sense to stress its basis in folklore.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Lust is no excuse for thoughtlessness.
In addition to being an acclaimed playwright, Harold Pinter was also an accomplished theater director and one of his greatest successes was with Simon Gray's Butley, which he directed for the London stage in 1971 and then for the American Film Theatre in 1974. For the film version, Alan Bates reprised his role as acerbic college professor Ben Butley, who finds out in a single day that both his wife and his boyfriend are leaving him. It would be wrong to say that he takes this in his stride, but he does use the opportunity to show off his dazzling intellect and play mind games with anybody who steps inside his office, whether they be lovers, colleagues or students (who come to him for their tutorials, but get turned away as a matter of course).
This is Bates's show from beginning to end, but he gets more than able support from Jessica Tandy as a colleague in the English department who invites Butley's jealousy because she's finished her long-gestating Byron book (while his own volume on Eliot languishes), Richard O'Callaghan as his former student and protogé who no longer wants to share an apartment or an office with him, Susan Engel as his soon-to-be ex-wife, and Michael Byrne as O'Callaghan's new lover. Incidentally, this was not the only time Pinter adapted Simon Gray for the screen. He also directed Gray's The Rear Column for television in 1980 and his own plays The Hothouse and Party Time for television in 1982 and 1992. Pity he decided not to pursue more cinema work, though. Given the challenge of shooting what is essentially a one-room play, I'd say he rose to it admirably.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
This is a rough time now, Harry. All the houses are tumbling down.
John Frankenheimer is a director I've admired for a long time, pretty much since I first rented The Manchurian Candidate I don't know how many years ago. Since then I've managed to see all of the films from his '60s heyday, but once he hit the '70s his work became somewhat erratic and harder to find on TV or home video. Case in point: 1974's black comedy with a body count 99 and 44/100% Dead, which I have finally gotten to see courtesy of the Fox Movie Channel (another one of the perks of digital cable). Unloved by critics or audiences on its initial release, this is the kind of film that could do with the added exposure of a DVD release, even if it would probably continue to be unloved by many.
Frankenheimer has many strengths as a director, but comedy is not one of them -- at least not the zany, madcap variety he strains for in this film. Written by Robert Dillon (who also co-wrote French Connection II for Frankenheimer the following year as well as X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes for Roger Corman a decade earlier), it stars Richard Harris as a high-paid killer in unflattering glasses hired by aging mobster Edmond O'Brien (in his final film role) to help win a gang war brought on by upstart Bradford Dillman (who seems to be one of the few actors in the film who's aware he's supposed to be in a comedy). Most of the actors play their roles absolutely straight-faced, to the point of calmly carrying out a conversation while under sniper fire, and some moments are even played for genuine suspense or emotion (especially where Ann Turkel as Harris's love interest is concerned), which makes the bursts of comic violence seem all the more jarring.
In many ways, it's hard to tell just what Frankenheimer was going for here. He obviously wants us to be impressed by Harris's prowess with a gun and his hard-boiled attitude (he even goes so far as to include the iconic shot of the hero who is completely unperturbed as he walks away from an exploding building) at the same time he plays up the absurdity of the action scenes. I guess this juxtaposition is where the comedy is supposed to lie, but whatever possessed him to include the prolonged scene where ruthless killer Chuck Connors switches out his hook hand for a number of other, even less savory, attachments while he menaces a prostitute, I'll never know.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
If you believe in a cause, danger is not frightening.
Like John Frankenheimer, John Huston is another director I've long admired with a lengthy list of credits that I'm still digging my way through after years of concerted effort. And thanks to the Fox Movie Channel (again), I have now caught up with his 1970 cold war spy thriller The Kremlin Letter, based on the novel by Noel Behn. The film features an international cast centered around intelligence officer Patrick O'Neal, who's forcibly discharged from the Navy (by Huston himself) when he's recruited by a bizarre spy network that has need of his photographic memory and language skills. Throughout the mission O'Neal is mentored by amiable "uncle" Richard Boone and tries to maintain a healthy relationship with beautiful young safecracker Barbara Parkins, but they're both compromised by the need to prostitute themselves in the name of achieving their objective (which, it has to be said, is never less than murky).
The film also features Dean Jagger as the spymaster who tasks O'Neal with recruiting the team for the mission, George Sanders as the special agent who's first discovered in drag playing piano at a gay bar, Max von Sydow as the ruthless chief of Russia's 3rd department (whatever that is), Bibi Andersson as his wife who wishes to defect to the West, and Orson Welles as the Central Committee member pulling the strings behind the scenes. I don't know whether it's due to the caliber of the cast or the fact that he co-wrote the script, but Huston seems much more engaged with this material than he was with The Mackintosh Man, his other spy movie from the period. It certainly helps that it's upfront about what kind of film it is.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Nature built Nijinky to dance, me to direct traffic.
Gus Van Sant didn't have his first flop until he took a stab at adapting Tom Robbins's 1976 cult novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues for the screen in 1993. The story of a girl born with extra large thumbs who uses them to hitchhike her way around the country, it's the kind of idea that merely seems absurd on the page, but is flat-out ridiculous when you see it on the screen. I've avoided it for many years as a result of its drubbing at the hands of critics (Roger Ebert famously gave it half a star) who were probably expecting something more resonant from the maker of Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. Now that I've seen it for myself, I don't think it's all that bad. It's just not all that good, either.
Uma Thurman stars as the bethumbed Sissy Hankshaw, who is able to make any vehicle pull over for her, which is one way to put a disadvantage to her advantage. She was also a top model for a time (with every shot subtly cropping out her freakish digits) for advertising guru the Countess (John Hurt), who attempts to hook her up with an asthmatic, full-blooded Indian watercolorist (Keanu Reeves). When that doesn't work out, Hurt sends her out west to his beauty ranch to take part in a commercial shoot (her first modeling job in years) that has been timed to coincide with the migration of a flock of whooping cranes. There she falls in with an ornery group of cowgirls led by Rain Phoenix and listens to the wisdom of self-styled sage the Chink (Pat Morita). Unfortunately, this is also where the film reaches a narrative dead end and any sense of forward momentum from Thurman's hitchhiking ceases.
Even with its shortcomings, Cowgirls features an overstuffed (and overqualified) supporting cast, with Grace Zabriskie as Thurman's mother, Buck Henry as the family doctor who eventually gives her one normal thumb, Roseanne (then) Arnold as a fortune teller who sees some men in her future, but a lot more women, Ed Begley Jr., Carol Kane, Sean Young and Crispin Glover as a quartet of artsy hangers-on, Angie Dickinson as the proprietor of Hurt's ranch, Heather Graham as one of the cowgirls Dickinson despises, and Udo Kier as the eccentric commercial director (is there any other kind?). It also includes bit parts for William S. Burroughs as himself, an uncredited River Phoenix as a pilgrim spurned by the Chink, an uncredited Edward James Olmos as a musician at a barbecue at the ranch, and novelist Tom Robbins as the narrator, who opens the film with the line, "The surprise of Sissy Hankshaw is that she did not grow up a neurotic disaster." The irony of it is that's exactly what Van Sant's film about her turned out to be.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Maybe it's all wrong. But I thought it was happiness.
Tom Tykwer's third film to reach the States was 2000's The Princess and the Warrior, which may not have been a Run Lola Run-sized hit, but it showed off his growth as a filmmaker to those of us who were paying attention. It also reunited him with his Lola star Franka Potente, who traded her red locks for blond to play a nurse who works in a mental ward and has a freak chance encounter with a mysterious stranger (Benno Furmann) after she's run over by a truck and he gives her a life-saving emergency tracheotomy. Like all good Tykwer characters, though, Potente believes there's no such thing as a chance encounter and seeks Furmann out after she's recovered, but finds that he's just as damaged emotionally as she was physically.
For some filmmakers that could be the whole story, but for Tykwer it's only the beginning of a complex relationship that is complicated even further by the bank heist that Furmann's brother (Joachim Krol) talks him into as a way of financing their long-discussed getaway to Australia. When the heist goes wrong, Furmann winds up hiding out at the mental hospital where Potente works and doesn't have a hard time fitting in with the other patients, although there are some who don't take too kindly to the interloper. The ones with the strongest attachment to her are the intense Lars Rudolph (who played the bank teller in Run Lola Run), who's harboring a serious crush that borders on obsession, and blind boy Melchior Beslon (who later appeared in Tykwer's segment of Paris, je t'aime), who takes drastic measures when he thinks she's rejected him. And then there's the violence-prone Ludger Pistor, who may or may not be her father (just like his bank guard character in Run Lola Run). As in the earlier film, Tykwer leaves that up to the audience to figure out.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
I am trusting you with a mission that is risky and of maximum importance.
I'm not entirely certain how 1954's The Island Monster (or Il Mostro dell'isola as it's known in the original Italian) qualifies as a "Drive-In Movie Classic" apart from the presence of Boris Karloff in the cast, but I guess that's enough for some people. Co-written and directed by Roberto Montero (based on a story by Tickle Me Carlo Lombardo), the movie takes place on the Isle of Ischia off the coast of Naples, where mustachioed treasury agent Renato Vicario has been sent to smash an international drug smuggling ring. That covers The Island part, but there's no actual Monster unless you count Karloff, who poses as a philanthropist running a charity children's hospital, but is actually the smugglers' ringleader. Of course, it should be obvious he's up to no good since he spends most of the film in a Gilligan hat.
Actually, the real monsters are the ones who worked behind the scenes. Not just Montero, who pads scenes out mercilessly, but also whoever was responsible for the dubbing, which is positively atrocious (even Karloff sounds like he's dubbed by a guy doing a mediocre Karloff impression), and the sound editing, which is choppy even for a low-budget movie. The padding is what really saps the film of its energy, though. It's as if Montero had a "we shot this and we're going to use every single foot of it" mentality. Listen, that's fine for a rough assembly, Roberto, but haven't you ever heard of the concepts of pacing or tightening?
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Everything they do is to keep us in our place.
After half a decade spent writing scripts for established directors like Sydney Pollack (The Yakuza), Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver) and Brian De Palma (Obsession), Paul Schrader stepped behind the camera to make 1978's Blue Collar, which he wrote with his brother Leonard. An assured debut, it stars Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto as three Detroit autoworkers who are all feeling the squeeze in different ways (the I.R.S. is breathing down Pryor's neck, Keitel is working two jobs and still can't make ends meet, Kotto is an ex-convict) and hatch a plan to knock over their local union's safe. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't contain the big payday they were hoping for, but there is a ledger with evidence of the union's corruption, which they decide to use for blackmail purposes. It doesn't take long for their scheme to get them in over their heads, though, and for their friendship to be put to the test.
An unjustly overlooked classic from the tail end of Hollywood's Decade Under the Influence, Blue Collar also features Ed Begley Jr. in a supporting role as a green lineman and Tracey Walter in a walk-on as a union member. I got to see it courtesy of Encore Drama, but it would have been nice if it had been letterboxed. Too bad the DVD (which includes a commentary by Schrader) is long out of print -- a condition shared by a good number of Schrader's other films. I wonder, will Criterion come to their rescue, too?
Monday, January 19, 2009
People who try to hang onto their individuality always come to a bad end.
Six years after co-starring in The Producers, Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder teamed up again for the American Film Theatre production of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Directed by Tom O'Horgan, who was best known for bringing Hair to Broadway and who died last week at the age of 84, the film takes a great many liberties with Ionesco's play (in fact, Julian Barry's screenplay drops sizable chunks of dialogue in order to make way for lots of physical comedy and an ill-advised dream sequence), but it still retains its core messages about the dangers of complacency and the struggle to maintain one's individuality in an absurd society. Sure, I would have preferred it if more of the play (a personal favorite of mine since high school) had remained intact, but I'm glad the filmmakers refrained from showing any actual rhinoceroses on screen. Metaphors have a way of losing their potency when they're made literal.
In contrast to his brash character in The Producers, Mostel plays a bit of a dandy here (actually, more than a bit of one), and Wilder's turn as a scruffy drunk must have been great preparation for his role as Jim, the washed-up gunfighter in Blazing Saddles. The film also features Karen Black as the secretary at the accounting office where Wilder works (and the object of his desire), with Joe Silver (who was previously only known to me from his roles in David Cronenberg's Shivers and Rabid) and Robert Weil (a veteran character actor who hadn't changed a bit when he played the mail room boss in the Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy 20 years later) as two bickering accountants, and Percy Rodrigues (a respected actor and voice-over artist who voiced, among other things, the Loknar in Heavy Metal) as their boss, whose attempts to get some work out of his employees are thwarted by the epidemic of people turning into rhinos that is sweeping the city. The standout scene, though, has to be the one where Mostel transforms right before Wilder's disbelieving eyes -- and without the aid of camera tricks or makeup effects. The way he commits to his performance -- as only Mostel can -- is truly something to behold.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
I can't tell you how upset I'll be if you lie to me.
It may be hard to believe, but it was 20 years ago this week that Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape was first shown at the Sundance Film Festival. (The IMDb says it premiered on January 20, but according to Soderbergh's published diary its first public screening was on January 22, so... I guess I jumped the gun a little. Thanks for the misinformation, IMDb.) At any rate, the film won the Audience Award at Sundance, was awarded the Golden Palm at Cannes four months later, made a tidy sum of money at the box office and was nominated for and won a raft of awards at the end of the year. Oh, yes. And it changed independent film forever. That's a lot of baggage for what is essentially a four-hander about marital infidelity and the myriad ways people communicate with and lie to each other, but Sex, Lies is resilient enough to withstand it.
Written, directed and edited by Soderbergh, the film stars James Spader (who won Best Actor at Cannes) as a drifter with a fetish for videotaping women talking about sex who drifts back into the life of old friend Peter Gallagher when he returns home to Baton Rouge after nine years on the road. There he also drifts into the lives of Gallagher's neurotic wife (Andie MacDowell) and her sexually liberated sister (Laura San Giacomo), with whom Gallagher is having a torrid affair. There are other, very minor characters in the film, but Soderbergh keeps such a tight focus on his four leads that when anybody else speaks it's something of a shock. One could almost imagine this being put on as a play, but then you'd miss out on Soderbergh's artful compositions and steady hand at the editing table. (Soderbergh also edited his next two films, the M.I.A.-on-DVD Kafka and King of the Hill, but didn't do so again until 2002's Solaris, when he started using the pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard.)
Another element that adds to the film's effectiveness is Cliff Martinez's ambient score, his first of many for Soderbergh. The film also cemented his relationships with producer John Hardy, who stuck with him through the lean times of the mid-'90s, and sound editor/re-recordist Larry Blake, who has had an immeasurable influence on his work over the past two decades. With Che currently in theaters (and hopefully coming somewhere close to me at some point), The Girlfriend Experience premiering at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and The Informant due out later this year, there's probably never been a more exciting time to be a Soderbergh fan.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
I'm telling you something big is happening here, and all that grabs you is my language?
By the time he made 1989's Dead Bang, John Frankenheimer's '60s heyday was long behind him, but the crime thriller film definitely played to his strengths as an action director. It's essentially a star vehicle for Don Johnson, who plays a harried Los Angeles homicide detective with a knack for rubbing people the wrong way with his abrasive manner and unorthodox methods. Estranged from his wife, who's gone to the trouble of taking out a restraining order against him, up to his eyeballs in debt, and living under an airport flightpath, Johnson is far from a happy camper even before he's charged with bringing in a racially motivated cop killer who also shot a convenience store owner the day before Christmas.
Throughout the course of his investigation (which he mostly conducts solo, I guess because no one in the LAPD wants to be partners with him), Johnson antagonizes just about everyone he encounters, including the slain cop's wife (Penelope Ann Miller, who's second-billed but essentially disappears from the film after only a few scenes), milquetoast parole officer Bob Balaban (who's rather put out about being shanghaied by Johnson on Christmas morning), by-the-books federal agent William Forsythe (who has a way of just showing up wherever Johnson's trail leads him), and police psychiatrist Michael Jeter (who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Woody Allen). About the only person he respects in the whole film is Colorado police chief Tim Reid, who helps him conduct the climactic raid on a neo-Nazi compound where Johnson believes his man is holed up. The white supremacist angle, by the way, is pretty much the only thing that sets this apart from other rogue cop films of the era (it even has the requisite pulsing synthesizer score), but there are worse ways to pass 102 minutes.
It sure is good to talk to you, Henry, because I know you're not judgmental or anything like that.
Back in October when I was watching serial killer movies, one that I really wanted to see but wasn't able to because it was rented at the time was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Completed in 1986 and screened at the Chicago International Film Festival that same year, its release was held up for several years because the film's producers didn't think there was a market for such a downbeat film. What they didn't realize was that director John McNaughton (who also co-wrote the script with Richard Fire, who -- like Stuart Gordon -- came out of Chicago's Organic Theater Company) had captured something very unique and disturbing and that his Portrait would reach an audience if given a chance.
Set in and around Chicago, the film stars Michael Rooker as the titular serial killer, who moves in with his degenerate prison buddy Otis (Tom Towles) after he's released and resumes his extracurricular activities without hesitation. At first we only see the results of his handiwork, but once he starts indoctrinating Otis into the lifestyle and they acquire a videocamera to record themselves, McNaughton doesn't shy away from their depraved acts. Meanwhile, Otis's sister Becky (Tracy Arnold), who's staying with him to get away from her abusive husband, tries to build a tentative relationship with Henry. This is, of course, doomed from the start, but she has no way of knowing that.
Henry was shot for very little money on an extremely tight budget and schedule, which makes its quality all the more remarkable. And instead of detracting from it, the look obtained by shooting in 16 mm and blowing up the negative to 35 mm enhances the film's gritty realism. Granted, not everybody's going to see that as a virtue in a movie about an unrepentant serial killer (who, it must be said, never seems in danger of being caught), but there's a reason why this film has gone on to be a cult favorite and Rooker and Towles continue to be in-demand character actors. For the duration of the film, they make you believe they're actually capable of the terrible things they do.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
What you are about to see is not for the weak. It is, in fact, not even for the strong.
When Michael O'Donoghue left Saturday Night Live at the end of its third season, NBC gave him carte blanche to do his own late-night comedy special, largely because he had been one of the show's head writers and most distinctive voices. What the suits didn't anticipate was what an unfettered O'Donoghue (along with his co-writers Mitch Glazer, Emily Prager and Dirk Wittenborn) was likely to produce, which turned out to be Mr. Mike's Mondo Video, a program that was roundly rejected by network censors and, after some retooling, found a second life as a would-be midnight movie in 1979, then a third life on home video a few years later. That video has become increasingly harder to find over the years, but now that Shout! Factory has brought it to DVD, just in time for its 30th anniversary, maybe it has yet another life in it. Stranger things have happened.
A parody of outre '60s shockumentary Mondo Cane and its ilk, Mr. Mike's Mondo Video is almost indescribable in terms of its mind-blowing bizarreness. The sort of film that has a polarizing effect on its audience, you either love it or hate it; it's hard to feel indifferent about it. Personally, I think it's brilliant, even if some segments do go on a bit too long -- the residual effect of having been edited with commercial breaks in mind -- but there's always some crazy non sequitur (my personal favorite: "Gig Young's groceries.") just around the corner, not to mention appearances by SNL stars Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Bill Murray, Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner, and ringers like Carrie Fisher, Teri Garr, Debbie Harry and Margot Kidder (who all contribute to the "American Gals Love Creeps" segment). Then there are the indelible musical interludes by Sid Vicious (whose rendition of "My Way" is presented without sound because the copyright holders balked at its inclusion) and Klaus Nomi (performing one of his space mutant operatic arias to a partially befuddled audience).
It's tempting to say Mr. Mike's Mondo Video has something for everyone, but to do so would ignore the fact that there are plenty of people out there who could watch it and get nothing out of it. (Take for example the 40 IMDb users who have seen fit to bestow one star on it, easily outnumbering the 34 of us who have rated it a 10.) That said, those who like their comedy with an edge -- and which runs the risk of going over it -- will find plenty to like here. And they'll never be able to look at Dan Aykroyd the same way again...
Sunday, January 25, 2009
You want me to rescue an old girlfriend who's shacked up with another guy? Thanks a lot.
After the runaway success of 48 Hours, which he co-wrote and directed, Walter Hill cashed in his chips and made Streets of Fire, a heavily stylized urban action-adventure yarn in the mold of his earlier film The Warriors. The main difference is that film was set firmly in the present day whereas this looks like a head-on collision between the '50s and MTV, which the opening titles attempt to gloss over by saying it's set in "another time, another place." The other claim they make is that this is "a rock and roll fable," which is clearly not what audiences wanted to see in 1984, the year Streets of Fire failed to catch fire at the box office. I can't imagine why.
Oh, yeah. It probably has something to do with the way Michael Paré takes the lead role of mercenary-for-hire Tom Cody and turns him into a complete nonentity. Of course, he doesn't get much help from Hill and co-writer Larry Gross, who saddle all of the characters with trite dialogue and transparent motivations that leave little room for depth or believability. That extends to Diane Lane as the hot young singer kidnapped by Willem Dafoe and his leather-clad biker goons, Rick Moranis as her boyfriend/manager (with the unfortunate moniker Billy Fish), who hires Paré to rescue her without realizing they used to be an item, and Amy Madigan as the tomboy ex-soldier who signs on as his right-hand woman. Once Paré, Madigan and Moranis venture by car into the Battery (a trip that somehow takes ten hours) to find Lane, the clichés come fast and furious and any pretense of realism goes completely out the window (not that it was very strong to begin with).
The film also features Bill Paxton as a pompadoured bartender, Lee Ving (who was soon to play Mr. Boddy in Clue) as Dafoe's head goon, Ed Begley Jr. as a streetwise bum, and Robert Townsend as one quarter of the vocal group whose bus Paré and company commandeer at one point. Naturally the group uses the opportunity to impress Lane with their vocal stylings and wind up as her opening act, singing "I Can Dream About You," which was a top 10 hit for Dan Hartman in 1984 -- and pretty much the only successful thing to come out of the entire film. Incidentally, this was apparently intended to be the first part of a trilogy of action films starring Michael Pare, but for some reason that didn't pan out. I wonder why.
Monday, January 26, 2009
It's tough getting help. Nobody wants to take care of old people.
Grown men donning gorilla suits is a running theme in a number of cult films, from 1966's Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment with David Warner to 1972's The Ruling Class with Peter O'Toole. In between came 1970's Where's Poppa? -- a question frequently asked by a senile Ruth Gordon of her exasperated son George Segal. Directed by Carl Reiner from a screenplay by Robert Klane (based on his own novel), the fast-paced comedy opens with Segal giving his mother a gorilla wake-up call in an attempt to scare her to death, but Gordon's a feisty old lady (as she would show the following year in cult favorite Harold & Maude) and she's not about to go down without a fight.
The turning point for Segal comes when he's interviewing prospective nurses and falls in love at first sight with applicant Trish Van Devere, who is equally smitten with him. Before he can even broach the idea of putting Gordon into a home, though, his brother Rob Leibman (who's in the habit of getting mugged in Central Park every night) reminds him of the promise their father extracted from him on his death bed. (Actually, there were two: he had to finish law school and promise never to put his mother in a home. Of course, Segal's law degree isn't doing him much good since he can't concentrate on his cases.) Clearly something has to give -- either Gordon's heart or Segal's sanity, and Segal's sanity isn't looking too good.
The film also features Rob Reiner and Vincent Gardenia as two of Segal's neglected clients, Barnard Hughes as an army colonel whose courtroom testimony had to be heard to be believed, Garrett Morris as one of Leibman's regular muggers, Paul Sorvino as the owner of an old folks home Segal looks into at one point, and Tom Atkins as the police officer in one of his fantasies. (Penny Marshall can be glimpsed as one of the spectators during Reiner's trial.) And I find it interesting that screenwriter Robert Klane returned to the well two decades later with the 1992 comedy-drama Folks! in which yuppie Tom Selleck has to deal with senile father Don Ameche. Not interesting enough for me to ever watch it, though.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
It was a different time, you must remember. A time which produced a different breed of men.
Watching 99 and 44/100% Dead a couple weeks back reminded me that I still had a few holes to fill in John Frankenheimer's '70s output. One of them was 1971's The Horsemen, which was written for the screen by Dalton Trumbo (who also penned Frankenheimer's 1968 film The Fixer) and set in modern-day Afghanistan. (Well, modern-day for 1971.) The film is essentially a hiss-fest between champion chapandaz (or horseman) Omar Sharif and his legendary father Jack Palance, who is overbearing simply because he's played by Jack Palance. The story is set in motion when Palance sends Sharif and his prize stallion to Kabul to take part in the Royal Buzkashi, a violent sport in which men on horseback play tug of war with a headless calf and whip each other relentlessly. Now that's entertainment!
The Buzkashi isn't the only scene in the film that would give the SPCA pause. We're also witness to a camel fight, a chick fight (which is mercifully not lingered upon), an oiled-up man fight (ditto) and a ram fight. With all the animal fights going on and people gathered around betting on them, you'd think nobody in Afghanistan actually has to work. Well, one person who sees no end of work is Sharif's faithful servant, played by David de Keyser, but he wavers during the arduous journey home from the tournament when nomad woman Leigh Taylor-Young (who's about as convincing as Jean Simmons was in Powell & Pressburger's Black Narcissus) comes between them. Not exactly a love triangle for the ages, especially since Sharif considers Taylor-Young "untouchable" and treats her with utter contempt.
On a lighter note, the film features the always-welcome Peter Jeffrey (who later played the sultan in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) as the kind of smooth talker one should know not to bet against. He lifts every scene he's in, which makes me wonder how much better the overall film would be if it didn't take itself so bloody seriously. What it probably needed was the touch of a John Huston, but he was otherwise engaged.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice, baby.
The Independent Film Channel had a Pam Grier blaxploitation double feature tonight, so I took the opportunity to catch up on two of her most iconic roles. First came 1974's Foxy Brown, in which Grier goes after the syndicate that killed her boyfriend (Terry Carter), a undercover government agent who had to get plastic surgery after testifying against them. Grier also has a bone to pick with them for roping her brother Link (the inimitable Antonio Fargas) into numbers running and coke dealing, and poses as a model named Misty Collins to infiltrate the high-class prostitution ring of Miss Katherine (Kathryn Loder) and her lover (Peter Brown, who played one of juvenile delinquents in Kitten with a Whip a decade earlier).
Written and directed by Jack Hill, Foxy Brown features abundant nudity and violence (at one point Grier even takes on an entire lesbian bar), and plenty of scenes where she uses her wits to get herself out of dangerous situations. She's also not above using her ample powers of seduction to get her way, like when she targets pilot Sid Haig, who brings the syndicate's drugs up from Mexico. Suffice it to say, once he has his run-in with Foxy, he's no longer in a position to keep the supply lines open.
1973's Coffy, which was also written and directed by Jack Hill, hits on many of the same themes and motifs as Foxy Brown -- drugs, prostitution, corruption in high places -- only this time Grier plays a nurse who's out for revenge against the syndicate that hooked her 11-year-old sister on drugs and put her former boyfriend, honest cop William Elliott, in the hospital when he refused to go on the take. This time she poses a Jamaican call girl named Mystique to get to big-time pimp/drug pusher King George (Robert DoQui), who supplies the exotic escorts for Italian gangster Allan Arbus. Sid Haig also pops up again, this time as one of Arbus's underlings, who comes to a bad end under a highway overpass. His characters always seemed to have a weakness for Grier's seduction techniques.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Nobody takes the mafia for this kind of money and lives to tell about it.
Those who know Walter Matthau only from his comedy work may not realize that he was equally adept at straight drama and on occasion could even be convincingly menacing. One such occasion was 1973's Charley Varrick, in which he plays the title character, a struggling crop duster pilot who spearheads a small-town bank robbery that nets him $750,000 in mafia money that he doesn't want because he knows what they'll do to get it back. In this case, bank president John Vernon sets pipe-smoking hit man Joe Don Baker after Matthau and the money, bringing to mind Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men (just as Vernon's presence brings to mind Point Blank).
The film also features Andrew Robinson (who previously played the Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry) as one of Matthau's accomplices, who proves to be a bit of a hothead, Felicia Farr (a.k.a. Mrs. Jack Lemmon) as Vernon's secretary, which seems like a thankless role at first but has its benefits later on, and Norman Fell (who was still a few years away from being Mr. Roper on Three's Company) as the district attorney eager to catch the bank robbers. Incidentally, Charley Varrick brands his crop dusting company as "The Last of the Independents," which was also the working title of the film. In light of his idiosyncratic career -- working within the studio system while still making his films his way -- it's easy to see why Siegel would have identified with him.
In here, in a room like this room, you find something about yourself.
Eager to shed his James Bond image after Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery jumped straight into the role of a detective sergeant on the edge of a nervous breakdown in 1972's The Offence. Directed by Sidney Lumet (who had also directed him in The Anderson Tapes the year before and The Hill six years before that) and written by John Hopkins (based on his own play), the film sees Connery grappling with a series of child molestations that has upset his equilibrium, so when he takes it upon himself to interrogate their suspect he goes too far, but Lumet takes his time in revealing just how far is too far.
The film opens with a hypnotic slow-motion sequence that shows the result of Connery's interrogation before it jumps back to show what happened in the hours leading up to it. Afterward we see flashes of the terrible things he's seen during his time on the force (with Lumet using the same kind of impressionistic editing that he had previously put to use in 1964's The Pawnbroker), which are the sorts of things that would cause anybody to come unhinged. Throughout the film, Connery gives a fearless performance, which is matched by Trevor Howard as the detective superintendent investigating his conduct, Vivien Merchant as the wife who offers to help him, and Ian Bannen as the suspect who sizes him up and determines that he's beyond help. Word to the wise: if a suspected child molester pities you, then you know you're in trouble.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Rome was not built in a day, opposition will come your way.
Killed two birds with one stone tonight with 1972's The Harder They Come, which was featured in both Danny Peary's Cult Movies and J. Hoberman & Jonathan Rosenbaum's Midnight Movies. The first feature film produced in Jamaica, it was an early mainstay of the midnight movie circuit and its cult status has remained intact ever since, so much so that it was shown on TCM Underground just a couple months ago. I've had it on tape ever since, just waiting for the right time to dig it out and watch it. Tonight was the right time.
Co-written and directed by Perry Henzell and produced under the auspices of Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, the film stars reggae sensation Jimmy Cliff (who also wrote many of the songs, including the anthemic title track and the soulful "Many Rivers to Cross") as an aspiring singer from the country who comes to Kingston to make his fortune and finds deceit around every corner. When he finally gets the chance to cut a record, he's forced to sign over the rights to the corrupt producer for a lousy $20. Then, after turning to the ganja trade to make some fast money, he kills a cop and goes on the run, becoming a kind of folk hero as his single climbs the charts. It's the Jamaican Dream come true, but it's hard to do a follow-up to a hit record when you're a wanted man.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Let's skip the build-up, get down to the main event.
After watching The Harder They Come last night, it only seemed natural for me to follow it up with The Harder They Fall today. Made in 1956, it was director Mark Robson's second crack at a boxing noir (after 1949's Champion) and features Humphrey Bogart (in his last screen appearance) as a washed-up sportswriter hired by crooked fight promoter Rod Steiger to build up a South American heavyweight billed as "The Wild Man of the Andes" who's really a total pushover. Bogart's looking to make a big score, though, so he checks his conscience at the door and in the process estranges wife Jan Sterling, who watches helplessly from ringside. The trouble is the young fighter (Mike Lane, who is an imposing 6'8" and was a professional wrestler before he turned to acting) is such a trusting soul that Bogart can't help but do the right thing in the end. It just takes him a while to figure out what the right thing is.
Hey, man. I don't give a shit. I just wanna wrestle.
Finally got to see The Wrestler, which has been in general release for a month and a half but only just showed up here in Bloomington. A powerful and ultimately moving character study, the film features a career-best performance by Mickey Rourke as Randy 'The Ram' Robinson, a professional wrestler who's 20 years past his prime and very much the worse for wear. Not only does he need to wear a hearing aid and eyeglasses, but he has to work part-time at a grocery store just to make ends meet and he has a hard time doing even that since he routinely finds himself locked out of his own trailer for failing to pay the rent.
About the only things he lives for are his weekend wrestling matches -- during which he takes a lot of physical abuse, but the cheering crowds make him feel like a champion -- and his visits with stripper Marisa Tomei, with whom he tries to build a tentative relationship. Then he has a heart attack after a particularly gruesome match, which forces him to reassess his lifestyle choice and priorities. One thing his near-death experience spurs him on to do is to attempt to reconnect with his estranged daughter Evan Rachel Wood, who would just as soon not have to deal with him at all. (We never meet his ex-wife, but it's safe to assume she feels the same way.) The film also features Todd Barry as the grocery store manager who always has a disparaging word to say about Rourke's chosen profession, and Ernest Miller as "The Ayatollah," who comes out of retirement for a 20th anniversary rematch with him.
The film was directed by Darren Aronofsky, who continues to impress me with every new film he puts out, and written by Robert Siegel, former editor in chief of The Onion whose directorial debut Big Fan premiered at Sundance earlier this month. As for The Wrestler, it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and is nominated from Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Awards. The two Oscar nods (Rourke for Best Actor and Tomei for Best Supporting Actress) are probably what convinced the studio to give it a wider release, though. Frankly, I don't care why it happened. I'm just glad it did.
Back to December 2008 -- Onward to February 2009
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