Lost in the Frame

Jesus' Son

2009-11-10T19:17:00.001-08:00

Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton in Jesus' Son (dir. Alison Maclean, 1999).

Billy Crudup and Jack Black.

Denis Johnson's 1992 book of short stories Jesus' Son not only leaves its narrator unnamed, but it leaves open to question whether this narrator is in fact the same from story to story. It's easy to see why so many readers assume it is. The voice throughout goes back and forth between various levels of heroin-addledness, which one can reasonably imagine as representing one person at different stages of deterioration or (partial) recovery. But it's never made explicit. This narrative structure is crucial to the book's power: the very notion of continuous identity is one of the commonplaces rendered unreliable or even moot by the destructive force of addiction. Similarly, even if we decide the speaker is the same, it's not clear that the order of the stories is chronological. They could well represent randomized memories of a life in irreparable disorder.

These are the main reasons that Alison Maclean's 1999 movie version utterly fails as a whole, despite the impressiveness of many of its parts. The decision to treat the book as a novel with an unequivocally consistent central character is disastrous (though it would have been equally disastrous to come down explicitly on the other possibility, that the characters are different, and it may be that the book is simply unfilmable). It's always a bad sign when a film adapted from a book relies heavily on voiceovers of speech lifted directly from the original text, and in this case the offense is particularly grave. Though probably no one could pull this off, Billy Crudup has no idea what to do with Johnson's gnomically elliptical prose. He tries to make it sound natural, even jaunty: big mistake. It's not natural, it's literary. It's not a script for performance, not a realistic facsimile of someone's interior monologue, but a deft superimposition of a pointed authorial sensibility onto characters who, if they were real, might well not even share much of that author's vocabulary. In the same way, the decision to render the discrete stories as a continuous arc of dramatic crisis eventuating in cathartic self-realization flattens out Johnson's far more challenging avoidance of obvious sequentiality.

Where the Wild Things Are

2009-10-31T09:41:00.000-07:00

A wild thing with James Gandolfini's voice and Max Records in Where the Wild Things Are (dir. Spike Jonze, 2009).

J. Hoberman, in his Village Voice review, refers to Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are as a group therapy session with muppets, and that's not inaccurate. For Hoberman this is a problem, but to my mind, Dave Eggers' script is the most engaging application of neurosis as an impressionistic medium since early Woody Allen. A word I might use to describe the film is "druggy," which is also usually an insult. But these are really weird, powerful drugs that leave the viewer--this viewer, anyway--in an emotionally complex state.

Sendak's book was never much on my personal canon; I always thought of it as slight and ponderous at the same time, too infused with what seemed to me like pop Jungianism and cheap primitivism--which is sort of impressive, considering that there can't be fifty words in the whole thing. But you know, it was just a kid's book, so no big deal. The pictures were pretty. Eggers' script, however, takes the dated psychological undertone of the text and turns it inside out, using the threadbare therapeutic allegory as satirically baroque wallpaper. The satire is never harsh or overly cynical, so the resultant tone is a poignant mixture of farce and elegy. Says Carol (James Gandolfini), walking with Max through a desert that symbolizes the sadness of a young person's first apprehensions of universal entropy, rocks turning to sand, and sand to dust, "I don't even know what comes after dust."

The weakest moments in the script are the two or three instances in which Sendak's words are pasted reverently into the dialogue (e.g., "Let the wild rumpus begin," or "I'll eat you up, I love you so." Other than this, the overall mood of sloppy beauty is immensely moving. A lovely film.

Drag Me to Hell

2009-10-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

Adriana Barraza, a goat, and Alison Lohman in Drag Me to Hell (dir. Sam Raimi, 2009).

Commercial horror with the vicious glee and exuberant silliness of an EC comic. Sam Raimi appears, on the evidence of interviews, to believe that his little film carries a moral message. This proves only that one does not have to be very deep to make a good movie. If we take Raimi seriously, we have to conclude that he has the moral vision of a radical Protestant bolshevik, and frankly he's not that complex a thinker. The "morality" of this story is really just stylized cruelty wound up tight like a mousetrap programmed to snap at well-timed intervals, which is the only thing that really makes it more interesting than any other PG-13 horror comedy. Because the main character is a loan officer who rejects an old lady's plea for an extension on her house payment, some reviewers read the film as a thoughtful socio-economic critique of some sort. Again, forget it. It's nothing but base carnival spookhouse manipulation that only asks to be taken seriously at the climactic moment--making that the funniest moment of all.

Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

2009-08-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

Miyuki Takeda in Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 [Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974] (dir. Kazuo Hara, 1974).

The intensity of some films makes one not only overlook their technical limitations, but embrace them as essential to its vision. Throughout most of Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, which was shot on bargain-basement home equipment, the voice synch isn't even close enough to be considered synch, and whole scenes, including a crucial one, are entirely out of focus. It's impossible to ignore these distractions--and they are distractions. There's no way to construe them as intentional, or even as accidental enhancements, in any direct aesthetic sense. But what one is aware of is the length to which one is willing to go to overlook the glitches, as though peering out a hotel room window at night, willing away the darkness and the noise of the traffic, voyeuristically trying to make out what's going on in the room across the street. The obstructions are not a means of invention for the artist, but a sacrifice the viewer is willing to make--and having made that sacrifice, our involvement is deeper.

Miyuki Takeda, the subject of Kazuo Hara's film (and of his own romantic obsession), is anamorphically chimeric: she is complex, and brutally simple; passionate, and cold; nurturing, and hard; sympathetic, and repellent; radically feminist, and thoroughly colonized by patriarchal ideology; quixotic, and realist to the point of cynicism. That is, she is real in a way that can never be fully captured by fiction. She drives Hara to tears on camera, and it's irrelevant whether we think she is cruel, or he is a sap, or both, or neither. "Character" dissolves into medium, and morality is transformed into memory. We feel the death that fills in the space behind each human experience like curtains of black ink, and that death sobers us out of judgment.

The streets and ports of seventies Okinawa are correlatives to both Takeda's toughness and Hara's sentiment. They are never picturesque, never lyrical, even in a noirish sense. They are just fleeting splashes of the historical Real, left as stains on film. Similarly, the two live births that are the culmination of the documentary defy any habitually conditioned emotional response. Takeda's relationship to children is somehow central to the film's "dramatic" movement, but by the end, all that can happen within that structureless structure is an overflowing or outpouring, a release of new life that is neither particularly hopeful nor particularly fatalistic. The final images of Takeda soaking in a tub full of babies arrest whatever prejudicial impulses might still be left flickering in the viewer's brain, and replace them with a simultaneously frightening and exhilarating readiness to see what new meanings can be forged there.

Pit and the Pendulum

2009-05-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

Barbara Steele in Pit and the Pendulum (dir. Roger Corman, 1961).

Larry Turner as the young Don Medina.

Vincent Price.

The second of Roger Corman's eight or so Poe adaptations (depending on which ones you count as actually having anything to do with Poe). Richard Matheson again supplies the script, as he did for House of Usher the previous year.

Corman's Poe films have been celebrated often and vigorously, and for good reason. They are models of just how much visual and emotional power can be generated on a relatively low budget, and without worrying too much about things like logic, continuity, or decent acting. Barbara Steele (star of such horror-sleaze milestones as The Maniacs, Terror Creatures from the Grave, 8½, etc.) is perfectly cast for such an enterprise: nearly rangeless as an actress, and creepy looking in a really hot way. And Vincent Price, of course, transcends conventional definitions of talent altogether. As the tortured Nicholas Medina, he gives a masterful portrayal of simpering guilt that slides abruptly into psychotic mayhem. The rest of the cast could be replaced by bookshelves wearing clothes, but the total effect is so good it doesn't matter.

The title contraption is all that remains of Poe's story (actually, that's all there really is to Poe's story). The rest is stock gothic plot elements woven into a flimsy and familiar shape: Nicholas's beautiful young wife Elizabeth (Steele) has died suddenly, and there are fears that she may have been buried alive. Elizabeth's brother (Michael Kerr) arrives from England laden with suspicions. Nicholas's doctor (Antony Carbone) and sister (Luana Anders) supply additional occasions for purple dialogue and advancement of the narrative, such as it is. But from start to finish, somehow, it offers everything one can reasonably ask of it, and the final shot is one of the great moments in horror cinema.

One more thing I have to add, speaking from purely poetic interest: I love the way the film omits the first article in the original title ("The Pit and the Pendulum") while retaining the second. It defies grammatical sense, and should by all rights never have made it past whoever was in charge of looking out for those things (well, there you go, I guess). And it's perfect. Any parallels out there that anyone else can think of?

The colorful title effects.

The Wrestler

2009-02-07T16:44:00.000-08:00

Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2008).

Mickey Rourke has never been one of my favorite actors, and it's odd that this stale dirty-realist draaaaama should show him to best advantage. He gives himself entirely over to the role of Randy "the Ram" Robinson, a wrestler who was big in the eighties and still clings to the decade's hair-metal ethic for dear life. The film gets just the right grainy look, and for the first twenty minutes or so, you're ready to believe that The Wrestler will plunge Cassavetes-like into the quotidian depths of its subject matter's spandexy squalor. But Darren Aronofsky is no Cassavetes, and after the insanely gnarly barbed wire and staple gun scene, which is almost worthy of Gummo, it's mostly clumsy emotion-wringing about the wrestler's relationship with his estranged daughter and the stripper with a heart of gold who tries to help him straighten out his life. (The stripper, by the way, is Marisa Tomei, whom I refuse to stop thinking of as my favorite actress despite not being sure if she can really act or not.) There are a couple of scenes with Rourke working behind the meat counter of a supermarket that nearly redeem the otherwise patience-testing stretches of generic triteness.

Top Ten Films of 2008

2009-01-12T16:28:00.000-08:00

This year's list took some padding and slippery conceptualization before it would satisfy me. If it had been a list of just comedies, it would have been easy to complete: many of the top ten are comedies, and I would have felt OK about including Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Role Models, Semi-Pro, Baby Mama, The House Bunny, Ghost Town, and maybe even Tropic Thunder and the fatally flawed Zack & Miri Make a Porno (not What Happens in Vegas, though). None of these, however, felt quite strong enough in the context of a general list of all the new films I saw during the year. I'm not quite sure what principle I'm appealing to in this distinction. But finally, the ones that made the cut did so on the basis of how strong my combined emotional and intellectual reaction was to them, and as a result, how often I thought about them after seeing them. Note: there are still quite a few prominent releases from 2008 that I haven't seen yet (e.g., Milk), so it's possible that this list could be modified in the weeks ahead.

10. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (dir. Guillermo del Toro). I don't remember much of this one now, but I know that when I saw it I was impressed by the sensuous energy of its fantasticality: the kind of thing Terry Gilliam always aims for (when Gilliam hits, it's only because he uses a shotgun). It was drowned out by the thunderous release, a couple days later, of The Dark Knight, and it deserves some recognition.

9. The Happening (dir. M. Night Shyamalan). "Best" must be carefully qualified here. Like a lot of other viewers, I was at times slack-jawed at what was either ineptitude or tonal inscrutability on the part of almost everyone involved in this bizarre, dreary, eco-Jeremiad. But it has stuck with me. Some of the images have the irrational, troubling aura of nightmare, somehow made all the more eerie by virtue of their blank execution.

8. Synecdoche, New York (dir. Charlie Kaufman). This would be either higher or lower on the list if I could decide whether it adequately critiques the middle-class white-male subjectivity it privileges, and whether it makes a difference even if it does. I think maybe I only put it on here at all because I just really like synecdoche.

7. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (dir. Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg). Crass, unfocused, and adolescent. Anyone got a problem with that? Rob Corddry wipes his ass with the Bill of Rights. Enough said.

6. Gran Torino (dir. Clint Eastwood). In his late seventies, Eastwood is looking more and more like Bud, the domesticated zombie in George Romero's Day of the Dead. But he wears it well, that beautiful, beautiful psycho.

5. The Dark Knight (dir. Christopher Nolan). Batman Begins was elegant, but narrow and overly prosaic; The Dark Knight is a steam-shrouded juggernaut, a Wagnerian spectacle. Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is like an ultraviolent aria. Oh, the film's politics are screwed up. Well, if they weren't, it wouldn't be a very accurate reflection of the state of our collective military-industrial fantasy life, now would it?

4. Pineapple Express (dir. David Gordon Green). Gratifying buddy antics with Seth Rogen and James Franco. Part of what recommends this, I will admit, is simply the memory of the trailer, so expertly edited to M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" (which I don't believe actually plays in the movie itself).

3. Step Brothers (dir. Adam McKay). "I'll kiss you on the mouth, Kenny Rogers."

2. Appaloosa (dir. Ed Harris). Renée Zellweger is such a ho in this! And yet the film manages never to judge her. Rather, it makes her a central hub of sympathetic attention (without requiring her to move a muscle, really). And on top of that, it's just a fine old-school western: relaxed dialogue, tense physical confrontations, and bold, expressive vistas. Big cat sitting on a mountaintop, watching a train go by in the distance. Hallelujah.

1. Burn After Reading (dir. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen). The Coen Brothers squeeze into the number one spot for the second year in a row with their most pessimistic and contemptuous work to date. Burn After Reading is a grim downward spiral of a spy spoof that drags you around by the heels till your fingernails scrape off on the asphalt. It gleefully forces its cast to surrender all dignity, especially Brad Pitt and George Clooney. A cinematic tone poem blowing a shrill raspberry at the human species.

Gran Torino

2009-01-11T20:35:00.000-08:00

Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Brooke Chia Thao, Chee Thao, and Ahney Her in Gran Torino (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2008).

The critical controversy surrounding Gran Torino is that Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is a largely unrepentant racist: he calls the Hmong family living next door to him "gooks" and other unpleasant things, even after he develops fond feelings for them and befriends the directionless son, Thao (Bee Vang), who tries to steal his precious 1972 Gran Torino in a botched gang initiation rite. The ideological problem, in plain terms, is that Eastwood's character is depicted as simultaneously bigoted and likeable. Obviously this sends a clear message that racism is endearing, and as a result audience members will leave the theater hurling epithets at minorities and expecting that people will find it cute. A small percentage of viewers, it is true, may realize that it is a work of fiction and not an educational filmstrip on social etiquette.

It was pointed out to me after the movie by the people I watched it with that Bee Vang is a terrible actor. I guess this is true in retrospect, but it didn't bother me. He's such a likeable kid. The whole movie is immensely likeable. And if its likeability weren't in many ways troubling, it wouldn't be as resonant as it is.

At one point, Thao's sister Sue (Ahney Her) tells Walt that she wishes he had been her father. Her own father, she says, was "old school." Walt points out that he's old school too. "But you're an American," she replies. We're not told what that means exactly, but it's clearly supposed to be a good thing. I think it has something to do with allowing people (including oneself) to screw up. This is certainly presented as a major theme of the film, thus the subplot about Walt needing to go to confession so he can cast away the "burden" of the horrible things he did in the Korean War. And that's as good a way as any of describing what is best and worst about being American: the idea that you can be forgiven for just about anything, especially if you're charming enough.

As a director, Eastwood pushes the adjective "workmanlike" as close as it can get to "excellent." He's like Walt: he has a garage full of a bazillion tools specially made to cover just about any task that might come up. He has a masterful sense of detail, fluid narrative energy, restrained symbolic instincts--if at the end the total structure is still that of a 1980s made-for-TV movie, it is at least the one that you watch again whenever it is rerun. And as an actor, he is tops in his field (the field of stony, snarling, antisocial scarecrows who must one day make hard choices that are too big to be contained by their day-to-day moral world views, and that thus explode them). Like John Wayne, he embodies both the romantic and the repellent sides of conservatism at once. He performs jingoistic, self-destructive, guilt-ridden acts of paternalistic heroism for you so you don't have to get your hands bloody. In return, all he asks is that he gets to call you a pussy. I treasure the man. I can't help it.

Nutshell synopsis: combines the best aspects of About Schmidt and Death Wish.

Synecdoche, New York

2009-01-10T20:04:00.000-08:00

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Samantha Morton in Synecdoche, New York (dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2008).

The heading for one of the message board threads at the IMDb page for Synecdoche, New York reads, "Maybe this makes more sense to atheists."

Honey, nothing makes sense to atheists. That's the way we like it.

I am left deeply unsatisfied, nevertheless, by the incoherence of the frivolous Schenectady/synecdoche pun out of which I cannot but imagine the film initially sprang as an improvised whim. This dissatisfaction, in fact, is itself a synecdoche for my more general misgivings about Charlie Kaufman. Yes, I was entertained by the movie, even moved at times, but I could never quite get past the way it broadcast its sense of itself as the work of an intrepid junior genius. Prodigal precociousness became Being John Malkovich; a decade later, it smacks a little of wishful thinking.

And yet the perennially-on-fire apartment is a lovely metaphor, both humorous and haunting, and there are a number of these touches throughout.

Across the Bridge

2009-01-04T11:08:00.000-08:00

Rod Steiger in Across the Bridge (dir. Ken Annakin, 1957).

A businessman (Rod Steiger) fleeing to Mexico to avoid prosecution for financial corruption throws a fellow passenger off the train in order to assume his identity. Upon deboarding, he finds he has inherited the man's dog. From a short story by Graham Greene. Despite the slightly distracting feature of having lots of Mexicans played by British actors, a fine, taut drama with a Wellesian feel (more, probably, on account of the setting and theme than anything else--stylistically, it's closer to Hitchcock). The central narrative problem is how to make the gradual development of the man/dog relationship interesting without resorting to tired sentiment, and it's handled very intelligently. Steiger becomes more likeable as he starts to fall apart under the pressure of paranoia and guilt, even though there's never any overwrought "moral transformation."

Changeling

2008-12-23T09:37:00.001-08:00

Angelina Jolie in Changeling (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2008).

I usually like Clint Eastwood movies best when he's in them--his own presence serves to distract him from his over-inclination towards redemptive aureate radiances and/or somber grey existentialities. Not completely, but just enough to make those excesses seem like evocative backdrops rather than strained auteurial strivings. In Changeling, it falls upon Angelina Jolie to do the distracting, and she puts in a heroic day's work of it. I think Jolie is one of the small handful of present-day cinematic leads who could have flourished in the old Hollywood star system. Not so much on the basis of her looks, which are solid evidence of whatever evolutionary transitions have occurred in the species over the last three decades or so, but her unabashed self-glorifying gaze, her confident sense of herself as a strange and wonderful idol whose human feet are just for show: she doesn't really need them to glide around as she does.

As Christine Collins, the real-life mother of an abducted child in 1920s Los Angeles, Jolie doesn't so much display authentic human emotions as invent new ones, on the spot, as she faces the camera. It's never as moving or pathetic as a more traditionally mimetic depiction of the event would be; instead, it's fascinating in a mechanical way. The anguish and grief is there, but it's bracketed, subjugated to its function as a narrative torture device. And the torture is very effective. It wrings from the viewer a confession of sorts. That confession is that we enjoy witnessing the progress of others' pain, at least when it is schematized and coordinated into narrative. Confessions like this are invariably followed up with the prospect of absolution, and to the film's credit, it does not try to force this sell. It does, however, try to sneak some pamphlets in your pocket at the last minute.

Besides Jolie, the other visual focal point is the ridiculously beautiful recreation of 20s LA. It's more than we need for this story, but as ostentation, it's admirable as hell. One historical detail, however, has bothered me since seeing the film (about a month ago): at one point, Collins tells her son that there is a "sandwich in the Fridge" for him. This sounded anachronistic to me, so I did some Google-searching. Frigidaire was indeed already a popular brand by this point, but I couldn't find any evidence one way or the other as to whether the casual abbreviation "Fridge" was yet current. Anyone?

Moontide

2008-11-30T12:03:00.001-08:00

Ida Lupino in Moontide (dir. Archie L. Mayo [replacing Fritz Lang], 1942).

Jean Gabin as Bobo.

Alcoholic montage sequence courtesy of Dalí.

The massive publicity campaign undertaken by Twentieth Century-Fox to make French star Jean Gabin into an American heartthrob was largely a failure. It's interesting to think what audiences made of him in Moontide. He's aggressively aloof, ungainly, almost simian. It appears at times as though America is an alien planet for him, with an unbreathable atmosphere. But it's also clear why he was a star in the first place: he seems in control of every interaction between every part of his body and the camera, down to the minute shadows cast by his facial pores and wrinkles.

The same can be said for Ida Lupino, whose ethereality is always compellingly at play with her back-alley sickliness. She glides limpingly, you might say. You might say that's what this entire movie does. The limp can partly be attributed to the replacement of Fritz Lang as director with the terminally prosaic Archie Mayo, but fortunately enough of Lang's touch remains to give Mayo a healthy push start.

The entire movie is shot on sets, creating a dislocated, dreamlike sense (or the sense that you are watching a filmed play, depending on how generous you want to be). A brief, surreal montage sequence by Dalí is barely a departure from the general mood.

Forty Guns

2008-11-21T12:43:00.000-08:00

Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1957).

Gene Barry, Robert Dix, and Barry Sullivan.

Sandra Wirth.

Barbara Stanwyck's role in Forty Guns is in some ways similar to the part she played a few years earlier in Anthony Mann's The Furies: a gutsy frontier matriarch who rules her ranch with an iron (albeit nicely manicured) hand. In both films, she's the core of emotional energy--her presence is inimitably, passionately electric. She vies compellingly with Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar for the distinction of ultimate western dragon lady.

The plot here is almost shapeless. It's been about a month now since I watched it, and I couldn't tell you the storyline if my life depended on it. What I remember is Fuller's riveting staging, and the overall mood of psychological wryness translated into kinetic strings of sexually charged code-images. If Hitchcock had ever done a western, it might have resembled this, at least visually. (Wow--don't you wish Hitchcock had done a western?)

Avida

2008-11-09T12:47:00.001-08:00

Anselme as le chanteur de faïence in Avida (dir. Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine, 2006).

Velvet as Avida.

Claude Chabrol as le zoophile débonnaire.

At eighty-three minutes, Avida still feels long. There are a few inspired moments, notably a brief appearance by Claude Chabrol as an aged connoisseur of roebuck flesh, the performance by one Anselme of a grating yet somehow eerie and compelling synth ballad about faience dinnerware ("nice and stored away"!), and a taxidermy scene that will test the endurance of pet lovers in a manner similar to Gummo. The casting of Velvet (whom I understand to be in her extra-cinematic profession some sort of online BBW courtesan) as the titular Avida is hit or miss depending on your tolerance for extreme amateurism. She can't act even when she's pretending to be unconscious.

The surrealism throughout is strained and mostly tired, flashing only occasionally, as I said, into arresting visual and conceptual vignettes. Totally worth seeing, however, for the elements mentioned. Thanks to Lanny for loaning me the DVD!

Appaloosa

2008-10-20T14:38:00.000-07:00

Renée Zellweger in Appaloosa (dir. Ed Harris, 2008).

When the only two bad things about a movie are the title font and the song that initiates the end credits, it's an occasion for celebration. Ed Harris has annoyed me at times in the past with his sincere, oaken maleness, but he knows how to make a western. He knows, for instance, the effectiveness of good banter, how it can account for up to 73% of the script. A good reference point here is Howard Hawks' triumphant Rio Bravo, which is really just John Wayne, Angie Dickinson, and Dean Martin trading small talk with a little jailhouse siege thrown in towards the end.

It's very satisfying watching Harris, Viggo Mortensen, and Renée Zellweger respond to each other's verbal and nonverbal cues with acute sensitivity and humor early in the film. It makes it even more satisfying when the easy conversation runs up against betrayal and disillusionment, and when those traumas are in turn met with pragmatic, stoic reason rather than stock bursts of violent passion (in the romantic plot, at any rate--there's plenty of frontier vengeance on the shoot-'em-up front).

It's an old-fashioned movie, but never blandly nostalgic. Zellweger's Allison French might be perceived as gendered in retrograde ways, but this depiction actually serves as an energizing constraint for both actor and script. Early on, Harris' Virgil Cole asks her if she's a whore. She takes it as an amusing affront, laughing in response, "Don't be crude." And it seems obvious to us as well that his question was inappropriate--until later events recolor our judgment. But then all is carried yet further to a delicate balance of grace and realism. Her "weakness" is what makes her interesting, not because she is able to transcend it, but because like most of us, she works around it, and finds others who are willing to do the same. Some viewers have complained that her character is underdeveloped; really, it is developed exactly to the right point. We are kept just far enough outside her interiority for it to take on a conjectural weight no concentrated performance could match.

See Jess Rowan's review/poem here.

W.

2008-10-19T21:50:00.000-07:00

Josh Brolin in W. (dir. Oliver Stone, 2008).

W. is a movie almost entirely without a point of view. Oh sure, it depicts the Bush presidency and the Iraq invasion as a massive travesty, but that's not a viewpoint; it's just current events. What Oliver Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser fail to include is any rationale for why we ought to be interested in W.'s personal background on any level beyond that which should interest students of politics and history. So he had issues with his father and he really liked baseball. So he was really into jogging. So he was ambitious but kind of dumb. So he was human. So what? If the point is that he was a simple, ordinary man who got thrust into a position far beyond his capabilities, fine, but we should then be given either a valid reason to feel sympathy for him, or a mercilessly satirical caricature of the monster this experience turned him into. As it is, he is presented as too oafish for us to like beyond a mild pity, and too confused for us to hate beyond a weary exasperation. The film reduces both his actual humanity and our legitimate outrage to a series of Lifetime TV moments. Everything is too programmatic and too disorderly at the same time: the plotting is both inert and sporadic, lurching and peakless. Moments of "genuine drama" are interspersed with bits of SNL-style lampooning. Stabs at serious journalistic exposé are squeezed uneasily between episodes of parodic soundbite collage. There are interesting performers, but they aren't allowed to give interesting performances. Josh Brolin is very good, but it doesn't do any good. Although I did laugh in the scene where the bespectacled young waiter comes up behind him in the restaurant to tell him he has a phone call, and he looks at him, jumps a little in his seat, and says "whoa, Buddy Holly!"

The Mack

2008-10-08T08:59:00.000-07:00

Max Julien as Goldie in The Mack (dir. Michael Campus, 1973).

Could director Michael Campus possibly be the same Michael Campus responsible for this year's made-for-DVD Thomas Kinkade's Home for Christmas, as IMDb indicates? I guess so. The other two films I recognize from the list there are ZPG (Zero Population Growth), which I never saw but remember from the newspaper ads in the movie section of the Modesto Bee circa 1972, one of those sensationalistic sci-fi current-events-jobs that partly defined the cinematic mood of the era, and Survival (1976), about which there is surprisingly little info, and which I actually did see on its release, a gross-out docudrama about the Rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes and who resorted to cannibalism, based on a book called Alive, which was filmed again in 1993 under that original title, and which I did not see, being suitably scarred by the first version.

As for The Mack, it's a fine, earnest pimp drama, filmed with some real feeling and style, and featuring an agreeable mix of amateurish stiffness and poignant emotiveness on the part of its principal, Max Julien. The real highlight, though, is Richard Pryor's performance in the supporting role of Slim. He's just over the verge into grotesque, moueing and gasping and keening like that stock cartoon figure from earlier in the century, the one who pounds his fists against someone's chest, screaming, ya gotta help me, don't let them take me away, his body twisting into impossible attitudes of desperation and alarm. Disturbingly, Pryor's mannerisms here seem to prefigure his later state of actual physical disintegration.

Hang 'Em High

2008-10-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

Bruce Dern and Clint Eastwood in Hang 'Em High (dir. Ted Post).

If you stare at that title long enough, it stops looking like English.

The biggest surprise for me about Hang 'Em High--a movie that's been on my must-see list for years--is how novelistic it is--and by "novelistic" I mean slow and talky. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but by about thirty minutes in, you get the feeling that the cast and crew lost the script and just had to wing it. Again, that makes it sound interesting, and it sort of is, as long as you don't have your heart set on a raucous, bloodletting revengefest like High Plains Drifter, or even Unforgiven. There's a segment with James MacArthur as a preacher delivering a sermon before a hanging that seems like it goes on for fifteen minutes (the sermon, not the hanging). In its own way it's as mind-altering as a John Cage composition.

I'm intrigued by Ted Post. His other films include Magnum Force, the underrated Beneath the Planet of the Apes, The Harrad Experiment (god, I'd love to see that: it looks terrible!), and lots and lots of TV stuff from the early fifties through the early nineties. His lack of basic directorial competence sits in an uneasy relationship to his instinct for arresting imaginative scenarios and high moral speculation.

The other noteworthy thing is just how fully developed as an actor Eastwood already is by this point. That could be taken as a backhand compliment, suggesting that his range is extremely limited. Well, that's true, but as narrow ranges go, it's an extremely compelling one. I'd say range-wise he's somewhere between Bela Lugosi and Dick Van Dyke. Like most of us.

Smiley Face

2008-10-04T14:16:00.000-07:00

Anna Faris in Smiley Face (dir. Gregg Araki, 2007).

[Thanks to Mike Hauser for recommending this!]

The little I remember of Gregg Araki's doom-and-gloom extrusions of decadent Gen-X trauma from the 90's has long since settled into a puddle of muted indie hysteria, but last year's Smiley Face is a flawed, sweet treasure. It is no more nor less than a vehicle for Anna Faris to push one button over and over and over: the "I am so stoned" button. And she does this with such determination, such high (get it?) seriousness, that if this turns out to be her best performance ever, it will be enough.

The plot of the film is as elegantly simple as one can imagine: woman ingests way, way too much pot and must subsequently go around trying to do things. There are at least two ways this premise could go wrong: by idealizing her cannabis haze so that what is really just stupor emerges as a privileged mode of insight that yields ultimately happy results, or by squashing its comic aspects under a pessimistic mass of neo-Menckenesque social excoriation. If Araki errs in one of these directions, it is more the latter than the former, but for the most part he doesn't do either in an obvious way, hence the arguments over whether this is a hedonistic stoner comedy or a tendentious anti-drug satire.

Even if he does err, it doesn't really matter. It all comes back to Faris, and her ability to be completely winning and completely pathetic ("pa-thet-tick," roommate Danny Masterson sneers) at the same time. In the throes of her wastedness, she looks up into the sky as a huge golden smiley face forms, gleaming and twinkling. She returns the smile, religious rapture spreading outward like sunshine from her own face. Suddenly the face in the sky morphs into an angry skull that levels a growling damnation at her. She cringes and cries out, in that instant becoming the most vulnerable and wounded of beings. It all passes with the next sensation. Or, catching a ride from a friendly prole (John Cho), she switches abruptly into libidinous abandon, swiveling around in the passenger seat, gaily leering: "Why don't we just fuck?" before it's revealed as only a brief fantasy. She's absolutely irresponsible, and absolutely blameless. This is the naked American fantasy--seductive as a sticky green bowlful, and destructive as an all-consuming cloud of paraquat.

Man of the West

2008-09-29T21:55:00.001-07:00

Julie London and Gary Cooper in Man of the West (dir. Anthony Mann, 1958).

This film--its story, presentation of character, plot movement, implied heroic code--is best watched as one would attend to the speech of one's patient (assuming one is a therapist) on the psychiatric couch. The same could be said for the bulk of classic Hollywood narrative cinema, especially in genres like the Western: genres, that is, that require investment in a mythos of lonely dignity and the quiet transcendence of principled individualism over the barbarisms that attend social alliances on the frontier.

In the case of Gary Cooper's Link Jones, this is a transcendence of both the outlaw gang, led by Lee J. Cobb, in which he was conditioned for a life of crime, and the emerging America of technological progress and civilized conformity. A train pulling into the station envelops him in steam, and he cringes in horror: the future has arrived, and it is bigger and rougher than he is. A chatty fellow passenger, played by Arthur O'Connell, nearly suffocates him with his familiarity and urban banality. Only once the train is waylaid by bandits, and he must escort O'Connell and schoolteacher Julie London through the countryside, is he at ease. In the wild, he can be self-possessed. Nevertheless, this trek leads him smack-dab onto the porch of his old hideout from his early days as a badman. His mentor Cobb has become a half-senile monster, an aging king who exerts a fragile control over his followers. For the rest of the film, Cooper has to exploit whatever cred he still has with Cobb to keep him and his charges from being killed. He must re-enter his old life in order to burn it out from within and effect a virtuous rebirth.

It's all much messier than that. It's a messy movie (though not at the level of visual composition). Tangents like Julie London's enforced striptease and Cooper's outrageous fight scene with Jack Lord take center stage. Mann was always a skilled orchestrator of symptoms rather than a director with a consciously critical vision. Man of the West was problematic for its original audience, perhaps because the symptoms in question really do look like symptoms. Cooper's anxiety is the dominant note of the film, and it never dissipates, even after the main plot points are resolved. This is most evident in the erotic tension that permeates his scenes with London. She accentuates by reverse example the safeness and dullness of his reformed life with a wife and family we never see. Just as Cobb and his outlaws represent the past he has tried to leave behind, she represents the sacrifices he must make to preserve his present and future. There's never a moment of climactic acceptance or dramatic breach; everything just simmers continually.

A fascinating, semi-dark movie that coasts along on the most tenuous logic and finally just drifts to a standstill. As in so many other great Westerns, the action scenes, however entertaining, feel like incidental interruptions of a muffled core psychodrama that never quite announces itself as central, but trembles beneath the surface like a rattlesnake in a burlap bag.

The Baron of Arizona

2008-09-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

Vincent Price in The Baron of Arizona (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1950).

Loosely fact-based story of James Reavis, the brazen swindler who faked centuries-old Spanish documents bequeathing the entire Arizona territory to a woman he groomed from childhood to this purpose, finally marrying her in order to obtain the title of "Baron of Arizona" for himself. Vincent Price pitches his performance just right: he's shifty, hypocritical, a cad--but eminently smooth in a way that hints at deeper strengths of character.

This is Samuel Fuller at his most cinematically conservative--the camera work and editing are reserved, efficient, and quietly elegant. The most audacious visual is the set for Reavis's office, with its bold, stylized full-wall map of Arizona behind the desk. Reed Hadley makes a good foil for Price as John Griff, the government forgery specialist who smells a rat, and Margia Dean (one of my favorite midcentury bit-players) has a charming moment as a gulled Marquesa.

The Matador

2008-09-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

Pierce Brosnan in The Matador (dir. Richard Shepard, 2005).

Neither winning performances by Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear nor some clever plotting can compensate for the lazy, feel-good moral philosophy (or lack thereof) at the heart of this movie. There are two ways a darkish crime comedy of this sort can go: toward unblinking, deterministic irony (the route taken, for example, by the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading), or toward an escapist sentiment of heroic absolution (I don't mean either "escapist" or "sentiment" in a derogatory sense; there are plenty of works that pull this off very well). To try to combine both is to court disaster, and that's where The Matador goes wrong.

There's nothing unusual about likeable characters who do irredeemably bad things, such as killing people for money, which is what Pierce Brosnan does. His dissolute hit man Julian Noble is a real kick--probably the best performance I've ever seen from him. Noble is funny and charismatic, if a little too kinkily seedy to be considered exactly "charming." Nor is there anything unusual about the usually decent character whose decency gives way to opportunity in a time of crisis. At a crucial moment, however, the film pulls its punches and lets its characters off the ethical hook, in one case by working a change on what we think we know, and in the other by simply sweeping stuff under the rug. Sloppy on both counts.

Hell Is a City

2008-09-14T00:08:00.000-07:00

Stanley Baker and John Crawford in Hell Is a City (dir. Val Guest, 1960).

Billie Whitelaw.

The coin game on the moors.

Well-shot Manchester noir from Hammer Films that struggles not to be stodgy and sometimes succeeds. Val Guest was the director of the Quatermass films, which I've always found impenetrable. Here he tries hard for an American-style hard-boiled flavor: jazz soundtrack, jaded dames, urban shadowscapes, a cop protagonist who must battle both bad guys and his own demons. The problem, dramatically speaking, is that Stanley Baker's demons mainly consist of his not getting along all that well with his wife.

American John Crawford is good as the main heavy, and Billie Whitelaw as a jeweler's wife getting some action on the side, and Donald Pleasance chewing up the scenery as the jeweler. Has anyone ever suggested that Donald Pleasance might be a stylistic role model for Elvis Costello?

Burn After Reading

2008-09-12T18:48:00.001-07:00

Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand in Burn After Reading (dir. Ethan and Joel Coen, 2008).

When the Coen Brothers are in top form, as they are in their new CIA comedy Burn After Reading and last year's No Country for Old Men, it makes you wonder how they can ever do wrong. And in fact, even their relative misfires--dizzy pastiche like The Hudsucker Proxy, brittle noir like The Man Who Wasn't There, throwaway fluff like The Ladykillers--offer the viewer more intelligent visual and verbal stimulation than most other mainstream films. One of their most impressive achievements is not repeating themselves morally. More precisely, no two Coen Brothers films have the exact same moral weight, though each one has a measure that seems careful and exact.

By "moral" and "moral weight," I don't mean anything as crude as a "message." I'm thinking of more of a quantifiable ratio: a ratio of moral actions foregrounded or downplayed, emotions evoked or withheld, attitudes implied or occluded. The formula for this ratio is usually complex rather than simple, and when it is simpler, the movie is generally pitched as whimsical fantasy (Raising Arizona, Hudsucker, O Brother, Where Art Thou?). One constant or near-constant in the formula concerns the fates of the innocent, and the amount of investment in those fates the directors permit us. Depending on how it is handled, the deployment of this theme can make for tragic seriousness or comic sadism, or--most interestingly and most often--some degree of both. Even in No Country, which must be the brothers' most straight-faced dramatic production to date, the wiping of blood off a shoe confuses our trained responses, making us process horrified sadness and wry wit in the same instance.

Burn After Reading is never anything but farce, in the sense that its characters are satirical puppets. This is as true of the "sympathetic" ones as the ogres and buffoons. Or, the point is, everyone is an ogre and/or a buffoon, even the most blameless ones (including Claire Danes and Dermot Mulroney, if you can call them characters). How on earth can you care about these people? That's part of the Coens' genius in this film: you don't, but it all still works. You may find yourself hoping that certain characters fare better than others, but usually only provisionally, within the confined logic of a single scene or sequence. In No Country, the mortal consequences are felt deeply, though even there they are felt through a certain filter, an ironizing layer of textuality. In Reading, these consequences are occasion for sport, for loud belly laughter, even if it comes with a guilty hesitation. It's as funny as anything the Coens have ever done, but it's probably their most agressively nihilistic film. I'm sure many other viewers will make this same observation, but the reference point I kept returning to was Dr. Strangelove. This is most obvious in the parts that take place behind closed doors at Langley (especially the two brilliant short scenes with J.K. Simmons as a cynical superior officer), but the tone of schadenfreude throughout is of the same nervous timbre, down to the shaky sixties lettering and graphics on the movie poster. Accordingly, the global zoom-in/zoom-out visuals that frame the film seem like more than just a convenient cinematic cliche: with the accompaniment of Carter Burwell's urgent, drum-driven score, they extend the joke to something sublimely large and cruel.

Dangerous Crossing

2008-09-04T14:52:00.000-07:00

Jeanne Crain in Dangerous Crossing (dir. Joseph M. Newman, 1953).

Halloween aboard the ocean liner.

Karl Ludwig Lindt.

Jeanne Crain boards a luxury liner with her new husband (Carl Betz), and within minutes can't find him anywhere. Everyone else on board thinks she's crazy ... and maybe she is. Based on a radio play by John Dickson Carr, who co-wrote the screenplay, this tidy thriller piggybacked on the sets and props of two other Twentieth Century-Fox productions from 1953, Titanic and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. This allowed it to be made on a very low budget and still look like an A film. Crain carries it nearly by herself (she's in practically every scene). Michael Rennie, as the concerned but skeptical ship's doctor, is considerately dull in a way that makes Crain's performance shine even brighter. Anna Quinn makes the most of a mousy stewardess role, and the uncredited Karl Ludwig Lindt is fun as a creepy foreigner. Fine cinematography by Joseph LaShelle.

The House Bunny

2008-09-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

Anna Faris in The House Bunny (dir. Fred Wolf, 2008).

The logical inconsistencies are as entertaining as the intentional comedy--maybe more. Our picaresque Bunny, Shelley Darlingson (a name worthy of the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel), is an evident half-wit who takes weeks to learn how to pronounce "philanthropy" and use it correctly in a sentence, but she achieves a solid grasp on current world events and assorted academic topics in a few montage-seconds. She doesn't know that steam is hot, but she can offer an insightful impromptu apologia for a mixed metaphor involving her heart falling out of her head. She knows what a blow job is, but not a breathalyzer test.

Actually, that last one is not an inconsistency at all, I suppose, but evidence that the film depends at its base on the rudimentary mechanics of the dumb blonde joke. That is, even more than it depends on the rudimentary mechanics of the dumb blonde joke's supposed antidote, the turnabout fantasy where the dumb blonde shows her smarts in the world, proving everyone wrong. Here, as in Legally Blonde, the protagonist does exactly this, but to an even greater extent than in that film, this triumph seems beside the point. Shelley is most interesting when she is dumb, when she is safely ensconced at narrative's beginning in Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion, frolicking at poolside or shopping on Rodeo Drive. What's riveting is her happiness: her absolute, rapturous sense of fulfillment at being a kept rabbit. "We're the luckiest girls in the world," she gushes to a quietly envious shopkeeper, who responds with patient cordiality, "Yes, you are." The initial temptation is to read an allegorical subtext of class tension into this encounter, but which privileged slave's ideological blindness is oppressing the other's here?

Naturally Shelley's complacency must be shattered in order for the story to advance, but there's an unexamined bathos (there might be other kinds) in the shift from luxury concubinage to sorority culture. A lot could have been done with this, if anyone had thought to get really ferocious about how the Greek system functions as a training ground for the sickest ground-level domestic and cultural maneuvers of the power elite. Instead, we get the tired old distinction between the mean pretty girls and the nice nerdy girls, and the equally tired formula for how once the nerdy girls can achieve prettiness minus meanness, everything is solved.

Anna Faris almost saves the show anyway. Part of her perfectness for the role is how imperfect she is by Playboy standards: she has the stilted grace of an ostrich, and her face contorts unpredictably into various complex cheek-puffings and eye-squintings. In real life, she could never be Miss November, and when her big break finally comes in the film, we are supposed to believe that Hef has temporarily suspended his business sense, and, guided by the piercing wisdom of his benevolent sentimentality, offers her the pin-up slot out of sheer endearment. It's totally unbelievable, of course. And the movie is drivel. But bookmark Faris's expert goofiness as a small core of self-justifying value.

Touchez pas au grisbi

2008-09-02T13:32:00.000-07:00

Jeanne Moreau, Jean Gabin, Dora Doll, René Dary, and Vittorio Sanipoli (barely visible at right) in Touchez pas au grisbi (dir. Jacques Becker, 1954).

Marilyn Buferd.

René Dary.

The title means "hands off the loot," and that's a pretty accurate summary of the story: two aging gangsters attempt to protect the "grisbi" they've recently acquired in the climactic heist of their career from a rival criminal who kidnaps one of the pair of old friends. Like Dassin's Rififi or Melville's Bob le flambeur, it transfers the look of the American crime film (albeit with generally lower contrast and more gentle haloes everywhere) onto a narrative structure built more around character than action, though there are moments of violence and tension. These films are as fatalistic as Hollywood noir--maybe even more so--but they're more soft-boiled than hard-boiled.

There are guns and dames and tough talk in Touchez pas au grisbi, yes, but the prevailing mood is one of lilting reverie. The world of seedy thieves and swindlers it depicts verges on urban pastoral, with its heightening of mundane environments--cafes, laundromats, motor scooters, stylish but decadent domestic interiors--into a minor modern Olympus of trivial demigods.

Jean Gabin as Max, the aging kingpin, combines quiet dignity and amoral ennui so subtly you can't tell which is which, or if there's a difference (again, this is a quality he shares with Roger Duchesne's Bob in Bob le flambeur and Jean Servais's Tony le Stephanois in Rififi). His scenes with Marilyn Buferd (who was Miss America in 1946) as his girlfriend Betty are particularly evocative. There is something about their relationship that seems to get at the core conflicts of Max's persona, and his vexed position in the fragile kingdom he has constructed for himself, but nothing is spelled out. She doesn't even really do anything. Her presence simply peels away thin layers of his exterior, like the hot glow of a radium lamp.

Cloak and Dagger

2008-08-28T10:20:00.000-07:00

Gary Cooper and Lilli Palmer in Cloak and Dagger (dir. Fritz Lang, 1946).

Lang at his most conventional, but nevertheless a moving story. His signature preoccupation with urban paranoia is evident throughout, and the scenes of active suspense are well handled, if few and far between. Gary Cooper, pardon me, is rather boring as a civilian academic drafted into espionage against Nazis pursuing nuclear research. The fault is not entirely his: the script calls for him to be a babe in the woods who gradually learns tough lessons about stealth and sentiment during wartime. A dispiriting, thankless routine. Lilli Palmer carries the burden of his upstanding innocence admirably with her portrayal of a seasoned but vulnerable resistance agent.

Strange Impersonation

2008-08-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Brenda Marshall (seemingly observing her own facial reconstruction operation) in Strange Impersonation (dir. Anthony Mann, 1946).

Hillary Brooke lets in the noir.

A spirited early Mann thriller, and it would be truly noteworthy if--consider yourself warned--someone hadn't decided at some point not to bother writing a real ending. It's low-budget, but does a good job of straining past its limitations with fluid camerawork and inventive staging. The leading man, played by William Gargan, is uninspiring, and Brenda Marshall as the main character is mostly effective on an ironic level as a caricature of the independent woman researcher ("Stephen!" she exclaims, as her amorous employer/fiance attempts a passionate embrace: "Remember science!"). But Hillary Brooke is a fine femme fatale, and there are good supporting performances, notably from George Chandler as an ambulance-chasing lawyer, and Mary Treen as (in the apt words of the IMDb cast listing) "talkative nurse."

Woman on the Run

2008-08-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

Dennis O'Keefe and Ann Sheridan in Woman on the Run (dir. Norman Foster, 1950).

I hope somewhere, someday, there's a better transfer of Woman on the Run than the gritty, blurry one on the DVD I watched, because this is one of the premier gems of noir lite. It's a Hitchcockian thriller-adventure with Ann Sheridan as a woman who's fallen out of love with her artist husband--until he goes missing after witnessing a murder. An intrepid reporter, played by Dennis O'Keefe, steps in to help her track him down. The gender ideology is 50/50: on the one hand, it's the old familiar moral about standing by your man and supporting the postwar economy by performing the duties of the subservient domestic wife, but on the other, Sheridan plays this character with depth and guts. There are also some supporting Chinese characters who are refreshingly scripted as hip, creative, and non-stereotypical (even though one of them gets offed).

The amusement park climax, which features a nailbiting roller coaster sequence, and which very well could have inspired relevant parts of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, is fantastically great, and is one of the points where I was practically in tears over the poor quality of the print. The San Francisco location shooting overall would be magnificent if the movie were properly restored.

The script is first-rate, full of startling plot developments and "snappy," smart dialogue.

Drunk woman at Sullivan's Grotto: "Say, why don't you wear a hat?"
Ann Sheridan: "I look funny in hats."
Drunk woman: "You know, you're right?"

The Candy Snatchers

2008-08-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

Vince Martorano, Brad David, and Tiffany Bolling as the Candy snatchers in The Candy Snatchers (dir. Guerdon Trueblood, 1973).

Ben Piazza.

Susan Sennett.

Over thirty years after The Candy Snatchers came out, star Susan Sennett, in the DVD extras interview, is still visibly traumatized by the experience of playing a Catholic schoolgirl who is abducted, buried alive, threatened with mutilation, raped, and otherwise terrorized by three kidnappers seeking a ransom in precious stones from her jeweler father. She spent much of the movie bound and gagged, and the burial scenes were particularly harrowing, as she actually had to be placed in a hole that was covered over with wooden slats and dirt as the camera rolled. Understandably, she has little love for the film.

The violence in the film is in fact less extreme and lurid than in many of its contemporary shock horror films, like Last House on the Left, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Cop Killers, or at least the constant undertone of dark humor makes it seem so. For a low low budget movie, it looks really good: the colors are as vivid as a spring garden, and cinematographer Robert Maxwell, who appears to have worked on nothing but exploitation films for the duration of his career from the early sixties till his death in 1978 (he shot such classics as The Astro-Zombies, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, and The Centerfold Girls), is better at stylishly shaping a scene than many a mainstream pro.

The over-the-top highlight has to be the little autistic kid (played by director Trueblood's own son) with the gun.

The Hitcher

2008-08-18T19:18:00.000-07:00

Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher (dir. Robert Harmon, 1986).

Do. Not. Pick. Up. Hitch. Hikers. Ever. What part of that is so hard to understand? Is it "hikers"?

Rutger Hauer is scarier than a plateful of wiggling teeth, and it's because you know that as evil and horrible as the stuff he does to people in this movie is, whatever hopeless crucible of self-loathing and universal disgust is going on behind those cyborgy blue eyes of his is far worse.

The movie was, screenwriter Eric Red has acknowledged, inspired by the Doors song "Riders on the Storm" (which is not on the soundtrack, however). Grim, nasty, unsettling--but ultimately very much in the classical narrative tradition of cinematic horror. The major gore is implied rather than shown, other than the occasional severed finger in a plate of french fries, and the moments when the camera turns away or goes dark are the ones that fill up with more nihilistic dread than you would think could be contained by a formulaic made-for-HBO thriller from the eighties.

Pineapple Express

2008-08-17T01:40:00.001-07:00

James Franco and Seth Rogen in Pineapple Express (dir. David Gordon Green, 2008).

Whoa, would that really work? A crossjoint?

See, that's the kind of movie I appreciate: one that presents intellectually challenging, potentially practicable, real-world concepts.

Too bad I had to give up pot years ago because it made me see the universe as a dark mathematical equation that solves repeatedly as a vast serpent-headed, mandala-like vortex of bloody automobile accidents and ICBMs. Yeah, no fun.

The movie's great fun, though. I can't decide yet whether the graphic violence is anything more than hyperbolic adolescent mannerism, but it at least jumps the Apatow product line a few feet out of its familiar parameters.

That Obscure Object of Desire

2008-08-15T12:15:00.000-07:00

Carole Bouquet and Fernando Rey in That Obscure Object of Desire [Cet obscur objet du désir] (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1976).

Fernando Rey and Ángela Molina.

Buñuel's final film, and a rich one. It departs from the anti-narrative track he was following in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty, offering a largely faithful modernization of Pierre Louÿs' novel La femme et le pantin. The two most conspicuous innovations he and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere make are the insertion of a terrorism theme (a theme initiated in the two previous films just mentioned) and, most audaciously, the device of having two different women (Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina) play Conchita, the lead female character. This counter-realist gesture is especially striking in that there is no pattern whatsoever as to when one actor plays Conchita rather than the other, beyond Buñuel's conscious decision to give each one roughly equal screen time, and to confine individual scenes for the most part to one actor (though this latter "rule" is broken subtly once or twice).

The accounts of how this dual casting came about are a little confusing and inconsistent, but the best I can make it out is that, after already losing Maria Schneider, who was originally slated to play Conchita but objected to all the nude scenes (despite having been naked for most of Last Tango in Paris), Buñuel grew dissatisfied with Bouquet's performance and replaced her with Molina--but then realized that, rather than having to film certain scenes all over again, he could keep the footage he had already shot and just integrate it with the new. (I have to say, as an exception to my general belief that Buñuel could do no wrong, I can't get my mind around the idea of objecting to anything whatsoever about Bouquet.)

As Buñuel has commented in interviews, his intention was emphatically not to have the two actors represent different "sides" of Conchita's personality, or anything like that. And as he has also remarked, this is a good thing, as that would have been an egregiously facile gimmick. The double casting cannot ultimately be rationalized into any psychological or symbolic system of order: it's pure anarchy, a boldly random anamorphic streak across the otherwise (mostly) conventionally representational canvas of the film.

Enchanted

2008-08-09T20:13:00.000-07:00

Barcode virgin: Amy Adams in Enchanted (dir. Kevin Lima, 2007).

A beautiful, animated maiden from a land where true love is forever, virtue always triumphs over evil, and small animals with the gift of human communication offer themselves up for free as domestic labor, pops through a dimensional portal to a modern-day New York City where ... well, where basically all those same things prove to be the case. The animals just aren't quite as cute.

You see the problem. We know pretty much in advance that perky young Giselle's can-do, dreams-do-too-come-true point of view will infect all the real people she comes into contact with, thus taking all the tension generated by the central premise and simply negating it instead of showing what might happen when two fundamentally incompatible worlds impose themselves on one another. What if Giselle's innocence were subjected to a real crisis of confidence? What if she faced at least the threat of actual corruption? What if she grew a brain? What if she cut her expensive shopping spree short and issued a twenty-minute Marxist-feminist critique of consumerism?

It's too bad that there's really no way the film this should have been could ever have been made--not by Disney, anyway. It's not that the filmmakers don't have the imagination or intelligence; it's a matter of market demand. You can't argue with seven-year-olds and the parents who are at the whim of their tastes. What would have happened if this movie had come out and folks had to tell their kids, "You probably wouldn't like this, dear: I know it's got a pretty cartoon princess and all, but it's really more of an existential postmodern parable for grown-ups." Nothing but tears.

So, considering, it's some consolation that Enchanted is as pleasing and colorful a wad of sticky candy as it is. Patrick Dempsey's a stick, but Amy Adams has a move or two (I'd really like to see her deliver that materialist critique). And it's funny when the chipmunk shits himself.

Be Kind Rewind

2008-08-04T12:14:00.000-07:00

Jack Black and Mos Def in Be Kind Rewind (dir. Michel Gondry, 2008).

I was one of those who were underwhelmed by Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Be Kind Rewind has elements that make it function as a corrective to that film for me (I haven't seen The Science of Sleep), but the same elements also finally confine it to throwaway status. And you know, that's OK, throwaway is OK. One might even say that the movie is a "sweded" version of itself. "Sweding" is what video store worker Mos Def and his unstable pal Jack Black do when Jack Black has his brain magnetized as the result of trying to sabotage a power station and then accidentally erases all the tapes in the store just by being near them. They film their own replacement versions of the movies, acting out the parts themselves and enlisting the help of people in the neighborhood (Passaic, New Jersey, lovingly filmed). It becomes a sensation when their customers, who are also often the stars, decide they like the sweded versions better than the Hollywood originals, and the two overnight auteurs have to work steadily to keep up with the demand. Eventually, the corporate movie people descend on them and they have to figure out a way to keep the spirit of cooperative creativity going and try to save the building the store is in from being demolished by the city.

From that synopsis alone, you get some sense of the film's weird split between outlandish slapstick and community-coming-together social-statement dramedy. For the first twenty minutes or so, it's like the most inept attempt at a wacky gagfest ever, and then it levels out into a congenial, lo-fi corner shop tale. The Passaic setting is impossible to resist: everything looks very real--simultaneously quaint and depressing. The scenes have an improvised, one-take feel, especially the ones with Mia Farrow and the locals who were recruited as actors. The conceit the story is hung from is that the building in which the video store is housed was once lived in by Fats Waller, and this gradually becomes the central focus as Black and Def shift their efforts to an original bio-pic of the musician's life.

It's a funky little picture. Describing it now, a week or two after watching it, makes me realize how endearing I found it after all.

Plunder of the Sun

2008-08-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

Glenn Ford and Sean McClory in Plunder of the Sun (dir. John Farrow, 1953).

I rented this after reading the novel by David Dodge, which was re-released recently as one of the monthly editions in the Hard Case Crime paperback series. It's pretty faithful, and captures Dodge's breathless travel-adventure flavor, even if the budget apparently limited the beautiful location shooting to Havana and Oaxaca, and not the book's third major locale of Peru and Lake Titicaca.

All the elements of a classic are here: Ford is great, Sean McClory makes a villain worthy of Orson Welles, and the camera work, as I said, is often breathtaking. What's missing? I don't know, gravitas or something. Not that the novel has any, either. Good fun, in any case.

The Drowning Pool

2008-08-02T09:45:00.000-07:00

Paul Newman and Gail Strickland in The Drowning Pool (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1975).

The second of the two "Harper" movies with Newman, and the better. Newman has toned down his brattiness a bit, and the New Orleans location work is nice, if a little superfluous. Some of Ross Macdonald's distinctive moodiness is allowed in. Overall, however, it shares a flaw with Harper: a large cast of women characters (in this case, played by Joanne Woodward, Gail Strickland, Melanie Griffith, and Linda Haynes) whose lack of self-knowledge compels them to be victimized, and to victimize others. Yes, this comes in part from the structure of Macdonald's novel (all his novels, really), but Macdonald always built in elaborate patterns of psychological background and introspection that made the gender dynamic more complex, if not entirely unproblematic.

Juno

2008-07-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

Valerie Tian and Ellen Page in Juno (dir. Jason Reitman, 2007).

All together now: aaaaawwwwwwwwwwwww.

But I don't care, I loved it. Ellen Page's wise waif Juno is not just perky/poignant/preggo, she's a necessary hero for the denizens of the disputed settlement between irony and whatever the fuck its opposite is purported to be.

I'm trying to remember if there's any other point in the movie, besides the part where she's sitting in the front yard in the guerilla-delivered living room set with her boyfriend and all the young guy athletes run by and she talks about "pork swords," where diegetic speech bleeds sneakily into voiceover: a neat trick, and a useful antidote to the problem thereof as it too often asserts itself in cinema.

The deleted-scenes feature on the DVD is of the rarer sort that is worth viewing. I understand why it was cut, on a couple of levels, but I must acknowledge the segment with the batty neighbor who responds to Juno's comment about a beautifully-colored sunset by saying that God loves all the colors--except Mexican. The laugh arrives with a smitten wince, and vice versa.

Harper

2008-07-27T20:07:00.000-07:00

Paul Newman in Harper (dir. Jack Smight, 1966).

I've heard two different reasons cited as to why the title of this movie is Harper rather than Archer (or The Moving Target, the name of the Lew Archer mystery by Ross Macdonald on which it's based). One is that Macdonald himself requested it because he didn't want there to be an entire series based on his books, just the one--an explanation that I don't quite get, especially as there was one more adaptation a few years later, The Drowning Pool. The other is that Paul Newman insisted on the name change, because he'd had great success with films that he'd starred in beginning with "H." I prefer to believe the second, because it helps me resent Newman for getting the character all wrong. What makes Lew Archer such an appealing modification of the hard-boiled private eye character as developed by Hammett and Chandler is that he's so wearily blank and sensible. When confronted by difficult antagonists on either side of the law, his usual response is to make himself small like a hedgehog, or to trot out reasonable arguments dutifully in the face of their obvious ineffectiveness. Newman's Harper, on the other hand, is a cocky loudmouth, festering with "boyish charm." When Archer gets clubbed over the head in the novels (it seems to happen once or twice in every one), it always makes me cringe in sympathy; when it happens to Harper, I feel gratified.

The film has a good look and a good cast, so it's a shame that it misses the boat so completely when it comes to tone. It also amplifies the misogyny that Macdonald managed by and large to muffle, especially with Shelly Winters' character. There are about twenty female roles, it seems like, and none of them manage to escape caricature. For some reason, William Goldman decides to insert a plot element about Archer's estranged wife (a theme that was only ever alluded to in the books). All it does is force poor Janet Leigh to play the long-suffering repressed shrew. Other than that, the script adheres pretty faithfully to the novel--until the unforgivably flippant and un-Archer-like ending, in which ethics and emotional gravity go out the window with a smirk.

Step Brothers

2008-07-26T10:36:00.001-07:00

Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in Step Brothers (dir. Adam McKay, 2008).

The greatest American film of the twenty-first century so far? No. Or is it? No, that would be Anchorman, or maybe Talladega Nights.

Scoff if you want, but how many directors have three first films (or any films in a row) as intensely, fully realized as Adam McKay's trilogy of the "stuplime," to borrow a term from Sianne Ngai? (Will Ferrell must receive a lot of the credit, of course, as his ad-libbing is so pervasively constitutive of the flavor of these movies.)

There's only one moment in Step Brothers that feels like a misstep (pun noticed at the moment of commission). That's when the writers inexplicably feel it necessary to have Richard Jenkins spell out to us that the two nitwits played by Ferrell and O'Reilly are more interesting and endearing in their state of stunted maturity than when they get their socialized act together and learn how to fill out tax forms. It's not just that it's obvious; it's that it attempts somehow to justify what is appealing precisely because it resists assimilation into justificatory structures. Brennan and Dale are unacceptable. They're complete idiots, noxious to others and hazards to their own well-being. When they manage to pull off "normal" long enough to point the movie towards its inevitable resolution, it's funny because their version of normal is just as stupid as their version of stupid. To have them realize that the squares they become are boring squares is too easy, and reflective, cathartic acceptance on the part of those around them muddies the humor.

But this is one imperfection in the midst of a veritable grand ballet of unapologetically farcical comic debasement. Some of the funniest moments belong to Kathryn Hahn, as the frustrated wife of Will Ferrell's brother Derek. Some viewers might object to the way in which her desire is presented a manifestation of the feminine grotesque, but within the overall anthropological erotics of the film's universe, she's just another brave pioneer at the outer boundaries of self-respect and imaginable subjecthood. When she takes charge of a urinal in a restaurant men's room, it's a bracing moment of political idiosyncrasy. Her confidence exceeds practicality, but as we cut to the next scene, we're spared the complications; we're left with merely the optimism of her bravado.

The Phantom of Liberty

2008-07-23T18:58:00.000-07:00

Valerie Blanco as Aliette, the missing girl in plain sight in The Phantom of Liberty [Le fantôme de la liberté] (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1974).

"I'm sick of symmetry": Jean-Claude Brialy.

Doesn't everyone hang out with their sister while she plays piano naked? Adriana Asti and Julien Bertheau.

Buñuel takes the discontinuities and absurdities of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie further still. Is there any other director whose approach, after decades, veers so resolutely towards comedy? (Usually it's the other way around.) And not just comedy, but very silly comedy.

Silly probably isn't the right word, as it denotes a lack of sense, and Phantom is far from senseless. What I mean to convey is the air of almost light-hearted farce that drifts through even the most violent or melancholy moments of the film. Prisoners are lined up against a wall and shot during the French Revolution. A man is diagnosed with an incurable disease, then goes home to find out that his daughter has been reported missing. A sniper picks off pedestrians from a room in a tall building. A police prefect is arrested for disinterring his dead sister. The stuff of surrealism, to be sure. But it is interspersed with material that would be in place in one of the British Carry On films of roughly the same period (actually, I've never seen any of those, but suddenly I want to): some swingers in a hotel try to get a bawdy party going with the other guests, including a group of monks; an ineffectual police academy instructor is mocked by his students; a polite party is held in which the guests gather around a table seated on toilets.

What gives it its weight, its significance, its unmistakable potency as art? Is it simply the expectations that accompany our awareness of the director's reputation? Well, probably in part. But even that speaks for the film's audacity. As I was saying, here's a veteran filmmaker who suddenly makes forays into whimsical parlor humor. Imagine if David Lynch's next movie were a college drinking farce a la Porky's.

More than that, however, Phantom is always resistant to classification, even in its most outwardly frivolous--or somber--moments. A great deal of it has to do with the pacing: the patient, unpredictable motion from one episode to the next, and the meandering stillnesses within each one, stillnesses that neither corrode into inertia nor harden into tension. A good deal of the time there is no good explanation for why we're watching what we're watching. It seems as though the camera had been set up just in case something important were to happen, and after the shooting had ended, the importance turned out to be as much in the waiting as in the payoffs. And yet there's no hint of improvisation, not at the level of plotting and transition. Everything is stamped with the confident anticipation of coherence.

Without Warning!

2008-07-22T20:05:00.000-07:00

Angela Stevens and Adam Williams in Without Warning! (dir. Arnold Laven, 1952).

Straightforwardly scary noirish thriller-procedural that feels like it has blood and gore even though it doesn't. Adam Williams is understated--and pitch-perfect--as the wholesome-looking gardener Carl Martin (no relation to the fine poet!) who uses his shears to dispatch attractive blondes. Wholesome-looking, that is, until you catch a little tremor in the lip or flutter of the eyelid that says "deep psychosis." Even just the way he walks, kind of shyly waddling along like a guilty kid, is enough to make you uncomfortable. Angela Stevens, as a very game bar girl, makes her small role into a minor set piece.

The first directorial effort from Arnold Laven, who had been a script supervisor on films such as D.O.A. and He Walked By Night. He went on to do a handful more in the fifties and sixties (including interesting-sounding titles like Vice Squad, Down Three Dark Streets, and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue), and a ton of TV up through the mid-eighties.

Framed

2008-07-21T21:24:00.000-07:00

Joe Don Baker in Framed (dir. Phil Karlson, 1975).

It was made in 1975, but it looks like it was made in 1972. Isn't it weird that it's possible to make that distinction?

Phil Karlson's follow-up to Walking Tall, and his last movie ever. Not his best, but pretty damn good. You have to love it when Brock Peters introduces himself as "Sam--without the bo."

Just look at Joe Don Baker. What the hell is he? He's not your typical tough guy, exactly--he's got too much dandy in him, too much deep-rooted moral weakness, about as much deep-rooted moral weakness as you can have and still be the hero. Who else is like him? OK, Burt Reynolds, I guess.

That's what Joe Don Baker is: the white Burt Reynolds.

Speaking of Burt Reynolds, the third issue of Abraham Lincoln will be out very soon, and it contains a groundbreaking poem about Burt Reynolds by Jennifer Knox.

In the Valley of Elah

2008-07-20T08:36:00.000-07:00

Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah (dir. Paul Haggis, 2007).

I'm glad I forgot that Paul Haggis was responsible for 2004's Crash when I watched this. It would have predisposed me to find reasons to hate it. And there aren't really any. It's hard to believe the two films were made by the same director.

So, yes, good movie. Other than that I really have nothing in particular to say about it. Sort of like most Clint Eastwood movies. (As it turns out, Eastwood was originally going to play Tommy Lee Jones' role in this film. Makes sense. It would have been exactly the same, except for the face.) I always enjoy them--even The Bridges of Madison County, somewhat--but I can almost never form a critique of them. They're just too reasonable. It would be like critiquing the perfectly intelligent, slightly old-fashioned guy who lives down the street and takes pretty good care of his lawn. And who would probably shoot somebody if they broke into his house in the middle of the night. Are you going to tell him that would be wrong? I'm not.

The Dark Knight

2008-07-19T17:52:00.000-07:00

Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2008).

"Welcome to a World Without Rules," reads the tag at the top of the poster for The Dark Knight: and below it, as in so many other advertising images for action thrillers over the past few years, is a minimally adjusted representation of the World Trade Center in flames. Even though Christopher Nolan's first entry in the Caped Crusader series, 2005's Batman Begins, was more explicitly about global terrorism, The Dark Knight taps with greater potency into the emotional aura of post-9/11 life. The Joker is not the fantasy equivalent of Bin Laden or al-Qaeda; he's more like a frantic projection of our own damaged ethical cores, an image of the kind of anti-human consciousness one would have to summon up to feel at home in the present ruleless world.

Rulelessness, chance, and anarchy are constant themes in this thundering, mournful behemoth of a movie. One character philosophizes that a flip of a coin is the only "fair" way to decide issues of life and death, as this chance-based gesture is the most accurate model of morality as it actually works in the world. The irony, which this character is too distracted to appreciate, is that to invoke fairness in the first place belies the theory. The Joker himself would never make such a claim: he is absolutely free from any concerns about fairness. He isn't capable of compassion, or self-doubt, or--most strikingly--fear. His own continued existence is of importance to him only as a moment-to-moment strategy for achieving his primary objective, which is, as he puts it, "fun."

The malevolent jouissance Heath Ledger embodies in his portrayal is so powerful it's almost too much to take in in one viewing. He's more believable and more terrible than any other Joker to date, including Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was funny, grotesque, and stylish, but not really scary--not this scary, anyway. Ledger is funny, too--like a heart attack. His "disappearing pencil trick" cements our understanding of his nature early on, even as it gets a big guffaw from the audience: we find ourselves gulping in mid-laugh.

The rest of the cast is excellent as well, but Ledger dominates to such an extent that any rehearsal of their virtues would be anticlimactic. And at any rate, other than the Joker, it's the total look and sound and mood of the film that one walks away remembering. Also its length: at two and a half hours, it starts to take on the feel not so much of an epic, but of a mini-series. I mean this in a good way: as in a season of The Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire, part of the impact comes from spending so much time with the characters that when things take a drastic turn, it hits harder.

As I said, there's more to process here than is possible after watching only once, which is one of the signs of a great movie--or possibly a confused one, though even if this should be the final verdict, it's confused in ways that make it worth dissecting. It's hard not to distrust how entertaining the film is--surely anything that gives that much immediate sensual gratification must be a sham. But it's unsettling as well, and to Nolan's credit, it's not always easy to tell the difference: is it distress or pleasure with which we watch the world burn? And if our distress becomes the same as our pleasure ... I deleted what I had typed here, because it was just too morose.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

2008-07-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

Paul Frankeur, Delphine Seyrig, Fernando Rey, Bulle Ogier, Stéphane Audran, and Jean-Pierre Cassel in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie] (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1972).

June 14th is Bloody Sergeant Day! I'm marking that on my calendar from now on.

Structurally, this resembles nothing so much as a loosely-connected string of Monty Python skits. The humor is more muted, but not really less subtle. Which is to say, it veers away from outright slapstick only to the extent necessary to maintain the illusion that realism of some sort might still be viable at any moment. The most surprising thing about the film's satire is how gentle is, relatively speaking: Buñuel never seems to have outright contempt for even the most corrupt and irresponsible of his bourgeois puppets. In fact, the most immoral of them all, the drug-smuggling ambassador from "the Republic of Miranda," played by Fernando Rey, is essentially cute. They're all cute, and at times even intrepid. In his way, Buñuel was as indulgent of the middle class he skewered as, say, Wes Anderson is now. The most appalling moment occurs when the main characters bring a chauffeur into the house and offer him a martini--so they can comment after he leaves about how he gulps it instead of sipping it. But I'm sorry, that chauffeur was a dull lout. And we all know how Buñuel felt about his martinis. The Criterion DVD includes a short in which he gives his recipe for the "Buñueloni":

I'm impressed that Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière also wrote the script for Jess Franco's The Diabolical Doctor Z, or Miss Muerte, which I commented on here last year. Whoa, check it out--also The Return of Martin Guerre, The Tin Drum, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And the Martin Guerre remake Sommersby with Richard Gere! Cat gets around.

The Savages

2008-07-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

Laura Linney and Gbenga Akinnagbe in The Savages (dir. Tamara Jenkins, 2007).

Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I hadn't seen this when I made my Top Ten Films of 2007 list; it might have squeezed in at no. 10 or 9. I don't know about you, but I always get at least a little amusement out of films about typical, whining, privileged middle-class writers who worry that they're typical, whining, privileged middle-class writers. I see it as an allegory about the filmmaker. I know, I know, I'm full of stunning insights.

Laura Linney plays the writer--a playwright, to be precise--who tries repeatedly to get governmental grants, and finally resorts to a sketchy substitute (I won't give it away, as it's one of the movie's rimshots). She's a slightly dishonest neurotic in an unsatisfying relationship with a married man, and her brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an emotionally repressed Brecht scholar with a Polish girlfriend who's leaving the country because her Visa is expiring. (Will there ever be a character in one of these movies who's a literary academic and not also emotionally repressed?) Their father is beginning to suffer from dementia, and his girlfriend of twenty years dies, so they have to fly him from Arizona to New York and put him in a nursing home. As you would imagine, hilarity ensues.

I'm making it sound like I don't like it. In truth, it really is both sad and funny, and director Tamara Jenkins does a skillful job throughout of avoiding the Scylla of maudlin gloom and the Charybdis of false cheer, except for two or three regrettable missteps in the latter category, mostly coming at the end, one--unconscionably--involving a loveable dog. Even there, however, there's enough absurd denial involved in the character's actions to keep it within an allowable range of "merciless satire." Barely. Maybe. Overall, the cynicism/sentimentality needle throughout wavers somewhere between Happiness and Me and You and Everyone We Know.

All the King's Men

2008-07-13T22:08:00.000-07:00

Sean Penn and Mark Ruffalo in All the King's Men (dir. Steven Zaillian, 2006).

Kate Winslet.

James Gandolfini.

All the King's Men came out in 2006 at about the same time as two other midcentury period pieces, Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia and Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland. All three were flops, I think, and none were received especially well by the critics. The Black Dahlia was a big mess with elements of brilliance, like a lot of De Palma; Hollywoodland was just dull and flat. All the King's Men is more well made than either of them, though it's not great, and I might prefer to rewatch The Black Dahlia before it, as I'm generally more interested in spectacular failures than modest successes.

Much of whatever praise the film has garnered has been for Sean Penn's performance as Willie Stark. It's such an actorly performance, though, that it's almost distracting. You can see the thespian muscles straining in his neck. Jude Law is perfectly serviceable in the thanklessly bland first-person narrator role as the initially principled reporter who slowly gets mired in the growing corruption of Stark's world, and Kate Winslet looks appropriately dismayed to see a ruined piano. Patricia Clarkson and Anthony Hopkins play Patricia Clarkson and Anthony Hopkins. The one real standout in the cast is James Gandolfini as Stark's untrustworthy lieutenant Tiny Duffy. The debased Tiny brims with menace and oozes ineffectuality at the same time: it's a painful, discomforting performance. I also like the way Mark Ruffalo nails the wooden "virtuous doctor" character from so many forties and fifties melodramas.

It's beautifully shot by Pawel Edelman--maybe a little too beautifully. It approaches the excesses of what I think of as the "blue ribbon movie," that is, the big grand production where every leaf trembling in the wind or sunset-soaked cityscape speaks the noble or ignoble condition of aspiring mankind. Think Dead Poets' Society or A River Runs through It. If you watch it on DVD, this is one case where the alternate ending is much better: I suspect it was changed for the theatrical release in order to cut down the running time.

Diary of a Chambermaid

2008-07-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

Dominique Sauvage in Diary of a Chambermaid [Le journal d'une femme de chambre] (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1964).

Georges Géret and Jeanne Moreau.

Muni.

Very little of Buñuel's characteristic surrealism here, and what there is consists largely in the casual suggestiveness of certain images: a Little Red Riding Hood girl collecting snails in a dark forest, an old man fetishistically caressing patent leather boots even in death, a churl torturing a goose. And yet it's every bit as disorienting in its way as Viridiana or other films from the same period.

The Parisian chambermaid Celestine, as played by Jeanne Moreau, plays her cards so close to her chest that we can't tell whether she's bluffing or just doesn't know the rules. Much of the film's emotional intensity resides in how it makes us concerned not just with what decisions Celestine makes, but with her ability to discern what is at stake, to exercise ethical judgment in those areas where it coincides with erotic friction. Her motivations seem complex, conflicted, ambiguous, though it's never clear whether this uncertainty is on her side or only ours.

Buñuel (with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière) pushes the time of Octave Mirbeau's novel forward to the late twenties, when fascism in France was gaining ever more steam. This leads to a savage twist on the original ending, a twist that is both politically chilling and an occasion for Buñuel to serve a belated slap in the face to an old enemy, Jean Chiappe, the Préfet de police who banned L'Âge d'Or upon its 1930 release.

Prime Cut

2008-07-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

Lee Marvin and Sissy Spacek fleeing the metal teeth of a combine in Prime Cut (dir. Michael Ritchie, 1972).

Angel Tompkins (no angel in this flick).

Gene Hackman eating a plate of guts ("I like 'em!").

Michael Ritchie (1938-2001) directed a handful of pretty good but not breathtaking movies in his lifetime (Downhill Racer, The Candidate, The Bad News Bears, Fletch), and some bizarrely misconceived ones (The Island, The Survivors, The Golden Child). Some, like Semi-Tough, The Couch Trip, and Cops and Robbersons, seem to belong to the latter category, but may yield hidden virtues to viewers in a future generation. Hell, maybe those other movies will too.

Prime Cut may be the closest thing he has to a neglected masterpiece. I mean, it's not, really. It's uneven in tone, and doesn't really have a strong narrative arc (OK, I confess, I've never understood exactly what a narrative arc is, but it seems like that might be what's missing here). What it does have is Lee Marvin badassing it up in top form, wonderful cinematography by Guy Polito, an exuberant Lalo Schifrin score, and some memorable set pieces--most notably the one in which Lee Marvin and Sissy Spacek are chased by a big red combine across a wheat field (possibly inspired by the cropduster scene in North by Northwest).

Sissy Spacek is used at times as a pornographic prop, as she would be again a few years later by Brian De Palma in Carrie. Lee Marvin, as the "good" mob guy sent into town to collect money owed by the "bad" mob guy, gallantly rescues her from the scumbags who are trying to sell her into prostitution: she and other girls raised for this purpose at an illicit orphanage are drugged and shoved nude into cattle stalls at a big flesh auction. But shortly thereafter, he shows her off in a transparent gown at the fancy restaurant of the Kansas City hotel he is staying at. After dinner, she regales him with heartbreaking stories of the amateur lesbianism she and her best friend were driven to in their manless teenage days at the orphanage. So you see what we're dealing with here. As in other of Ritchie's films, you can't tell if it's being played straight or for laughs, and either way it's creepy.

Gene Hackman plays "Mary Ann," the head of Mary Ann's Meat Packing, which is both a legitimate company and a front for the aforementioned slavery ring. Hackman hams it up (oh, there's a pun), leering and gloating and swaggering. He and his brother Weenie (Gregory Walcott) wrassle like five-year-olds, whaling the crap out of each other while the company accountants try to do their work: it's right up there with the kitchen fight scene in Gummo.

Location is key to much of the film's vividness: Chicago movie theater marquees, a county fair, enormous fields of sunflowers. Most of all, I love the shots of early seventies Kansas City. Near the beginning of the movie, as Marvin's limo rolls into town, one of his helpers (Howard Platt) looks out the window at a series of tableaux culminating in a big nuts and bolts factory, and says in a bemused Irish voice, "Jesus, what a bare-ass town."

Cop Killers

2008-07-08T13:48:00.000-07:00

Bill Osco and Judy Ross in Cop Killers (dir. Walter R. Cichy, 1973).

Diane Keller and Jason Williams.

1973 gas prices.

Two small-time drug dealers blow away some cops and decide, since they're in it now, why not take out some more? And might as well throw in an ice cream truck driver, a gas station attendant, and a random guy for good measure. They also abduct the random guy's girlfriend and hold her hostage (teaching her how to snort coke along the way).

Filmed for $50,000 on location in Tucson, the movie makes liberal use of non-actors, some of whom are more talented than the leads. Larry Williams of Flesh Gordon "fame" is the more sadistic of the two outlaws. Gore supplied by Rick Baker in his first make-up credit.

Why do I like this movie? All I can say is that it has that same quality one finds in other films of the period, like Last House on the Left or Texas Chain Saw Massacre, of seeming to capture perfectly the blank horror of the public mood at the time (a slightly different flavor of blank horror, I would suggest, than the current one). The bad dialogue, stilted acting, sloppy editing, prurient exploitation scenes, insanely mismatched soft rock score, and grainy 16mm blown up to 35mm (the scratches on which are nicely preserved in the DVD transfer), all enhance the nihilistic doominess. Better social commentary through technical incompetence!

Eyes Without a Face

2008-07-07T21:11:00.000-07:00

Edith Scob in Eyes Without a Face [Les yeux sans visage] (dir. Georges Franju, 1959).

Alida Valli.

Juliette Mayniel.

A dubbed version of Franju's film was released in the US in 1962 as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus (on a double bill with The Manster). I'm thinking that, aside from the vocal synching, it must not have looked too terribly different to American viewers from other horror movies of that era. This is not a slight against Franju, but a reminder that some of the most innovative and hallucinatory images in cinema came out of the low-budget productions of that genre at that time, and have largely been consigned to the dung-heap of drunken irony (or "camp"). Granted, many of them might work better as silents.

And in fact, there is nothing particularly remarkable about the script (or at least the dialogue) of Les yeux sans visage: a doctor abducts young women and attempts to graft their faces onto his daughter, who has been badly disfigured in a car accident. It could easily be a schlock B movie. Strike that: it deliberately uses the trappings of such movies. What separates it from its American equivalents, or models, is largely pace. Everything is at the mercy of Franju's macabre visual lyricism--perfectly complemented by Maurice Jarre's mad, carnivalesque score.

The face removal scene is horrifying, and can't help but recall the notorious eyeball scene in Buñuel's Un chien andalou. Included on the Criterion disk is Franju's 1949 short Blood of the Beasts, which uses the pretext of being a documentary about slaughterhouses to allow Franju to indulge his surrealist's appetite for aestheticized cruelty. Horses, cattle, and sheep are killed, dismembered, and flayed before the camera, and the camera comes alive with a sadistic sentience. The effect is too rarified to be considered pornographic, and too frank to make it all the way towards art. It's more of an essay, an essay whose thesis is clouded by hepatomancy.

Blood of the Beasts [Le sang des bêtes] (dir. Georges Franju, 1949).

Blood of the Beasts.

Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told

2008-07-06T20:50:00.000-07:00

Quinn Redeker and Jill Banner in Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told (dir. Jack Hill, 1964).

Beverly Washburn, Jill Banner, and Lon Chaney Jr.

Sid Haig.

Late in Lon Chaney Jr.'s career, perhaps his most nuanced and humorous performance. He plays Bruno, chauffeur to the last remnants of the Merrye clan, a family stricken by a degenerative disease that turns them gradually into homicidal freaks. Assorted deformed uncles and aunts are confined to a pit in the basement, leaving only three younger Merryes to roam about the house and grounds of the crumbling old family mansion: Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn), the most rational of the trio, relatively speaking; Virginia (Jill Banner), cute as a bug, which also happens to be a major part of her diet; and Ralph (Sid Haig), a bald, affable, cat-killing, cretin. Bruno has been doing a pretty good job of containing the Merrye menace up until the beginning of the movie, when a messenger (played by Mantan Moreland, one of the most politically incorrect old Hollywood character actors) falls victim to Virginia's deadly indulgence of "playing spider." The trouble escalates when a team of inheritors and lawyers descend on the house, with predictably ghastly results.

What would otherwise be a minor, albeit amusing campfest is raised quite a few notches by atmospheric cinematography, very effective comic acting, and the film's ability to inspire sympathy for both the deranged, psychopathic Merryes and their despicable would-be displacers (except maybe for the thoroughly loathsome attorney Schlocker, played by Karl Schanzer).

The Car

2008-07-02T19:14:00.001-07:00

James Brolin in The Car (dir. Elliot Silverstein, 1977).

Kathleen Lloyd.

R.G. Armstrong.

There are (at least) two kinds of classic 1970s low-budget B-grade horror movies. This is the other kind.

Slightly adjust the hairstyles and clothes, and take away just a smidgen of the camera's sophisticated swoop-capacity, and so forth, and you could be looking at a film by John Sturges or Nicholas Ray from the mid-50s. Everything is framed in excellent rectangular narrativity-vision, the technicolor finely coordinated at the level of things like how the short-sleeve shirts and topographical wall maps match at the police station. I appreciate that stuff, dammit!

Further, James Brolin's Sheriff Wade Parent (who is, indeed, a parent) is the perfect protagonist for this kind of gritty little fish story. His Viking-like moustache alone registers shades of emotion and befuddled heroism too subtle for today's actors (though his son Josh has some of his presence). When Parent faces down the diabolical car that is terrorizing his small southwestern town, he is a study in courage mixed with helpless confusion. His bullets do nothing to the tires or windshield--it's like they evaporate before they even reach their target. It's downright chilling. The car is chilling. It's a black 1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III rebuilt to look like a cross between a coffin and a deathwatch beetle. Everything about it is freaky: its hoarse honk, its handle-less doors, its nearly opaque windshield, the way it scurries around in half-circles like something poisonous from under a rock. I want it. If I drove something like that, no one would screw with me ever.

Also featuring Ronny Cox, Kathleen Lloyd (who had previously done The Missouri Breaks), and a host of great character actors, like R.G. Armstrong and John Marley.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

2008-06-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

Jenna Fischer and John C. Reilly in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (dir. Jake Kasdan, 2007).

"Fuck Nobility. Fuck ancient Egypt. Fuck cats."

Airheads

2008-06-29T21:41:00.000-07:00

Amy Locane and Brendan Fraser in Airheads (dir. Michael Lehmann, 1994).

Nina Siemaszko and Adam Sandler.

Steve Buscemi and Michael McKean.

Trapped--nay, scuttled--in this genially lame farce about three rockers who hold a radio station hostage is a thoughtful group character study imagined through the chromatic and compositional visual sensibility of a Bellini or a Veronese, were those artists forced to work in cheap temperas and deprived of their usual dignified subject matter.

One thing that's nice is that everyone is played just slightly against type, at least at times. Adam Sandler has not yet crystallized into his more manically rageaholic persona, so he comes off as a sleepy, addled baby. Steve Buscemi is a steroidal satyr, all venom and cockiness (check out his Thor tattoo). Brendan Fraser simmers with an almost believable anger, albeit an anger of vague and risible origin. Chris Farley has some shining (almost dignified!) moments.

Wanted

2008-06-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy in Wanted (dir. Timur Bekmambetov, 2008).

Angelina Jolie's body is now its own product placement, so that the more naked she becomes, the more she recedes behind the abstracted symbols of her always once-removed identity. Isn't one of the tattoos actually a bar code? Maybe not, but all the same.

Perfect, then, for this sleek, brutish cyborg of a movie, in which each glistening image, each bit of aggressive voiceover, each digitized syntactical bitchslap is calibrated so as to afflict the viewer in some domineering, vaguely contemptuous way. The special effects have more personality than the human characters, though, to be fair, they have quite a lot of it (the effects, not the characters). How are we supposed to feel about seeing someone get his face mashed to pulp as he's pushed backward across the room in slow motion by the barrel of the gun doing the mashing? Elated, I think. And transfixed by the complex mechanics of the maneuver, both as a concept and a CGI rendering. And (especially) exonerated of any bothersome responsibility toward any residual respect for life we might have been harboring.

The movie ends with the line "What the fuck have you done lately?" (oh, quit your whining, that doesn't give anything away, and even if it does, live with it). One implication here is that I, like the rest of the audience, am a passive consumer of mass entertainment, safely cushioned in my cocoon of vicarious mindlessness. Fair enough. I even pay for the privilege of having this pointed out to me in the course of said entertainment. But the other implication is that the character speaking has ascended to a higher level of animal vitality and existential immediacy by mastering the art of assassinating persons whose names are randomly assigned by a big weird sewing machine. Sure, pal. By those standards, you win.

The Aristocrats

2008-06-26T21:32:00.000-07:00

Sarah Silverman in The Aristocrats (dir. Paul Provenza, 2005).

Uneven but frequently hilarious "documentary" about the stupidest joke of all time. I put "documentary" in quotes because much of what is treated in it is pretty hard to take seriously as something that could be intelligibly considered documentable. There's this long, pointless, dirty joke that all comedians know and occasionally tell to each other (but rarely to an actual audience). End of premise. We don't really learn anything about the joke's origins, or how it became a familiar comedic meme, or why it maintains such a foothold in the profession; we're just treated to comedian after comedian talking about how foul and silly it is, and giving their own renditions (which, again, are sometimes flat, sometimes inspired).

The fascinating thing about the joke is the way in which its fundamental conceit causes all the obscenity in it to become emptied of signifying power. Since we know in advance that the point of the joke is to include as much filth and atrocity as possible, we never experience it as actually referring to any of the unspeakable acts involved. Everything is leveled into a purely prosodic or phatic device. The basic outline of the joke is as follows:

A man walks into a talent agency and says, "Have I got an act for you. It's a family act. My wife and I and our son and daughter and dog come out on stage and ... [insert long recounting of over-the-top pornographic, incestuous, pedophiliac, scatological, violent, and otherwise immoral actions the family is said to perform]."

Talent agent: "That's quite an act. What do you call it?"

Man: "The Aristocrats!"

The spectacular unfunniness of this skeletal set-up is what puts all the burden of the joke on whatever sick abominations the comedian can come up with to fill in the middle section. The movie itself takes on some of the structure of the joke in treating the joke as a subject worthy of having a whole documentary devoted to it, and filling ninety minutes mostly with examples of the depravity one is required to imagine in order to tell the joke.

So it's all pretty interesting and amusing. Some viewers have complained about the disgustingness. Like I said, the language itself gets entirely neutralized for me by the conceptual apparatus. I just wish I didn't have to see Carrot Top's butt.

Or the rest of him either.

The Happening

2008-06-23T20:18:00.000-07:00

A dead cop in The Happening (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 2008).

Anne Boyer writes:

I have no idea why you thought this was a bad movie. Perhaps there are two movies with this name and Roger Ebert and I and a few others have seen one which is quite good, and you are seeing something else?

I had to get online to see why people hated the film so much. Apparently American consumers do not like things that move slowly and do not consider nature a threat. But why would you hate this film?

Certainly an improvement on other recent apocalyptic films, esp. Children of Men. The only weak part was Zooey D. making moon faces and insipid sounds at the camera, but even that worked thematically.

K. Silem Mohammad replies:

I love slowness (I'm one of those "slow poets"). And I'm extremely scared of nature.

I'm even willing to grant that the bad acting (on both Wahlberg and Deschanel's parts) fit the overall "aesthetic" of the film somehow, as did the Monty Pythonesque absurdity of some of the gore (the guy in the lion cage, the guy who lies down in front of the riding mower). I'm just not sure if it was intentional, or if it was, what exactly the intention was, or if it wasn't, why exactly it's as interesting as it admittedly sort of is.

My favorite moment:

WAHLBERG: Close the windows and doors!
DESCHANEL: Why?

Phone conversation ensues in which Boyer points out that the riding mower scene is a visual quote of Tienanmen Square, along with other astute observations. Conversation ends with Mohammad provisionally assenting to proposal that Shyamalan's film is a minor antihumanist milestone in mainstream cinema.

Le Samouraï

2008-06-08T19:21:00.000-07:00

Alain Delon in Le Samouraï (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967).

Melville's icy fantasia on This Gun for Hire unfolds with the pristine hyperelegance of a classical ballet or an MGM musical, only quieter. John Boorman's Point Blank came out the same year, and there are some striking similarities in color palette and general composition of shots. Someone can probably tell me if one film was an influence on the other.

Simultaneously more sentimental and more unemotional than Melville's earlier Bob le flambeur, Le Samouraï is nevertheless an exhilarating piece of cinema. It's among the very best of that play-of-cool-postmodern-surfaces neonoir subgenre to which it helped give birth, and within which we are still seeing countless newer directors find material for giddy invention, as drunk on its conventions as though they had emerged for the first time last week.

Diary of the Dead

2008-06-06T20:28:00.000-07:00

Amy Lalonde and Chris Violette in Diary of the Dead (dir. George Romero, 2007).

For the first third or so of Diary of the Dead,, I was having a really hard time getting past Romero's determinedly low-budget mentality. I don't think we're talking entirely about an "aesthetic" here: the man is just plain not very sophisticated in about ninety percent of the ways one must be sophisticated in order to create a competent film. But then there's that other ten percent, which he owns.

Land of the Dead (2005) was a disappointment, in part because Romero's DIY ethic (that's what it is--an ethic rather than, or above and beyond, an aesthetic) got spludged up kerplunk against a slightly larger budget and some name actors (Dennis Hopper, John Leguizamo). Also, the story was overly ambitious: a dystopic future Road Warrior style city-fortress premise that couldn't sustain its would-be epic weight. In Diary, we go back to square one, when the dead first start coming back to life, and everything is seen through the lens of a camera in the hands of a group of student filmmakers (who are trying to shoot a mummy movie[!] when the catastrophe starts).

The first hurdle is to accept that the film is not very scary. If you can live with that, it's fascinating to watch Romero fiddle with his topos like an equation he can't quite bring to solution, revisiting the old parts of the formula almost obsessively: the newscasts declaring that the dead have returned to life and are devouring the bodies of the living; the nightmarish encounters with undead family members; the bands of trigger-happy rednecks making sport out of the crisis, and so on. As commentary on national and global unrest, it's bald, blatant stuff, ground that has been more effectively covered countless times in the last few years by younger, fiercer filmmakers. In fact, all Romero really has going for him is a type of ramshackle soul, a faith in character (even in the absence of little things like believable dialogue), and a knack for isolated images of shocking eeriness--like the "human goldfish bowl."

Identity

2008-06-04T21:32:00.000-07:00

Identity (dir. James Mangold, 2003).

Like David Fincher's Se7en or Robert Rodriguez' Sin City, James Mangold's Identity is neon bubble-gum horror noir that thumbs its nose at the very notion of textual depth or subtlety. Identity, however, has a cast that apparently believes they're acting in a real movie, so it's at least fun to watch them wasting their time. In particular, Ray Liotta is maybe the closest thing we've got to a modern-day John Garfield or the like: playing a man, not a good man, trying to pass as an upstanding citizen and constantly betraying his thug's heart through little shrugs and guilty glances, he is a marvel to behold. He should have won something for this (did he? I don't keep track of those things). John Hawkes is good too, and John Cusack ... well, you know, he's always the same, but it works. John McGinley is squandered on any role where he doesn't play a jerk. Amanda Peet is all over the map, as usual, but she has so much gusto. Alfred Molina is practically an extra. Then there's poor Rebecca De Mornay, who is cast, it seems, chiefly as a cruel joke at her expense. John Hawkes, behind the motel desk, looks at her ID and says with a look of delighted recognition, "Didn't you used to be that actress"?

As for the story, it's a colossal cheat, not quite as clever as it tries to be, and therefore unable fully to compensate for its root inanity. Visually, it's terrific. The motel set they built for the film is almost too perfect. The color balance and meticulously arranged iconic retro elements (flickering sign, etc.) are so stunning that you can never quite forget you're looking at a simulacrum. Which, in a way, is appropriate.

The Truth About Cats & Dogs

2008-06-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

Ben Chaplin in The Truth About Cats & Dogs (dir. Michael Lehmann, 1996).

Janeane Garafolo and Lisa Marie Russell.

Ben Chaplin and Uma Thurman (in medieval saint's pose).

Upon watching The Truth About Cats & Dogs, my left brain automatically sets up a right-hand column of cons in opposition to the left-hand column of pros set up by my right brain, and neither ever emerges as the dominant column. There are some premises that are hard to get past, the most unbuyable being that a guy falls in love with a gal on the basis of her radio personality, then can't recognize her voice when talking to her in person. There's also the cop-out around the issue of beauty: Janeane Garafolo's character Abby is presented as a plain jane (or at least she perceives herself that way), but there's no getting around the fact that Garafolo is hot. The point is supposed to be that she overcomes her own insecurities, etc. etc. But what if Abby were actually homely? How would that affect the reaction of the male lead upon finding out that she's not actually Uma Thurman? The message seems to be that physical beauty is unimportant--as long as you've got some on reserve.

There are also some unsatisfyingly unresolved plot strands. What happens to Uma Thurman's asshole boyfriend? She realizes he's a loser at one point, but we never get to see his dismissal. He's set up as such an ogre that it seems unfair to deprive us of a comeuppance scene. Jamie Foxx is given almost nothing to do--a big waste. And maybe I blinked and missed it, but what was the job Garafolo sets Thurman up for at her station towards the end of the movie? The way the scene plays, it seems like we're supposed to wonder what's written on the little slip of paper Garafolo hands Thurman, as though it's going to be a big funny surprise when we find out. But nothing.

On the other hand, there's something interesting in nearly every scene (well, maybe every other scene). How many Hollywood romantic comedies are there where one of the couple reads Roland Barthes to the other as a prelude to phone sex? And the scene where Ben Chaplin feeds Thurman cheesecake is both funny and grotesquely erotic. The relationship between Garafolo and Thurman is the other, perhaps more believable love story in the film (though of course this remains at a commercially safe level). Same-gender friendship is, I suggest, the key component of the "chick flick," or its flip side, the "dick flick" if you will, which usually involves some guy trying to get laid, receiving extended counsel from his male cohort, and/but inevitably finding out he really wants intimacy. This is Lehmann's metier, on both counts: he directed last year's Because I Said So with Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore, as well as 2002's 40 Days and 40 Nights (perhaps the purest example ever of how dick flicks are actually chick flicks in drag) and 1994's Airheads. Most notably, he directed Heathers (1989), which hinted at a future career of dark satire and trenchant cultural critique. But like I said, Airheads.

Castle Keep

2008-05-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

Burt Lancaster in Castle Keep (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1969).

For a couple of years in the late sixties, movies were more postmodern than they have been at any time since. I don't mean postmodern in the sense of Baudrillardian simulacral sci-fi stuff, I mean in the sense of narrative, dialogue, and dramatic structure, a la Albee or Stoppard or Barthelme. Those only familiar with Sydney Pollack's later work, which typically perceives the world itself as a resolutely quotidian expanse peopled with the occasional reluctantly anomalous obstacles to the smooth functioning of its banal evils and repressions, would likely never guess he'd had a penchant for this sort of thing: half Dirty Dozen, half Putney Swope.

A troop of American soldiers, whose company includes a prominent art critic (Patrick O'Neal), a baker (Peter Falk), and a would-be novelist (Al Freeman Jr.), occupies the medieval French castle Maldorais. Maldorais contains an impossible cache of priceless European art, as well as an effete duke (Jean-Pierre Aumont) and his nubile young wife (Astrid Heeren). The eyepatched Major Falconer (Burt Lancaster) takes up with the wife, and the critic takes up with the art. Young Corporal Clearboy (Scott Wilson) takes up with a Volkswagen. Nearly all the men take up with the whores in the nearby village, where conscientious objector Bruce Dern wanders around with his makeshift Salvation Army band decrying war and fornication.

As the film "progresses," its elliptical lyricism gets more and more hallucinogenically pessimistic. As the derangement escalates, the story undoes its own narrative premises, violating its implied contract with the viewer in a formally radical way that's nevertheless so subtle it doesn't fully sink in until the credits are in mid-roll.

Spider

2008-05-29T21:38:00.000-07:00

Bradley Hall and Ralph Fiennes in Spider (dir. David Cronenberg, 2002).

Miranda Richardson.

Ralph Fiennes.

Spider alienated many Cronenberg fans, who felt their beloved creepmaster was straying too far into "respectable" cinematic territory. The same critique was made, with somewhat more justice, of M. Butterfly (1993), but Spider is completely true to vintage Cronenbergian form. It doesn't have the usual level of blood or mangled flesh (though there are a couple of brief gory scenes), but all the trademark obsessions are there: the dread of sexuality, the encasement of the body, and most of all the dark fantasy of narrative and text assuming the power to corrupt one's sense of reality at a deep pychological, perhaps even cellular level.

I can't help but think that Cronenberg derived some cruel ironic pleasure from granting Ralph Fiennes his longtime wish of playing the role of the schizophrenic Dennis "Spider" Clegg--and then having author Patrick McGrath rework the script to remove nearly all of Spider's lines (originally planned as voiceover). Fiennes says maybe twelve intelligible words in the whole picture, and it lends considerably to the pervading sense of anxiety and isolation, as do all the shots where Spider is the only person in the frame.

Much of the story is presented as flashback, with Fiennes sharing filmic space with his younger self--and sometimes revisiting scenes he could not physically have witnessed in the first place. This is another of Cronenberg's familiar unnerving maneuvers: to put both us and his characters through vertiginous sequences of events that complicate and contradict each other. Miranda Richardson adds to the disorientation by playing multiple roles (I didn't realize this till the movie was almost over, but I'm hopeless with facial recognition). The final "twist" is predictable, but this doesn't lessen the emotional impact that much.

My favorite moment is the opening scene, where we watch what seems like half of Britain (actually the entire crew of the film) getting off a train and streaming past us, and we know that eventually we will be introduced to Spider as part of the stream--and the moment keeps getting deferred, until when we do finally see him, we are so relieved that our defenses are down, and we register his agonized presence like a sudden shock to the system. He crawls slowly off the train and onto the platform as though unsure of his footing, and our next impulse is one of protectiveness and sympathy. For the rest of the film, we feel bound to him, even responsible for him.

Tangential note: I say "we" because, even though I don't believe in a universally uniform audience response, this is how the experience of watching a movie feels to me: it's not directed at me, individually, but at an ideal set of spectators I happen to be among. I always sense that larger theoretical set, like a company into which I am temporarily inserted, when I'm watching a film.

Spartan

2008-05-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

Val Kilmer and Derek Luke in Spartan (dir. David Mamet, 2004).

Remember what I said about Mamet's films never threatening to turn into real movies? Spartan comes close to jumping the shark in that regard. There's just too much big governmental top-security danger danger action, creating the feel of one of those low-budget knock-offs of big-budget pictures like Patriot Games. The plot, if you can follow it, is preposterous in the extreme. But that's all right, because Val Kilmer brings his freaky intensity down hard on nearly every scene (does anyone besides me think he has a lot of talent?). He's the scariest character in the film, and he's the good guy.

Why is it called Spartan? Did I miss something? Is it a Marine thing?

Heist

2008-05-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

Gene Hackman in a very Bergmanesque shot from Heist (dir. David Mamet, 2001).

I admit it, I'll always watch a Mamet film. I would say that this is one of his most minor directorial efforts, but they're all minor. Their brittle miniature quality is part of what makes them enjoyable: you're never worried that they're going to balloon into actual real life movies and draw attention away from all the fussy plotting and mannered dialogue. There is, however, probably less going on than average in Heist. I don't just mean that the heist itself is nearly an abstraction, and happens in the middle of the film; I liked that part. Actually I liked all of it. In a subdued manner of liking.

The Cooler

2008-05-24T20:15:00.000-07:00

William H. Macy in The Cooler (dir. Wayne Kramer, 2003).

Bernie Lootz, played by William H. Macy, is a "cooler": a guy who goes to the gaming table in the casino to make customers lose, like just by emitting bad vibes or something. Do they really have those? Things get screwed up when he falls in love with Maria Bello and starts to bring good luck instead of bad. That's the dumbest part, that romantic fantasy element. The rest is fairly engaging, thanks to the production design (which is at once gaudy and noirish) and the chemistry between Macy and Bello (I know, bizarre, right?). The first sex scene is convincingly intimate enough to be a little embarrassing. In a "sweet" way, which is I guess what makes it embarrassing.

The Hidden

2008-05-23T19:59:00.000-07:00

Kyle MacLachlan in The Hidden (dir. Jack Sholder, 1987).

I think I fell asleep when I watched this on late-night cable over fifteen years ago. I've always remembered that I liked it, but seeing it again, I remembered almost nothing. Which is nice, because I didn't know how it was going to turn out, so it was like seeing it for the first time. Anyway, it's a load of fun--it has some of that weirdo late-eighties sci-fi energy that say, Repo Man has (though not quite that much). The basic premise is that an alien life form takes over normal people and makes them want to do violent crimes and listen to terrible hard rock. Kyle MacLachlan, in his third screen role, plays an FBI agent, four years before Twin Peaks (did Lynch get the idea of casting him as Dale Cooper from this?).

Ms .45

2008-05-19T23:29:00.000-07:00

Zoë Lund [as Zoë Tamerlis] in Ms .45 (dir. Abel Ferrara, 1981).

Abel Ferrara's sublimely tasteless splatter-drama about a young mute seamstress who gets raped twice in one day and goes on a man-shooting spree (her name is "Thana"--get it?). The main obstacle to her rampage is her nosy landlady, who has an equally nosy obnoxious little dog, and also happens to be a very, very bad actress. The big climax occurs when Thana attends a work Halloween party dressed as a nun and goes totally Carrie on the joint. It would all be contemptible if it didn't have so much sleazy New York soul. The very last shot combines black humor and cheap sentiment in a way I don't even know how to process.

Bob le flambeur

2008-05-18T20:43:00.000-07:00

Roger Duchesne in Bob le flambeur (dir. Jean-Piere Melville, 1956).

Isabelle Corey.

Montmartre after dark.

Melville's classic anti-heist film is so wonderful on so many levels that I don't know what to say. It's a flawless piece of construction that never feels mechanically contrived; a celebration of human singularity that never stoops to maudlin psychologizing. To say that the movie is all style is no slight to its depth. Soul and wit, compassion and irony are made indistinguishable.

If I could be beamed back to any point in history, possibly to stay, it might be Melville's Montmartre of the fifties (who knew street cleaners ever looked like that, anywhere?). And if that Montmartre is merely imaginary, I would gladly dwell in its phantasm.

And if Isabelle Corey were there as well, that would seal the deal.

What Happens in Vegas...

2008-05-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz in What Happens in Vegas... (dir. Tom Vaughan, 2008).

1     What happens in Vegas is everything that is the case.

1.1     What happens in Vegas is the totality of facts, not of things.

2.01231     In order to know what happens in Vegas, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities.

2.2     What happens in Vegas has the logical form of representation in common with what it pictures.

3.221     What happens in Vegas I can only name. Signs represent it. I can only speak of it. I cannot assert it. A proposition can only say how what happens in Vegas is, not what it is.

4.112     What happens in Vegas is not a theory but an activity.

5.6     The limits of what happens in Vegas represent the limits of my world.

6.41     The sense of what happens in Vegas must lie outside what happens in Vegas. In Vegas everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value--and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening in Vegas and being-so. For all happening in Vegas and being-so is accidental.

6.43     The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.

6.44     Not how what happens in Vegas is, is the mystical, but that it is.

7     What happens in Vegas, thereof one must be silent.

Play Dirty

2008-05-16T22:57:00.000-07:00

Nigel Davenport and Michael Caine in Play Dirty (dir. André De Toth, 1968).

Nigel Green.

Mohsen Ben Abdallah and Mohamed Kouka: "All they ask is kif and each other."

Another tough little movie from De Toth--maybe his toughest ever. Superficially, it's a Dirty Dozen knock-off, but really it's a brilliant deconstruction of the colorful-gang-of-wartime-scoundrels genre, with its stock theme of camaraderie under fire. As in Aldrich's film, a troop composed mainly of criminals is sent on a secret mission against the Nazis. The one non-reprobate is Michael Caine, an officer who's drafted from his safe duties as a port inspector to lead the group in question across the Egyptian desert to find Rommel's fuel depot and blow it up. Sent along with him to make sure he gets back alive is Nigel Davenport, an arrogant, cynical mercenary.

What you gradually realize as the film goes on is that none of these guys are ever going to bond. All the plot mechanisms are in place for it, but they just spin and whir to no effect as though the script were mocking itself. Nor does Caine ever come down off his high horse and examine the hypocrisy of his anachronistic British investment in decorum. The closest he comes is, in a pinch, to adopt the same disregard for the sanctity of human life as the rest of his outfit ("You're learning," says Davenport when Caine blows away some German ambulance attendants--and that's the closest thing we see to bonding). As for the supporting cast, you think at first they're going to be "colorful"; no, they're just soulless thugs. The two most likeable of the bunch are Hassan and Assine, a couple of gay Arabs. When three of the other men try to rape the German nurse who treated Hassan's injuries, Hassan gallantly shoots one of them in the ass from his stretcher. But even this small moment of decency is subject to an ironic recontextualization as events unfold.

Nigel Green plays the colonel who sends all these guys on their quest, and he is perhaps the movie's most complex, merciless joke. His endearingly dotty eccentricities (wearing sandals, planning attacks by consulting ancient battle maps) eventually give way to a revelation of his true character that is devastating in its offhandedness. In this way he is a microcosm of the film as a whole.

Day of the Outlaw

2008-05-15T21:21:00.000-07:00

Robert Ryan in Day of the Outlaw (dir. André De Toth, 1959).

Mike McGreevey and Burl Ives.

Tina Louise.

Robert Ryan.

Frank DeKova as "Denver": "I want to look at you."

Robert Ryan sneers at old flame Tina Louise, who's contemptuous of his lack of mercy: "You won't find much mercy anywhere in Wyoming." De Toth's version of Wyoming (I have no idea where it was filmed) is bleak indeed: with all its snow and long shots and low-contrast black-and-white it looks a lot like Peter Brook's King Lear. That is to say, it looks great.

Ryan looks great too: grizzled, cool, and surly. Tina Louise has not yet surrendered her identity to become Ginger on Gilligan's Island, and at times she takes on the delicate gravity of a Sargent painting. Elisha Cook graces us with his presence for about ten seconds. David Nelson, son of Ozzie and Harriet, plays a clean-cut young outlaw you don't believe could have lasted five minutes among the gang of ruffians he rides into town with on the run from the cavalry. That scurvy crew includes Jack Lambert, who played "The Claw" in Dick Tracy's Dilemma and "Dum Dum Clarke" in Siodmak's The Killers; Lance Fuller, from This Island Earth and Slightly Scarlet; and Frank DeKova, as a grotesque (I think he's supposed to be an Indian) named Denver, who's oddly sensitive in a psychotic way. And, yes, Burl Ives as a renegade Union officer in charge of them all! All we ever find out about Ives' character, Jack Bruhn, is that he led a massacre of Mormon settlers in Utah. We don't learn why, and we're not let very far into the dark chamber of Bruhn's troubled conscience. His men are clamoring for alcohol and rough sex with the local wives and daughters of the townfolk, but he holds them tightly in check, even as he's suffering from a serious bullet wound. This power he has over them isn't really explained either, beyond the casual observation that they "need" him," but he makes it believable. He's a very reasonable outlaw, and scarier for it.

Baby Mama

2008-05-14T20:55:00.000-07:00

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in Baby Mama (dir. Michael McCullers, 2008).

What is this thing with movies (the loathsome You've Got Mail being one of the worst offenders) in which it is explicitly pointed out how the main characters are privileged, entitled materialists, and how evil the big corporations they work for are, and so on--but then everything proceeds as though there were no consequences to these facts? Oh, right, realism.

But that can't make me hate Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and Dax Shepard in this silly little movie. Or Greg Kinnear, though even he couldn't redeem You've Got Mail (no, nor could even Parker Posey). Steve Martin is funny as a pony-tailed organic supermarket CEO who gives his employees "five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact" as a reward. Sigourney Weaver is extremely creepy in her role as an extremely creepy person. The whole thing is an homage to mommy comedies of the eighties like Baby Boom, so if you're OK going into it knowing that, you'll probably have a good time.

To Live and Die in L.A.

2008-05-13T17:57:00.000-07:00

Darlanne Fluegel and William Petersen in To Live and Die in L.A. (dir. William Friedkin, 1985).

Dean Stockwell.

Willem Dafoe.

Friedkin is a very hit-and-miss director. His approach--and I believe he would admit to this--is for the most part to throw stuff on the floor and see if it makes interesting patterns. A lot of the time it does, but a lot of the rest of the time, as with The Exorcist (in my opinion), you just have a messy floor. The floor is a little messy in To Live and Die in L.A., but it's a big enough floor that ... agh, I'm abandoning this stupid metaphor. What I want to say is that this is a very good, if flawed, movie. The flaws are weirdly hard to pinpoint, but I think they have a fair amount to do with the casting of William Petersen and John Pankow as the two Secret Service partners who go after counterfeiter Willem Dafoe. They're both fine as actors, but they look so eighties, in that fratty young white guy way. I can't get past that.

The look of the film is one of its main strengths. Wim Wenders' sometime cinematographer Robby Müller drenches the screen in evocative colors, shifting elegantly from pastels to neons, tight compositions to sprawling vistas. Moreover, the one scene that Müller didn't shoot, an out-of-control chase sequence that won't quit, had me squirming on the couch. Dafoe gives a restrained, intense performance as an artist who's really a criminal who's really an artist etc. And can I just say, Dean Stockwell (who is onscreen only about five minutes total, and doesn't really do much, but still saturates the picture with his scary quietness) is God? Why the hell doesn't he get more big-screen roles? Did he piss off some powerful person?

Springfield Rifle

2008-05-12T17:35:00.000-07:00

Gary Cooper in Springfield Rifle (dir. André De Toth, 1952).

Perfectly entertaining Civil War western directed by the sporadically great André De Toth. It's a Hollywood heel-rider on at least two levels: it's Gary Cooper's next role after High Noon, once again as a guy who has to prove he's not a coward; and the title at least is an attempt to cash in on Winchester 73. People have complained that the title is misleading, since the eponymous rifle plays a relatively small part in the story. Those would be people who don't understand metonymy. The real subject of the film is counter-espionage as a military tactic, which like the gun in question was a relatively untried quantity at the time (at least the filmmakers work under the assumption that it was--beats me if it's true).

As I said, it's diverting enough, though no masterpiece. Lon Chaney, Jr. is good as a big dumb brute (surprise). Max Steiner's score is interesting: most of the time it hums along predictably with variations on "Battle Hymn of the Republic," but every once in a while it breaks out into stylized Coplandesque flourishes for no discernable reason.

Hustle

2008-05-11T16:33:00.000-07:00

Burt Reynolds in Hustle (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1975).

Robert Aldrich, remember, brought us Kiss Me, Deadly, one of the strangest and finest American films of the fifties. His Hustle is two films in one: one a brooding neo-noir in the vein of Chinatown or Night Moves, pregnant with socio-political critique; the other a unwatchably inept abuse of the filmic medium, not even good enough to be a TV movie. And here's the sad part: the main flaw is in the direction. The cast is great--Burt Reynolds, Ben Johnson, Eileen Brennan, Catherine Deneuve, Paul Winfield, Eddie Albert, Ernest Borgnine, even a young Robert Englund, of Nightmare on Elm Street fame--and frame by frame, it often has the look of one of those languorous seventies classics where the contempo casual decor and the seedy liquor store locations all bleed together into art. Steve Shagan's script is a little purple at times, but it's also full of potential. With the right editing and revision, it could have worked. But the pacing and general structure of the film overall is just off. It feels like a bad daytime soap. Occasionally the camera will swoop with unwarranted confidence, setting up a scene for some heavy moment of significance, bringing in landscape and architecture and urban atmosphere, and then--plop. It only works if you view it as unintentionally "experimental." There's a dream sequence with Ben Johnson, for example, where the superimposition and dissolves are so crazy it feels for a minute like you're watching Brakhage.

Blast of Silence

2008-05-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

Allen Baron as "Baby Boy" Frankie Bono in Blast of Silence (dir. Allen Baron, 1961).

Walking the mean streets.

Harlem and the Apollo (Peter H. Clune, second from right, with the moustache).

I'd be willing to bet money that Taxi Driver is a near-direct result of Scorsese studying this movie frame by frame. It's all there: the fatalistic voiceover, the downbeat jazz score, the big slow cars gliding over rain-slick city streets, the sexually thwarted protagonist. Like Dassin's Rififi, it was shot by happy chance on overcast and stormy days, filtering muted expressivism through documentary frankness into a subjective grey totality. Director Baron stepped into the lead role after originally-slated actor Peter Falk said he couldn't do it, and he doesn't so much act as direct on screen, using his body's wary tenseness as a cue for the general spirit of alienation that drives the story. Like Scorsese's Travis Bickle, "Baby Boy" Frankie Bono is above all lonely. He wants to make human connections despite himself and his occupation (hit-man), and most of the time he succeeds in suppressing that desire. When he does let his guard down, the results are a botch. As soon as he allows an old chum from the orphanage--and more importantly, the old chum's sister--to talk him into attending a party, he makes himself fatally vulnerable. When he joins in a party game of pushing peanuts across the floor with his nose, we know he's had it. There's no way to recover the protection of his criminal shell. He's like Frankenstein's monster: gestures of kindness only enflame his awareness of his own maladjusted nature and lead him to embarrass himself (both emotionally and professionally).

The footage of New York City ca. 1959 is reason alone for watching. Each time the camera registers a specific location--Greenwich Village, Rockefeller Center, the Staten Island Ferry, Penn Station--it generates a little photoessay set piece. The Harlem sequence is especially striking.

More on the film at Noir of the Week.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

2008-05-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

John Cho, Kal Penn, and Rob Corddry in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (dir. Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, 2008).

The vulgar libertarianism (I guess the non-vulgar kind is plain old anarchy, which can be pretty vulgar itself) of South Park and other recent cultural productions is in full view in the new Harold & Kumar vehicle, and reveals itself predictably as the limited and limiting downward spiral of subversion and containment that it always is. The big payoff comes with the catch phrase delivered by a blunt-puffing George Bush, "You don't have to like your government to be a good American; you just have to love your country." The levels of irony and counterirony in this moment are so dense as to be opaque, and therefore negligible. It finally doesn't matter whether the Bush character or anyone else "means it" or not, let alone whether the phrase itself can be parsed into meaning anything at all.

All this, of course, is rendered beside the point if you are not so naive in the first place as to harbor the illusion that a popular movie can be a viable vessel of political resistance, assuming anyone connected with it ever even had that as an objective. In which case another fact about the picture emerges: it's funny as shit. It's funny in the same way that Cheech and Chong were funny for a few months in the seventies, before the pot smoke cleared and everyone could see that they'd been laughing at a condition of social abjection so large and irremediable they should really be crying. In other words, really funny, gallows funny, Rabelais-funny. The movie retreats into fantasy from the first frame onward, until it reaches a point of opiate denial so total that it approaches joy. The periodic demystifying gestures of romantic irony along the way are mere ruses, modes of deferral to increase the intensity of the final buzz.

The Hot Rock

2008-04-21T22:47:00.000-07:00

Robert Redford in The Hot Rock (dir. Peter Yates, 1972).

Robert Redford is miscast at the most basic level as Donald Westlake's career thief Dortmunder: the role calls for a Harry Dean Stanton or a Bruce Dern, someone congenitally shifty and undernourished. The book, light comic fare that it is, retains a touch of the same convincingly seedy criminal underworld that Westlake explores (under the pseudonym Richard Stark) in his Parker novels; the film is all bright proto-Sting Hollywood shenanigans, and just this side of TV-movie squareness. It's meant to be rousing good fun, but it feels restrained, even lethargic. The New York locations inject a little color and vibrancy, especially during the unearned buoyancy of the final scene.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

2008-04-20T22:17:00.000-07:00

Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Ryan, and Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (dir. Sidney Lumet, 2007).

It's to Sidney Lumet's credit that I got all the way to the end of this before I realized how bad it was, and why. The film looks great, the cast is phenomenal (well, except for Ethan Hawke), and Lumet treats the material like it's worthy of his and our attention for some reason. The end result is a feeling of being profoundly cheated out of what this cast and crew (minus screenwriter Kelly Masterson, who has got to be some producer's kid or something), might have done if they had had a decent script to work with. The tremendously talented Amy Ryan is treated the most unconscionably by the script: all her lines are some variation on "Pay your fucking child support." Even Albert Finney's heroic attempt to express pain at the loss of his character's wife is compromised by the flat dialogue he's forced to recite.

One of the many problems with said script is that it begins with the premise that people behave heartlessly towards each other, which is a fine first step, and then goes absolutely nowhere beyond that. The premise stops being a premise and becomes just a stunted point of view. Nothing anyone says in the film suggests the smallest grain of moral awareness. Which is the same as saying that when one of them is cruel to another, we neither believe in their cruelty, nor in the pain others feel as a result of it. Nor is there any wit--any--to counteract the unwavering sourness. Some critics have called the film nihilistic, but this is giving it too much credit; the characters' depthlessness evinces not a world view, but simple writerly ineptitude.

Marisa Tomei is the most telling register of the story's bankruptcy. I'm not sure whether she can really act or not, and this has never kept her from being one of my favorite actors. But this movie forces her to express feelings that aren't there to be felt, and you can see her sniffing around for them like a deer in the forest, finally giving up and resorting to a series of pouts and nose-wrinkling maneuvers. Those will be what I remember most about this film, for better or worse.

Viridiana

2008-04-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

Silvia Pinal and Fernando Rey in Viridiana (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1961).

Carnality vs. spiritual devotion.

A perversion of the Last Supper.

Buñuel's Viridiana astounds on many levels, one of the most surprising of which is its restraint: from scene to scene, the narrative movement is almost entirely conventional. It's only cumulatively that the progression of events takes on its most strikingly surreal dimensions (as opposed to the minor surrealism of individual shots or tableaus, such as Silvia Pinal's hand reaching for a cow's teats, or the Rabelaisian beggars trashing their benefactor's mansion in the manner of profane apostles). The plot summary at IMDB ("spoiler" alert), supplied by a Swedish viewer, manages to capture the obliquity of the total plot trajectory:

Don Jaime lives alone in his manor. His wife died from a heart attack on the wedding night. He has paid the gift and education so that his wife's niece Viridiana could become a nun, and wants her to visit him for a few days before she takes her final vow. She strikingly resembles her aunt and is persuaded to take on her wedding dress. Then he asks her to marry him. When she refuses, sleeping pills are put in her coffee. Jaime only decently fondles her. One the next day she leaves but is brought back by the police. Jaime had made a trap that might lead to another marriage. He acknowledges his "bastard" son Jorge, writes a will making his manor the common property of him and Viridiana, and hangs himself. Jorge starts modernising agricultural methods. Viridana gives free food and housing to many beggars. When Jorge and Viridiana must go away to see a lawyer, the beggars succeed in entering the locked great house. They make a banquet, but eventually beat asunder many things. When the owners return, most beggars leave the house forever. But one of them binds Jorge to a wall-cupboard and tries to rape Viridiana. Jorge promises another beggar money if he kills the rapist. He does so. One later evening when all is calm Viridiana goes to Jorge.

Somehow this description is all the more accurate by virtue of its English-as-second-language-ness.

Silvia Pinal glides through the film in the title role with the aloof, static blondness of a Hitchcock heroine: in particular, the thin layer of non-responsiveness and repulsion she continually threatens to rupture makes me think of Tippi Hedren in The Birds or Marnie (which came out around the same time or a little after). The closing sequence gave me that feeling I occasionally get of excited emotional collusion with the director: "is he going to end the movie here? yes, yes, do it, end it here! he did it! he's ending it here!"

Buñuel, as was often his custom, cast people off the street in the roles of the beggars, including one mentally deranged man who gives a shatteringly disturbing performance. Bunuel's treatment of these dissheveled, incapacitated poor is entirely unsentimental, if not downright cynical: their disenfranchisement has rendered them incapable of ethical agency (whether the more privileged characters possess such agency is, of course, one of the film's provocative opacities). This is my favorite thing about Buñuel's artistic-political sensibility, actually: its conflictedness. In the interview included with the Criterion DVD, he more than once mentions his guilty love for American conveniences, for clean streets and modern amenities. If his leftism were not so often compromised by his weakness for material comfort--and its aesthetic pleasures, which he takes pains to distance himself from, but does not fool anyone--he would not be such a compelling artist. Watching him talk with his interviewer, I felt something like the affective glow of deep friendship, intermingled with a mild bemusement that can never turn into contempt, but only makes the glow burn a little brighter.

Street Kings

2008-04-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

Keanu Reeves in Street Kings (dir. David Ayer, 2008).

Street Kings seems to be doing pretty good box office, despite being mostly trashed by the critics. This in itself is no big deal--the same could be said for, say, 10,000 BC or Scary Movie 7 or what have you. But in this case, since it's not the sort of movie that pleases crowds by sheer spectacle or soothing idiocy or star appeal (Keanu Reeves can't really bring in that many viewers on his own now, can he?), I think the critics have missed something. There's no doubt that the dialogue is sometimes outrageously cliched and stilted. Reeves still can't really act (though age is giving his face some interesting gravity). The plot is so predictable they might as well have started with the ending and worked back. And yet, rather than sinking the film, I think all these things actually contribute to its appeal. It all feels like a 50's B-movie, full of square jaws and sincere speeches and cut-rate action. Reeves is perfect for this sort of hackery, and James Ellroy knows what he's doing (up to a point) with his mannered script. He works with the genre conventions so literally and flatly that they effectively become pastiche.

I say "effectively" because in truth I'm not entirely convinced Ellroy knows what he's doing, here or in his novels. Part of what I find interesting about his work is just how repressed and lacking in true self-knowledge he comes off as, despite all his autobiographical mythologizing in both his fiction and memoirs. For example, I honestly have no idea whether he's conscious of the homoerotic strains in his work. And I don't just mean homosocial, I mean homoerotic. I mean big guy buddy or old boss daddy guy takes in young guy wonder-hungry rookie as charge and shows him the he-male ropes or betrays him like cruel stud horse-breaker and there's also always some younger smooth Adonis kid who's just a hunk of heartbreak. All it would take to make any Ellroy story into queer niche-fiction is the addition of a few explicit guy-on-guy scenes. They could replace the rare, unconvincing hetero sex scenes, which always suggest that Ellroy has never been in the same room with a woman, let alone had any fleshly interest in one. The bizarre cartoon hound-dog noises he makes in interviews when the subject of attractive actresses comes up do little to hurt my case here. I'm sorry, is this all turning very ad hominem? I'm just trying to get at what makes Ellroy such a distinctively odd writer, and again, interesting.

So, as in the books, Ellroy's world in Street Kings is one of smothered drives, urgent sublimations, confounding blindnesses of personal motivation. It's very compelling, and whether it's intentional that it's all dressed in a bad-movie suit or not, the semblance of ironic distance thus obtained is palpable. Ellroy knows what he's doing on one level of pacing, scene-setting, all that craft stuff. But it's the combination of this skill with all those elements he doesn't know what he's doing with that's fascinating, that's disorienting, that smells like art.

Joy Ride

2008-04-15T21:51:00.000-07:00

Steve Zahn and Paul Walker in Joy Ride (dir. John Dahl, 2001).

Roadside graves.

"Caaandy Cane...."

John Dahl is one of the notable torch-bearers of neo-noir in the last twenty years, though he's had only a couple of totally solid genre successes. Joy Ride is Dahl well after falling from his peak, having a little resurgence of inspiration. It's not particularly inspired inspiration--the best moments are almost still shots, showing Dahl's considerable feel for atmosphere and framing. Part of what these moments drive home is that even at his best, in films like Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, Dahl's noirish vision was that of a talented student: once he got the form down, he had no ideas of his own where to go with it. Thus he became yet another creator of competent but forgettable Hollywood not-quite-thrillers like Rounders. Joy Ride does deliver some real scares, however, especially in its first half; after that, the formulaic turns come too routinely, and the comfortable conventions of the buddy movie defuse the dread that's been built up. The DVD's special features contain about a billion alternate endings, all of which are exactly the same despite their elaborate differences.

Breakheart Pass

2008-04-03T17:28:00.000-07:00

Charles Bronson and Archie Moore in Breakheart Pass (dir. Tom Gries, 1975).

This midseventies Charles Bronson vehicle feels greater than the sum of its parts to me, maybe partly because I remember seeing it when it first came out, and how it completely satisfied on that popcorn matinee level of midseventies Charles Bronson vehicles. Ben Johnson has so much presence that it's easy to overlook how fundamentally uninteresting his character is. Robert Tessier is a terrifying villain, but he's only in the film for a few minutes total. All I really remembered from my first viewing--what stuck with me over the years--was the train (as well as the fight on top of it) and the northwest locations. The constant shots of the train barreling toward its destination, a prosaic sense of snowy danger and stock costumes.

The Long Night

2008-04-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

Henry Fonda and Barbara Bel Geddes in The Long Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1947).

Vincent Price.

Henry Fonda.

I haven't seen more than a couple of clips from Marcel Carné's 1939 Le jour se lève, but I've seen enough to determine that The Long Night is damned to American remake purgatory (can one be "damned" to purgatory? you know what I mean). One's knowledge of the inevitable compromises and dilutions made by Litvak's film diminishes its real uniqueness and power. Contemporary viewers and critics didn't appreciate the stylized sets and striking use of background miniatures to create illusions of distance and scope. They just thought it all looked fake. And I'm sure they had no idea what to make of Vincent Price's lizard-like performance as Maximilian the magician. American audiences in the forties weren't ready for their melodrama to turn a conscious eye on its own latent surreal neuroses, though it tried now and then (Welles' Lady from Shanghai is another piece of evidence).

I'm not claiming that The Long Night is a masterpiece, or without serious flaws. There is some dissonant casting (Fonda, particularly, though he gives it all he's got, never quite finds his character's violently jealous pulse), and it's clear that the climactic logic required by the story is betrayed for the sake of studio approval. It has a look all its own, however, and it gets at that compelling pseudo-occult seediness I associate with the stage-magic industry of midcentury: a kind of two-bit theatrical perversion without a clear audience, half hermeticism, half con game, somewhere between Satanism and door-to-door vacuum sales.

Ann Dvorak is a peach-in-the-rough as Price's disgruntled assistant, and Elisha Cook Jr. and Charles McGraw appear too briefly in too-small roles.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars

2008-03-27T00:00:00.000-07:00

Title frame from the trailer for Robinson Crusoe on Mars (dir. Byron Haskin, 1964).

A monkey and Paul Mantee.

Victor Lundin and Paul Mantee.

Best thought of as a pretext for the engaging display of a series of vivid matte shots with bits of live-action motion thrown in here and there as seasoning. It's almost exhilarating to witness what look like the extreme lengths the filmmakers went to in order to ensure that the special effects not look convincing. Haskin even recycles the spaceship design from his War of the Worlds: these alien crafts "dart around" by means of a rapid succession of still cartoon shots. I fumble to articulate a schema according to which such minimalistic spectacularity is an extension of the movie's general ideological blandness, the way the whole thing might as well have been a Soviet production.

Beyond that, the monkey is a nice touch (though it has surprisingly little personality), and there is a charm to the perpetually clean-crewcutness of Mantee as the Crusoe figure, matched by the Friday figure Lundin's perfectly neat pageboy do. It seems hair never grows on Mars. Adam West makes a brief appearance, two years before becoming TV's Batman.

Oh, and how many other movies can you think of that are "based on" a novel (Defoe is even given partial writing credit), but the novel in question is mentioned explicitly by one of the characters? There seems to be some violation of fictive logic there.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons

2008-03-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

Akihiro Tomikawa as Daigoro in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons.

I was just barely following the plot in this, the fifth of the six Lone Wolf and Cub films. Ogami Itto has to assassinate an abbot delivering a scroll, intercept the scroll, and make sure it gets to a certain person, except that person may or may not be the right person, and in addition he has to kill some more people, something something something. Early on there is an entirely detachable episode in which little Daigoro gets involved in a pickpocket's escape, and has to be flogged publicly in an attempt to shame the pickpocket into confessing--while his father watches impassively from the crowd! Daigoro's a tough little junior assassin, and takes it like a man.

---

The DVD "extras" feature has trailers for several other samurai films, including Lady Snowblood (1973), which looks like a must-see. Check out the inventive subtitling here:

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril

2008-03-18T17:24:00.000-07:00

The hands of Tomisaburo Wakayama and Akihiro Tomikawa in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril (dir. Buichi Saito, 1972).

As exciting and visually striking as they are, these movies sort of run together after a while. What sets this one apart is the assassin who defeats her enemies by flashing her tattooed breasts at them. That and the little song about raindrops that plays when Daigoro goes off wandering.

Two more to go.

10,000 BC

2008-03-16T19:01:00.001-07:00

CGI elephant chasing guy with dreadlocks in 10,000 BC (dir. Roland Emmerich, 2008).

Did you know that some people are upset because of the "BC" in this film's title? Excuse me, some people, may I laugh at you? In the world of this film--a world where people can talk to tigers (I mean, I guess people can talk to tigers in our world too, but in this movie, the tigers understand), where old medicine women can tell the future and telepathically heal arrow wounds, and where seven-foot-tall malevolent albinos enlist not only human slaves but wooly mammoths to build huge golden-tipped pyramids--I think it's fair to entertain more than just the possibility that the as-yet-unborn Jesus Christ is a legitimate holy savior worthy of having all the years subsequent to his birth named after him; in this world, he could very well be an electric-banjo-playing international porn star who's able to shoot laser beams from his tongue.

I think what I like best about 10,000 BC is that the three main characters are named D'Leh, Evolet, and Tic'Tic. Their language must be derived from backwards Journey lyrics or something. For the audience, of course, it's English, which is fine; but why, when people in movies are supposed to be speaking another language, are they given those stupid accents? They don't have accents when they speak however they "actually" speak in their language, do they? So why should they have accents in "translation"? And why is it so important that the English used to represent their speech never contain any contractions? And I'm sorry--did I really hear someone say "many moons"?

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid

2008-03-15T11:06:00.000-07:00

John Pearce and Robert Duvall as Frank and Jesse James in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (dir. Philip Kaufman, 1972).

The biggest problem with this movie is its inability to tell the difference between satire and farce. For a certain sensibility, that's also part of what makes it interesting. The gee-whiz voiceover that begins the film gushes enthusiastically about the heroic qualities of Jesse James and his fellow outlaws, and what follows for the rest of the film is designed to show us, in incrementally stronger doses, what a load of horseshit all that is. But then there are bizarrely "comic" sequences like the Northfield baseball game, or more generally, the entire treatment of Cole Younger, played by Cliff Robertson. Cole is "the guy you like." He's curious, compassionate, good-natured--basically, a teddy bear. He shows the kids the bullet holes in his protective leather vest, and he fixes the calliope guy's calliope (much to his later regret). Jesse (Robert Duvall), by contrast, is a slobbering fiend, a cracker zealot, a murderous big bad wolf. But this contrast doesn't go anywhere, so we're left in a divided state of attention that finally seems beside the point. One could argue that there's some kind of irony in the realization that, at a crucial climactic moment, Jesse makes a decision that turns out to be strategically "right," whereas Cole's humanitarian instincts prove to be ill-considered. Sort of like the central argument between Mr. Cooper and Ben in Night of the Living Dead. This film, however, doesn't deliver its nihilism with the same brutal confidence as Romero's.

The film is still saturated with an idiot vitality that makes it well worth watching. Duvall is blood-curdling, especially from the moment when he says "She's a Yankee too" to the end of the film. The Northfield scenes are very colorfully and interestingly shot (they were actually filmed in Jacksonville, Oregon, a few miles away from me). When a big steam-engine proto-automobile thing comes chugging down the main street like a dinosaur, Cole's mouth drops ("Now, that's a wonderment"), and the other outlaws take a step back, momentarily frozen in terror. A pretty Scandinavian whore sings a beautiful song in the town brothel. Elisha Cook Jr. has a small role (too small) as a bank employee. And there's some good dialogue. A couple of the outlaws are arguing over whether a ring around the moon means it's going to rain, and one says that don't mean anything, it's just an old wives' tale, and the other says it don't have to mean anything if it's true.

The Prisoner of Shark Island

2008-03-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

Warner Baxter and (barely visible, on the right) Ernest Whitman in The Prisoner of Shark Island (dir. John Ford, 1936).

John Carradine.

Frank McGlynn Sr.

The story of Dr. Samuel Mudd, wrongly accused of complicity in the plot to assassinate Lincoln. Ford's immersion in the milieu of silent film is still very evident here, not only in the mechanics of blocking and framing and such, but in his Griffith-like treatment of the north vs. south theme, complete with repeated scenes in which negroes are depicted as alternately childlike and animalistic. Although, supposedly, Ford actually toned down the racism of Nunnally Johnson's screenplay quite a bit during shooting. Ernest Whitman does manage to infuse the character of ex-slave "Buck" (what else?) with some dignity, despite being required to jump up and down every so often and shout "Ah do declare." (Whitman played "Pinkie" in Jesse James, also scripted by Johnson: "A darkie named Pinkie on a mule named Stinkie.")

Aside from all that, and in spite of the usual historical distortions, it's a compelling story about government manipulation of due legal process, complete with chilling analogues to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Especially freaky are the pointed hoods placed over the heads of the accused conspirators during the "trial" scene.

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter

2008-03-13T11:36:00.000-07:00

John Lupton and Cal Bolder in Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (dir. William Beaudine, 1966).

Narda Onyx experiencing perverse electrical pleasures ordinary persons can't even dream of.

Estelita Rodriguez taking careful aim.

This rendition of the Jesse James legend includes some notable episodes of the outlaw's life that are omitted by most other films, such as the time Jesse's muscle-builder friend had his real brain removed by a lady mad scientist and replaced with an "artificial brain." The great William "One-Shot" Beaudine's last film (you may remember that I reviewed his modern cattle-rustling yarn Tough Assignment here a while back). The Joe Bob Briggs commentary on the DVD is a blast (and contains some substantive info on Beaudine's career, the actors, etc.).

A minor point, perhaps, but I want to say in response to all those critics who have complained that the Maria Frankenstein character is not actually Frankenstein's daughter, as the title proclaims, but his granddaughter: think about it. Frankenstein's son is a Frankenstein too, thereby making the son's daughter Frankenstein's daughter. No problem.

The Bank Job

2008-03-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

Jason Statham, Stephen Campbell Moore, James Faulkner, Alki David, and Daniel Mays in The Bank Job (dir. Roger Donaldson, 2008).

Roger Donaldson would probably have been more at home, and more frequently successful, in the old Hollywood. He makes highly conventional, story-driven movies according to formula, and is often very resourceful within those limitations. The Bank Job showcases his talents to their best advantage. Casting Jason Statham strictly according to type, for example, is hardly imaginative, but it's practical, and gets a certain dimension of audience expectation securely in place and therefore out of the way. Donaldson also has the restraint (or lack of range?) to avoid milking the early seventies English setting for its retro-groovy factor: this is not a hip ironic heist film, it's just a heist film. And as such, it's got the right moves. There's the inexhaustible Rififi-esque routine of painstakingly tunneling into the vault area, the mazy network of double- and triple-crosses, the brotherhood of thieves and their fragile code of honor.... And nothing new beyond that. This is just solid, workmanlike genre fodder. And if there were crime movies this solid and workmanlike at the theater every week, I'd be in heaven.

Dead Calm

2008-03-10T17:56:00.000-07:00

Billy Zane in Dead Calm (Dir. Phillip Noyce, 1989).

In my discussion of James Foley's adaptation of Jim Thompson's After Dark, My Sweet a few posts back, I talked about how being too faithful to a novel can be bad for a film. Phillip Noyce's treatment of Charles Williams's 1963 Dead Calm takes many more liberties with its source, some successful and others not so much. The basic plot remains intact: a man (Sam Neill) and his wife (Nicole Kidman) sailing alone on their yacht (the Saracen) in the middle of the ocean pick up a man (Billy Zane) leaving his own ship (the Orpheus) on a small dinghy. The ship is filling up with water, he tells them, and furthermore everyone else on it is dead from food poisoning. While the apparently distraught man in resting in the cabin, Neill's character (John) takes the dinghy over to the other ship and finds that things are not quite as Zane's character (Hughie) has made them out to be. While he's gone, Hughie overpowers Kidman's character (Rae) and takes over her and John's yacht. For most of the rest of the film, John must try to keep the floundering Orpheus afloat, and Rae must try to figure out a way to overpower her abductor and get back to John.

Most of the changes from the book can't be discussed in depth without giving away crucial turns of plot, but there are two which are especially striking: one concerning the number of major characters, and one concerning the extent of Hughie's sociopathy. With regard to the latter, let's just say that whereas in the book Hughie is a troubled and potentially dangerous young man, in the film he's a murderous psycho. The problem is that although we see graphic evidence of his lethality, Hughie is still written pretty much the same way he is in the novel: it never quite makes sense that he is supposed to be a total monster, especially as the interaction between him and Rae depends on us accepting a certain naively trusting quality in his personality that feels out of sync with the aforementioned changes in his character. It's not hard to see why the filmmakers would want to make these changes: the Hughie of the book is just not that scary in and of himself. Aside from the obvious race against time with the sinking boat and all, the tension comes from the relationship between Hughie and the other characters who don't make it all the way into the film. This leaves Noyce nothing to work with but standard mad-killer suspense tactics, and as I've said, Hughie still seems more like a spoiled, unstable kid making a big mess of things than a true cold-blooded slasher. These uneven elements lead the story into all the predictable cliches of the genre, which is too bad, because the movie has an overall feel that really works at times.

Here, then, in abandoning crucial story elements from the book, Dead Calm may seem to make the opposite mistake from the one made by After Dark, My Sweet; but from another perspective, the mistake is the same: that of retaining elements from the book that it can't make work cinematically. Billy Zane makes a very good Hughie, but he's playing the Hughie of the novel, not the Hughie they forgot to write for the film.

Someday maybe someone will release however much was completed of Orson Welles' late sixties version with Laurence Harvey and Jeanne Moreau, The Deep (no relation to the Peter Benchley novel/ Peter Yates movie), before Harvey died near the end of shooting.

The True Story of Jesse James

2008-03-07T09:12:00.000-08:00

Robert Wagner in The True Story of Jesse James (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1957).

An engaging enough remake of King's 1939 Jesse James. Not only is it based on Nunnally Johnson's original screenplay, but some of the shots from the earlier film are directly recreated, such as the bandits scurrying across the top of the train at night with its interior all lit up, or the horses leaping off the cliff into the water (I just don't like to see that).

Wagner tries to give James an ambivalent, dangerous edge, but he's even more fundamentally clean-cut than Tyrone Power. Jeffrey Hunter is almost too believable as his brother Frank--that is, sometimes I had to strain to tell them apart. Other admirable cast members include Agnes Moorehead, Hope Lange, John Carradine (who played Robert Ford in the 1939 film, here a preacher), Frank Gorshin, and Alan Hale, Jr. Despite all this talent, and despite a story that combines generic elements of two of Ray's best films--They Live By Night and Johnny Guitar--Ray only infuses it with his distinctive directorial aura here and there, in an isolated shot or exchange. The lead-up to the inevitable "picture-straightening" scene is a beautiful superimposition of 50s suburbia onto the western past, complete with picket fence and children playing outlaw in the front yard. This too, however, was already set in place by King's film.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades

2008-02-29T21:40:00.000-08:00

Akihiro Tomikawa and Tomisaburo Wakayama in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades (dir. Kenji Misumi, 1972).

More literally, "Perambulator Against the Winds of Death." I really don't know what to say about these Baby Cart movies. They're masterfully put together, and always gripping, but the codes--both filmic and ethical--are often opaque to me. Sometimes I get caught up in the unflagging emphasis on samurai honor before it occurs to me that this honor is depicted in an utterly incoherent way. Sometimes Ogami Itto steps in and does chivalrous things for damsels in distress (mostly prostitutes), and sometimes he just stands there with that sour, blank expression on his face (yes, it's both sour and blank) and watches the bad guys raping and killing innocent women. And there's just so much rape. Rape, rape, rape. Rape and killing. Lots of killing. Killing and honor. Every once in a while, when there's a lull in the carnage, li'l Daigoro looks around in wonder at scenes of natural serenity and beauty. At least I think it's wonder; his gaze is as blank and pitiless as his father's.

The Return of Frank James

2008-02-28T20:51:00.000-08:00

Henry Fonda in The Return of Frank James (dir. Fritz Lang, 1940).

It's a disappointment that Fritz Lang's first western is not quite as good as the film it is a sequel to (Henry King's Jesse James). Not as good, that is, at being the kind of film the first was: a big romantic crowd pleaser with lots of action and glamor. This would be fine if it were as good as other Fritz Lang films, but that's not the case either, although there are some attractive visual arrangements in which you can spot his emotive signature of brooding and dread. Henry Fonda reprises his performance as Frank James, and he's good, but he never delivers fully on the promise of wraithlike sternness he showed just standing in front of the camera in Jesse. Gene Tierney doesn't make much of her movie debut: all she gets to do is be a perky kid reporter and make a few concerned noises. John Carradine is a pleasure to watch as Robert Ford, but here as in the first film, he has sadly little screen time. The Jackie Cooper character (gung-ho kid tagging along after Frank) is useless. The color is dramatically more muted than in the first film, and that would make sense if Lang were consistently true to his downbeat aesthetic, but the screen captures I've posted above nearly exhaust the moments when this is the case, so a lot of the time things just look dull. There's a brief but mildly inspired scene where Frank walks in on the Ford brothers doing a heinously false cabaret "reenactment" of Jesse's murder, with the delightful help of career extra Barbara Pepper as Nellie Blane, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the West."