The Six-Reel Shuffle

In the Valley of Elah

2007-06-13T13:48:00.000-05:00

dir. Paul Haggis

Hollywood is an unmysterious place.*

Spencer Owen, BERKELEY
with special guest: John Doe, LOS ANGELES
June 12, 2007 - 35mm - unnamed L.A. movie theater

The Introduction to the Introduction by Spencer Owen

I've never seen The Sopranos more than four times. One of those times, it even happened to be a rerun of another one of those times. This summer, I plan to start the series fresh. But it has been hell -- "hell," I say -- trying to avoid finding out details about the ending. At this point, thanks to Google News, Reuters, MOG, Defamer, and the Daily Show, I know the form of the ending, and I know that it's ambiguous, and I even know the song that plays, but I don't know the content. That's okay with me. I'm proud that I've managed to evade the meat of the issue. The furious people, I guess, are getting the press, and then my friends love it. (A reaction like the one being reported by the media makes me think that the show wasn't, at least at large, appreciated for what probably made it so great. But I digress.)

The point is, no amount of spoiler alerts can prevent a worldwide discussion from at least partially making itself known to a person so connected to certain media outlets like myself. Luckily, the new Paul Haggis film, In the Valley of Elah, is not currently being discussed worldwide, so my urgent SPOILER ALERT for the following post should be absolutely heeded by anyone wishing to see the film untainted when it arrives at theaters later this year. I haven't seen Elah yet; needless to say, neither has almost anyone. However, if you hated Crash like I did, and you couldn't care less, perhaps you'd care to engage vicariously in this minor bit of critical revelry concerning the introduction and conclusion -- that is, the framing device -- of In the Valley of Elah. In the following discussion between myself and guest John Doe, the outrage manifested towards writer-director Paul Haggis and the society that spawned him easily rivals the globe-spanning fury from jilted Sopranos fans. Except, and I'm taking my friends' word on this one, we're right and they're wrong. I'll let John take it from here.

The Introduction by John Doe

Hello friends,

John Doe of Los Angeles here. I went to see Paul Haggis' new film In the Valley of Elah the other night. In my opinion, it was generally a bad movie, done in by Mr. Haggis' overwrought approach to nearly every single sequence, scene, and moment. I would rather not review the entire thing, as it was definitely a rough cut and I'm sure played much longer than it will once released. Also, one can always hope that certain post-production adjustments might improve a project like this. As bad as it is, it's not some piece of assembly line nonsense. Mr. Haggis is certainly trying to make a great film about something he cares about, and that's never something to completely dismiss. Still, he's a preachy, simple-minded filmmaker so much of that time that his ambition seems to almost backfire on him; he aims to engage complex issues, and seems so certain about his ability to do so in an intelligent way, that he chooses to leave absolutely no room for interpretation, or even for an audience member to get a thought in edgewise. This has the unfortunate effect of simplifying the "issues" in his films to the point that there seems to be nothing left for an audience to do. Nothing, of course, but to clap.

Anyway, after coming home, I began a conversation with my friend Spencer Owen, and what follows is a transcript of my description of (and our subsequent discussion about) Elah's framing device, which is one element that I'm certain will remain in tact once the finished product arrives at a theater near you. This device was so indicative of Mr. Haggis' unfortunate tendencies, and our conversation so indicative of our problems with him as a filmmaker, that we both agreed it was worth posting here at the Six-Reel Shuffle. What follows is a relatively detailed description of the film's final scene (as I remember it), right up to the "fade out." There are also some other plot spoilers contained here. And think of this not as a review, with measured critical thoughts, but as an in-the-moment reflection on something that really left a bad taste in my mouth. Consider this our passing that taste on to you.

The Brief Discussion

JOHN: Early in the movie, as Tommy Lee Jones is first setting off to find his son, he's driving his truck out of his hometown and sees that a janitor guy, who's Hispanic or something (but speaks fairly good English... I say "fairly good" because he's still a pretty dopey "Hispanic" character), is hanging the American flag at the high school upside down. So Tommy Lee stops and has him take it down, turn it the right way, and then raise it again. And he says, "You know what it means when you hang the flag upside down?" "No." "It means our country's in distress, send help, we're at a loss," or something to that effect.
SPENCER: Uh huh.
JOHN: So then... the movie happens, and, you know, Tommy Lee discovers how traumatic Iraq was for his son, and how it completely ruined his brain, basically. So then at the end he gets a package from his now-dead son (sent while he was still alive), and part of the package's contents is a pretty tattered American flag... I can't say I really know why his son sent him a tattered American flag, but whatever... Cut to: the next morning, Jones is again at the high school with the janitor guy, and he seems to be raising the flag his son sent him. So he's putting it on the thing, and he raises it (we don't see it yet), and then he pulls out a roll of duct tape and duct tapes the rope to the pole so nobody will mess with it (stupid). And then the janitor says, "So I shouldn't take it down at night?" and Tommy Lee's like, "No, you leave it just like that."
SPENCER: Wait, wait. Wait.
JOHN: Hold on, I want to finish this. ... and janitor's like, "Oh. That's easier." And then the janitor says, "It looks pretty old!" and Tommy Lee says, "It's been well used."
SPENCER: God, this is torture...
JOHN: Then Tommy Lee drives off. Pan up, and the tattered flag is hung upside down. Applause. Fade out.
SPENCER: That was TORTURE.
JOHN: (laughs)
SPENCER: I swore you were gonna say, "There's a shot at the end of Tommy Lee putting the flag on upside down" and I would've been like, "Oh, okay... that's not so bad." But JESUS!
JOHN: That's what I'm talking about! That's the fuckin' Haggis way!
SPENCER: You know what else is the fuckin' Haggis way?
JOHN: What?
SPENCER: A stupid Hispanic guy putting it on upside down.
JOHN: (laughs) Yes. It is. Very much so. It would never happen. None of that would ever happen.
SPENCER: Nope.
JOHN: By the way, the line "Oh. That's a lot easier," or whatever, gets a pretty big laugh. Asshole.
SPENCER: Wow... holy Christ... I get madder at this by the second. I seriously was ready to not care, and have it be ordinarily lame, but no... I think that Haggis and Spielberg must have had a long talk.
JOHN: Spielberg would never stoop to this, I don't think... his sensibilities wouldn't allow a full scene like that.
SPENCER: I just think Spielberg was like, "Tell you what, I'm interested in making less boneheaded political movies. But there's still a place for truly boneheaded ones. Here's all the tricks." And then Haggis ran with it longer and deeper than Spielberg ever could.
JOHN: He'd go for the flag shot, perhaps (though I'm talking in spirit, because Spielberg would never make a movie about this). But it really just comes down to Haggis sucking as a writer. That's it. He sucks as a writer, and is even worse as a director of his own writing.
SPENCER: Funny thing is, though, he's also great. Totally great. Really worth watching out for his next projects. Really captures the zeitgeist.
JOHN: Right, he's really putting some dents in the American dilemmas of the day.
SPENCER: I think this is a key problem, a curse that Haggis shares with many amateur (or even professional) screenwriters you're faced with on a day to day basis. These films rely -- whether intentionally or not, and usually because of the faults of the writer to be unable to see the big picture -- on the viewer's inattentiveness. For that ending to work, the viewer has to not notice all the things that are wrong with it.
JOHN: Well, yeah, that's true. But it's also true that, based on almost every script I've read, I really can't even tell you what subtlety looks like on the page. It's so, so, so rarely there.
SPENCER: Okay, but more crucially, the viewer has to not really care about the continuity and not really be interested in putting two and two together right away. Like, when that opening scene happens, it happens... and then when a flag appears any other time in the film, the viewer has to NOT remember that first scene in order for that excruciating final sequence to work. Either that, or the viewer has to be like "Oh, I see what he's doing... this is fun to watch play out!" ... which has to be rare.
JOHN: Yeah, that's very rare. It's just something that's never quite happened with popular movies... it's never been okay, really, in a popular sense, to make a movie that doesn't do all the thinking for you. audiences prefer to applaud a statement rather than a question. And the way it's done in this movie is, like, TEXTBOOK framing.
SPENCER: Yeah.
JOHN: A reasonable person would say, "Oh, this is going to come back later, isn't it? Sheesh." But no way. Nobody does. It reeks of planning, is what I hate.
SPENCER: And furthermore, the audience has to be inattentive enough not to notice the idiotic, baseless stereotype of that janitor character.
JOHN: Yes. The stereotype that a janitor of Hispanic descent, who speaks fluent English, and clearly isn't illegal, doesn't know the right way to hang a flag... mindblowing.
SPENCER: Yep.
JOHN: Why not make it a fuckin' little kids job? A kid who just didn't care that he'd done it wrong, not someone too stupid to know better.
SPENCER: Why not ... not make it anyone's job, and just have him notice that it's upside down, and change it back, and not have to have the conversation...
JOHN: Yeah, totally.
SPENCER: ...because if you live in this fucking country, and even if you don't, you understand the basic symbolism of the American flag... for god's sake.
JOHN: Of any flag!
SPENCER: Let's take this a step further. Why not have that first scene not exist. And then if you have to end your movie with the shot of Tommy valiantly and defiantly putting up the flag... it would be unexpected and, perhaps, more powerful. What about THAT!
JOHN: Well, but see, Haggis is all about planting seeds. He needs that stupid dialogue so we know what it means EXACTLY when Jones does it in the end.
SPENCER: Yeah, because we wouldn't know otherwise.
JOHN: Right. We'd just be totally in the dark. Clueless and confused.
SPENCER: All we'd have is this totally unforeshadowed moment. Jeez... never heard of it.

* The above photograph, we've been told, was actually taken in Mr. Haggis' living room. The giant Oscar behind him was a preemptive gift from the Academy, which expects him to lead a lustrous, progressive, award-studded career. The back of the human-sized award, which sits on a rotating pedestal, is lined with shelves, with places for at least ten more of the little gold fellows.

Once

2007-05-11T23:51:00.000-05:00

Once

dir. John Carney

Czechin' out an Irishman.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
May 11, 2007 - 35mm

Without a doubt the “nicest” movie to come out this year, John Carney’s sweet little romance, Once, plays nice from start to finish. The movie opens with a street musician (our hero!) frustratingly playing to an audience of one, some drunk guy. This drunken fellow, in turn, snatches our hero’s guitar case and the pocket change that comes with it. The hero makes chase and catches the thief, who amicably hands over the case. The street music saint, then, feeling badly for the sorry sod, hands him some pocket change. What a gentleman. Sigh.

One of last year’s “nicest” movies, The Pursuit of Happyness, found Will Smith’s heroic lead constantly chasing after thieves and dreams. That movie is nice. It has the word “Happy” in the title, but the hero in that movie is not as nice as Once’s hero. He redefines nice. The Pursuit of Happyness is not a bad movie, neither is Once. These movies are gooey, gooey gumdrops, well acted, well shot, cute and teetering on the ledge of obscene narrative contrivance, every once and a while getting a toe or foot wet.

Our nameless hero, played by real life musician Glen Hansard, writes and performs most of the songs in Once, and there are a lot of them. Almost each and every one is bad, and I’m certain we’ll see at least one, if not two nominated for an Academy Award come year’s end. In a pursuit of sappyness, Hansard’s singing falls in the category of other bad bands like Coldplay, Keane and The Dave Matthews Band. Whatever strength or weakness the lyrics may have become irrelevant as the singer starts groaning and hollering gibberish with a pained look of exasperation that translates:

“Oh man, I’m so sad and frustrated, grrrrr... I could snap at any second… but my voice is getting high, because I’m nice… I’m so nice… baby, I’m sad… I’m not growling like this because I’m a mean guy… I’m a good guy… but I’m dark… and angry… but I love you… what a mystery I am… so tortured… what love have I lost… nice.”

Even though the music is bad, it does not affect the believability of the characters' satisfaction with the tunes. It’s easy to believe these characters love these songs. They’re so nice.

Once looks a lot better than it sounds. It’s a homemade movie, seemingly shot guerilla-style, with handheld long-takes that settle into the oft-exchanged gazes of the potential lovers, hero and heroine. Marketa Irglova plays the nameless heroine, and her songs are better, a lot better, than Mr. Hansard’s. It’s a pity we get so few of those. They make an exceptionally handsome couple, their chemistry oozing off the screen. There is flirting nearly the entire movie, the pair relishing every moment their deep gaze is matched by some brief physical connection, be it a piggyback ride or touch on the shoulder. The flirty excess plays similarly to the atmospheric brilliance of Before Sunset. Where Sunset shines is the deconstruction of the two no-longer-young leads, exposing them as often hypocritical, mean and petty, and yet the chemistry and romance is extraordinarily palatable. Once opts strongly against any character flaw whatsoever with the leads or peripheral characters, though I find one. They’re too nice.

The niceness leads to a surprisingly satisfying ending that is decidedly not simple or stupid. For all of the niceties in the movie, remember, “nice” is not always bad, that’s why it’s called “nice.” Nice meaning admirably small, taut, short, sweet, silly, a little daft and sometimes boring.

And now, for a boring song from the movie:

Murder by Decree

2007-05-05T14:42:00.000-05:00

Murder by Decree

dir. Bob Clark

Observing a sad loss.

Kalen Egan, LOS ANGELES
May 4th, 2007 - DVD

Bob Clark’s recent death has brought a lot of well-deserved attention to a few of his excellent and neglected works, particularly his cool and gritty early horror breakthroughs (Deathdream, Dead of Night, The Night Andy Came Home, The Veteran, Whispers, etc.). For some reason, though, surprisingly few of these “and he was good, too!” obituary articles even mention Murder by Decree, which to me is arguably his greatest accomplishment. A model of effective, efficient, and quietly resonant storytelling, this is one of my own favorite mystery films, a slightly twisted Sherlock Holmes/Jack the Ripper hybrid that combines intelligence, wit, chills and—most unexpectedly—a little heartbreak. It’s a movie with the rare ability to unspool a plot that feels at once meticulous and haphazard (in all the best ways), and by the finish it has even earned the right to reduce Sherlock to tears—twice!

The film opens with an incredibly good scene. Holmes (Christopher Plummer) and Watson (James Mason) are at the opera, and everyone is awaiting the Prince’s arrival. When he shows up, he’s received with a mix of polite applause (from the wealthy patrons seated on the floor) and jeers (from the upper galley cheap seats). This goes on for a few moments, until Watson—appalled by the lack of respect—bellows out “God save his royal highness!” from his seat in one of the side balconies. This instigates thunderous applause from most of the audience. Holmes turns to Watson, proud and surprised, and says, “good show old fellow.” This should be the fuckin’ primer on how to open a movie. We get so much out of this seemingly tangential introduction; the turmoil in England that serves as the background for the entire Ripper mythology, Holmes and Watson’s place situated between the poor and the wealthy, and—most charmingly—a representation of the sincere and deep friendship between the two partners.

This “relationship” element is one of the film’s strongest attributes; here, probably more than in any other Holmes film, we get a realistic understanding of the Holmes/Watson dynamic. Holmes was content to observe and critique the cultural melee at the opera, while Watson felt emotionally moved to do something about it. Watson needs Holmes' intelligence to right criminal wrongs, and Holmes needs Watson as his kind of emotional-everyman compass. Furthermore, not a film willing to relax into easy character patterns, some of the best sequences in Murder by Decree occur when the two characters adopt the skills of their counterparts; Watson takes on some of the detective work himself, for example, or (especially) the scenes in which Holmes becomes deeply invested in the humanity of the case.

Clark is good at getting great performances from the excellent cast (which includes Donald Sutherland in his haunted, long-stare mode) but he's even more of an asset when it comes to visualizing this particular world and story. The sets, despite often feeling like sets, are beautiful and misty, and there is a sincerely disturbing sequence where Holmes visits an insane asylum. Clark even sparsely applies some of his signature shots in unexpected and effective ways. He all-but pioneered the modern usage of “killer’s POV” in Black Christmas (and would later rip it off as “peeper’s POV” in Porky’s), and his occasional use of it here—just a year after the technique blew the horror world’s mind in Halloween—is inspired and startling even today. The first kill in the film is as sleazy and disturbing as anything in Black Christmas, and it sets the whole movie on edge. In other Holmes films, we assume people have been murdered, sure, but by brutally depicting the deaths Clark raises the stakes for the great detective. Holmes tries to remain impassive, but eventually the severity of the crimes sneaks in under his skin, and when he finds out who’s responsible… well… he gives John Gielgud a fat piece of his mind, let me tell you! It’s a great scene, as are nearly all the scenes in this subtle and expert film.

Murder by Decree puts modern mysteries to shame. The investigative thriller genre has been hit hard in recent years, to the point that it’s nearly dead as a dependable entertainment. TV bullshit like C.S.I. and Law and Order have turned the “mystery” into a kind of crank toy, where “get this to the lab” is the new “elementary, my dear Watson” (which, it’s important to note, is a line that goes unspoken in all of this film-- such is the filmmakers' reverence for the characters). Maybe the reason Holmes has remained so enduring as a character is because he’s completely removed from stupid technology, like UV lights and DNA testing. How fuckin' boring is that? In 1978, when Bob Clark was at the top of his game, he knew that in order to make a truly modern investigative thriller he couldn’t easily rely on his own era. Instead, he took his style and intelligence back to the roots of the genre, and delivered one of the best mysteries I know of.

Bob Clark, you'll be very fondly missed and remembered. And not just like this.

Spider-Man 3: The IMAX Experience

2007-05-05T12:51:00.000-05:00

Spider-Man 3: The IMAX Experience

dir. Sam Raimi

James Franco and Neve Campbell in Robert Altman's The Company.
Kyle MacLachlan in Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls. Tobey Maguire in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
May 4, 2007 - 70mm/AMC Lincoln Square

My favorite scene in Robert Altman’s The Company is when a shirt-less (hot!) James Franco prepares an egg breakfast for Neve Campbell. This occurs in the morning, after what we can only assume was a night of passionate chef/ballerina-style lovemaking. The egg preparing is surprisingly very intimate, more so than a sex scene would have been, but more than intimate it is hilarious. He smiles that goofy million-dollar smile and all is right with the world. And, on top of the smiling, he’s a good cook! He’s making eggs! What a catch! Way to go, ballerina Neve!

My favorite scene in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 is when a fully clothed (hot!) James Franco prepares an egg brunch/dinner/snack for Kirsten Dunst. This occurs in the middle of the day, after and during dancing rather poorly to “The Twist”. The Spider-Man movies are full of musical montages, but this is hardly a montage. Mr. Raimi opts to treat this small, intimate scene with the frenetic “so much is happening and time is passing!” styling of a “‘love is in the air’ montage” by bringing archaic music, wild and crazy dancing and, most importantly, Mr. Franco’s priceless smile. A great chunk of this movie, when Mr. Smile loses his marbles, is very amusing. It all culminates in a scene with Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man/Peter Parker) and Mr. Franco (New Goblin/Harry Osborn) in a coffee shop.

The coffee shop scene is a serious one, but it ends comically with the young Osborn essentially commenting on the “damn good slice of pie” to his waitress. Mr. Franco’s insistence on the quality of the slice of pie echoes the work of Kyle MacLachlan in David Lynch’s television show, Twin Peaks. This unhappy coffee shop meet between Parker and Osborn, in conjunction with some alien goo, leads to another series of over-the-top slapstick silliness. This time, Mr. Maguire plays the part of the wild and crazy guy, which leads us back to Kyle MacLachlan. As the alien goo and his newly acquired “single” status take hold, Peter Parker becomes a charming sleaze-ball. This sleaziness physically manifests itself in an altered hairstyle. The “sleazy-spidey” hairstyle happens to be another echo in the Kyle Maclachlan canon, reflecting his hair in Paul Verhoeven’s movie, Showgirls. In Showgirls, Mr. Maclachlan’s “sleaze” is represented through staring at girls, a lot of cocaine use and weird, body-flopping pool sex. In Spider-Man 3, Mr. Maguire’s “sleaze” is represented through staring at girls, a lot of cookie-eating and weird, body-flopping jazz club dancing.

Peter Parker dances at a jazz club with some new girl, Gwen Stacy (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), to get back at his recently fired ex and ex-Showgirl (Broadway, not Vegas), Mary Jane Watson (played by Kirsten Dunst). Ms. Dunst does quite a bit of singing in Spider-Man 3, and all of it is very poor. Can any of the women in the Spider-Man universe do anything right or be the least bit independent or strong? Unlike the dancing in the movie, the singing is not funny. Not funny at all.

Almost none of Spider-Man 3 makes any sense, not in the classical sense of the word and not in the fantasy universe created in first two (successful) installments in the series. There is a sand-monster who can grow to exponential heights, a cross between the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters and Nick Nolte’s “water-father” monster from the end of Hulk. There is an old advice-giving manservant at the Osborn mansion that bequeaths pivotal knowledge to Harry at just the right narrative moment. There is an inexplicable vibrating desk. All of these oddball non-sequiturs, compounded with an overly complicated, yet very simple and stupid, story make for something that, if anything, is good for a few laughs. I have no intentions of elevating the first two Spider-Man movies to the levels of the to-be-mentioned series, but Spider-Man 3 fits snuggly in the Batman Forever or Return of the Jedi category of moviemaking. It has the totally bonkers nonsense feel of Batman Forever, combined with the performative (none of the actors care) feel of Return of the Jedi.

Spider-Man 3 is a bad movie.

No Country for Old Men

2007-05-01T23:25:00.000-05:00

No Country for Old Men
dir. Joel and Ethan Coen

Hair + Can = Movie Magic

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

April 30, 2007 - 35mm/AMC Lincoln Square

Josh Brolin plays Llewlyn Moss. One day, on a rather unsuccessful hunt in the pristine wild of West Texas, Llewlyn happens upon the aftermath of a botched heroin deal. Bloodied, rotting bodies of both men and dogs have been shot full of holes. It’s a mess, but it is beautiful. The site is brimming with a history of the not too distant past. The loud gunfight lives on only in this painting, a still sculpture of bloodshed. Llewlyn methodically observes the carnage as though wandering through a museum or diorama. Every bit of motion on the hush landscape is startling. Following a trail of blood, which may as well have been gingerbread, he finds the body of a man who almost got away, and with him, a satchel full of cash. How much cash? Who cares. A lot. The concern is not how much cash is in the satchel, but whom the money now belongs to. Finders keepers. Llewlyn Moss takes the money. There’s no turning back, and the wonderful thing about No Country for Old Men is, Llewlyn Moss doesn’t turn back. He takes things as the come. It’s not fate. It’s more complicated than fate. It’s survival.

For every hero (Llewlyn Moss), there’s an equally capable villain (Anton Chigurh). Chigurh is a movie baddie for the history books. Javier Bardem embodies his charms, looks and creative murderous zeal with expert precision. He wields a can of super-compressed air (the sort used on the kill-floor of the slaughterhouse) and turns it on humanity. It is a quiet way to take a life, and the nonchalance with which Chigurh executes his victims is matched by how death and violence is portrayed in the movie. There is a startling, magnificent degree of matter-of-factness to the entire thing. There is little to no screaming in No Country for Old Men and practically no music in aid of tension or action. The violence is allowed to exist. Death is enough. Death, as a matter-of-fact, is serious. It speaks for itself, though it would be a mistake to call this “hands-off” moviemaking, as the deliberately paced action sequences are gasp-worthy because of the stillness and silence contained within the expertly designed landscape, both physical and emotional.

The carnage and straight-laced in-the-moment chaos of the Llewlyn/Chigurh young man’s hunt is juxtaposed with Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s tempered reflections on life’s past. No Country for Old Men takes place in 1980, but more importantly it is set in the present tense. The present is a difficult place for Ed Tom to be. Played by Tommy Lee Jones, Ed Tom is an old man, and suffice it to say, this is no country for him. Whilst providing the greatest amount of comic relief in his dealings with the young deputy (chameleon Garret Dillahunt), Ed Tom also carries the brunt of the burden all of life and death on his sad shoulders. His hefty words bookend this tale nearly devoid of foreshadowing, catharsis and climax.

No Country for Old Men is a marvelous movie, steadily surprising and thrilling both emotionally and intellectually, with performances, wit, set pieces and visuals that are a glory to behold. Every location is lived in. Every hotel room needs a dusting. Every home seemingly decorated by its occupants. The astounding and ravishing Scottish actress, Kelly Macdonald, plays Llewlyn’s wife and not for a moment can you consider her not a West Texas native. Writer/Directors Joel and Ethan Coen have successfully captured the spirit of the present, forever moment (as provided by Cormac McCarthy) in both personality and texture, fashioning an eternal motion picture classic.

Moviemakers and storytellers have been deconstructing the mythos of the “Old West” for generations. There is timelessness and urgency in this exploration, worthy not only of the brain, but also of the soul and to the very essence of being natural people of this country and of this earth.

Killer of Sheep

2007-04-29T22:44:00.000-05:00

Killer of Sheep

dir. Charles Burnett

Jeff Larson, Baton Rouge
April 2, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center Megamall

Samuel Johnson, the greatest critic who ever lived, once wrote, “the critic is the only man whose triumph is without another’s pain, and whose greatness does not rise upon another’s ruin.” These are damning words, but the inverse is, also, ultimately true. A critic – even one self-anointed like I am – faced with a work of art so completely successful and jaw-dropping in its execution is the loneliest of men. Unable to codify, categorize, and explain what or how the project does what it does, he always must resort to speaking in terms of mere beauty. And this is why the critic will always fail. From Plato to Bloom we have long sought to intellectualize beauty, but beauty is beauty because of its ephemeral and indefinable nature, understanding it is possible, but fully describing it is an impossible task. All we can hope for in cases where beauty smacks us across the face because of our vanity is to write words that present a mere fraction of what our experience was.

One of the frustratingly beautiful examples of this is, of course, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. The film focuses on a modern day shepherd, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), and, increasingly, the sadness and desperation in his eyes. He is surrounded by his family: a wife (Kaycee Moore), who is incredibly dispirited by their increasing distance, a daughter, who sings Earth, Wind & Fire songs to her dolls and wears a sad-eyed puppy dog mask, and two sons, one who in the twilight of his adolescence is both a child – he has a thing for too much sugar in his cheerios – and becoming a man – he is desperate for money, and in Watts County, California will have that desire for quite some time. And, there’s the rub: Watts County, with its TV thieves and would be murderers, is inescapable. A quick trip to a local racetrack ends with a flat tire with no spare affordable or within reach, and a potentially funny scene centers around a group of people sitting in a car, but when one of them reaches through the nonexistent windshield for a can of beer it becomes clear the car is merely a shell. The effect is devastating, and the corollary for Stan is equally so. Halfway through the movie, when Stan, shirtless, and his wife are slow dancing in silhouette, his movements are robotic while hers are fluid and loving, and slowly become urgent, determined, and desperate. These two no longer have any escape open to them even in the privacy of their own home. A crushing blow to be sure, for the scene is one of the most strikingly arresting in the whole movie, and the outcome is the most powerful depiction of overwhelming despair I have ever seen.

But the movie is not merely concerned with gloom; there is a fair amount of glitter here as well. Interspersed between Stan’s scenes are short vignettes centering on the adventures of the neighborhood children. The immediate connection between these stories and Stan is through his daughter and younger son. At first glance these scenes seem disjointed from the rest of the movie, as if they are a particularly affecting form of navel-gazing. Mostly, in these scenes, the neighborhood children throw rocks at each other or foolishly risk life and limb, but often because this playing is so cinematically beautiful, the immediate effect is a reverence towards the moment itself. Three scenes in particular stand out from the rest. In one, the children jump between rooftops, and we see them from below, as they, like Icarus, hang in midair before landing on the next roof. In another, as seen from a train, they run alongside the tracks, and, like a bunch of would-be soldiers, toss rocks towards the camera. And, even in a quiet moment, when the kids are merely sitting on the train-tracks, the framing is so exquisite and the kids are so exuberant that when they all can’t help but look at the camera, I felt a connection, a warming inside, because, yes, this is what summer is.

To most of the critics, these images are irreconcilable with Stan’s scenes; they often cite a jumbled disjointed nature to Killer of Sheep – along with some words about Stan’s culpability, the kid’s overwhelming innocence, and the underlying social message. All of these themes are, of course, there, but even in the children’s scenes a melancholy undercurrent connects with Stan’s preoccupations. Most often the children’s games are violent in the sort of ways that children’s games are: they often involve rocks, displays of superiority, or slightly dangerous actions. Their outcome is, of course, skinned knees, hurt pride, and a healthy bout of tears. Truly, most summer games end up this way, and in Killer of Sheep the kid’s emotions are conquerable – after the tears dry and your face is salty, it’s time for an ice cream and more adventures. When we are kids these feelings disappear, but as we age the feelings behind them become vastly insurmountable and dire. We learn from our culture – books, movies, human contact – that these feelings are important, and that it’s necessary, for better or for worse, to address them. And that’s the central conceit of Killer of Sheep: Stan has reached a place where he lives in his emotions, and because of Watts county, he is powerless to address them, so he becomes a stranger, the man underground. And, to some extent the same can be said of any lifetime. There will always be histories that we can’t address, can’t correct, because to do so would destroy our sense of ourselves.

The movie begins with Stan lecturing his son on what it takes to be a man – “You are not a child anymore, you soon will be a goddamn man” – Stan tells him he must protect his sister, must stand up for himself, must ignore his emotions, and must, most of all, be strong. He son listens with a mixture of confusion and disbelief. When Stan insists that he “Start learning what life is about now, son”, it’s pretty clear that he already knows: rocks hurt, and sometimes you can’t fix, or ignore, them.

The best movies are those that present their themes concisely, but you can sense an ambiguity, a certain uncertainty, behind their insistence. The closer you look, their themes collapse one by one until you are left with a hazy picture of what it was you once saw, but of one thing you are convinced, this experience, this catharsis, has placed within you a new sense of yourself and the world around you. You slowly realize the experience you're having is not one centered around a social or political argument; it is not exploring time or space; it is not a collection of disparate, perfect moments; it is not merely about race, or class, or gender: something far more complex and unnamable is happening. You are not holding your breath out of fear, but because you are experiencing something so wonderfully beautiful. Killer of Sheep is why we go to the movies: in short, you'll never look at things the same way again.

Bonus Song!

Final Destination Trilogy

2007-04-15T20:09:00.000-05:00

Final Destination

dir. James Wong

Just like Kenny Rogers and the SATs, Death hates cheats.

Joey Devine, ALAMEDA
April 15, 2007 - DVD

The Seed.

Final Destination is a really subtle movie. In a genre as overblown and dumbed-down as the teen horror genre, Final Destination really just lets the audience figure it all out. In fact, this movie is so ambiguous you can’t even tell what it’s about until the tightly wound knot that is Final Destination unfurls itself in the final act. Take the first 8 to 10 minutes:

We are shown a copy of Death of a Salesman.

Dad says, “Live it up, Kid! You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” (Cue Ear Shattering Ominous Score)

A student reads a book about French tourism that mentions Lady Di. (Wait…isn’t she…No…She Didn’t? She’s dead right?)

“Leaving on a Jet Plane” by John Denver plays in the airport bathroom. (Actual line of Dialogue: “John Denver? Wait a second; didn’t he die in a plane crash?")

A baggage cart reads the number 666.

Oh wait. I totally lied in that first paragraph. Sorry. This movie is about as subtle as the new Dane Cook CD. (Translation for Dane Cook fans: THIS MOVIE IS THE OPPOSITE OF SUBTLE. Wait, why are you reading this? Shouldn’t you be bro-ing it up somewhere?) So, it’s not subtle, but that’s okay because it has great dialogue, right? No, actually the dialogue is really wooden and terrible; as is the acting by some person named Ali Larter and the kid who played Casper the Friendly Ghost. (I would normally give some kind of example here, but I lost my notes, and watching all three Final Destinations in one sitting has irreparably damaged my brain.) No, FD1, as I like to call it, is all about the wacky deaths and irreverent “black humor” (I put that in quotes because it is neither dark nor is it humorous). A lady gets stabbed and exploded (AT THE SAME TIME!). A kid hangs himself taking a shower. All with generally mediocre to almost-fun results. Little did we know that this little movie would lead to something so much greater.

A quick plot rundown:

Funny song plays ("Leaving on a Jet Plane"). Kids get on plane. One kid has a dream that the plane is going to explode. Kid freaks out. Various under developed characters and love interest get off plane with kid. Plane explodes. Various half characters die in over the top ridiculousness. Kid and love interest get scared. Kids think they beat death some how. Kids die in end. (Credits Roll)

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!

Read that series of events one more time, because that is the basic formula from which genius spawns.

A quick FD1 fun fact:

On the DVD there are 3 different commentary options. Including one with just the composer of the score. (Spencer, I think you need to get on this one.)

Final Destination 2
dir. David R. Ellis

"Holy Shit! It’s Bob Weinstein!"

The Misstep.

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Alfred Hitchcock once said that the key to making a great sequel was showing the audience exactly what they saw the first time, only bigger and include only one major character from the first movie (Remember a couple of paragraphs ago when I said all the kids died? Yeah, that was a lie. Ali Larter is still alive.) That’s why Psycho 2 was so great, because he followed his own instructions.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!

Psycho 2 is neither great nor was it directed by Alfred Hitchcock. And I made up that stuff about sequels.

The premonition part of Final Destination 2 is totally great. Highway to Hell plays. A bus full of football players screams “Pile up! Pile up! Pile up!” It is really over the top and in general, shockingly fun. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the rest of FD2. Well, actually it is really over the top, but where FD1 took itself almost too seriously, FD2 is just too goofy (okay, so that’s a lie. FD1 really wasn’t THAT serious, but please, just bear with me here). FD1 is all Bob Hoskins. FD2 is all Roger Rabbit. FD2 is a movie where a guy escapes a fire and then dies because he slips on some spaghetti he threw out the window. And another 19-year-old kid has a plate glass window fall on him, because he can’t resist the urge to chase a group of pigeons away. Even under Final Destination rules isn’t that just a little too crazy?

I hated this movie. Luckily, 65 minutes into the movie, it ended. Not because the movie was over, mind you, but because I rent movies from the local Blockbuster Video, and it came with a deep scratch across the DVD. Thank you, Weinstein Company, for contractually obligating all Blockbuster Videos to destroy all non-Weinstein movies. I could kiss your feet Bob and Harvey. I really could. So yeah, I don’t know how this movie ends. And I also don’t really care. Good Riddance.

Final Destination 3
dir. James Wong

Every fourth scene in this movie looks like this.

The Pinnacle.

I’ve got to level with you guys. I’m facing a real dilemma here. I love Final Destination 3. But I HAVE NO IDEA WHY. It’s not a good movie, I don’t think. But I also don’t love it because it’s terrible. But it’s a movie I love so much I’ve watched it 4 times this month. It is always on HBO. Final Destination 3 stars the girl from Brick that I have a crush on (Wait…Hold on…Actually I’m being told it stars the girl from Sky High who I don’t have a crush on. Sorry, I always get those two movies mixed up, you know, because they’re so similar), and someone named Texas Battle. (Or at least it says so in the credits, but I refuse to believe that there is someone out there actually calling him or herself Texas Battle). FD3 mixes the over the top ridiculousness of FD1 and the mega super A-bomb ridiculousness of FD2 into a cocktail of face burning acid that will thrill and delight!

FD3 has the greatest premonition scene in all of movie history, and that includes the movie Premonition. Let me just say it involves a bunch of kids and a roller coaster. IT IS AWESOME! People get cut in half, the roller coaster defies the laws of physics and hangs for an eternity at the top of its loop. It is amazing. And to think I’m only being half sarcastic when I write this!

Where FD3 really succeeds is in its execution. It throws away the build up to everyone’s crazy deaths that was so prevalent in the first two, and instead of building up tension using fake scares and slow mo as people turn on ovens and stuff, it lets us know how the characters are going to die using a cheap plot device. The entire movie is a race to see if the main characters can convince people not to go tanning or whatever, and when they can’t, getting there just late enough to watch their heads explode as the main characters look on in terror with blood all over them. Seriously, I would say an eighth of the scenes in this movie end with two people looking on in horror as blood splatters all over their faces. For some reason, I enjoy this every time it happens. (Funnily enough, it seems as if MTV agrees as they just premiered this show called Scarred that seems to have the same premise. Only with skateboarders and in real life.)

In the end, I think the reason I love this movie so much is for the same reason I used to love that game Mouse Trap. It’s literally like watching that game happen over and over again, only if some kind of outrageous idiot savant had designed it. In one scene, two valley girls turn the heat up in their tanning salon, which melts the ice on a soda; the condensation from the soda leaks into the box that controls the temperature on their tanning beds, frying them; the heater blows a coat rack over; which knocks a shelf on top of the two tanning beds, causing the two girls to burn to death in a tanning bed. All while the chorus of Roller Coaster of Love plays over and over again! I know it’s stupid, but it’s great stupid. I think. I don’t know what else to say, I love this movie!

So, go see Final Destination 3, but please don’t blame me if you think it sucks.

Prince, Star of Stage and Screen

2007-04-09T00:50:00.000-05:00

Prince: a Spotlight

Somebody bring him a mirror.

Spencer Owen, BERKELEY

Bear with me here. We go through phases, my friends, and I write this smack-dab in the middle of a phase where I can't find much motivation to write about movies. I've only seen one great film that's come out in my area in 2007, and it was Zodiac, and I haven't done much home viewing either. I now present "taking it where I can get it," the "it" being that cursed motivation.

A parallel phase, although I seem to be at the tail-end of this one, is that I've been incredibly into Prince. I go deep into musicians and filmmakers, but especially musicians, to the point where someone will say to me, "Man, you are obsessed with that." To me, it makes a lot of sense. If I like something by somebody enough, I'll explore their work further and deeper until I feel like I've heard or seen enough for now. The so-called obsession lasts a relatively brief time, usually, and it can come in waves. But until the saturation point or points, it's a thorough wade through the pleasure-waters of what I imagine as "where that person is/those people are coming from." Around the release of INLAND EMPIRE, "it" was David Lynch. On New Year's Eve, I saw Neil Hamburger at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco and I was utterly taken with him for the first month of '07; Neil was "it." Last spring and summer, Steely Dan was "it" (by the way, "Deacon Blues" was in Zodiac). Some months ago, I found out about an enormous amount of unreleased Prince material, and thus "it" was – and has been, and still, to some degree, is – Prince. Don't we all have these phases, too? I guess that, the way I operate, with me it can look like an obsession. So be it.

Luckily, my phase can branch off into multimedia, because Prince isn't just a musician. He's also an actor, and ... a filmmaker! Stop laughing. He really has made two honest-to-God feature-length narratives. And check yourself: Purple Rain (1984) isn't one of them. That leaves two movies you likely haven't heard of, both directed by Prince Rogers Nelson: Under the Cherry Moon (1986) and Graffiti Bridge (1990).

The best movie among them is Purple Rain. Prince, the Revolution, and his other Minneapolis cohorts had so much damned charisma back in the day that the movie could have been just as good even if it had been directed a bit worse, but director Albert Magnoli does pull off a mid-'80s confection, and his work should be respected. Purple Rain is worth seeing, and you should really try to see it in a theater with an excited audience. I saw it at the Parkway Speakeasy in Oakland and the audience behaved exactly as I'd hoped to make it a wonderful night: laughed, shouted, shushed, sang and clapped at all the right parts. It's not just because every movie should be viewed with its ideal and respectful audience that I say this; Purple Rain is a variety show, with comedy and drama played for mass appeal, and some show-stopping musical numbers (some of which are performed live and some not – guess which!) on the stage of the First Avenue Club in Minneapolis. Prince's character, the Kid, does not convince you that he should be called "the Kid," or indeed anything but Prince. He's odd, soft-spoken, and somewhat stilted, but he's magnetic nonetheless. As my friend Jamie put it, the movie really does take place in a sort of Princeworld, so whether things make sense or not is irrelevant. It's one of those movies.

The worst movie of the three, and Prince's second (and presently final) turn at the helm of a feature, is Graffiti Bridge. It is an interesting companion to Purple Rain. Rephrased more accurately, it is interesting that it exists and what it attempts is interesting, but it is not an interesting movie. Starting in 1990, Prince's music shifted somewhat abruptly in a manner that would far more often mask his personality with things generic and flat, whether lyrically or in the arrangement and production, or both. The Graffiti Bridge project may serve sufficiently to mark the distinction between '80s Prince and early '90s Prince. His return as the Kid is disappointing; his charisma is gone, all quirks ironed out, and the songs make no splash. Morris Day and the Time, such a dynamic and breezily comical fixture in Purple Rain, make a return and barely inject some life into it; the rest of the supporting players generally pale in comparison to the sassy members of the Revolution. Another key shift: Princeworld in Graffiti Bridge isn't Minneapolis, but a sound stage at his own Paisley Park Studios, and no amount of dutch angles or neon colors can make this an appealing place.

The best phrase I can think of to adequately describe the aesthetic of Graffiti Bridge would be "mystical urban cinema." Prince wrote the script as well, and he lays the mystique and quasi-mysticism thick, with no insightful poetry to be found, only a jumble of personal spirituality that he fails to clearly communicate at any point. As for "urban," I refer both to the African-American city life aspect and the Prince-penned-and-produced black music in the film. The former rings distant and false, and the latter falls quite short. I tend to validate the existence of this project only by four of the songs from the resulting soundtrack – and they are "Elephants and Flowers," "Joy in Repetition," the top-10-hit "Thieves in the Temple" and the Time's "Release It" – and unlike with Purple Rain, nothing is gained by experiencing them in the film; they're simply decent studio recordings, no more or less.

So Prince tried to follow up Purple Rain and he failed. In between the smashing success of Purple Rain and the somewhat embarrassing failure of Graffiti Bridge, however, was a much more respectable failure in the form of his first directorial effort, Under the Cherry Moon. The third and final album by Prince and the Revolution is titled Parade, and it's just about as outstanding as the other two; a fact that even casual Prince fans might not have fully assimilated is that the full title of the album is Parade: Music from the Motion Picture "Under the Cherry Moon." The music is used in the film almost exclusively as incidental cues, yet despite the high quality of the tunes, it doesn't bother me that only one of them gets musical-number treatment (the funk jam "Girls and Boys"). Even merely as background, the songs are welcome in the movie, despite the Revolution being sorely missed as on-screen players, and despite it being a black-and-white period piece set in 1930s Paris.

No, it isn't really a period piece. It supposedly takes place in that period, but to call the dialogue and mannerisms anachronistic would be to suggest that any attempt other than pure visual aesthetic was being made to realistically evoke the era. Becky Johnston's script is often quite adequate, and Prince's Christopher Tracy character is very different than either incarnation of the Kid. He's sly, quick and talkative, and though the comedy is fairly base, he really is a pleasure to watch; he certainly holds his own as a romantic lead against the debut of future-Oscar-nominee Kristin Scott Thomas. (I find it amusing to note that in her first scene, Thomas is playing a drum set unaccompanied, and she really appears to be doing it, and competently.) He's also got a great sidekick relationship with the Time's Jerome Benton as his best friend and roommate, very playful and even a tad homoerotic.

An example of the movie's charm comes in a scene where the aristocratic Thomas is at dinner with the street-wise Americans Prince and Jerome. They're poking fun at her high-class European ways; they show her a piece of paper with "WRECKA STOW" written on it and ask her to read it. Every time she says it in her accent, thoroughly convinced that it is nonsense, they die laughing and she gets more peeved. Finally Prince prompts her: "If you wanted to buy a Sam Cooke album, where would you go?" Her answer – of course, "the wrecka stow" - sends them into fits. This is the kind of infectious good-silly that much of the film contains, the funky playfulness that Prince shows off in spades on the concert stage and finally gets to mess around with here on celluloid.

Sadly, the movie's total effect is unfortunate. The style, though more successful than the ambience of Graffiti Bridge, dead-ends for sure. By the time we're on a foggy airfield, I'm ready to wish Prince had never even seen Casablanca. Worst of all, the characters' personalities and relationships, so likable for the majority of the picture, imminently dissolve into mechanical plot resolution. If the movie had stayed together, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it alongside Purple Rain. But I find it telling that just about the best thing in Under the Cherry Moon, aside from the leading man performance Prince pulls off beautifully in all but the last act, is what the ending credits roll over: the compelling music video to the Parade album track "Mountains." (I found it on Youtube, but the quality is horrific. Rent the DVD if you want to see that. It's great, promise.)

Probably needless to say, I wouldn't recommend navigating Prince's persona through his film work. If you're gonna watch the movies he directed, wait until you've assimilated his entire musical output up through 1989, and even then I must stress that Graffiti Bridge is a real snore no matter how you slice it. But feel free to dive into Purple Rain right away. I'm not usually one to use popular success as a measure of anything but itself, but Prince became a bonafide superstar on the strength of Purple Rain, and you should be able to see why.

Teeth

2007-04-06T17:00:00.000-05:00

Teeth

dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein

Innocent girl finds out she has teeth in her vagina. Comedy/horror ensues.

Guest Article!
Dan Keezer, NEW YORK CITY
January 25, 2007 - 35mm/Library Center Theater

Teeth is, without question, a feminist social critique masked as a B mutant-slasher-comedy. Everyone knows this, right? Like, duh. What ails me is that I seem to remember a similar tactic used in George A. Romero's Land of the Dead where, instead of Dawn of The Dead's subtle stab at American capitalism, we are subjected to an overt allegory of contemporary American politics. I mean- you've got- okay, so there's this walled city that protects the last of the living from the zombies, right? Then there's this big fucking skyscraper filled with all the privileged white people which is sealed off from the hobo heroes who live on the streets. And Dennis Hopper's a republican. I mean, it's obvious, right? The chick's got fucking teeth in her pussy! It's like I can hear Camille Paglia saying, "Eat a dick Laura Mulvey!" Duh!

God, I wish I could fuck Camille Paglia and Laura Mulvey at the same time.

Dawn (played by an amazing Jess Weixler) is a sexually confused teenage babe who swears to be celibate until marriage. She lives in a typical American suburb that is powered by a prominent nuclear power plant (MUTANTS!!! TMNT and shit! WOO!!). And she has no idea that super-hot blonde (it's important that she's blonde) girls aren't supposed to have vagina dentata. The B-movie excuse for bad writing comes in when we realize that all the dudes are outrageously arrogant misogynists. Every male figure in this movie is deplorable, with the exception of Dawn's stepfather, who is unmistakably benevolent (aren't movie stepfathers supposed to be the ones that are deplorable? Clever!). I mean, am I crazy? Not all men are rapists! "Or are they?" Teeth asks.

It really is totally awesome when these dudes get castrated though. Love it. In fact, there is quite a bit of cock (severed or not) featured in this movie, hardly any tits, and no toothed vaginas. The sole female nude scene arrives when Dawn is alone and gazing into a mirror. She is discovering she is a woman, an empowered woman, and her attitude toward ~~the shitty~~ men ~~in her life~~ changes. This scene in particular is very affecting. Without a word, it evokes Eowyn's "I am no man." Weixler really nailed it.

Then comes the plot again. With a few more glaring cliches (maybe it's satire?) Dawn fully transforms into the super-hero Teeth prescribes her to be.

Teeth's message, albeit profound for its associated genre(s), is oversimplified with a barrage of perfunctory plot points justified by its B-horror prerequisite. Sort of like Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle's relationship to stoner movies. Teeth, with all its awesome rape scenes and uber femme fetale, occasionally (not often) made me roll my eyes and grumble. This movie is not perfect. I was sometimes bored when I should have been titillated and emasculated, and then totally desensitized! Man, I wish I could stop masturbating for a week and watch Basic Instinct.........and then smoke a cigarette, yell at my girlfriend, hang out with some dudes at a bar and then punch some fucking homo greaser in the face!

Teeth is written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein (you know, from The Wedding Banquet) and, with my reservations aside, he does an outstanding job. The Weinstein Company picked this one up at Sundance (where I saw it) and promises us they'll keep the NC-17 rating. Wait. Why is it NC-17? That's a whole other story (hint: the MPAA is run by men). In the meantime, we'll have to see if Teeth makes it back from the slaughterhouse.

Death Proof

2007-04-05T22:29:00.000-05:00

Death Proof
dir. Quentin Tarantino

David Brent's favorite actor, Sydney Poitier.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

April 4, 2007 - 35mm/AMC Empire 25

The second helping of the Grindhouse double-feature, Death Proof, successfully elevates itself above mere tribute or homage to become its very own motion picture. This is no accomplishment. This is a given. The immensely talented writer/director Quentin Tarantino deserves no accolades for making a stand-alone movie. He should receive praise for making a thrilling, exuberant, visually stunning and often elegantly paced movie.

Sydney Poitier (not to be confused with her father, Sidney) and Vanessa Ferlito play “Jungle” Julia and Arlene “Butterfly,” respectively. Faced with the difficult task of leading us through quite a hefty opening chunk of Death Proof, Julia and Butterfly mindlessly gab away about their latest sexual conquests, scheming toward further success in the evening ahead. They’re not alone, there are other girls interjecting “Oh no, you didn’t!” and so on and so forth. The oddly gripping non-stop gabathon relocates to a local Austin bar and continues on and on, blending beautifully with intermittent dancing to the jukebox from the gals and their camera-ogled, glistening, sweat-damp legs.

Our main attraction, Kurt Russell’s scar-faced “Stuntman Mike” sits at the bar, overhearing the young ladies’ ruckus, smoothly chatting up Rose McGowan’s faux-blonde. A barrage of characters are thrown out there very quickly, and due to Tarantino’s exceptional patience and tension building, the real flesh and bones of movie making, the first half hour or so play like gangbusters. He has a bag of surprises in store, delivering cut after cut of wonderful heartfelt buoyancy, as he did in his previous Kill Bill movies. Unlike Kill Bill, when Death Proof enters its second phase, this changes.

Kurt Russell hijacks the lives of those young gals with his “death proof” stuntcar in a deliriously quick rampage of nighttime vehicular homicide. Throughout this entire first section of fabulous stuff, there are little jabs in the winking eye. Quentin Tarantino’s presence as the bartender in the Austin dive is harmless and funny enough, though in this first half we get a mere taste of what is to come as far as literal, spoken movie references go. A few verbal quips quoting Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill go down, sucking us momentarily out of an otherwise gripping dialogue scene. As a result of Russell’s rampage, two Austin police officers are introduced, and I’ll be damned if Tarantino does not tap into a bit of Kevin Smith buffoonery in reintroducing Michael Parks and his son to regurgitate some chatter from Kill Bill. Mr. Parks and “Son Number One” are quick on their way to becoming the Jay and Silent Bob of Tarantino’s universe, a universe he so frustratingly shares with Robert Rodriguez.

Introducing Zoe Bell. Zoe Bell is a brave, spunky top tier stuntwoman. She doubled for Uma Thurman in the more impressively physical parts of Kill Bill, and now, in Death Proof, she doubles for herself, playing herself. She is thrown into the pot with another group of gals on hiatus from shooting a movie. They all work in the movie industry, so Tarantino lets the movie chatter fly like buckshot. From Lindsay Lohan to Vanishing Point, these gals let it all out. Unlike with the first troupe, the dialogue is in aid of name dropping, not personality building and character molding. Fantastic actress extraordinaire Rosario Dawson is part of this club, and when she has the floor the movie shines, but somehow the movie keeps coming back to Ms. Bell.

Zoe Bell is a pathetic actress. Weak actors have not prevented Quentin Tarantino from siphoning great performances in the past; just look at how great Michael Madsen is in Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill. Watching Zoe Bell deliver pages and pages of dialogue is unpleasant. During one exceptionally long discussion in a diner, Tarantino opts not to cut away as the camera floats in and out and around, solving the issue of a circular conversation without cutting. Zoe Bell’s line delivery overwhelms what could be astounding. She tops herself again with another long dialogue scene, this one without the moving camera, so her every move can be properly monitored. While being spoken to, her mind is seen working to deliver her next line with the confidence of the ham of your elementary school production of Alice in Wonderland. She is a bad, bad, bad actress.

Luckily, back comes the super-animated Kurt Russell, and this time in glorious daylight. The resulting car chase is mesmerizing, with stuntwoman Zoe Bell doing what she does best, riding on the hood of a car during a chase. It is a fantastic sequence, though it’s got nothing on the Belmondo/Sharif car battle in The Burglars, nor on any number of the chases in The Bourne Supremacy, but don’t get me wrong, it’s great. Russell brings the movie back to its senses, as he gnashes his teeth and bites into his role as a man who gets his kicks from car crashes. By kicks, I am referring to the variety of kicks had in the movie Crash.

Quentin Tarantino’s movie is wonderful, though difficult to watch when it falters, not unlike the grindhouse movies it refers to. Rather than craft an homage, he crafts a real movie, a slicker, improved variety of grindhouse picture that looks great and sounds great. He opts against the immense digital scratching up of his film print, and instead giving it a properly weathered, true to projection standards feel, with jumped frames now and again. Death Proof, like his other movies, is a profession of love, and this love cannot be articulated verbally, no matter how hard he or his characters try. When it comes to getting down to brass tacks and putting images with his exceptional non-movie related dialogue, there are few better. Don’t forget that, no matter how much stupid shit the guy says.

For your enjoyment, Berkeley's own Goodbye the Band unleashes his "Music From, Inspired by, and/or Theoretically Re-Appropriated From The Motion Picture 'Grindhouse'" EP. Give a listen to "Official 'Grindhouse' Song" below and download it here.

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Planet Terror

2007-04-05T00:49:00.000-05:00

Planet Terror

dir. Robert Rodriguez

Planet Boringtown. Population: Stupid Rose McGowan's stupid limp.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

April 4, 2007 - 35mm/AMC Empire 25

Right at the outset of the Grindhouse double-feature, during Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, Naveen Andrews (the only half-way redeeming actor on that show nobody watches called Lost) whips out a big container of balls! Balls! This container of balls gets busted and later becomes a big bag of balls! Ewwwww, balls! Testicles in a bag, that’s so, oh I don’t know, I’m reaching for the word… GGGRRRRRRRRIINNNNNNDDDDDDDHHHHHHHOUSE. Planet Terror is not the first instance of big-budget teste-heavy filmmaking. That credit goes to Robert Zemeckis’ simply testacular Christmas fable The Polar Express, featuring Santa’s gigantic scrotum of Christmas joys and toys for the kiddies. Did I mention Planet Terror has jokes about a big bag of balls? Sometimes the balls fall out of the bag, and it’s so gross! It’s so gross I forgot to react at all, due to Planet Terror being the most powerful roofie of a movie since Mr. Rodriguez took advantage of me with Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

If Robert Rodriguez turned in Planet Terror for his homework assignment from the prompt “Grindhouse,” he would receive a D+. There thankfully has never been a grindhouse movie resembling Planet Terror in any shape or form. There are jokes about testicles, guns, dead bodies, explosions, lopped limbs and rolling heads, far more reminiscent of Michael Bay and Tony Scott R-rated actioneers than any low-budget exploitation picture. The creativity and sparse genius of many of these exploitation/genre/grindhouse pictures has a great deal to do with the restrictions of working within the limits a small budget, short schedule and a specified genre. The filmmakers of yore would have to rack their brains and creative marrow to make their pictures stand out from the deluge of work being produced on the cheap. Whether the movie falls into the “Women in Prison,” “Car Chase,” “Revenge Western,” “Zombie,” “Haunted House” or “Heist” category is secondary to what the craftsmen actually squeeze out of it. It is not enough to make a “Women in Prison” movie, there are a billion of those. It's about making the best, craziest, most visually exciting "Women in Prison" movie you can make.

With Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez works with no boundaries, save the debilitating limitation of his talent. He throws a load of crap up at the screen and every once in a while something sticks. It is bound to happen. This is a popular mode of expression. The animated television series The Family Guy is based solely on that principle, and is therefore funny 10-15% of the time. Planet Terror’s 10-15% ratio comes mostly from the strong, funny performance of Josh Brolin as Dr. Block, a few bits from Terminator star Michael Biehn and a brief appearance from the always entertaining Nicky Katt. The most unremarkable performance comes from the wooden (pun intended) peg-legged Rose McGowan. She is the hero of a story built around the concept of her stolen leg being replaced with a machine gun. Auteur Mr. Rodriguez came up with a thought (Machine-Gun-Leg!) and attempted to stretch it into an idea and finally a movie. It remains a thought, or an afterthought as one struggles to remember one memorable moment of a movie filled to the brim with unfinished thoughts doubling as “moments.” The result being repetitive jokes about balls and peg-legs, “gross-out” snippets of boiling bubbly flesh (which pale in comparison to similar moments in Slither) and a greasy BBQ restaurateur all seen through “Grindhouse vision.”

Planet Terror’s understanding of grindhouse aesthetics appears to be a movie print that has been scratched to all hell by projectionists that are more likely to be porcupines, rather than chimpanzees or humans. It is a nauseating, unnecessary effect that is very, very fakey and far from authentic or organic. I speak on this matter with experience as a projectionist with beaten up film prints. They look nothing like this. When a print overheats and burns out, there is no silly sound effect, and the movie does not continue. But hey, it’s all in the name of fun, right? Planet Terror’s computer generated scratches are an attempt to make the movie feel sleazier, but nothing can permeate Rodriguez’s slick, antiseptic green-screen playground.

Planet Terror is a visual, technical, emotional failure. It fancies itself a non-stop, heart-pounding romp, but is a self-satisfied bore. There is a funny idea now and again. I suggest you relish those moments, rather than feel guilty about enjoying the utter stupidity. After all, Planet Terror is not as egregious as 300, but it comes damn close. Balls! Testicles! Bruce Willis! Nuts!! Balls!

Pulse

2007-04-03T23:41:00.000-05:00

Pulse

dir. Jim Sonzero

It sure was nice of Sir Ben Kingsley to get all made up for this one.

Guest Article!
Joey Devine, ALAMEDA
April 3, 2007 - DVD

I hate Gore Verbinski. That fucker and his boring ass ring movie have ruined the teen horror genre. Lately, I’ve found myself perusing the new release wall pining for the days of Final Destination, I Know What You Did Last Summer and all of those really mediocre middle to late ‘90s Scream rip offs. Instead all we get are fucking innocent blonde ladies being terrorized by fucking children and houses; and in this movie, internet savvy ghosts. That’s right, in this one Death goes High Tech! Pulse stars a who’s who of young Hollywood: Veronica Mars, That Guy With the Weird Hair from Old School, the Jewish guy from Freaks and Geeks, some dude from Lost (speaking of which, who the fuck watches THAT show?), and Christina Milian who I think I heard mentioned on TRL one time when I was drunk. So yeah, that’s the cast. Excellent, excellent cast. I’ll let the hysterical old lady from the middle of the movie explain the plot:

“They came through the computer! We heard it’s safe in the dead zones! Anywhere there’s no computers, no phones, no Wi-Fi! Anywhere they can’t come through!”

Thanks for summing that up for me, screenwriter. This movie somehow manages to be a boring Japanese horror remake mixed with crappy 28 Days Later empty streets paranoia. All leading up to a hilariously stupid race against cell phone signal bars. Read that last sentence again, because it’s not a typographical error.

THE THRILLING FINALE OF PULSE IS A RACE AGAINST CELL PHONE SIGNALS!

Who wouldn’t want to see that? In fact I take back everything thing I’ve said, Pulse is great! Ms. Mars is a cute as a button leading lady. The choice of never properly lighting the scenes is genius. Freaks and Geeks guy is Rob Schneider in Judge Dredd-esque as the comic relief. And this movie is literally pulse pounding! (har har har)

If you want to find yourself asking questions like...

“Why doesn’t anyone turn any lights on?”
“Is Ted Raimi in Grudge or Grudge 2? "
"Did I even see Grudge 2?”
“Man, are the Japanese versions just as crappy?”
“What’s worse, this or The Skeleton Key?”
"Didn't I sleep through most of The Skeleton Key?"
and most importantly, “What hath Gore wrought?”

...then by all means, see Pulse. It’s totally boring and stupid.

~Joey “Sure, I’ll contribute to your website, but only if I get to write about mediocre and crappy movies no one cares about” Devine

Seconds

2007-04-01T13:19:00.000-05:00

Seconds

dir. John Frankenheimer

Who needs 3D when you got James Wong Howe?

Kalen Egan, LOS ANGELES
March 31, 2007 - DVD

In addition to being an amazing movie, Seconds has one of the great titles in film history. It implies a certain greed, or a general dissatisfaction with what you’ve been given. Even when the “second helping” is insisted upon instead of requested, it’s in the act of taking that a person’s self-interested nature reveals itself. At the same time, this movie is savvy enough to sympathize with the taker, and it aims to investigate the larger problem, which is a society that knows an individual will take everything they’re offered, and irresponsibly keeps… on… offering. When a pet goldfish eats itself to death, who’s to blame?

Whoa. But I’m getting carried away. First, the set-up. The story is one of those things that begin with a successful man, perhaps in his mid-fifties, who lives his life as a ghost. He and his wife sleep in separate beds, it’s awkward when they kiss, and he finds nothing very worthwhile about his comfortable existence. One day he receives a phone call from a friend he thought was dead, and he’s given vague instructions that will lead him to an opportunity to live an altogether new life, as a new man, complete with a new face, new personality, new interests, and even “a new signature!” For more, check out the trailer.

This Twilight Zone-y premise is just the beginning, though, and Frankenheimer steers the story through some of the most harrowingly photographed psychological set pieces I’ve ever seen (special fun note: big fans of Requiem for a Dream might be surprised when they see shots that predate Aronofsky’s cheeseball “camera-attached-to-the-character” business by almost 35 years, and do it with infinitely more success, purpose and panache). Cinematographer James Wong Howe attacks this stuff like a man unfettered, often jamming his lens so close to the features of the actors that the camera shadow jags across their face. More than once, physical instinct had me leaning backwards, thinking Rock Hudson’s forehead might smash through the screen. It’s like a latter-day Orson Welles picture (or maybe one of Larry Cohen’s cracked bits of pulp genius) in its seemingly limitless supply of funhouse angles, some of them magnificently sloppy, and all of them supplementing the movie’s surreal, manic atmosphere.

Seconds was apparently met with a lot of confusion and derision upon release, and even now is generally seen as a fairly minor, “flawed” cult film. This is insane, of course, because the movie’s an awesome success, but I think I have a theory as to why the uncertainty remains. Like The Beguiled, this film uses our knowledge about other movies and about ourselves to assume that we’ll take certain notions as a given. Take the dissatisfied middle-aged man element, for example; Seconds makes no real effort to probe the main character’s psyche and find out what, specifically, is wrong with him. Instead, we’re talking about a general, familiar malaise, and it’s with this kind of vaguery that the film asks the audience to fill in the character gaps by projecting their own minds and experiences upon him. This kind of thing makes viewers nervous—it’s getting a little too personal. Couple this with truly invasive cinematography, and suddenly Seconds is "psychologically shallow" and "overly stylized."

And let's talk once again about that style. There are two scenes in particular that come hand in hand, one after the other, which I believe earn Seconds most of this type of criticism. In actuality, these are probably the best scenes in the entire movie. The first is set at a weird kind of wine festival, and the second occurs at a cocktail party in the main character’s house. Both of them are long, essentially plotless pieces of pure movie mania; in the first, we watch a stodgy, proper man gradually lose all his inhibitions. It begins as a fairly innocuous-seeming, renaissance-style grape stomping party. Quickly, though, it evolves into a full-blown, drunken, naked free-f0r-all (I mean, full-frontal... and this is 1966!), and by the time Rock Hudson is grinning like a mental patient and screaming "YES!! YESSS!!" we totally feel the release. Interpret that as you will. In the second sequence, we watch this same man crumble under the weight of his new (and, at its core, false) personality. We watch a man drown himself in alcohol, stumble around embarrassing all his guests, and eventually hit rock bottom (ho, ho) as he realizes that no matter what he does he's the same lost and dissatisfied man as he was in his old life. Calling this second sequence "uncomfortable" would be an understatement... it's brash and ugly and insane. And it gets us exactly where we need to be, down and out and massively depressed. Because of the elation we felt in the earlier sequence, this actually kind of feels like a personal failure. It tears at us as viewers, not just at the Hudson character, and it's this kind of invasiveness that, I think, freaks the shit out of some people. It's a more advanced level of filmic interaction, but if you can deal with it and acknowledge that it's achievement is pure and direct, and that the uncomfortable feeling is just the film working its magic, then this movie may be among the most powerful you'll see.

And in the end, it all comes down to greed. This is a film about a man destroyed by accepting an offer for "seconds," and thinking that the answers to his problems lay in a different assortment of company and products. I've read some reviews (and, indeed, Frankenheimer himself has agreed with this assessment) that at it's center this is a "be careful what you wish for" sort of film. I completely fuckin' disagree, even despite the director's interpretation of his own work. This is a man who only "wishes" for something after he's told it will fix all his problems. When it doesn't, as it certainly never would, he gets blamed for the failure, and the punishment he receives is nothing short of permanent and ever-repeating. What a crushing, fantastic movie.

Hot Fuzz

2007-03-29T22:24:00.000-05:00

Hot Fuzz

dir. Edgar Wright

A rare appearence of Haagen Dazs in a movie that, like this reviewer, prefers Ben and Jerry's.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

March 5, 2007 - 35mm/Broadway Screening Room

During the invasion of the nearly finished dreamhouse of Cuban drug kingpin Johnny Tapia (Jordi Molla), some hot-shot detectives and CIA super-soldiers happen upon the drug lord’s elderly mother, who in turn pulls a shotgun on them and starts unloading. It is one of the most annoying and unfunny moments in the string of overblown meanness that is Bad Boys 2. That is not to say the Bad Boys saga is not peppered with moments of overblown creativity and humor. The simple state of absolute excess in all areas is bound to yield a degree of brilliance, and in Bad Boys 2’s case, it does. Alas, this minimal, but fierce brilliance is beaten to a pulp by filthy, filthy, aggressive garbage (such as the camp of an old lady firing a shotgun).

With a firm grasp of its wits, a full heart and open arms, Hot Fuzz embraces Bad Boys 2 and the likes of many, many other movies like and unlike it, primarily those concerning police officers. In embracing these pictures, like with the team’s previous movie, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz takes a Bob Beamon leap from the spoofier side of the tracks and creates a movie that simply, eloquently becomes a member of the genre it initially appears to be spoofing. It is the stuff of reverent homage, made with the virile aggression of Bad Boys 2, but displaced to the English countryside with scenes of dialogue that are directed rather than presented as an annoying necessity separating car chases.

Again (and again and again), like Bad Boys 2 and Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz is a buddy comedy featuring a straight-laced man of action (Simon Pegg) and his doofy doting sidekick (Nick Frost). The buddy cops patrol the rural, isolationist town of Sandford, where the community’s primary concerns are hooded youths and a “human statue” street performer. Needless to say, things are not what they seem and violence ensues, but it is these early character-driven and positively meditative by action movie standards scenes that allow for the success of the chaos to come. Jokes are tossed back and forth between the two buddies and an alarmingly prestigious supporting cast featuring the likes of Jim Broadbent and a mustachioed Paddy Considine. These scenes and jokes (catching an escaped swan, eating ice cream as punishment and so on) are only mildly amusing, but due to their modest existence, when this movie takes off and fully explores its action roots the image of an elderly woman firing off a shotgun actually becomes funny! The smalltime, composed jokiness of previous scenes juxtaposed with full-throttle old lady artillery equals funny!

While these “smalltime” scenes are moments of quiet, the transitions between them are anything but. In Shaun of the Dead, director Edgar Wright utilized a series of three or so quick cuts as transitions from scene-to-scene. Used again in Hot Fuzz, these quick cut, loud-as-all-hell bits drag on and on in the queasy, mean-spirited style of every single scene in Bad Boys 2. The bits eventually develop into the stock “lock and load” gun montage, which, again, is funny though extremely loud and lacking the cocksure bravado Edgar Wright displays when the triggers of those guns are being pulled.

Cars explode, our heroes fire every variety of gun known to humankind and most importantly, bodies start flyin’ and start droppin’. The deft balancing act between the complicated, creative action and inventive and referential comedic one-liners tips Hot Fuzz to the rim of greatness. The movie takes a giant leap forward anytime its characters grow tight-lipped and straight-faced. In other words, the picture gets a whole lot funnier when the characters get serious and curb the chucklesville joke-time.

As the picture wraps up it returns to chucklesville, population: cameo. As brilliant as the likes of Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy are, the movie belongs to Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. They outshine even the otherworldly talents of Jim Broadbent and Paddy Considine, and because of their spark and Edgar Wright’s extraodinary chops as an action director, Hot Fuzz excels. Comparisons will unavoidably be drawn to Shaun of the Dead, as Hot Fuzz is quite close to stylistically being the same movie. They’re both welcome, ambitious additions to their respective genres, and if you like one you’re likely to enjoy the other, but more importantly if you like Bad Boys 2 at all (and damn you if you do!), Hot Fuzz’ll be worthy of more than a hearty Mike Lowrey/Will Smith “WOOOOO!”

Black Book

2007-03-26T00:32:00.000-05:00

Black Book
dir. Paul Verhoeven

Carice, starlet (not to be confused with Clarice Starling)

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

February 27, 2007 - 35mm/Walter Reade Theater

The sexiest holocaust movie ever made, Black Book tackles the European World War II narrative through the lens of a different variety of heroism from your typical liberation saga. It has its share of benchmark or stock moments of World War II cinema, such as the young soldier struggling with his first “murder,” but thankfully moments like this are presented without the annoying “oh so tragic, oh so important” air that detracts from such scenes in the Flags of Our Fathers and Saving Private Ryans of the world. There is no droning music, washed-out old-timey muted color palette or even a moment to reflect. Most of all there is little to no catharsis or self-congratulatory back-slapping. Instead, you get layer upon layer of enjoyable thrills blending in successfully with horrifying scenes of inhumanity garnering heroically human reactions.

Carice Van Houten stars as Rachel Stein, a Dutch Jewish girl who, upon the execution of her family, joins an underground resistance against the Nazi occupation. There in lies one of the many fascinating grey areas this movie addresses. Is our heroine fighting for revenge or some political cause, and more importantly, does any of that even matter as long as she’s fighting/fucking? Fucking? In order to infiltrate a German base and liberate a fellow resistance fighter, Rachel Stein becomes Ellis de Vries and seduces the handsome Ludwig Muntze, head of the Nazi Intelligence (the Sicherheitsdienst or “SD”). In the typical and always refreshing style of director/co-writer Paul Verhoeven, our heroine is presented in a way that breaks down the term “sex-symbol” giving us a character of immense sexiness borne not only from statuesque beauty, but of human, earthy strength and frailty. A great deal has already been written about the transitional Rachel to Ellis scene where she dyes her hair blonde, including (gasp!) her pubic hair. Paul Verhoeven, never one to shirk the details, presents this scene with a frank matter-of-factness that only enhances the sexiness of his lead. Mr. Verhoeven’s inclusion of not just that scene, but scenes such as one where Ellis and another Nazi mistress swap dialogue over peeing lends profundity and a sense of human realism that lacks from not just World War II movies but historical movies of all kinds.

The sexual and physical realism brought to the table by Mr. Verhoeven and his brave actors gives the "War thriller" narrative a sense of urgency as the plot careens forward through double-crosses and side-swapping. At times it seems the Nazis may as well be gangsters who have taken a hostage and a sexy police officer goes undercover to get to the bottom of it (see The Departed). Yet, the stakes are greater, and more often than gangsters the Nazis appear to be the American military complex colonizing nations with a presence of boastful cocksure instability.

For the Verhoeven aficionados and obsessives out there (I know I’m not alone! Top five living directors!) the authorial trademarks are ever present. His attitude toward WWII and war in general has wavered little since Soldier of Orange, though his rollercoaster ride through Hollywood has made him a slicker narrative beast, with Black Book his most cohesive (only in the narrative sense) picture since Basic Instinct. His anger toward his native Holland’s role in The War is reiterated, and Black Book is an excellent companion to Soldier of Orange, maybe its big sister (Katie Tippel would be its cousin). While Black Book will be toted as Paul Verhoeven’s “return to form,” he did not go anywhere. He made one, and only one, self-described bad movie in Hollow Man after a string of consistently brilliant efforts. Black Book is another great one, consistently brilliant throughout, thrilling, sexy, bold, smart, brash… all of that good shit, but mostly, most of all, human, and human in the face of the craziest big picture moviemaking around.

300

2007-03-22T20:25:00.000-05:00

300: the IMAX Experience

Dir. Zach Snyder

Balls.

Jeff Larson, NEW YORK CITY
March 22, 2007 - IMAX/Loews Lincoln Square

Aw, hell. It's:

and (Ann Coulter at her worst),

and,

(I apologize to you all for the shallow nature of this post. 300 is the kind of pap -- sometimes called "art" -- that sucks the lifeblood of culture and leaves a burnt shell containing only scores of massacred brain cells. It's by far the worst movie I've ever seen. America needs to wake up now, and 300 is putting us all back to sleep.)

(Click on the comments below. As always, Jeff GP has a far more erudite and accurate portrayal of 300 than I could ever hope to write.)

Ennio Morricone Festival, pt. 3

2007-03-21T01:03:00.000-05:00

Death Rides A Horse

dir. Giulio Petroni

J.P. Law heads out for a cold dish.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 13, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

On the off chance you or anyone you know decides to massacre a family in the Western part of the United States of America in the 19th century, make sure they kill ‘em all. Death Rides a Horse takes the familiar trope of a young child, witness to his family’s death, growing up to wreak havoc and take revenge, bloodying the landscape along the way (see Once Upon a Time in the West). Unlike Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West, John Philip Law does not take his time in becoming the baddest most feared of all gunmen. His pride won’t let him admit that, but he reluctantly takes the aid of an old outlaw, played by Lee Van Cleef, who happens to be hunting the same gang of rapin’ murders.

Young, handsome John Philip Law will have nothing to do with compromise or bribery and will stop at nothing for his revenge. His fury has warped his perspective of his familial tragedy. The images have been playing in his mind for 15 years to boiling point. Anytime one of the gang members are in sight, passion takes over in the form of a red-hued replay of that specific gang member’s part in the massacre over Law’s steaming eyes. Ennio Morricone provides a thumping, rhythmic, primal score to these moments that is the stuff of dreams and has since become the stuff of legend. I’ve done well to not specifically reference how his scores have been used in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, though in this case, Mr. Tarantino borrowed not just the music cue, but the fury of revenge close-up/red-hued flashback, and to great effect. In a picture more subdued, such as Death Rides a Horse, the insanity of a gut-curling score and stylized close-up pack an emotional wallop.

Lee Van Cleef delivers another brilliant and emotionally complex performance here, as the convict who is not all he appears to be. His swagger as he trots his horse around a buried-to-the-neck Law is both charming and mean with a balance of manner practically unique to his on-screen persona. While The Big Gundown is his swan song, the legendary “Bad” makes us love him yet again.

It would be an understatement to call this trailer "awesome." Watch it.

End of the Game

dir. Maximilian Schell

Wedding Crashers, starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 14, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

This tired, unnecessarily moody thriller, featuring a barely existing, unnotable score by Ennio Morricone is the low point of narrative contrivance in an otherwise nearly perfect selection of challenging, complex and mostly unseen classics in the Ennio Morricone program. Director Maximilian Schell takes a little whodunit and throws so much disinformation at you that it becomes bogged down with nonsense.

Jon Voight plays a young go-getter detective taking and shunning advice from a dying old detective. They’re investigating the very mysterious death of yet another detective. The corpse of the murdered detective is played by Donald Sutherland, the lifeblood of so many fantastic ‘70s pictures. The case and point being the lack of pulse in End of the Game. Mr. Voight, who plays innocence wrapped in a rough exterior very well, is unaware of the very personal battle being waged between his old, doddering partner and the suspected murderer. The movie opens many years earlier as the two friends pick up a young lady.

“I could murder her right in front of your eyes and you couldn’t prove it.”

Both the tagline of the picture and the overarching thematic “haunt” of End of the Game lies in that line, spoken by the murderer to the detective (best friend to best friend, rival to rival). The movie would be better off as a tale of cruel obsession with pride, and if it were more focused on the dying old man, it would be a better picture. Instead, Jon Voight unnecessarily takes center stage and observes. Madness, friendship, themes of regret and frustration for a life lost and lives lost; these are all interesting things presented in the blandest possible package. Fog rests heavily over the countryside as the two detectives explore the crime scene, but the heaviest fog distorts what could, in fact, be great if it were less Love Me If You Dare and more The Conversation.

This is part of the ongoing Morricone Festival coverage.

The Witches

2007-03-18T21:45:00.000-05:00

The Witches

dir. Mauro Bolognini/Vittorio De Sica/Pier Paolo Pasolini/Franco Rossi/Luchino Visconti

Dancing around a boiling cauldron?

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITYFebruary 12, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

The Witches is one of a thankfully short string of highly unsuccessful short film collections released as one motion picture. The most famous relatively recent American forays into this medium have been Four Rooms and New York Stories. Like those two pictures, The Witches, is a mixed bag, so mixed in fact, that only one of the pictures displays any ambition and success. Unsurprisingly this short comes from Luchino Visconti, director of the legendary Burt Lancaster epic, The Leopard. This is not the first time Mr. Visconti partook in such a short film exercise. Prior to The Leopard, he directed a segment of Boccaccio ’70, a collaborative short program between himself, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli and Vittorio De Sica, who also contributed a short to The Witches.

The thread linking all of the shorts in The Witches' program is the lead actress, Silvana Mangano. It is a celebration of Ms. Mangano’s dexterity as an actress. The five drastically different characters she plays may simply be described as the titular “witches” though only a few demonstrate literal supernatural abilities (none have warts or wear pointed hats). The least supernatural is also the least comedic and most superlative of the shorts, which can all be described classically as “comedy.”

The first short, The Witch Burned Alive, from the aforementioned Mr. Visconti follows Ms. Mangano appropriately playing a beautiful, famous actress worn down by her popularity and the constant fawning of male suitors. She retreats to an old friend’s snowbound resort to escape some of these pressures for reasons initially unclear. Her discomfort is clear from her introduction. Outside the confines of her room she plays the prim and proper entertainer, regaling everyone with her sophisticated beauty; tugging men’s heartstrings this way and that as she is naturally inclined to do. Yet, in private she is on the brink of an emotional breakdown. Her life is in tailspin and nobody can tell. She is pregnant. Pregnancy, in her universe is the end of a career and the start of a many, many things that accompany pregnancy, and her crisis is levied with an appropriate weight and subtle humor. Of course, the “woe is me” attitude of a wealthy beauty cannot help but be funny, though Visconti’s “witch” has kept her pregnancy to herself, because she is tragically unsure of her own personality. All of these threads are very unspoken and play out as our “witch” traverses room to room, a flurry of unpointed emotion. It is wonderful, smart, and thankfully maybe the longest of the shorts.

Pier Paolo Pasolini contributes a slapstick fable, The Earth Seen From the Moon, about a doofy father and son team searching for a new woman of the house, as their wife/mother has recently passed. Their misadventures play out as a silent comedy would, all bug-eyes and body jestures, complete with a whirling soundtrack. Ms. Mangano plays a mysterious, beautiful and loving deaf gal, adding a certain contextual flair to enhancing the extreme physicality of the comedy in a way that clearly refers to Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece, City Lights (where The Tramp falls in love with a beautiful and loving blind gal). Pasolini’s general sense of humor is different from Chaplin's, often drawing from visceral recklessness, but in this case the tempered chaos he attempts, with a neon-bright color palette (never more prevalent than in the father and son’s orange hair), burrows into cartoony tedium. There remain a fine joke hither and thither, but the sheer volume of jokes and numerous misses resemble a live-action episode of The Family Guy.

Speaking of cartoons, the two least known directors in the program, Mauro Bolognini and Franco Rossi, contribute very brief, slightly amusing tales that could be told in a single panel comic plunked between a Henrik Hertzberg and Lauren Collins piece of The New Yorker’s “The Talk of the Town”. A young “witch” rescues an injured man from a car wreck and appears to speed him off in the direction of the hospital. As she passes a hospital it is revealed, she just wants an excuse to drive fast and meet her date in time! THE END!

Perhaps the only segment of The Witches Americans may be farmiliar with is Vittoria De Sica’s An Evening Like the Others co-starring Ms. Mangano and a boyish Clint Eastwood. Eastwood plays the silly, repressed American husband to a sexually dissatisfied Italian wife. He complains of being tired and calmly refuses nights out on the town. His wife bottles up her anger, releasing it in flights of daydream musical fantasy sequences. It is amusing to see Eastwood so unhinged in these fantasy sequences, with his prevalent, unencumbered sexuality on display, though the simple representations of the spouses in the non-fantasy sequences is the stuff of, well, short movies (pleasantly light, when not attempting to be uncomfortably heavy). Like in Pasolini’s short the joke gets old and drags into the horrifying predicament of the movie short that is just too long.

Someday, The Witches will be released in a digestible DVD format, where you can pleasantly spread the shorts out or just relish Visconti’s over and over again. But, for now, if you speak Italian, enjoy the slightly sped up version that youtube has to offer, complete with Ennio Morricone’s finest score of the picture.

This is part of the ongoing Morricone Festival coverage.

Breach

2007-03-16T10:06:00.000-05:00

Breach
dir. Billy Ray

Thick Brows.

Jeff Larson, NEW YORK CITY
February 23, 2007 - 35mm/42nd St. Loews

In February of 2001, John Ashcroft held what would be among the first of many carefully scripted press conferences to announce that the FBI had caught the worst spy in the history of the United States. Breach, directed by Billy Ray, opens with a serious, but nonetheless smug, Ashcroft intoning, as if in prayer, “Let me be clear - individuals who commit treasonous acts against the United States will be held fully accountable.” Ashcroft is passing judgment upon one Robert Hanssen, a devout catholic and unabashed capitalist who accepted $1.4 million dollars to spy for a country that had long ago folded its hand.

In Breach, Mr. Hanssen, played by Chris Cooper, is an FBI agent who has long ceased to matter, and Cooper is a perfect match for the role. In his twilight hours as an FBI agent, Hanssen is desperately trying to talk to anyone who listens about the pressing need for more security and better infrastructure throughout the bureau, but in his eyes we can see that he is preoccupied with other matters. Once he had been the FBI’s top Soviet analyst – apparently the best.

Eric O’Neill, played here by the thick-browed Ryan Phillippe, was the man who brought Hanssen down. An overachiever who spends his nights spying on Arab targets fighting with their wives and his days writing 50 page memos about data mining, he is playing the game and doing everything he can to become an agent. Kate Burroughs, his not-so-immediate superior, (Laura Linney-- doing her best Jodie Foster impression, without the terrifying stilettos) informs Eric that his efforts to fight the new hidden war are no longer needed and that he will now be shadowing Hanssen as his assistant. The reason given is purposely unclear; something about Hanssen being a “sexual deviant,” and Eric slowly begins to see through the ruse. But, in the merit-based hierarchy of the FBI, pride and status are paramount, and Eric, the klutzy underling, isn't appraised of the full extent of the investigation until much later.

Early on, two workers exchange a couple of hallway portraits from those of Bill Clinton and Janet Reno to George Bush and John Ashcroft, and it’s clear that Robert and Eric are playing out a similar changing of the guard. Hanssen takes O’Neill under his wing to teach him not only the inner-workings of the FBI – he sees every bureaucratic conflict as a game of politics – but also how to be a “Good Catholic,” and good husband -- that O’Neill’s fiance is a Protestant, let alone an ex-pat from a former soviet bloc country riles him to no end. But, more importantly, the guard is changing under the auspices of a pervasive sort of dumb pride. Hanssen brags about writing an unbreakable encryption program in binary code, ones and zeros, before lunch, and sends pornographic videotapes of himself to eastern European countries. Of course, then, it is obvious that the bumbling overachiever, O’Neill, is assigned to track his movements – the simplified psychology in the film casts his diligence as an immediate match for Hanssen’s self-love.

And, unfortunately, too many instances of this sort of filmic stenography occur in Breach. So much of the film is bogged down in the pervasive clichés of the spy thriller -- one moment involves a security camera and a series of cut-aways to a slowly advancing download bar -- that the end product becomes exhaustingly familiar. Rather than creating characters who are believable, in Breach, the characters are built out of their vices. But, we’ve seen these vices before: Eric’s girlfriend can’t understand his obsession with the FBI and threatens to leave him (sound familiar?) while he hits the bottle, and Hanssen is portrayed as a caricature of a straight and cartoony ultra-conservative – his wife looks surprisingly like Barbara Bush, and he insists that the soviets lost the war because they were atheists. Now, usually I’m fine with a measured amount of shorthand – movies are too short to include everything – but masking shorthand as serious character building, in a movie that takes itself as seriously as Breach, just amounts to sloppy filmmaking. As the movie progresses, Both Hanssen’s and O’Neill’s pride emerges as the sum total of these vignettes, and ultimately this pride leads to Hanssen’s downfall – and, we are to assume for we have assumed before, the downfall of the FBI.

Ennio Morricone Festival, pt. 2

2007-03-10T16:10:00.000-05:00

Four Flies on Grey Velvet
dir. Dario Argento

Two fists on brown velvet

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 8, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

The appeal of Dario Argento over the likes of, for example, Lucio Fulci will never cease to amaze me. Argento is very effective at molding neon-technicolor color schemes into something that means “horror,” coupled with three or four wham-bang scenes or ideas for scenes. In the case of Four Flies on Grey Velvet part of the wham-bang comes from something as sophisticated and clever as scary masks.

A young, hip rock n’ roller in some way unbeknownst to him and us becomes the victim of a very, very convoluted series of events that frame him in a murder plot. The person wearing the scary mask is the one behind it! Our protagonist being a dopey drummer in a rock band reeks of something as tired as a sleep-away camp horror story with the sex-starved little kiddies being haunted by a Scooby-Doo monster.

At its heart Four Flies on Grey Velvet is a mystery with a result so stupidly unlikely, and plot devices as gooftastic and amateurish as our protagonist having an affair with his wife’s obnoxiously hot cousin, and thus living out some sort of teenage fantasy. Like with most of the Argento movies I have seen there are moments, and I mean moments, that are very strong, funny and creative. These moments would be enough in a movie of greater ambition, not one feigning ambition with a nonsense plot, cheap thrills and slack performances by pretty faces.

Decidedly awesome trailer for decidedly fair movie.

A Quiet Place in the Country
dir. Elio Petri

Elio Petri directing a roped and diapered Franco Nero

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 8, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Franco Nero plays our hero, Leonardo, who leaves the pressures of being a city-bound artist to find some inspiration in a rural, isolated existence. Leonardo finds himself drawn to a particularly beaten-down country home. As it turns out, this place is haunted and Leonardo’s previous mania (both urban and sexual) molds itself into an obsession with the young woman who met her demise on the premises during WWII. Soon enough the girl’s sordid history unravels and the house starts acting unruly. The old townsmen reveal their many lusts and conquests with the girl and Leonardo’s obsession with the girl grows and develops into something sexual, much to the confusion and chagrin of his manager/lover, played by an adventurous Vanessa Redgrave.

A Quiet Place in the Country director Elio Petri demonstrates admirable restraint in presenting the horror elements of this story with little to no bloodshed. It can be seen as a clear precursor to Stanley Kubrick’s comparably plotted and restrained masterpiece, The Shining. They are both haunted house movies revolving around an artist’s need for peace and quiet, and the resulting rebellion and betrayal against the loved ones who pressure them to create. Kubrick and Petri also infuse the haunted house genre with a sense of poetry and artistry, by considering their subjects with the utmost sincerity. A Quiet Place in the Country respects its characters, though at the same time, acts as a critique of the bourgeois fascination with rustic living and the idealization of finding some sort of earthy sanctuary, ala Straw Dogs.

Ennio Morricone provides the cacophonous score, full of what sounds like clanging pots and pans melded with various orchestral string plucks, emphasizing that yes, this is a horror movie. While a horror movie, Petri molds an accomplished post-war nightmare, like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. This layer and his awareness of the intellectual implications of including a ghostly victim of not only her sexuality, but of The War are almost a bit heavy-handed. This contextual intellectualization of the post-war horror pulls out some of the visceral fear that could have been gut-wrenching stuff, if Petri weren’t so intent on elevating himself above the junk-art of other 60’s and 70’s Italian filmmakers.

Deadhead Miles

2007-03-04T19:01:00.000-05:00

Deadhead Miles

dir. Vernon Zimmerman

"God Almighty damn! That was fun. That's what I call fun."

Kalen Egan, LOS ANGELES
March 4, 2007 - VHS

This film resurrected memories of Sally, a man I once met, who in reflection seems more like a movie character than a real person. Along with four other high-school classmates, I was taking a field trip to a student video festival, and we were all to be transported in my film teacher’s hatchback Honda. There was one seat too few, though, so the teacher—who was an oddball himself—picked up a telephone and called Sal, a friend of his. Kind of bug-eyed and unsettling, this guy showed up half an hour later in an orange pick-up truck, grinning wide as he waved hello.

Somehow it was decided that I’d ride along with him, maybe because I displayed just a glimmer of curiosity where my peers all visibly recoiled. Just as Sal and I were about to leave the school parking lot, my teacher chuckled and said something like, “Sally, maaaybe you should take the tank out of the truck bed and keep it up front where it won’t bang around so much.” I’m thinking, “What tank?” Very soon after, and without a good grip on how exactly I’d gotten into this situation, I found myself with a fire-extinguisher-sized canister of propane sitting between my legs as Sal pulled the rickety pickup onto the freeway.

From the minute we set off until we arrived, Sal spoke a stream of whacked-out consciousness; everything from episodes out of his Brooklyn youth, to probable conspiracies surrounding the minutiae of gasoline prices, to his (serious) idea for a remake of Striptease starring himself in the Demi Moore role. He didn’t seem insane, exactly, but he was definitely being beamed in from left field, and I felt extremely nervous being stuck in a moving vehicle with him behind the wheel. Sal also talked about the irrelevance of time, and that everyone in this world was much too hung up on where to go and how long it takes to get there. While no great slice of philosophy, the sincerity with which he said this (coupled with the fact that I thought I might become a human rocketship at any second) actually managed to make the sentiment stick with me, and it has sometimes served as a steadying, head-cooling thought if I ever get too worried about deadlines or schedules. Needless to say, when we finally arrived at the festival, it was half over.

Watching Deadhead Miles is like taking this wild ride again. It’s not always pleasant, it’s often irritating, but the sheer, weirdo spectacle is enough to want to hang in there with it, and by the end it manages to carve out a little hole for itself in your permanent memory. Whatever else this movie is, it isn’t one that’s easy to shake.

Alan Arkin plays a redneck big-rig driver (complete with loud, twangy southern accent; yes, we're both thinking of the same Alan Arkin) and aspiring adventurer. He seems to live his life as a search for pure, good ol’ boy fun (he especially loves throwing full bottles of soda at road signs), and welcomes action and experience above all else, especially a clear trajectory or end goal. He’s always quick with a half-baked plan to get out of mischief, and—more often than not—these silly efforts somehow seem to work out in his favor. Other times, he’s as wide-eyed and curious as a little kid, and seems content to soak up the world around him. When a hitchhiker, who he’s already traveled many, many miles with, suddenly decides to rob him at gunpoint, Arkin responds by saying, “I didn’t know you were a bad man. That’s interesting.” He then somehow manages to disarm the hitchhiker and lock him in back of his trailer. How? God only knows. He’s lucky like that.

The “story” consists of Arkin and the hitchhiker driving fast and getting nowhere, occasionally running afoul of police officers, and always finding something to do, be it good, bad, pleasant or distasteful. Without anything to grab on to in a narrative sense, the picture earns our attention through Arkin’s crazy performance and an endless supply of sometimes obnoxious, sometimes wonderful, always delirious episodes. It all builds to a quiet tragedy, though, when Arkin ultimately seems to discover that the USA really isn’t as fun or fulfilling as he’d like it to be. Expecting innocent whimsy, he often gets sudden ugliness. In one of my favorite passages, Arkin seeks out a prostitute he (apparently) used to know, and just when he and she are about to commence with the sex, he discovers that she has an elaborate harness on her body, connected to a rope, which ties her permanently inside the room. Arkin’s reaction to this discovery is heartbreaking in its way, in that it seems to utterly crush his unassuming feeling about the way the world ought to work.

In a weird way, his aimless trip across the country parallels the one in Easy Rider; what he’s looking for isn’t really out there, or if it is, all he can find is the dark shadow of good times long gone. Add to this the fact that even though America’s never really been the land of romantic cowboys and way-down-the-trail mythology, that doesn’t stop us from wanting to think it was and still could be.

And there’s one more level working in Deadhead Miles. A person might, I think, be able to make a convincing argument that a great majority of the adventures contained in this movie are actually only playing out in Arkin’s head. There’s a constant trade-off between successes and setbacks; soon after the disturbing scene with the girl on the rope, Arkin and his hitchhiker are passed by a long car, in which a whore lies seductively in the back seat, naked, and holds up a sign that says “10 Dollars.” Arkin passes on the offer, but you can tell by his face that “this is more like it.” Same with a sequence later on: the big rig breaks down, and out of nowhere a mysterious old cowboy dressed all in black shows up and instantly fixes the engine, only to hop into his own big rig—all black—and drive off back down the road. Arkin reveals that this was, in fact, the ghost of a six-years-dead truck driver who was killed in a jackknife, and who now patrols the roads lending a friendly, ghostly hand to truckers in need. This is impossible to take literally, and seems instead to reflect Arkin’s dearest wishes about what mysteries “the road” might contain. If this theory is to be embraced, then the movie becomes even a little more profound and sad, in that we’re watching a man slowly lose a mental grip on his own dreams, both about himself and about his home country.

As to the nuts and bolts of the filmmaking, the direction is pretty limp and occasionally ridiculous; scenes have a tendency to end with loopy little “jokes” that call unnecessary attention to themselves. The script, the first ever produced by the soon-to-be-legendary Terrence Malick, feels like it rests somewhere between the spray-gun, first-draft-is-the-best-draft style of Hunter S. Thompson, and Malick’s own more ethereal future masterpieces about the American consciousness. Regardless, let it never be said that the world has no use for hare-brained films like Deadhead Miles; its faults combine with the things it does right to make it a completely unique experience, and that counts for a lot in my book.

The worst movies leave you feeling empty inside, as if you haven't gained or lost a thing. This film makes you feel like you’ve seen around a corner you never knew existed, and if you don’t necessarily want to look around that corner again, then you’re certainly better off for having peeked once. It deserves to be viewed, and to not be forgotten. And for me, it put me right back in the cab of Sally’s orange pick-up truck, where he happily told his life philosophies to me, some kid he’d never met before, while I anxiously made sure the propane canister didn’t clank too hard against the carpetless floor.

Zodiac

2007-03-04T01:52:00.000-05:00

Zodiac

dir. David Fincher

San Francisco Vice

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

March 1, 2007 - 35mm/Regal E-Walk

The lights are on, but it is dark, because it is nighttime. Dark and muddy, and somehow, if you adjust your eyes to the dark, there is an incredibly detailed figure looming somewhere back there. You can see him! Most of the time Jake Gyllenhaal (portraying Robert Graysmith) is the one in the darkness, hunched over a book or a file in the middle of the night. We can see him, in the dark! It actually looks dark, but there he is! Harris Savides, the cinematographer of Zodiac, and possibly the best in the business, displays as much prowess with digital video here as he has with every ounce of film he’s shot in the past. His clear technical prowess with the actual celluloid stuff, in this case, translates to a near perfect use of digital video. Director David Fincher and Savides play video to its strengths, shooting in blackness appropriating a happy medium in reproducing actual human night vision, something film has struggled to do (though Savides did it very well in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days). Just after last years mega-million dollar art project, Miami Vice, Zodiac sits as one of the most beautiful and digitally shot pictures ever made.

Fincher forgoes the insane virtuosity he has shown in the past with his popular pictures Se7en and Fight Club, instead opting to make a rare character and word-driven piece of filmmaking that is able to balance its relentlessly paced flood of facts with the feeling of an exacting thriller. The most common comparison with this technique of deluge of fact is likely to be the flashy-as-all-hell and great, great, great, great movie, JFK. I would also like to pat Zodiac on the back and lump it in with another paranoid talking men movie, The Insider.

Like both of these comparative pictures, Zodiac is bogged down with the annoying, but essential scenes of wives complaining about their husband’s obsession and leaving them, with the kids in tow. In Zodiac, the responsibility to play out these difficult scenes is plopped into Chloe Sevigny’s very capable hands. She does what she can with those stock scenes, and they would be the most tired scenes in the picture if it weren’t for Ms. Sevigny’s introductory scene. In this scene she meets an already obsessive Graysmith and practically forces her love upon him by simply hanging around, and not giving up. It’s saddening and lonely, but also very romantic. Other attempts to “humanize” some of the obsessive men are not so effective, particularly Mark Ruffalo’s Inspector Toschi’s cutesy addiction to animal crackers. If that bit was cut out completely from the script we would all be better off.

Now, what Zodiac is about exactly is a decade-spanning investigation of a true-life notorious murderer, not a serial killer, as we learn there is nothing in particular linking his victims. This dead end case becomes a media phenomenon, and the San Francisco Chronicle is the newspaper wrapped around this big fish. For a while, we spend a great share of time with Robert Downey Jr., as the hard-drinking Chronicle writer Paul Avery. Downey Jr. is stellar as usual. There’s also the aforementioned Mark Ruffalo as the lead Inspector on the San Francisco end of the case, with his partner, well played by Anthony Edwards. Gyllenhaal, the Chronicle cartoonist, carries the bulk of the story, and the movie is based on his character’s book (Robert Graysmith). Zodiac is brimming with strong, exhausted performances from all of its actors, and the casting is impeccable the long way down through the smallest bits of the movie. Fincher enlists pitifully underused actors like Dermot Mulroney, Ione Skye and Clea Duvall who are given their due and master their scenes. Duvall is specifically grand as a bruised up prison inmate.

Beaten down with frustration, every character has bags under their eyes, particularly the obsessive trio of Ruffalo, Gyllenhaal and Downey Jr. They’re exhaustion, filtered through Fincher's time jumping narrative, translates as riveting and the “long” duration of the picture breezes by, ending abruptly. Their performances do take a back seat to the sumptuous photography and rich tabloid essence of the story, which is regrettable because so many of them are on the money. The images simply overwhelm and will live on and on. David Fincher pulled out marvelous, marvelous performances and told a whammy of a fun tale, but Harris Savides is the great big muddy star of Zodiac.

Navajo Joe

2007-03-02T23:17:00.000-05:00

Navajo Joe

dir. Sergio Corbucci

Burt Reynolds deliverances us from evil.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 7, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Burt Reynolds, who is a quarter Cherokee, plays the titular character in Navajo Joe. It is only slightly disconcerting to see Mr. Reynolds caked in a reddish layer of body covering make-up, as the movie takes on an approach of reaching back to a time, and a race, that has been wiped out of history. Joe lives alone; his tribe and lover’s lives stripped from him, and thus the last pieces of something humane and familiar have disappeared. He cannot simply be described as lovelorn and lonely, as his loss is larger than that, reeking of post-apocalyptic recklessness and despair. His people are gone and he exists in a deserted wasteland of a patch of ground, resembling something far less than a hogan, and more like the scarecrow-strewn plains of Planet of the Apes.

Joe lives a superhero existence, living out his days fighting for a code of honor and justice, and spending his off time at a dilapidated lair, but he has no need for a mask or an alter ego. Instead he tosses his body from horse to horse with complete abandon, selflessly, instinctively saving the day. Reynolds excels with his ferocious, grounded physicality, balanced by his very direct, very funny line delivery. “I’m going to need some dynamite,” Joe repeats over and over again to much laughter, intentionally or otherwise… it doesn’t matter. Ennio Morricone’s score is one of loud high-pitch screaming coupled with rhythmic chants of “NAVAJO JOE!”, effectively tempering the rather placid Joe with an undercurrent of operatic anger and desperation. This musical cue also functions in further injecting some sort of comic book or superhero element by giving Joe a theme song.

While these layers of apocalyptic emotions flood Reynolds’ performance and the overall feeling of the picture, it is unfortunately framed as a revenge saga. The folks that murdered his people scheme to rob a large lump of cash and lay waste to a blossoming Western town. Joe volunteers to protect the town, and in turn volunteers to kill every last one of the bandits, with shotguns, pistols, knives, dynamite and his hands. The story would succeed to a greater degree if revenge had nothing to do with it. Joe never stakes his claim of revenge, or demonstrates ill judgment due to any personal emotional involvement with the crooks, and thus themes of revenge are never really explored and are irrelevant. Director Sergio Corbucci seems to favor the idea that Reynolds is playing a wanderer who has stepped out from the dust of some extinct species and different time, frightening even those he volunteers to protect. This idea is far more interesting than simple revenge, and thankfully there is greater time spent on it. As a result, any hint of the revenge narrative feels a bit tacked on, though fun and action packed.

Eventually the townspeople acquiesce to the idea of a mythic stranger unquestionably saving their skin, yet once they’ve used him all up the dinosaur wanders off into the sunset. He may be going to save another town, but more likely he’ll fade away.

This is part of the ongoing Morricone Festival coverage.

The Beguiled

2007-03-01T01:44:00.000-05:00

The Beguiled

dir. Don Siegel

“…and we could prepare them especially for him.”

KALEN EGAN, Los Angeles
February 28, 2007 - DVD

Here is a film so ahead of its time that even today it feels like something relevant, wise and alien. Yet it is equally locked into and cogent about its own era, and also manages to be intriguing in its depiction of history. Set during the end of the civil war, The Beguiled aims its thematic guns on nothing less than the clash between national red and national blue, depicting the worst of both worlds in a battle for American supremacy. At the same time, it envisions men as salacious, liberal liars, and women as conservative, repressed rage-machines, and in doing so anticipates centuries of harbored, built-up animosity between the two sexes. Shit, this is one cynical little monster, and one of the great social terror pictures of the 60’s and 70’s, hanging right beside classics like Don't Look Now and, especially, Rosemary’s Baby. Like that film, The Beguiled embraces metaphor over plot and logic, and builds toward a calculated leap off Lunatic Ledge. It’s never as bracingly scary as either of those aforementioned movies, but I think it's more sharply satiric, and no doubt much funnier.

Clint Eastwood plays Corporal John McBurny, a yankee soldier who is shot out of a tree and blown up, then discovered and rescued by a 12-year-old girl (“Old enough for kissin’.”) named Amy. Instantly seduced by his forwardness and rugged sex appeal, Amy brings the war-ravaged John to her nearby boarding school, which is populated by six or seven other women. As John recuperates from his injuries, he single-mindedly sets to charming the skirts off as many of the house’s females as possible. Foremost among these ladies is the school’s headmistress, Martha Farnsworth, played with a cool mix of austerity and longing by Geraldine Page. Why is John so determined to collect all of their individual affections? And why are they so eager to give in to him? Who, in the end, is manipulating whom? Or, hold it… is anybody really manipulating anybody?

See, the great comedy of this whole scenario, it turns out, is that John and these women are utterly compatible in their collective desires, yet they’ll never be able to acknowledge that fact. In one of the movie’s most alarming and insightful scenes, Martha actually fantasizes about a three-way orgy involving John, herself and the house’s etiquette teacher (who has also fallen head over heels for the wounded soldier, and who might be the only reasonably sane, moderate person in the house; of course, her simple wants will eventually crumble under the weight of everyone else's selfish desire). And throughout his experience in the house, John seems determined to keep each of his seductions secret, as if it’s just more rewarding to feel like he’s getting away with something. In both cases, they’re just looking for kinky sex with “the enemy,” and if they could only sit down and admit it to each other, everyone would probably be better off.

The women are the product of stern, religious-minded morality, and John represents unbridled desire and self-interest; these traits are hyperbolic extremes of the political right and left, respectively, and of women and men, and it’s a credit to Don Siegel’s even-handed humor that the scales don’t ultimately tip in any one direction. Nearly everyone here is equally weird and destructive, and as the film ends—with the North beginning to claim its victory over the South—we sense a definite time-bomb already starting to tick. The South will indeed rise again, and then slip again, and then rise, and then slip…

It’s so exciting to me that a film from 1971 could see this phenomenon as a perpetual give and take, a battle destined to wage for a long, long time, and perhaps serve as the defining characteristic of this particular country—a struggle between unrestricted freedom and self-imposed oppression.

But give us a fuckin’ break, Kalen, this isn’t really a political film. It’s one where Clint Eastwood gets his leg chopped off by a bunch of angry girls. Indeed, The Beguiled is a movie that keeps its relevance buried inside, to be mined afterward, and during its 105 minutes glides along on a consistent stream of enthralling madness. Few films are confident enough in their craft and concept to go all the way over the edge, and this is one that gets away with each of its nutso indulgences. The intermittent voice overs, the arty/trashy dissolves, the gore, the ever-more over-the-top performances, etc. All good, all entertaining, all relevant to the central idea.

In short, this is a movie that proves unequivocally that the best and most memorable way to inspire thought and conversation is by mashing it into pulp, and serving it to the viewer like a bowl of tasty, poisonous wild mushrooms. Once you watch, you’ll never get it out of your system, and the country surrounding you might seem just a little more violent and hopelessly absurd.

Click the film's title at the top of this article, and buy the movie for $6.05! I'm not getting any kickback off this recommendation, it's just... could you ask for a better deal than that?!

Babel

2007-02-26T23:43:00.000-05:00

Babel
dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu

And the Oscar goes to: Earth Wind & Fire (as remixed by Fantastic Plastic Machine)!

Spencer Owen, BERKELEY
February 24, 2007 - DVD/Academy screener (thanks, Anonymous!)

What needs to be said about Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel? Hopefully not much; it's a bad film, and the Academy saw fit to recognize this fact by... well, by doing whatever they wanted, since as we're all aware, neither a nomination nor a win means a thing about the quality of a movie. It was nominated for several awards and it won only one. Yet, of the nominations for which it had any sort of decent odds (not, for instance, best picture), best score, its sole and meager prize, is the most offensive one of all. Why? It's a fascinating story! Promise!

But let's talk movie shop before we talk music shop. People talk about Crash and Babel in the same general category, and so here I distinguish between them. Crash is an incompetent time-waster, akin to the rough cut of a made-for-TV movie or, in my dream world, a local film festival also-ran. Its condescending and pretentious intentions are painfully obvious, its insipid situations painfully unconvincing and contrived. It is about racism. Babel is competent, just quite obnoxious. It is not about racism; if it is trying to be, it fails. It paints a somber picture of a globe easily tipped to crisis, and does so with a pointlessly-structured set of four "interlocking" stories by turns boring and infuriatingly manipulative.

Like Crash, it is based on a lot of contrivances, but these aren't as irritating as the manner of narrative assemblage, and most importantly the effort one has to expend to care about Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and their two kids. I spent a good deal of time on my critique of Babel's construction and ultimately decided to heed the advice of my opening sentences. I will, however, bring in my comment about the nominated Adriana Barazza (who lost to Jennifer Hudson): good acting, but by the time she has her climactic scenes, we're so infuriated at her puppet-masters that we'd rather see the strings cut.

Now I'd like to talk about someone offscreen, Gustavo Santaolalla. What is his role in this free-for-all? He's a Los Angeles-based Argentinian composer and solo recording artist, and has also been the producer for a wonderful Mexican band, Café Tacuba, and others, too. He provided the musical backdrop, in part, for Iñárritu's previous films as well as this one. This man just won last year for the score to Brokeback Mountain, and I was not wholly displeased by that choice. Though I wasn't enamored with the theme, it gave the movie a memorable, non-regrettable signature. And now, it's 2007 – another year, another Santaolalla, this time for Babel. He sure seems to have the stuff! Let's look closely.

Santaolalla has several cues in the film, and they're all rather insignificant, very brief mood enhancers and segues. Fine; this is the stuff of a score, more often than not. But in Babel, it often seems arbitrary. So much of the movie does a fine job without music, and it doesn't seem particularly organic when Santaolalla's worldly noodlings show up. There is other music in the movie, and it's all perfectly appropriate; in fact, generally, the music from outside sources works much more organically within the film than Santaolalla's original compositions. Past the one-hour mark, in the film's best sequence, the deaf Japanese girl (my favorite character) has a delightful day with some of her disabled and non-disabled peers, feeling accepted and feeling finally like a part of the world she lives in. This day climaxes in a dance club, and as they enter, the Fantastic Plastic Machine remix of "September" by Earth Wind & Fire is gradually introduced into the ambience of the soundtrack and then joyfully takes over. As the revellers revelled, I felt completely involved in the movie for the first time. Rather effectively, Iñárritu takes this opportunity – for the first and only time in the movie, tastefully – to occasionally cut the sound out completely with the edits, to remind us that this girl is inherently alienated. It isn't the first time someone's employed this technique, but since he'd withheld it this far along, it comes in as a surprise, and casts a perfect emotional contrast in the moment.

But that's Fantastic Plastic Machine! Criminy, where is Santaolalla's big Academy-baiting moment? Where's the sweeping statement equal to Pan's Labyrinth's lullaby theme? The Pan's theme took over a half-hour to show up; with Babel, we're at the two-hour mark! The trusted name of Gustavo isn't enough for the Academy to nominate a sparse and ambient tapestry, is it?

No, but "Iguazu" is enough. Yes, it's a song by the man himself. I've gotta admit – it's not bad. It's named after a waterfall, and it sounds like an imitation of one, a harp-like pattern of quick, arpeggiated string plucking on an instrument I can't quite recognize. You might recognize this piece of music not by name, but by source. Iñárritu used it previously in Amores Perros. You can also find it in Michael Mann's The Insider from 1999. More recently, it also showed up, I'm told, in the cable serial Deadwood. The first place you'll find it is on Santaolalla's 1998 solo album for Nonesuch entitled Ronroco. The latest place you'll find it is in Babel. This is correct, and you'll find few who deny it: Santaolalla's music makes, incomparably, its biggest impact on Babel when "Iguazu" is used as backdrop to a climactic montage over two hours into the film.

Let's recap. A song is released on CD, without film accompaniment or the intention thereof, nearly a decade before a particular Oscar year. It is used in at least two other films during the interim. It is then the primary force leading to an Oscar nomination, in said decade-later Oscar year, for best original score. There's a first for everything, I suppose. (By the way, if anything like this has happened before and you're aware of it, I urge you to comment on this post; I love to learn.)

I will allow you to guess what piece of the soundtrack they chose to represent the score during the presenter's nomination montage. Then the thing straight up won. It is perhaps hyperbole to add up all the elements of this situation and call it an insult to the art of musical composition for film, because it's the Oscars. But I'm insulted, as a music enthusiast first and a film enthusiast first-and-a-half. So should be, at the very least, the other four composers that were nominated. (Even Javier Navarrete for Pan's Labyrinth.)

A coda. In the film's final scene, we wrap up our Japanese story, and a lovely piano trio is introduced, fittingly melancholy with a beautiful tune. This piece is called "Bibo no Aozora." It is written by Ryuichi Sakamoto, and it is performed by Sakamoto, accompanied by the cellist Jacques Morelenbaum (with whom Sakamoto has recorded a couple of albums) and the violinist Everton Nelson. After about four minutes of this piece, the final shot fades to credits, and the music crossfades awkwardly to more Santaolalla. It isn't "Iguazu," but it sounds just like "Iguazu" ... "Son of Iguazu," maybe. At the end of the credits, you can hear some of the noodling that makes up some of the rest of the score. Here's that whole cue. Thanks to whoever uploaded this to Odeo.

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Ennio Morricone Festival, pt. 1

2007-02-24T21:02:00.000-05:00

The Film Forum here in New York City just finished up a series of movies scored by Ennio Morricone. They showed 26 different movies over a period of 3 weeks. I saw 18 of them in the theatre during those 3 weeks. The other 8 I had previously seen. This entry is the first of many, examining each of those 18 pictures, often with visual/aural aids. Some of them have already been reviewed here, and for those I will simply post a link.

Mr. Morricone is receiving an honorary Academy Award tomorrow. I can only hope this means brief clips of some of the below movies get shown on national television. To be very, very brief, my favorites of the bunch I saw were Arabian Nights, The Burglars and The Big Gundown.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
dir. Elio Petri

Big posters of some hand prints.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 3, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

The title of this picture is pretty much the sum up its parts, though it leaves out the very Philip K. Dickian twist that the investigator is also the “citizen above suspicion.” After meditatively, deliberately murdering his kinky mistress, the titular citizen (and investigator) sets out on an Ouroboros quest that begins as an intellectual experiment and folds upon itself to Dostoyevskian/Dickian paranoia. Dostoyevsky meets Dick is a fine way to describe this artsy and introspective, yet pulpy, handheld detective yarn.

The anti-establishment bent of the picture and the detective’s proto-fascist power abusing intents build something that is more intellectually palatable for the Film Forum-going audience than say, Burt Reynolds as a Navajo, and thus it makes a very fine two-day long opening to the Morricone program. It tastes a bit like a much trashier detective version of Army of Shadows or The Conformist (both of which enjoyed extended runs at Film Forum). The brand new 35mm print looked pristine and is clearly indicative of an impeding, overdue DVD release in the near future and a chance for Dickheads all over to imagine a world where Elio Petri could direct Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.

Arabian Nights
dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini

LOVE!

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 5, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s mythological celebration of life takes the form of a series of short moral tales strung together with hyper-ecstatic energy. The lesson or moral of each is fairly unclear, but what is clear is that the characters in this blissful, meandering journey are more than likely to be spending their time fucking or dying than anything else.

The story charged with holding the picture together and running from start to finish revolves around the lusty passion between a young boy (of about 14 or 15) and his young (also 14 or 15) dominating slave girl. They are beautiful kids and the young boy’s beauty is so paralyzing that as he loses his slave girl and searches for her far and wide he ends up copulating with a wide variety of smitten young women. This young kid looks like one of the heroes of Larry Clark’s wonderful Wassup Rockers and Pasolini rests his camera on him with the same affection and awe, marveling at his frequently nude figure, skillfully blending human, animal passions with fantastical elements with an ease that would make Guillermo del Toro blush.

This joy-filled movie is currently not available on this country on DVD, though once was, briefly. I do not want to assume this is due to the frank use of graphic teen sexuality, and rather the delay to gather the best elements for a marvelous American Pasolini box set.

Danger: Diabolik
dir. Mario Bava

LOVE!

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 6, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Danger: Diabolik is a silly, sly, visually stunning, yet entirely straight-faced comedy about a handsome James Bond-ish super villain and his lover’s adventures in lucrative, victimless crime. While John Philip Law is the charming, statuesque “star” of the movie as the titular character, the set design and visual gags clearly take center stage. Eva, his lover, sterilely writhes around in piles of money and the two passionlessly kiss the night away, as we crane our necks to observe the gadgetry that adorns Diabolik’s lair. Eventually all gadgets are exposed, and are creatively designed, though all a bit too polished. The polish and camp making the stuff of cult appreciation, Danger: Diabolik is best when it is a music video, not just to the Beastie Boys’ “Body Movin'," but to Ennio Morricone’s electric guitar twang as well.

After The Burglars, this manages to take the prestigious spot as the 2nd best of the Ennio Morricone scored emerald heist movies. Though the score for Danger soars among the greatest, with Morricone flexing his silly muscle and elevating the 60'sness excess of James Bond music to another level. Danger is great fun, but for its lack of substantive material (minus the score and visuals) and its impression on the ham-fisted idiotic bullshit of Roman Coppola’s CQ, it deserves to sit in the corner of this series with a dunce cap atop it’s funny little head.

The Burglars

dir. Henri Verneuil

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 6, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Click here.

The Big Gundown

2007-02-23T23:56:00.000-05:00

The Big Gundown
dir. Sergio Sollima

Run, man, run.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 13, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

A young girl, a real young girl, has been ravaged and murdered. Government endorsed vigilante lawman Jon Corbett is going to stop at nothing to catch the motherfucker who did it and watch him bleed. The motherfucker is Cuchillo Sanchez, and I’ll be damned if he isn’t the craftiest, dirty-fightingest scumbag on this piece of shit maneatin’ planet. I’ll be double-damned if you don’t love fucker by the end of this picture.

Largely due to the bravura performance of Tomas Milian, who plays Cuchillo, The Big Gundown stakes its place as arguably the greatest non-Sergio Leone spaghetti western (Lee Van Cleef’s strongest performance, a glorious score from Ennio Morricone, no-nonsense direction from Sergio Sollima and the intellectually complicated subject matter may also contribute).

The first taste of the sort of man Cuchillo is comes from a scene where he appears to be taking a second victim, another pre-teen, a blonde Mormon girl. He bathes giddily in a river beckoning the young lass to join him in the fun. Corbett (Lee Van Cleef) to the rescue! Cuchillo’s playfulness and good humor is a shocking display of objectivity on the part of director Sergio Sollima. With dramatic irony in place, the audience well aware of Cuchillo’s predatory tendencies, the scene plays out as if Solima just stumbled across Cuchillo taunting the pre-teen from the water and found it simply a source of mild amusement. The confrontation with Corbett is doubly strange, considering that it occurs so early in the movie. The set-up is one suggesting an endless chase, and the hero and villain are already facing off? Wait, Corbett gets shot? Already? I would call it a spoiler, if it didn’t occur so soon in the story. Cuchillo, caught red-handed and practically naked, rags hanging from his skin, starts blubbering like a fool when threatened by Corbett. Pathetically and half-mockingly repenting to God, Cuchillo, by flailing and whimpering on his knees manages to coerce the young girl into, get this, shooting Corbett! Cuchillo has a great belly laugh and takes off. When Corbett comes to, an old Morman man thanks him for protecting his wife and apologizes for his getting shot. Wife? Yes.

Nothing as it seems is the status quo in The Big Gundown as Corbett, used to fighting for simple right and wrong, is now drowning in a world where a raping murdering motherfucker is actually charming and likable. There will be no take ten paces and “draw!” with these two. Cuchillo barely picks up a gun the whole movie. Instead, he uses a knife, whines, squirrels his way out of trouble and runs about like a chicken with its head cut off from scene to scene through Texas and Mexico, every once and a while injecting a political diatribe about the state of his oppressed peasant culture, which are all strikingly genuine. Slowly Corbett discovers his foe is not as simple as things seem and he is faced with not only being outsmarted by this ruffian, but having his ideological and geographical worlds turned upside down.

The wonderfully junky and comical candy scenarios and characters in The Big Gundown coated with the hard emotional shell of poverty, rape, murder and desperate fatalism make a delicious masterstroke of moviemaking. This picture is the missing link between the bombastic poetic schlock of the spaghetti western genre and the intense character studies as haunting political and emotional landscapes of the Sam Peckinpah genre (yes, he deserves his own genre). In other words, come for the goofy hijinks, rousing score, snap dialogue and fun performances, stay for self-critical crises of ugly introspection, dishonorably charming cheating motherfuckers and brain-busting, jaw-droppingly brave motion picture creation.

Fires on the Plain

2007-02-19T16:35:00.000-05:00

Fires on the Plain
dir. Kon Ichikawa

Kon, artist.

Guest Article!
Jeff Larson, NEW YORK CITY
February 19, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Film Center

In Fires on the Plain, Kon Ichikawa’s WWII masterpiece, a soldier walks. He does not fight, and only twice sees the enemy. It’s 1945 and the Japanese have no hope of winning, or even, as the film contends, returning to the realm of the living. Fires on the Plain imagines, in stark black and white, a world where even surviving is more harrowing than the hells that wait beyond the grave.

In a small hut on the island of Leyte, the soldier Tamura, who is suffering from tuberculosis, is reprimanded for returning to his unit unwell. The squad commander tells him the dire situation facing the Japanese on the Philippine front: there is no food, little water – a supply officer fills out requests for supplies with no one to send the requests to – a burgeoning guerilla war, and, now, here is this young soldier who is too sick to help his men dig air shelters. Tamura, played by an angelic Eiji Funakoshi, waits through this scene with an abject stiffness that seems to be a remnant of some long lost muscle memory of military decorum, and as the film progresses, his slowly stiffening limbs parody any semblance of discipline. He is ordered back to the hospital, whether he is admitted or lies dying outside is of no consequence, and reminded that he has a hand grenade to blow himself up before starving to death.

At the hospital, the chief medic refuses to admit Tamura on the basis that he can still walk. And while waiting outside among the sick-but-still-walking, Tamura watches the medical staff desert their post shortly before the hospital is destroyed by air raid. His dying comrades scamper like ants from the huts serving as the hospital before an unseen enemy drops his bombs. The resulting scene is the first of many striking apocalyptic visions: the ground is strewn with scores of the dead and the dying, and the movie stops to indulge in the bleak and devastating landscape.

Without bombast -- except, oddly, in the score -- an atypical theme arises out of the destruction: on Leyte, comrades-in-arms are only helpful as survival tools, there are no letters to write home, girls to fantasize about, or even any hope for escape. Ichikawa’s camera pauses on the most horrifying scenes long enough for them to become terrifyingly beautiful in their stillness: Tamura ventures, at one point, up to a deserted church which is literally bursting with the bones and flayed limbs of his fellow soldiers, shortly before he shoots and kills a young girl for a pouch of salt. The film’s sensational score drops out in the village, as if it embodies an observer who received more than he bargained for and is obediently reverent to this desecrated chapel.

Ichikawa’s morals in this film are hard to pin down -- one would be hard-pressed to simplify the message as merely anti-war. Tamura’s hardship always arises out of following orders, and being a largely heroic soldier. He is generous with his small amounts of food, he is strong and good-looking despite his health condition, and he blindly follows orders. In a lesser film, we would admire his hardships, but his outstanding qualities are moot: there is no one to fight, and everyone will die.

After rendezvousing with the retreating Japanese forces, he marches, without shoes, towards an evacuation at Palompon. Tamura is following the rest of his comrades because he has nothing else left to do, and he is hardly alone in his despair. In one scene, after being strafed by enemy aircraft, the survivors slowly get to their feet and leave the dead where they lie. In another, a soldier eulogizes over a seemingly dead soldier. “Are we all going to end up like that?” he asks. The exhausted, yet not dead, soldier lifts his head from the mud and answers, “What?” On the hellish Island of Leyte, simple conceptions of heroism and honor have broken down. This is the rare war film with no warriors. Surprisingly, without war, Ichikawa manufactures a plausible and veritable war zone, but even more amazing is how he creates an army of broken individuals through subtle and motionless camerawork, the lines around a man’s eyes, and a patience that conveys a devastating stillness and an odor of death. Fires on the Plain is a necessary movie, and even a slice of it affects us more deeply than all of the most successful scenes in all of the Saving Private Ryan clones. Fires on the Plain breathes death, and yet is tasteful enough not to rely on simple sleights of hand to invoke the horrors of war.

Near the end of the film, Tamura happens upon a survivor who proclaims he is the Buddha on the mountain. Like all Buddhas – past and future – salvation is coming to him. He is waiting for a helicopter to save him while surviving on a diet of his own shit and the maggots who are living in it. Tamura looks to the sky and sees no helicopter. “What kind of birds are those?” he says. The shit-eating Buddha retorts, “those aren’t birds, they’re flies.” Indeed.

(All six of you reading this should buy the DVD when it is released on March 13.)

Pennies From Heaven

2007-02-19T02:05:00.000-05:00

Pennies From Heaven / Pennies From Heaven
by Dennis Potter

Hoskins vs. Martin
(Spoiler: Hoskins wins in a bloody triumph)

Kalen Egan, LOS ANGELES
February 18, 2007 - DVD

Uncompromising and uncomfortably honest, the television miniseries Pennies From Heaven was visionary in the way it introduced a new, freaky road into the minds of fictional characters. It was such a triumphant and surprising technique, in fact, that it would serve as the cornerstone for the justly-celebrated career of its creator, Dennis Potter, who would put this weirdo idea to use in a number of other BBC miniseries'. It was not, however, strong enough to survive being transmuted into an American musical, and the attempt to do so stands as a sad testament to the side of Hollywood we’ve occasionally wished didn’t exist; its tendency toward grandiosity and overstatement, and it’s singular ability to (maybe inadvertently, maybe intentionally) elbow out intelligence and logic in favor of spectacle and self-importance.

But before we get too deep into that unpleasantness, let’s talk about the great and often mind-blowing original work. Over more than eight hours, Potter has us completely enthralled with the lives of some truly cruel, gullible, and pathetic people, and only in the end does it feel like we (tragically) have to turn our backs on all of them. The aforementioned “surprising technique,” of course, is that throughout their misadventures, the characters spontaneously lip-sync to 1930’s era pop songs. The predominant read seems to be that these frequent departures from the otherwise very, very grim day-to-day reality are essentially reflections of the characters’ wildest wishes sprung to life. The sunny songs, then, are (in theory) a kind of ironic, relieving contrast to the story. But is this really what’s going on? Well… according to me (and, c’mon, who else’re you gonna believe?), yes and no.

The truth is that Potter was aiming at something more complex, and more insightful. Each time a character mimes a song, the context and outlook are carefully constructed so that we know exactly whose perspective we’re observing. For example, the fantasies of Arthur, the sheet-music salesman played by Bob Hoskins, generally reflect an alternate version of himself; one in which he is confident, truthful, and an all-around good man (or, if not “good” per se, then at least he imagines that the world around him is as twisted as he is, and happy about it). Eileen, the school-teacher-turned-prostitute played by Cheryl Campbell, has musical fantasies that serve to soften the world around her; she’s actively, desperately looking for the good in other people, even when (or, perhaps, especially when) they’re looking to exploit her. These are two completely different motivations for fantasy, yet they both draw upon the same stock of popular music from the period, as they naturally would to people in this place and time. Each musical sequence, then, is not merely a break from the story, but their break from the story. Most of the people in the series get at least a single song to themselves, and in each and every case the motivation for the fantasy represents an angle unique to their character. In all cases, Potter is using the lip-syncing sequences to bring us closer to the character. What, after all, is more intimate than a grown person's fantasies?

Consider this for a moment, and you’ll realize what a completely out-there concept it is, yet it’s so skillfully executed that after a brief period of growing accustomed, it becomes as natural a storytelling device as, say, a flashback. Very rare in motion pictures is a new concept introduced that’s creative and easily accessible, yet here is an amazing example where both are true.

The story of Pennies From Heaven is unceasingly depressing, involving deception, abortion, marital discord, murder, contrition, and a great, great deal of self-loathing. Bob Hoskins’ Arthur is one of the most reprehensible, weasely characters I’ve encountered, yet I would be lying if I said I didn’t seriously love the fuckin’ asshole. He’s such a thoroughly considered creation, and so human, that there’s really no way not to love him, assuming you have a shred of empathy inside you. His perverse dreams are our perverse dreams—he desires affection, sex and absolute support in equal amounts, without any obligation to give the same in return. Anybody who’s never felt like this to some degree is either delusional or boring. This miniseries is something for the ages.

In sharp contrast, the 104-minute movie version has no idea who Arthur really is. He comes across as nothing more than a dumb rube, more a man-child than Hoskins’ childish man. This should probably not come as much of a surprise, since basically Steve Martin plays the character as The Jerk in depression-era Chicago. And yes, I know that sounds funny. Just trust me that it isn’t. (By the way, The Jerk is great, great, great. Don't get me wrong about that.) By this same token, the musical sequences are painful to endure—they look kind of cool, I guess, and they're very large in scale, but they possess no interesting perspective. Herbert Ross, the director, has envisioned the story as both a classic musical and as a simultaneous comment on the falsity of classic musicals. This is such an obvious approach, and such a disservice to the original work, that at first I thought he must have a secret idea up his sleeve. This isn't the case. For Ross, what these sequences really are, I eventually and sadly discovered, are nothing but the fantasies of the filmmaker as opposed to those of any given character; odes to Busby Berkeley (who wasn’t even notably famous during the period in which the movie is set) and references to Singin' in the Rain, a musical released nearly thirty years after the events in this story, suggest that Ross really doesn't have any interest in probing the minds of these characters. Instead, he's just looking to recast an old-fashioned and typically joyous art form in a darker mold. Boy... quite the revelatory concept, eh? Even in 1978, when the miniseries first premiered, Dennis Potter knew this was much too simple an approach, and so took it straight to a higher, more interesting level.

Now, I know that it isn't fair to criticize a movie based on respected material for being its own thing... I don't have a problem, really, with the film version downgrading the importance of certain key characters from the miniseries. It's just that what this film winds up being is so comparatively pointless. Here is the best example I can give to illustrate what's so aggravating about this version: this is a still shot from the film. Look familiar? It's a recreation of the famous painting Nighthawks, from 1942. Why is this included in Pennies From Heaven? The characters certainly don't imagine that they're sitting in a painting from eight years in the future. The best explanation I can muster is that it's in there as a Scary Movie-esque gag, a self-congratulations on the part of the filmmakers. But you see the fundamental problem, here? This isn't a film about people, and it isn't really about investigating anything relevant... it's about the cleverness of the creators, and as such possesses almost no central drama, and offers no reason for us to care about anything that's happening on more than a candy-coated surface level. Each individual sequence is kinda fun on its own, but they don't accumulate into anything greater. Worst of all, this movie strips Arthur and the rest of their humanity, and all we have left is a tap-dancing director. This is not, not, not, not, not interesting.

But more important than discrediting the weak movie version, I really can't recommend seeking out the miniseries more emphatically. It's really one of those things.

Superman II

2007-02-18T03:20:00.000-05:00

Superman II
dir. Richard Donner

"Oh, God."
"It's Zod."

Guest Article!
Matt Robison, NEW YORK CITY
February 17, 2006 - DVD

True fans of the original 1978 Superman film-- true fans, such as myself-- who adore it for its beauty and its taste and who are never hesitant to defend it vehemently as most obviously the greatest super-hero film of all time—well, we’ve always found Superman II to be sort of an embarrassment. It’s overly sentimental and crudely pasted together and frankly I blame it wholeheartedly for lowering the standards for embarrassing sequels to come (of which the latest, Superman Returns, surely is included). But perhaps the most disheartening thing for us (true fans) when watching Superman II is the sense of such seemingly limitless potential for the thing. Three escaped convicts from Superman’s home planet escape the Phantom Zone to wreak havoc on the Earth! Anyone, even casual, less than true fans, would assume that such an awesome plot would render the thing nearly fool proof. But Warner Brothers, it turns out, are exceptional fools. They fired Richard Donner, the original director, for reasons still undisclosed, and his replacement, Richard Lester (whose name Donner smugly claims in the commentary track not to remember), no doubt firmly misguided by the film’s producers, managed to cut together one of the shabbiest, schmaltziest super-disappointments of all time. Donner had been filming Superman and Superman II simultaneously up until the first picture was released, and it was after great financial and critical success that the company inexplicably chose to change their horse in mid-stream, leaving us with only a partial sketch of what Superman II would have been—lost, along with The Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon and quite probably the fourth season of Deadwood, forever to the annals of tragically unrealized masterpieces.

But wait.

Now after nearly 30 years, finally the original director’s cut of Superman II has found the light of day—or almost, anyway, in the shape of a DVD. The new disc does contain a film and it is approved by Richard Donner, but, weary fans be cautioned, it is also something that could hardly be thought of as definitive or even really finished. For instance, I would never show it to, say, my girlfriend. I assume that it would be like someone trying to foist on me a late record by Warren Zevon; I, who am not a true fan of Zevon but only a general, insouciant fan of Zevon, would not begin to understand the infinitesimal quirks and nuances of the thing. I can’t read Braille either. The point is that though this new (or old) version of the film does have superior pacing and marvelous taste compared to its bizarro counterpart, not to mention much, much better fight scenes, an (almost) total lack of embarrassing voice-over, a far better story and some great previously unseen footage of Marlon Brando as Jor-El, it still just doesn’t quite feel like a whole movie. It is unavoidably, through no fault of the film’s sensational restoration team—who thankfully included in their added computer effects nothing nearly Lucasian in scale—missing those final finishing touches that make a film really feel over when it’s over. The ending of this version is terrific by comparison, but it doesn’t make any more sense than the other one. It couldn’t, because this version was never made properly with its own ending; it has to borrow and steal from the other films just to be coherent.

What this disc really seems for is not usurping Richard Lester’s version of the film—this by now would be totally impossible—but to serve as an outlet for properly mourning the unsung majesty of the series. We’ll never know how good it could have been, but if this disc is any indication, probably a lot better that what we got. In other words, something more than a wonderful curio. But for true fans only.

Bridge to Terabithia

2007-02-18T01:23:00.000-05:00

Bridge to Terabithia
dir. Gabor Csupo

Running is nothing like Narnia, despite the inane advertising campaign.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

February 17, 2007 - 35mm/Regal Union Square

The most effective children’s movies and, for that matter, children’s stories are often full of peril. Not peril in a hanging from a helicopter sort of way, but in a fear of discovery sort of way, and there is no time more perilous for a youth than that ledge on the brink of pubescence and independence of thought.

Bridge to Terabithia introduces its young hero, Jesse, as he begins to observe his family with a new pair of eyes. He may have always known his parents and older sisters were hardly perfect, but for some reason, his eyes start to linger a bit longer on his emotionally exhausted parents, as if the camera finally realized it could hold a shot of them for just a little while longer, in the process catching an overwhelming sadness. Jesse’s younger sister provides a nice contrast, as she still blindly and lovingly perceives herself as daddy’s little girl. His father is played by Robert Patrick, enriching a similar role to his horribly written and performed bit in Walk the Line. His fatherly distance and regality is a bit less intense than Kevin Arnold’s father on The Wonder Years, but in the same ballpark. The family’s fiscal and emotional struggles permeate Jesse’s psyche, yielding a very no-nonsense state of melancholy.

These initial scenes coupled with Jesse’s navigation of the treacherous waters of Jr. High School conjure familiar, tucked-away emotions of the daily life and death struggle of pre-pubescence. The atmosphere this creates is not one that should be simply referred to as fear, but more of a necessary, inevitable maturation that is justifiably scary, a loss of innocence and a new fascination with knowledge. It just so happens this knowledge is a double-edge sword.

In an emotionally overwhelming scene of startling beauty Jesse’s music teacher, played with unfettered love by the wonderful Zooey Deschanel, takes him on a field trip to an art museum. Jesse has never been to a museum before, though is a talented young artist. His jaw-dropping reaction to the discovery of these otherworldly paintings is incredibly moving, not just as something to vicariously relive through the eyes of youth, but also for a parent or teacher who has ever observed a child realizing their potential, becoming as blissful as a kid in candy store. Note the simile, because Jesse is no longer a kid, and this movie is about dealing with just that, but also having it be okay to enjoy yourself as a kid would, no matter your age.

The aforementioned museum scene is a result of quite a journey for Jesse, particularly due to an adventurous new neighbor, Leslie. Leslie is quite a fashionable young poetess who is not afraid to get her hands dirty. After a typically Jr. High, and therefore rocky, start to their friendship the couple build an elaborate tree fort in the woods and play fantastic games of make-believe that mirror their day-to-day struggles (some more literal than others). Their relationship and banter is quite believable, reminiscent to those that pepper such terrific movies (and books) as Holes and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Their friendship continues to blossom as the two become best of friends, and again, this friendship is fierce and passionate in an oddly gut-wrenching way as the pre-pubescent peril looms large throughout. Together the pair ponder questions of social structure, parental authority, nature vs. nurture and heaven and hell, and frankly it would be a bit easy to guffaw at some of these things and other genre conventions if it weren’t for the rock in your stomach and impending dread.

Bridge to Terabithia is an optimistic, hopeful tragedy. It is a journey well-worth taking, and I suggest seeing it in a theatre full of young ones, so you’re not idly thinking, can a child understand this? Is this okay for a kid to be watching? It is more than okay, and feel free to add Bridge to Terabithia to a list of the best wonderfully serious children’s movies of the past decade, such as the aforementioned Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Holes, Happy Feet, The Iron Giant, Eight Below and Finding Nemo to name a bunch.

The Burglars

2007-02-16T00:44:00.000-05:00

The Burglars

dir. Henri Verneuil

Regrettably, the youtube version of the chase is not in the proper aspect ratio, limiting its monumental power, but... you get the picture.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

February 8, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

The concept of cop and criminal being of the same mental geometry is a tired one, and something I would like nothing to do with. With a tired genre convention such as that, something easily grasped, comes the fruition of a new world amass in possibility. Utilizing a pre-existing, innately understood concept is freeing, letting one delve deeper into concepts both flighty and psychotically fearsome without the limitation of having to spend time establishing rules.

Abel and Azad are a crooked cop and a crooked criminal, respectively. They are quintessential foils, and the expediency with which they discover that they are pieces of the same puzzle (accepting their own social conventions) is in effect a safe-cracking, an unlocking of scenes that may otherwise make no sense. These scenes explode the senses, bringing joy, excitement and laughter at every turn, in the coherent, masterfully told motion picture event, Henri Verneuil’s The Burglars.

An extremely quiet, mostly dialogue free emerald heist kicks off the story with a whisper, harking back to that extremely serious, marvelously quiet heist in Rififi. The Burglars’ heist is detailed and systematically interesting, though the technological gadgetry is the stuff of a bad spy movie. Logically following a scene of dialogue-free quiet is a scene of dialogue-free loudness; without a doubt, one of the most riveting, wowing car chases in movie history. The hyperbole is well earned. Two crappy cars careen in every direction though the streets, sidewalks, back alleys and stairs of Athens, Greece. Yes, the cars chase one another down stairs, just like Jason Bourne. An utter lack of what today one would refer to as special effects or controlled locations load this pursuit with an air of refreshing reality, rendering each near miss of a pedestrian jaw-dropping, every impact eye-popping. This is a lengthy chase, worth dissecting, but what carries the heft of the never boring chase are the moments when one or both of the cars come to a halt. There is no blood thirst amongst these rivals, and the chase is not a murderous one. There are moments of quiet when the cars stop, often practically on top of one another. The struggle to then escape an automobilic chokehold, a duel even, is endless entertaining. There is an urge to scream at either of the drivers to get out of the car and pull the opponent out, but then the opponent would be able to jet away. Even a slow car is faster than a man.

The chase comes early on, and is long, but what follows is thrilling set piece after set piece matched with Abel and Azad’s delicious cat and mouse banter. The crazily cool Omar Sharif, playing the civilized super villain the utmost ease, plays Abel. Jean-Paul Belmondo (yes, the guy from Breathless), a physical man’s and ladies’ man hurdling and tumbling through the picture’s creative set pieces and colorful supporting characters, plays Azad. Both characters spill over with confidence and zero fear. In order to improvise escape, Belmondo runs up to a moving bus, jumps up, shoves his arms through a window and holds on while the bus continues down the highway, Sharif in tow, attempting to knock him off with his car door. There are showdowns at a seemingly abandoned toy warehouse and a stunning conclusion in a silo (pre-Witness, obviously). Again, as action-packed as this all seems, it is tempered with winning, witty, wordy power plays between the leads, and a constant grinning joy.

In the movie’s most amazing moment, a clear demonstration of exuberance and joy for cinema, Belmondo has evaded Sharif during a showdown at a carnival by hiding in the bed of a truck hauling salt. The truck takes him to the top of a mountain of salt and trash and he is dumped overboard. The vantage point is from the bottom of the mountain. Belmondo tumbles, and it is undoubtedly him, in a moment of sheer physical bravado, flipping recklessly down a mountain, enormous chucks of salt and rock chasing him down and down and down and down and right into your face. BAM! This is movies!

Pride

2007-02-13T01:13:00.000-05:00

Pride - Theatrical Poster

SIX-REEL SHUFFLE POSTER POLL!

We here running this, the most popular blog on the internet, thought we'd take a break from our opinions and request some of yours. There's a minor debate going on right now behind the scenes as to the aesthetic/artistic quality of the poster above. One of the Six-Reel editors has called it "the best poster I've seen in years." Another said, frankly, "blech." Well, only one way to settle this-- put it to the masses; the millions and millions of our loyal readers. Post your comments below. What do you think?

Burn!

2007-02-12T01:16:00.000-05:00

Burn!

dir. Gillo Pontecorvo

Sir William Walker can out-puppet Don Corleone any day of the week.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

February 12, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Not unlike Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s previous feature, The Battle of Algiers, Burn! is a sprawling, rambling, geographically contained epic of timeless urgency. The lesson is a simple one. No person can free another person; a person can only free themself. The method by which this lesson is taught is the interesting thing here. An unusually and appropriately restrained Marlon Brando plays an Englishman with flowing locks of hair. This hair, along with his collected demeanor first suggests the classic “white man out to save the black people” narrative, though Mr. Brando turns out to be the classic “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

He lands on a Portuguese Caribbean colony where, naturally, Africans have been enslaved to work sugar plantations. After witnessing a government endorsed beheading of a “friend,” our white knight helps the deceased’s family carry the beheaded body back to their home. He then proceeds to hang around looking for the smallest indication of rebellion amongst the enslaved. Once he discovers this, in the form of Jose Dolores (Evaristo Marquez), a band of revolutionaries is formed and Brando leads his pupils by the hand through a successful revolution. This first portion of the movie is riveting political thriller/revolutionary cinema stuff, and it all carries the impressive weight of a “why dunnit?” rather than a “who dunnit?” Why is Brando’s Sir William Walker doing this? Is it out of hate of the Portuguese? Has he been hired to free the people for their own good? Yeah, right. Sir William is on that island for the same reason any imperialist country has any presence in any “unstable” country. Money.

Abruptly Sir William convinces Jose that he is unfit to actually run an organized government and installs a puppet ruler. Britain wins! 10 years pass; talk about abrupt, a title card just flashes on screen. Brando no longer holds any interest in the island he fought so hard for. It was all in a day’s work, and now he is enlisted by his government for another day’s work, this time fighting against the still wound up and enslaved islanders and their still powerful leader, Jose Dolores. The second half of the movie is far more ambiguous and difficult to comprehend than the first, due to the fact so much time has passed and that Britain and therefore Sir Williams Walker’s interests are in stark opposition to their previous allies. This is a historical norm with imperialist governments, and it has never been so pointedly represented.

Brando’s character, through the first half of the picture, is presented as a morally ambiguous presence, but this ambiguity is exposed as heartless and inhumane, no matter if his actions seem well intentioned in the first portion. No matter if this imperialist nation is fighting for “good” or “evil” they are still “evil,” but more than evil, greedy. Brando plagues this island like a curse, and this time around the violence takes on a far more affecting strain in the form of civil war. The island is divided between those who decided to follow the puppet leader, and thus Dolores’ troops now war, not against English or Portuguese soldiers, but against their own people. Brando simply observes, a political puppet master with only the slightest twang of guilt over the chaos he caused at the behest of his nation.

Sir William Walker is a fascinating, complex creature and Brando plays it all with maniacal detachment in his eyes. Struggling to figure him out, Jose becomes the audience’s eyes and ears, which adds to the complexity of the movie’s structure, considering Jose is not the main character. Sir William is our hero, and it is often a horror to be left alone with him. Ennio Morricone adds a gripping musical theme of epic heroism with an underlying current of menace, as the camerawork acts similarly, shaking through a chaotic mass of extras, yielding a grand scope of intimacy and uncertainty. The uncertainty yields passages that are uneven and less interesting than others, but Burn! remains one of the most politically complex movies I’ve seen, even if the morals of the story are beat over your head in the final moments.

Film

2007-02-05T21:11:00.000-05:00

Film
by Samuel Beckett

"Buster, if they click the title above our picture, they can watch the entire movie."
"Don't make me laugh, Beckett."

Guest Article!
Jeff Larson, NEW YORK CITY
February 5th, 2007 - World Wide Web

In Samuel Beckett’s Endgame -- Cormac McCarthy fans take note: this is the precursor to The Road -- a character says to the others, “Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” And what a delightfully accurate summary of Beckett’s works it is. Samuel Beckett: the bromide solipsist, the shit satirist, the despair humorist, the maximum minimalist. The ultimate modernist.

Beckett’s works approach life as a purgatorio, as a tedious affair of rotting flesh, locked limbs, and failing bodily functions punctuated by flatulence and discomfort. For Beckett, death merely is an inconvenience, a release to undergo at the end of life, and while watching it draw near, his characters indulge in complex algorithms to stave off boredom with the hope that this sweet release will seem to arrive that much sooner. Yet, Beckett’s talent for conveying comedy darkly removes us from the tedium of their realities. In his novel Malloy, the titular character, who is starving and suffering from an increased inability to use his legs, focuses on sixteen “sucking stones” which he found at the seashore -- this will be long, but here we go:

I distributed them equally among my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone form the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it.
…
But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four.

And repeat ad infinitum: Malloy will, of course, go on. The world, for Beckett, contains only these most simple and devastating minutiae of humanity, completely unlike the overwhelmingly beautiful and complex stream of consciousness found in Joyce or Faulkner. This excerpt occurs 40 pages into an 80-page single paragraph which describes Malloy’s increasing inability to survive and his reluctance to do so, and by the end of his journey, he is reduced to slowly crawling forward at less than 14 yards a day. But even in the most tedious of passages, a hint of darkly tainted hilarity bleeds through the futility and insignificance of Malloy’s persistence. Beckett’s novels exclude such pedestrian foofaraws as plot, arc, and often, traditional treatments of character: in Beckett, the characters are always less than human. Whether they are suffering from failing limbs, going blind, or slowly suffocating, these figures often seem to embody mere faint shadows or whispers of the wind. And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely these shortcomings that produce characters who so profoundly and uniquely display existence, and synchronously, all its failings. This singular combinational talent largely accounts for Beckett’s reputation as an extreme bore – Waiting for Godot was once summed up as a play where, “Nothing happens. Twice.” – and, in contrast, a practically knighted champion of literary experimentation.

Beckett, an Irishman and secretary to James Joyce, spent most of his life in France. His sole journey to the States was to enlist Buster Keaton to star in a short film he had written. (Charlie Chaplin, who echoes throughout Beckett’s works – it seems everyone wears a bowler, was his first choice.) In what would be Keaton’s last silent movie, Film opens with an overused, undergraduate shot of Buster Keaton’s eye opening and closing, and unfortunately, the duration of Film feels decidedly French (in the stereotypical sense e.g. self-referential, pandering etc.). However, since his novels and plays were often first published in French before English, his influence on French film – including its preoccupations, and hang-ups -- is deep: Godard reportedly even wanted to film an adaptation of Waiting for Godot, but Beckett balked. Later, we see Buster, 60 years old, nimbly running -- over piles of bricks and construction debris -- alongside a lower eastside New York wall, and nearly tackling a couple standing in his path. This disgusted couple then notices the camera – or, perhaps, Keaton’s pursuer -- and is shocked and dismayed. References of this sort are on par for Beckett, yet often we are to treat them as simple, yet devastatingly dire, jokes: in Endgame, a character, while searching for a living soul outside of his shack after an apocalypse, exclaims, upon turning towards the audience, “I see…. a multitude….in transports …. of joy. […] Well? Don’t we laugh?”

After a scene in which an elderly lady carrying flowers looks at the camera and dies, Keaton rushes into a bare room which contains a cat, a parakeet, a fish, and a dog – plus a mirror, a window, a photo of a statue, and a rocking chair. Over the course of the rest of Film, Keaton will cover up – with the multiple coats that he is wearing – destroy, or remove from the room each of these objects. All the while the camera floats, lazily behind his back and only at the very end do we see Keaton’s face. His goal, we soon realize, is to cease being perceived, for, here, being perceived is to exist. “What a folly! What a boring metaphor for film!” I hear you say. But, there is magic here, if only for the briefest of moments. Keaton is in his element: he has a profoundly difficult time removing the cat and dog -- whenever he throws one out of the room, the other runs back in – and when his coat falls to the floor, he dives to the ground a little too forcefully. And all we can do is laugh, for what a foolish endeavor it is to try to cease to exist and to try this hard. Unlike in Keaton’s other silent films, in this desolate place there is no one left to save, no goal to accomplish. Of course, his project fails, the camera can see him, we can see him, and it turns out he can see himself (in a twist, finally, Keaton observes his pursuer, who is not the camera, but himself).

Film is a spectacular failure, mostly because of its incessant pandering to the theory crowd; it ends with the shot of the eye from the opening sequence, for Christ’s sake. Yet, the dog and cat episode, the sickness-inducing camera movements, and Keaton’s efforts not to be seen are deliciously fun. We celebrate his refusal to live in the present tense, to take place in the here and now, because of his dedication to the cause. And because such blind dedication strikes the rest of us as foolish, the results, through Keaton’s anarchic grace, tremble a tinge of delight and sympathy deep within us. In short, these are complicated and contradictory themes being expressed here, both Keaton’s determined perseverance and his utter failure to accomplish any sort of sane outcome display an exhausting plea for human reality, however fantastic its manifestation may be.

Within this portrayal, Keaton’s determination not to exist contains a distinct odor of heroism – in the classic, and fantastic, sense. This sort of Heroism-through-dedication has its roots everywhere from Odysseus to Hamlet to John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. All are spectacular failures: Odysseus fails to return to his wrecked home for 19 years while cavorting with a sea nymph, Hamlet pines for the majority of the play only to kill his family and friends, and Ethan Edwards spends 5 years searching for his nemesis only to have the film’s fool find him. And so it is with Keaton, but no one is around to help this hapless hero. His doomed project is merely his own.

(For a more modern, and more successful, take on the themes expressed in Film, check out Matt Larson, directed and shot by the Shuffle’s own Kalen Egan. The similarity between them both is coincidental: we had no knowledge of Film when we made Matt Larson. For all of you out there who insist that the coincidence is too significant, and that we must have been aping, and conversing with, Film: why don’t you just take your salt-and-pepper beards and sweater vests and shove off?)

Duck, You Sucker!

2007-02-05T02:56:00.000-05:00

Duck, You Sucker!

dir. Sergio Leone

Blondie and Tuco. I mean... Harmonica and Cheyenne.
I mean... Sean and Juan. Whew.

Kalen Egan, LOS ANGELES
February 4th, 2007 - 35mm/New Beverly Cinema

There are “transition” movies, and then there’s the almost comical embodiment of everything a “transition” movie could be. Duck, You Sucker! is the latter. Falling directly between Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America, this is the film to watch if you need either a quick cliffs notes version of Leone’s entire output, or an unruly recap of one of the great one-classic-after-another directorial careers in history. Nearly every one of his thematic staples are on display here, and it’s almost a game in itself to identify those that reflect where he’s been and those that indicate where he’s going (yes, America was his last production, but there’s enough idiosyncratic material in that 229-minute monsterpiece for it to be considered the intellectual equivalent of at least four average movies). It may be telling that I was seriously tempted to begin this article with, “This movie is all that is good, all that is bad, and all that is ugly* about Sergio Leone’s wonderful, awe-inspiring body of work.” But if I did that, you might groan!

Perhaps not surprisingly, Duck, You Sucker! is not quite as formidable as most of Leone’s other works. While it certainly builds on the grandeur of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and ...in the West—it’s one of the hugest movies I’ve seen, and absolutely underlines the fact that Leone was every bit Lean’s equal (and I’d sometimes say his superior, depending on which day of the week you ask me) in the visual scope department—it also finds the filmmaker working at a heretofore unseen level of self indulgence. Leone’s lowbrow, European brand of satiric comedy is all over the place in this film (and would pop up again in an even more unrestrained way in My Name is Nobody, which he produced and, as I understand it, sort of ghost directed), and Ennio Morricone’s music follows him right to the edge of the cliff. For many, the music might be too much-- follow this link, and listen to the sample of Track 10 on Disc 1. That’s right, the female voice is singing “Sean, Sean, Sean,” the name of James Coburn’s character. Imagine hearing this at least a dozen individual times throughout the film, and you’ll have some idea why half the audience I viewed this with twittered and laughed each time the theme returned.

Of course, both Leone and Morricone had been down this spaghetti western road so many times before that they’re probably entitled to a little genre-poking fun... but this approach poses problems for the film every time it aims to be taken seriously. When the scenes dealing directly with the Mexican revolution come around, you can almost feel Leone losing interest, chomping at the bit for something more universal and mythic. I don’t like to get into the “making-of” history in these articles, but in this case it’s worth pointing out that Leone wasn’t even initially going to direct this movie—he was going to produce it for Peter Bogdonavich. It’s strange to say, but for the first (and only, in my estimation) time in his post-Colossus of Rhodes career, Leone seems uninterested in his central premise. Indeed, I’ve just this moment read a quote by Leone in Christopher Frayling’s indispensable book Once a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone in which he stated, just before the production of this movie, that he’d “fallen out of love with the things associated with the West.” Well, sir... hate to say, but it kinda shows.

You see, boiled down, this is a film about political revolution that seems only very mildly interested in revolutionary concepts. For a film to be ambivalent about its own position on such an issue is fine, of course, provided it's going to really put some thought into it, but the way Leone deals with this is by too often retreating into comedy and genre familiarity. That the “genre” in question is one Leone himself created only compounds the problem. Rod Steiger’s performance as “Juan,” for instance, is such a big, over-blustery Eli Wallach impression that it's hard to see through to the sensitive work he contributes in some of the quieter scenes. (If you think about an "over-blustery Eli Wallach" hard enough, by the way, you might be able to understand why my companion at the screening said Steiger reminded him more than once of George Costanza).

Another example: Leone seems to believe that his classic bridge explosion scene in Good, the Bad was just an overture for the out-and-out symphony of “KA-BOOOM’s!!!” in this movie; a church, a mountain, a tree, another bridge, a train, a bank, a rock wall... There are some reviewers and fans that defend this somewhat schizophrenic approach as being Leone's comment on the smattering of politically-minded spaghetti westerns that had popped up in recent years past (The Big Gundown--which I'm so goddamn jealous Jeff GP is going to see and review sometime in the coming weeks, Run Man Run, A Bullet for the General, Campaneros, etc). I say, unless they're referring to "Hot Shots!," be very wary of anybody that says a movie is principally a "comment" about any other movie(s). The odds are pretty good that a person like that doesn't have any idea what they're talking about. Odds are equally good that they currently or will soon instruct a college course in film studies. Ha, ha! Take that, teachers!

Whoops! I’ve written all this, and failed to report that I really, really enjoyed the movie. When it’s able to side-step political concerns, it’s utterly splendid. The upside to Leone’s devil-may-care approach is that he’s willing to experiment even more than in Once Upon a Time in the West, and (as I intimated earlier) you can see Once Upon a Time in America’s central “guilt” storyline being born. Leone’s sense of revenge is also in good supply, and nobody does payback like this guy. In addition, Coburn is having a blast (yuk, yuk) playing an on-the-run, dynamite-toting IRA rebel, and the primary villain of the story drives around the desert in what can only be described as a giant Darth Vader helmet with machine guns for eyes (Leone loved his own brand of wacky machinery). It also represents the most "fuck's" I think I've ever heard in a supposedly PG-rated film.

In other words, for a Leone fan, the picture is completely essential. If it doesn’t quite approach the fun and adventure of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or the sweep and imagination of Once Upon a Time in the West, or the novelistic lyricism and heart of Once Upon a Time in America, then Duck, You Sucker! at least distinguishes itself as the single most "signature" picture of the man’s filmography; it's ambitious, rollicking, and endlessly entertaining. From one of the all-time masters of movies, that’s pretty damn good.

* “Ugly,” of course, standing in for a more appropriate adjective, like “fuckinglorious.”

Shockproof

2007-02-05T00:38:00.000-05:00

Shockproof
dir. Douglas Sirk

A Magnificent Obsession... with MURDER!

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
January 25, 2007 - 35mm/Pioneer Theatre

With The Naked Kiss Samuel Fuller takes the domestic melodrama and injects a harsh bite of reality by infusing it with the urban emotional landscapes of his earlier noir. He relishes exposing unspeakable suburban perversion without condescension, in a way that should make the Todd Field’s and Alan Ball’s of the world cry themselves to sleep every night. A tiny twinge of what would make The Naked Kiss one of the best movies anyone has ever made can be felt in the Fuller-scripted Shockproof, directed by Douglas Sirk.

Douglas Sirk is no slouch of a moviemaker either, and the simple fact that this early collaboration of these soon to be legendary moviemakers exists should be indicative that, considering the guts of the content of their output, the pairing is not all that unlikely. On the surface, yes, Fuller is attributed to a certain run and gun, blood and guts hard-boiled type of junk movie, whereas next to “melodrama” (the word was practically invented for Sirk) the most common attribution of Sirk’s movies is “weepies.” Fuller’s movies, full of madness and nihilistic rage are often full of touching, subversive, politically progressive interpersonal behavior, whereas Sirk’s, caked in upper-middle class Technicolor, are filled with emotionally dry relationships that get turned upside down by scandal and a rage and helplessness below the bright, fancy dresses. The similarity between the two genres really come to a head in The Naked Kiss and Fuller firms himself as a far riskier director, but the suburban sentiment is the same.

A parole officer, Griff (a name Fuller would recycle for a crooked cop in The Naked Kiss), is assigned to keep tabs on a recently released murder, Jenny (Patricia Knight), who just so happens to be a leggy blonde knockout. Griff is a hard luck George Bailey type Good Samaritan caring for his blind mother and very young kid brother, while inviting parolees into his home for dinner. Despite his incredibly bland goodness, Griff (Cornel Wilde) carries a quiet desperation, nursing an oddly placed band-aid wrapped around his ring finger. Is it a bandage suggesting a previous heartbreak? Possibly.

Though at first she rejects it, Jenny eventually becomes swept up in the goodness and parolee and parole officer become husband and wife, but THEN! Bonnie and Clyde! The Honeymoon Killers! Jenny’s murderous streak strikes again, and her doting husband does everything to protect her, abandoning the comfort of suburban domesticity and his loving family. It would be easy to assume the rich Sam Fuller content kicks in hardcore with a murder, but this is where the movie starts to fall off the rails. The hard-nosed Jenny trading words with the well-intentioned citizens of this small town early on is where Fuller’s knack for dialogue shines. The melodrama hits hardest when the lovers are on the run as they struggle from meal to meal and toward the Mexican border. This is very typical genre material, with an added stroke of weepy drama yielding something a little north of boring, but lacking the life and vitality of the domestic scenes.

Shockproof is an oddity, as two not-yet young auteurs join forces in a movie that quite basely does combine what would come to define their careers. For fans of either, this is essential history, and considering the lack of availability of Fuller’s movies, a treasure for his fans, myself included. The boring bits are worth the always-priceless lyrical snap of Fuller dialogue, and while Fuller’s writing chops were established, Sirk’s direction is not what it would become.

A Wedding

2007-02-04T01:20:00.001-05:00

A Wedding

dir. Robert Altman

Muffin wears braces like a bird on a wire.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

January 22, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

A Wedding subscribes to the “let’s throw a bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks” philosophy of Altmanic moviemaking. In this case the “bunchashit” are people and the “wall” is a lavish wedding party. The result is a dead grandmother of the groom, a sister of the bride pregnant with the groom’s child, some more deaths, an entire relationship arc of the “cheating” mother of the bride, Leonard Cohen covers, an old fashioned brotherly beating by the father of the groom and so on and so forth. A Wedding is, of course, a comedy, and a quite funny one. Wait, did somebody say a comedy with dead grandparent hijinks?! Where have we seen that before? Hmmm, possibly in National Lampoon’s Vacation or the uncomedy in the most serious movie ever made, The Grapes of Wrath? Nope, can’t think of anything else. I digress.

Somehow a movie with 48 speaking parts is able to go down easy and feel light, despite its reflective, serious moments. This is the big-budget action extravaganza (the Independence Day) of situation ensemble comedy. Like Gosford Park, the best of Altman’s “situation” movies (the only other being A Prairie Home Comapanion), there’s as much fun to be had with trying to keep characters straight as there is with the rich content. The most daunting task is following a flock of lovely redheaded ladies, many of whom are the spawn of mother of the bride, the very funny Carol Burnett. Her daffy country charm extends to her daughters; the bride (Muffin) is innocent and ignorant, whilst her sister (Buffy), played by Mia Farrow, acts the innocent country charm, but is quite the promiscuous girl. Ms. Farrow is something to behold, as she barely speaks a word and manages to steal most of her scenes with just a shrug.

On the male side there are many more redheads from both sides of the aisle including a rather large man who does his best to romance the married Ms. Burnett. Other than he and an Owen Wilsonish (wedding crasher!) college roommate of the groom, the men are far less interesting than the women. Luckily the women get the bulk of the attention as the mother and aunts of the groom scheme for the opportunity to tell everyone that their mother has died, but the men are mostly boring. Luckily, with 48 characters and chaos piled upon chaos, a little weakness only goes so far to be a minor annoyance.

A Wedding is regrettably underseen due to its lack of star power and being from that obscure post-Nashville pre-The Player portion of his career, when he continued making great movies. A Wedding makes a stellar pair with Nashville, acting as its less serious bridesmaid. Currently it is only available as part of a box set, but sometime soon it is due out on its own, hopefully with the incredibly informative (hopefully larger) movie poster.

Pan's Labyrinth (Oscar's Fever!)

2007-02-02T01:08:00.000-05:00

Pan's Labyrinth
dir. Guillermo del Toro

Unfortunately for the Pale Man, he cannot cover his ears and use his eyes at the same time.

Spencer Owen, BERKELEY
January 26, 2007 - 35mm/Landmark Shattuck

There are, unsurprisingly, five movies nominated by the Academy for Best Score this year. One of them is Pan's Labyrinth, directed by the suddenly-beloved Guillermo del Toro. This movie is nominated in more than one category, which makes the fact of its recognition in the score department go down a bit smoother; if it had been nominated only in this category, I would be fairly perplexed, but now I can write it off as a sort of "associative" nomination. Y'know -- they thought it was a magical movie, and what's magic without magical music, or something. But really, what makes a score worthwhile enough to nominate?

Philip Glass is nominated for Notes on a Scandal; he's got his thing and people like it.
Alexandre Desplat's work for The Queen really does enrich its film.
Then there's Thomas Newman for The Good German, and Newman's been around long enough that I find this unsurprising; it's like nominating James Newton Howard.
We'll get to Gustavo Santaolalla's Babel if or when I get a chance to see it. (I will go in wanting to like it; he did a nice job on Amores Perros, and also happened to produce a few records by the best Mexican band I've heard, Cafe Tacuba. Go listen to their album Reves/Yosoy, actually. It's one of the finest of the '90s. I digress.)

I walked into Pan's Labyrinth ready to listen intently to the music -- no more intently than I normally hear music in films, that is, but with a particular attempt at Oscar-level acuity (note: sarcasm). Hearing with Academy ears, so to speak. I came out of the movie having enjoyed it on some levels and disliked it on others, the enjoyment only just edging out the dislike, as it has such wonderful imagery in the fantasy sequences and never quite gets truly boring or irritating in the rest... except for the matter of a particular musical concept. Yes, that's right; the music was my least favorite part, if only just for one lame idea, flaccidly executed. And I'm close-to-positive that this nauseating phrase was the reason why the music was nominated.

Javier Navarrete (this is the only work of his I've heard, due to his having scored primarily Spanish cinema I've never seen) does a suitable if thoroughly unimaginative job meeting the criteria of the styles. He does summon up some horror at moments meant to be horrific, notably to highlight the actions of the Pale Man, my favorite "character" in the movie. He does this nicely, and the visceral aspect takes it up a small notch. Still, 90%, even 95% of the movie is scored "suitably," rarely if ever transcending mere pragmatism or basic genre trope. This is not something I'd moan about if we weren't trying to figure out why it's 20% likely to win an Oscar. Is this all a movie needs to do to get the Academy's attention? Something's missing.

In fact, I believe they'd gotten through the entire first act before I heard any semblance of theme, and then it happened. The lead character, a girl named Ofelia, is going through some strife, no doubt. So is her foil and not mother but maternal substitute, Mercedes, who doesn't really get to know Ofelia but who nonetheless feels a deep bond with her, and who has a protective instinct and a strong moral backbone in general. Mercedes is cradling Ofelia in a time where they both could use a good cradling -- it's some emotional stuff, or at least it's meant to be -- and Ofelia asks Mercedes: "Do you know any lullabies?"

"Oh, this is it," I must have nearly said out loud, I thought it so clearly. Mercedes replies, "I don't remember the words, but..." With that, the score symphony actually pauses in order for her solo to begin, at which point she hums a quite insipid minor-key melody as the strings play the changes beneath her. I don't know where this melody came from -- a wholly original Javarrete composition, perhaps, or maybe an adaptation, maybe even from a real lullaby -- but if this is the moving motif we were waiting for, and oh it is, we are disappointed. It's a whiny sap-tap of a tune, something that would have worked much better if it hadn't been so obviously laden with significance. If she'd merely hummed the lullaby without the assistance of an orchestra and then we could move on, to speak of it later only as a humble scene... but no, this lullaby, of course! It's the emotional essence of the tale! How evocative this song is, how masterful its author for creating it just so!

And does it return? Mm. It haunts the rest of the movie, and I won't spoil too much, but it comes back at the end, twice as overwrought. Good thing you and Mr. Navarrete went to the John Williams seminar, Guillermo; that hour spent on Star Wars Episode II really made an impression. Bonus: plays over the credits, only a few minutes after it appears at the end, too! So here I wonder: who honestly cared for this enough to put it on a ballot? Was there nothing better? Could it really be just an "associative" nomination? In my favorite theoretical scenario, the head honchos who overwrite all the poll results were trying to think of a movie with a theme that Itzhak Perlman could play on stage at the ceremony without having to practice. You'll hear it a minimum of two more times, and one of those is guaranteed to be when it takes home Best Foreign Film; I hope the other one isn't when it wins Best Score.

Eraserhead

2007-02-01T22:46:00.000-05:00

Eraserhead
dir. David Lynch

Nance-y Boy.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
January 20, 2007 - 35mm/Museum of Modern Art

Eraserhead is a drill into my brain. Suck out some brains, mash it all up and stick on the end of a pencil. Life in a factory that makes pencils and sucks brains. It erases the pencil markings and narrative movie memories!

Eraserbed is the place Eraserhead takes me. Its woozy rumbling soundscapes and cloudy black and white dreamscapes are not the things of dream, but of sleep induction. That is, until…

Eraserbread is a bun in the oven. A giant leechy sperm, well-cooked and popped out; growing into a sickly horse fetus monster. Eraserbread is scary, boring, overcooked, overwrought, random, whiny, wide-eyed and underwhelming. David Lynch is insatiable. His immense cinematic appetite cannot simply be satisfied by this bouldery mountain of Eraserbread.

The uneven, bouldery, cavernous echo of Eraserhead is only matched by the molten, craggy, toxic gas spewing aggression of the chalkboard scratching Inland Empire. No matter what’s to be said of those two movies, no matter my slight distaste for Eraserhead and my staggering distaste for Inland Empire, David Lynch is some kind of monster when it comes to directing actors no matter the picture, and bless him for that, but somebody needs to keep him on a fucking leash, if only for a moment.

A monumental achievement for a young fellow, such as a young David Lynch, Eraserhead contains many wonderfully directed scenes of aggravating nonsense. With that said, any director so able to make any non-narrative stew shine with pure conviction of performance is a perfect match for a Hollywood picture. It almost makes Mr. Lynch the ideal director for hire, but then again his strengths are clearly guided by a wavering, yet rock solid certitude in his psyche. He’s the sidearm knuckleballer of cinema. He is quite the pitcher, no matter if he throws a ball or strike. Eraserhead is a stiff-haired sandlot Lynch practicing in his backyard, developing his style by throwing against the garage door. Inland Empire is Lynch inevitably throwing out his arm in Game 6 of the ’86 Series. Lynch, for a moment triumphing in epic stupendous disaster, becomes Bill Buckner. Whether or not this injury will be career-ending is left to be seen.

Back to that leash. The leash of a movie or television studio would bring upon Lynch’s greatest triumphs (The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., Twin Peaks). The 8-time Oscar nominee, The Elephant Man being the most typically narrative and oddly enough, his follow-up to Eraserhead. Like The Elephant Man, Eraserhead taps into the quite fear worthy subject of parenthood and deformity, both emotionally and physically. This physical viscera is what pushes bits of Eraserhead to greatness. The horse-headed pulpy mush of a child that the heroine, Mary (Charlotte Stewart), births is undoubtedly horrifying as well as a technical achievement. Is it a puppet? It must be a puppet, right? Whatever it is, its whine is a thing of death, and hero, Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) looks on in equal parts helpless befuddlement, adoration and anger. This look is now rightfully legendary and immortalized on merchandise.

If David Lynch can be blamed for anything specific in this world, it would not be merchandising, but the insistence film students and short-filmmakers have in feebly attempting to mimic the blown-out howl of the David Lynch emotional soundtrack. This howl is most effective when accompanied by any number of Lynch’s scores by composer Angelo Badalamenti. Eraserhead exists without his future collaborator, and the drone wears out its welcome.

The same goes for much of Eraserhead, as images repeat and reform themselves without the aid or comfort of character or precious narrative. Many of the images do stick. Lynch conjures his first of many riveting musical sequences and the image of a spectacular crystalline moon man. There are many seminal, classic bits of moviemaking here, and I will be forever grateful for the immense faith shown to Lynch post-Eraserhead, in order to make The Elephant Man and continue and build on what would become a career of legendary ups and downs, no matter how long we were forced to wait from one to the next. Do not make us wait anymore. Perhaps after Inland Empire you have another narrative masterwork in store for us, but I will not hold my breath, for that knuckleball may sink.

Miami Vice

2007-01-31T22:05:00.000-05:00

Miami Vice
dir. Michael Mann

"My mommy and daddy know me."

Kalen Egan, LOS ANGELES
January 17, 2007 - DVD

I was walking through the aisle at Ralph’s when an impossible deal made me stop in my tracks. It said, essentially, “MIAMI VICE DVD: 19.99. Ralph’s Club Price: 8.00.” I was all, “Whaaaat?” So I asked the clerk if that price was right, and he looked at it and went “Whaaaat?” He rang it up, and the pricing was accurate. He stashed the remaining two copies under the register. I left the store thinking that it was kind of charming the way the Ralph’s clerk dug the cool-looking but ultimately goofy Miami Vice movie enough to save multiple copies for himself. The truth is, I probably wouldn’t have bought the thing if it hadn’t been for the price (in tandem with my kind of insatiable desire to own DVDs), and if I hadn’t, I would perhaps never have realized that this was one of the absolute triumphs of 2006.

Now, I saw Miami Vice in the theater and enjoyed it, but kind of came away feeling like there wasn’t a lot there outside of the visuals and editing. Seeing it at home, however, was... well... the best way I can get at the feeling is by using a sort of trashy, stupid simile, for which I really do want to apologize in advance. Here goes-- to me, watching it this second time felt like jumping into a swimming pool while intoxicated. You’re kind of out of your element, and “this isn’t like normal swimming,” but it feels so good. The water has a new weight against your body, and the fact that something you’ve done a hundred times is now unfamiliar makes it twice as exciting. This was the effect the movie had on me this second time-- it made the familiar, procedural, drug-bust plot seem alien and immediate, and the look of the thing is not just slick and high tech, but exciting in a way that stirs the soul (see: 2001, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and almost any Herzog movie ever made for similar examples of visuals with the capacity to fill your heart). Yes, it’s true—I see all this in Miami Vice.

And the only explanation I have for this nearly 180-degree turn in appreciation is INLAND EMPIRE. I think it’s valid to let it be known that there are members of this very site who loathed their INLAND experience, and I certainly won’t, and don’t, speak for them now. It’s not a film everyone will love (neither is MV). But for me, watching INLAND was like thinking about movies with a new brain. It asked me to accept and adore what I would under normal circumstances refer to as hideously ugly image quality, and to see the tools used as the only possible way of communicating Lynch’s thick and balmy soup of ideas. It’s not that I just became okay with losing the quality of film—it’s that I was made to prefer this ugly, shit-looking, three-chip digital image to film stock. It told the story better, and INLAND would be worse without it. The filmmaking synchronizes with the visuals, and I realized that with enough revolutionary storytelling, the beauty of the visuals fall into place naturally.

With Miami Vice, I find almost the complete opposite equation. Here, the visuals are so unbelievably enthralling that the story feels perfect and sparkling new. Gunfights take on a new immediacy, even when most of the participants are just ducking behind cars, popping up for potshots. There's an unbelievable camera move during the final shootout, handheld and feeling totally unplanned, in which our perspective urgently races from behind one car to another, while bullets fly overhead. Watch that shot, and see if you don't feel like ducking. Wind whipping through Colin Ferrel's hair as he roars down a street in his convertible-- the moment feels fast and cold. Clandestine meetings in parking garages, when shot on this high-def video, feel like they're really happening-- someone could show up from out of nowhere and catch these guys, because this feels like real, unpredictable life. The difference is in the immediacy; on film, you're aware that there's a hand at the controls. On this video format, you're not so certain. Oh, man, and I don't even want to begin talking about the way the sky flashes in the background, but never quite gives way to rain; it's cinema fucking magic, and gorgeous to behold.

After seeing INLAND, I think I’ve become more open to the idea that image quality and storytelling are somewhat separate, and with enough of one you can feel entirely satisfied with the other. If INLAND is the new brain of digital cinema, asking the viewer to think in a difficult and challenging new way, than Miami Vice is certainly the new eyeballs (okay, okay… at least until this behemoth proves otherwise…), demanding a whole new way of looking at the screen. Visuals this beautiful seem to inspire a different kind of acting, and I think Ferrell and Foxx got kind of a bad rap when the movie came out—check out the way Ferrell and Gong Li nod their heads while looking at each other while sharing a shower. Thanks to Hi-Def digital’s strange, intangible ability to make things immediate, this rang to me like one of the truest cinematic moments of 2006.

There are many, many more individual great moments on display in here. I’d love to write about those extensively, or write about why (in both MV’s and INLAND's case) an extensive knowledge of the directors’ filmographies will vastly improve your experience (not in an elitist, in-jokey way, but in the way that triumphant art rewards those who know the biography and work of its creator). But I think both of those things will have to be saved for another time, or maybe for a personal conversation (and since I think I know most of the few people that might be reading this, that’s not at all out of the question—start me up, man, we’ll talk about this shit all night). For now, just go to your local Ralph’s grocery store and drop the 8 dollars. It’s so worth it if you can catch this wave.

I haven't posted in a while, and I think this article is a bit more breathless and less considered than other ones I've written. Somehow, that feels appropriate. I usually write about older movies, and MV and INLAND are brand new, and I think suggest a lot of wonderful, wonderful possibilities for the future of cinema. It's difficult for me to find a careful, considered way to put that into words... I think it says something that I'm really struggling to explain why the movie based on that funny show and later unofficially adapted into that sweet, bloody video game strikes me as revolutionary. Just see it. And if you've seen it already, see INLAND EMPIRE, then see Miami again.

The Hidden Fortress

2007-01-28T15:40:00.000-05:00

The Hidden Fortress
dir. Akira Kurosawa

Serious - Funny - Funny

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
January 19, 2007 - DVD/Landmark Sunshine Cinema

A pair of squabbling bickering best buddies end up stranded in a desert after an enemy pursuit. In a moment of frustration the two separate, only to be captured and reunited. These buddies are Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matakichi (Kamatari Fujiwara), and more than enough have been written about how their Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-ish presence in this picture resembles that of R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars. Some people venture into complete inanity and refer to Star Wars as a remake of The Hidden Fortress. That is not true. This opening scene no doubt meshes with the opening of Star Wars and George Lucas’ movie even takes specific visual and aural cues from The Hidden Fortress, but referring to it as a remake is about as helpful as referring to Boogie Nights as a remake of Raging Bull (meaning not helpful at all). So, to get that out of the way, Star Wars does not sneakily and unjustly remake The Hidden Fortress and not give credit where credit is due. As I initially indicated, having a pair of “fools” to push a story forward is not something Akira Kurosawa nor George Lucas invented, but it is something they used to magnificent effect in producing fun, beautiful, easily digestible fantasy (historical or interstellar) that would influence countless storytellers for ages.

Tahei and Matakichi, tempted by royal riches, end up embroiled in the high-stakes exodus of Princess Yuki (Misa Uehara) from dangerous to safe territory. Her protector is arguably the most charismatic action star in the history of moving pictures, Toshiro Mifune, playing arguably the most skilled fighter in Japan, General Rokurota Makabe. The simplicity of this road actioner is not to be underestimated. It is simple, but this simplicity, matched with good-humored colorful characters and performances, stellar action sequences and beautiful black-and-white landscapes foretell the brilliance that would come from Hollywood’s greatest action pictures and directors (Steven Spielberg and James Cameron to name two).

Along with that Hollywood influence comes the similar trappings that make these Hollywood pictures somewhat disconcerting. In The Hidden Fortress, comic relief Tahai and Matakichi bumble through masses of peasants, many of which are getting shot and killed. Bodies are falling left and right, and it’s played for laughs as the two buddies goofily avoid getting killed.

With all of those corpses aside, and the violence presented as wholly unreal and unaffecting, the flood of humanity is quite striking in contrast with the deserted landscape that occupies most of the movie. For pieces The Hidden Fortress plays and looks the part of a big-budget adventure with expensive expansive sets and tons of extras, but when the gang is not in a town or urban center, they are alone in a tiny-budgeted human comedy. The city limits stop and there is nothing. They wander the countryside unmolested and alone with the landscape. The prospect of a very small outlying community seems impossible. With the exception of a scene where a few mounted troops give them some trouble, the motley band must avoid groups that seem to travel no less than 100 people to a group. The interplay between the personal and epic scope is what would go on to define the great Hollywood yarns of the future. The personal, small nature of movies such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lawrence of Arabia and Lord of the Rings is what makes them true successes, not only the action. It is a simple formula, but very difficult to manage well. Akira Kurosawa was one of the early pioneers of such thought, and in turn made movies as fun as they can be. The Hidden Fortress is the least serious I’ve seen Kurosawa be, and the most playful and fun.

A final note:
Big action, big personalities, fantastic music and glorious black and white vistas look detailed and magical when projected on 35mm. Why then, and how dare they, charge full regular admission at the Landmark Sunshine for a screening of The Hidden Fortress on DVD? Nothing is classier than a movie starting with a DVD menu. Fuck you Landmark. If you can’t get a print, why even book it? What’s your problem?

Brewster McCloud

2007-01-27T17:30:00.000-05:00

Brewster McCloud

dir. Robert Altman

Harry Potter and the Pantsless Eyelashes

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

January 18, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

Brewster McCloud is the motion picture debut of the talented and sexy Shelley Duvall. Brewster McCloud is the first motion picture featuring Bud Cort as the titular character; his next would be Harold of Harold and Maude. Brewster McCloud is likely to be (cannot be too sure about this) the only movie where a serial killer leaves bird shit on the bodies. Brewster McCloud is often incredibly funny and irreverent. Brewster McCloud is like M*A*S*H in that an incredibly long action/sporting scene cuts the movie’s sails and brings it to a rather tedious dead halt. Unlike M*A*S*H, this scene is not the climax of the story or the humor, and the movie is forced to struggle to recover (in M*A*S*H, the movie ends). This is a tricky situation that only occurs when a movie is actually genuinely funny, filled to the brim with sillybilly belly laughs. The laughter becomes the norm, and in this case, a long sequence that is unfunny feels far worse than an unfunny scene in a marginally funny movie. The tragedy I speak of is a very long “funny” car chase sequence, shot in characteristic Altman fashion, meaning long shots zooming in and out at a whim, which cause the life-size cars to appear almost like match-box cars. The hyper-kinetic energy of the rest of the movie is reduced to watching a four-year-old play with toys. It is frustrating, because otherwise, Brewster McCloud is classic Altman and a comedy classic. Instead it has been reduced to a mere oddity, but it is so much more, so so much more.

Brewster McCloud bolts out of the gate with a false start and then gets chugging along at a relentless pace. It beings with a woman singing a dreadful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner in the Houston Astrodome. The credits roll over the thing, but the arrogant woman stops singing, berates the band for being out of key and then both the song and the credits start over again (false start). Soon we’re jettisoned to Stacey Keach in old man make-up. He is collecting money from nursing homes. Eventually, Mr. Keach goes careening down a hill in his wheelchair. He hollers quite a bit, very much like (or exactly like) Spike Jonze in the below clip from Jackass: The Movie.

It comes after Wee-Man in the Cone

These scenes are intercut with scenes that are even more non-sequitor. Rene Auberjonois plays a high=strung, hypo-allergenic ornithologist. He lectures fun and not-so-fun facts about birds to the camera, which are always funny (sadly, the frequency of his appearances slow as the movie moves forward). Very quickly a detective is brought in from San Francisco to investigate the bird shit murders. This detective specializes in turtleneck sweaters, and is played by Michael Murphy, who wears piercing ocean blue contact lenses (this is all introduced in the midst of the relentless pace part).

All of this overkill funny leads to what? Does it need to lead to anything? Part of the beauty of Brewster McCloud is the amount of clutter in every frame, clutter or detail, something fans of Wes Anderson may find familiar and comforting. Altman also embraces something that has since become something of a Wes Anderson fixture, which is framing a person or action in the center of widescreen frame, while a cluttered background or oddball action surrounds.

Robert Altman started making movies not as a young man, but as an adult, yet Brewster feels the work of a young, enthused director. The anarchic sunshine that is this picture has a twang of melancholy, but it is first and foremost a whacky comedy. The cherub-faced Mr. Cort is building wings to fly away and become something of a true cherub. Wearing a pair of skimpy briefs, Brewster, with an uncherub-like, sweaty, muscular body does chip-ups. A friend, who works at the local health food store, delivers his order of human bird food, if you can imagine what that is. This girl is just overcome with sexual attraction to this to-be-winged man. Sex is the last thing on Mr. McCloud’s mind, but the gal is willing to take care of things herself. It is one of the funnier scenes in the movie as the girl writhes under covers on Brewster’s bed and he is ardently oblivious. Shelley Duvall is more successful in her seduction, shifting Brewster’s focus just a tiny bit away from flying. His idealist passion to fly away is discovered to be malleable, making Brewster McCloud a coming-of-age story. It is not about sexual awakening, but about dreams and youthful idealism quietly breaking with the influence of the real world and human frailty. Sex is presented as something frail and human, not corrupting. Though Brewster builds himself to be an organic flying machine, like a bird, his avian ideology stumbles a bit with every touch of humanity. Though the movie is not sad and human frailty is celebrated, despite the lost idealism. It would take a man of Altman’s history and stature to communicate this, particularly through comedy, and with its flaws and humanity, Brewster McCloud will be rediscovered and cherished.

Countdown

2007-01-21T18:05:00.000-05:00

Countdown
dir. Robert Altman

No images of Countdown anywhere on world wide web.
This movie is lost in space.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

January 18, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

Worth noting in the Robert Altman canon is the 2nd half of this otherwise typical astronaut movie. The first half is a very calm, cool, collected character drama. Robert Duvall is frustrated (though in a rather subdued manner) that James Caan is picked for a solo mission to the moon. Jealousy runs rampant, though with the restraint you would expect from astronauts and their families. The way the families of astronauts were forced to become politicians, and thus look the cleanest of clean cut is fairly interesting. Moving from The Right Stuff to Apollo 13 to Countdown, every astronaut, their kids, their wives seem more or less physically interchangeable. Serious acting chops carry Caan, Duvall and Altman regular Michael Murphy through the first half with class, despite its rather uneventful nature.

Countdown opens with a Star Trek 2 “fake-out” featuring the aforementioned three leads. They’re prepping for one of the Apollo missions. News comes down the wire that the Soviets are on their way to the moon. The race is on. Countdown was released in 1968, a year before the United States won that leg of the space race and set foot on the rock. The Soviet vs. United States race was very real, but it did not reach the heights of this movie. The race in Countdown is a simple footrace through the stars, though the competition is nowhere in sight.

From the launch of the one-way solo spacecraft to the very last frame of the movie Altman fashions a deliberately paced and tense stretch of drama. As Jimmy Caan goes streaming through space, his communication (and lack of) with the base is just about all we get for 40 minutes. In 1968, all this switch flipping and technospeak must have sounded like nonsense. It still does today, but like all the grounded scenes in United 93 and the engineering babble in Primer the drama takes precedence over understanding what anybody is talking about. The banter between Duvall and Caan is so constant that when it is cut off, due to technical problems, the silence is deafening. All this is well and fine, but totally uninteresting.

Fatalism overtakes the rest of the story as Caan embarks on a suicide mission, and for what? For pride. For manliness. For poetry. Obvious parallels can be drawn between what happens toward the end of this movie and the overreaching themes of the far superior in every way, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was release mere weeks apart from Countdown. In part, I’m sure 2001 is responsible for the failure of Countdown. The final landing on the moon, in all of its loneliness and silence is shocking. Earth has lost communication and Caan is in the desert. He then embarks on a journey to find a small space station the U.S. landed on the moon not long before. In there he will live awaiting rescue. He has no idea where the station is. Along the way, as time and oxygen starts slipping away he comes across the spacesuited corpses of Soviet astronauts. This scene makes the movie worth watching. It is very, very simple, very quiet, and politically charged. There may be a space-race on Earth, but up there on the moon, there are no countries, no politics, no race. There is only cold loneliness. Mission accomplished.

Cookie's Fortune

2007-01-18T01:07:00.001-05:00

Cookie's Fortune

dir. Robert Altman

Just another holiday in the "clink."

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

January 16, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

Anne Rapp wrote back-to-back Robert Altman pictures. In 1999 came Cookie’s Fortune. In 2000 came Dr. T and the Women. Both movies are failures. With that said, Dr. T boasts a positively bonkers and somewhat daring ending, which almost makes it worth seeing. Cookie’s Fortune boasts Charles S. Dutton. Needless to say, Ms. Rapp has nary written a picture since.

Anne Rapp wrote Cookie’s Fortune through a looking glass into 1930's Hollywood. An update on the screwball comedy, Robert Altman is the perfect man to pervert such a genre, dead or otherwise. Yet, there is no subversion or perversion in sight, it simply borrows from the least the genre has to offer. Rapp’s script could easily have been tossed aside in the heyday of Cary Grant’s goofy glasses and dead aunts. Frank Capra would have yawned at Ms. Rapp’s hijinks and opted for Clark Gable erecting the Walls of Jericho instead.

In order to “update” the genre, the stage is set in Mississippi, The South, where people are dumber and more gullible, right? Their funny accents allow for screwballiness of epic proportions. Glenn Close buzzes around a house quickly eating a suicide note. Liv Tyler parks up on the sidewalk enough to the point she has a dashboard coated with hundreds of parking tickets. Later on she exclaims she has something like $264 in tickets overdue. Only $264?! This must be 1938, when parking tickets were a nickel! What is this movie?! Where is Robert Altman through all of this?

The actors play the comedy straight, and by straight, I mean stiff. Altman’s comedy must have come by way of his son, Stephen Altman, the production designer. Set around the Easter holiday, the movie is an April shower, or torrential downpour, of pastels. Glenn Close and Julianne Moore are just buried in pink and powder blue light, blossomy fabric. Yes, Julianne Moore is in this picture. It was the same year she gave two of the best performances of the year, with The End of the Affair and Magnolia. In Cookie’s Fortune she plays the half-wit sister to Glenn Close’s maniacal playwriting cupcake face.

The two sisters happen upon the dead body of their aunt, Cookie (when living she is played by the marvelous Patricia Neal). In order to avoid the shame of a suicide in their family, Camille (Glenn Close) decides to cover it up by making it look like a robbery-homicide. This results in Cookie’s best friend, Willis, being tossed in prison. Willis is played by powerhouse Charles S. Dutton. For this role, S. Dutton deflates into a sweet as pie seemingly sexless neighbor, and he manages quite well. I say “sexless,” because while every character seems to have had a spouse or other, Dutton seems blissfully sterile. Now there’s something from 30’s comedy, a sexless, non-threatening, wise, kindly southern black man. Huzzah Ms. Rapp, you captured the 30’s spirit there, right? (wrong!). Still, Dutton shines, a breath of fresh air, as he manages to be the least buffoonish of the bunch. He makes for a strong base as the straight man, and his banter with Ned Beatty is actually quite fun when you cut out every time Beatty is forced to express Willis’ innocence by saying, “I know he’s innocent. We go fishing together.”

Mr. Altman has a way of blending humor and melancholy unlike any other filmmaker. When it works, enough praise cannot be pig-piled any higher. In this case, he is crippled by a script written in a genre that bakes melancholy and despair in an oven of crazy. When screwball comedy worked, it worked from the inside out. Plagued by The Depression and War, Cookie’s Fortune is not. By taking the screwy and attempting to layer in some brand of seriousness this picture mostly falls flat in the mud. Only Charles S. Dutton remains afoot, slowly but surely, rounding the bend, Wild Turkey in hand.

Ace in the Hole

2007-01-17T01:26:00.000-05:00

Ace in the Hole

dir. Billy Wilder

"It's a good story today. Tomorrow, they'll wrap a fish in it."
Chuck Tatum will eat your puppy.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

January 15, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

“I've met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my time, but you - you're twenty minutes.”

Oh, snap! “Hard-boiled” is correct. Ace in the Hole is a nasty Frankenstein of a picture. Characters are yanked from behind the private eye desk, Venetian blinds and ocean-side mansions of film noir and thrust into the even more nihilistic, more cynical world of politics, money and the most cutthroat of them all, journalism.

Kirk Douglas plays the bullshit-shilling huckster, Chuck Tatum. Tatum has been kicked from major publication to major publication. Always willing to sink his fangs into a great story and run with it, he often takes on a bit of collateral damage with his monster chomps, which gets his shit kicked to the curb. Having torn through all the majors, he is forced to submit to the dregs of the industry, a two-bit rag out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The folks at this paper wear belts and suspenders both. Tatum stays holed at the paper for a year, expending a greater effort bitching about his long lost New York City than writing exposition for the paper. The stage is set for shit to hit the fan.

On his way to cover a puff piece, Tatum stumbles across a small desert outpost, where a man is trapped in old American Indian cave dwellings. It’s the classic boy-down-the-well tale with a twist of Indian folklore, and a story only as good as the story is long. In order to keep the story a-going and to get the national attention this “hard-boiled egg” of a reporter deserves, Tatum’s willing to keep the poor sucker half-buried and half-alive long enough to kick Albuquerque to the curb and get back to his precious New York City drowning in Pulitzers.

Douglas boils with furor throughout the picture. In the process of bulldozing the townspeople, he’s managed to blackmail the sheriff and the trapped man’s wife into doing his bidding in order to comply with the drama he’s concocted for the paper. In turn, Sheriff wins power and Wife wins cash. Her and her husband own the outpost and she serves up hamburgers and tourist trinkets to the flocking tabloid hounds, all the while planning to ditch the buried man for the big city.

Ace in the Hole belongs to a very specific cross-section of cinema. Titles such as Sweet Smell of Success, A Face in the Crowd, Network and Bamboozled serve a very similar function. Like those titles, Ace in the Hole’s cynicism eventually overwhelms the story (often at its expense), leaving a sickness in the pit of your stomach. It’s easy to get suckered in to the drama (or comedy), until the movie cuts you down the sides with the human comedy (or tragedy), leaving you limp and helpless, but mostly disgusted. Enraging as it is, this picture keeps afloat with snappy dialogue and the no-nonsense Douglas’ infectious, sickening intensity. He carries the charm of a sad-sack private eye, but rather than keep an emotional distance from this dame and that gig, he must act a newspaperman, emotionally involved and manipulating.

I don’t need to tell anyone how much the media influences and shapes history as we understand it. Ace in the Hole takes it a step further, pointing a big fat finger at the media for shaping history, as it happens, not just how it is understood. Billy Wilder’s movie is angry and cynical, a bit exhausting and frustrating, and as an older woman put it on the way out of the theatre, “not entirely heartwarming.”

Absolute Wilson

2007-01-15T02:25:00.000-05:00

Absolute Wilson

dir. Katharina Otto-Bernstein

This poster is not nearly as cool as the cover of the book she wrote about him.

Spencer Owen, BERKELEY
January 13, 2007 - 35mm/Landmark Shattuck Cinemas

Absolute Wilson is a new documentary about the avant garde theater director Robert Wilson. It's talking heads and archive footage, and it goes: growing up, early work, and then, interspersed with the portrayal of other achievements he's done, several segments summarizing the process behind several of his most landmark works (namely Deafman Glance, KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace, A Letter for Queen Victoria, Einstein on the Beach, the cancelled CIVIL warS, and The Black Rider). Some of the talking heads are David Byrne (ha ha, for real though), Susan Sontag, Philip Glass, and most importantly a lot of Wilson himself.

I was glad to see this film. I learned a lot about his history and it was delightful to hear him speak about it. It's semi-thrilling to find out about his non-Einstein work, such as his seven-day (!) play staged in Iran (!), KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace. He's reminiscent of Werner Herzog when he talks about being hospitalized for dehydration; when he comes to in the hospital, he remembers that he's in Iran doing a seven-day play, and so he "tears out the tubes" and goes back to performing. Yet I was reassured that Einstein on the Beach must have definitely been the pinnacle of his work, as it is certainly the pinnacle of Glass's. Tears came to my eyes to hear Robert's sister Suzanne talk about their uber-conservative father's proud reaction to Einstein's landmark performance at the Met, and then see Wilson and Glass take a bow to their rapturous ovation. (Pomegranate Arts, a couple years ago you were advertising a touring version of Einstein, now nothing! What happened?)

On the other hand, after the opening sequence, I was sure I would hate it. Clips of Wilson smiling and saying semi-goofy things (not a problem in themselves) are cut along with some of the more eccentric moments of a handful of his theater productions (also not a problem). Naturally, it's cut to music. This movie has quite a thorough original score, actually, by a gal named Miriam Cutler, and she kicks it off with a real thud by contributing some completely indistinct and chintzy big band jazz -- like, some real weak comedy music. So essentially, we're watching very brief clips of what are supposed to be these immersive, highly surreal, and ... sure, sometimes comical, but nonetheless serious and simply unusual theatrical events ... set to what sounds like royalty-free music. Then they actually go and do a decent job timing the montage to the music. I'm unsure of how accurately I'm conveying the effect, but essentially, we launch by making a thorough mockery of the subject.

Now, I understand the occasional need for serious art to cut through that fog that so many call "pretentiousness" and bring some levity to the table, and I think this was Mrs. Otto-Bernstein's intention. This sequence could have easily worked in their favor if it weren't for the terrible, undermining choice to have it run through with music fit for a Comedy Central special on the upcoming Rob Schneider film. I came in biased towards Mr. Wilson, and after a couple minutes, I was not looking forward to this overview any longer. Imagine the effect it could have on someone who doesn't know a thing about his work. They might be sure he's a pure goofball right away, or a charlatan, or even worse, something like a parodist of Beckett. The most irritating part is that these are all valid criticisms of Wilson, and though I disagree with them, I can easily see them all coming to the surface thanks to this opening treatment.

The movie got better, fortunately, but some of its clip usage seemed arbitrary, and there was a definite overuse of stock footage that had nothing to do with Robert Wilson (a doc pet peeve). As for the rest of Cutler's score, it also seemed stock, but not quite as offensively so, and thankfully it did not all dabble in swing music. My ears perked up at a couple of deliberate Steve Reich rip-offs. I mistook a piece for Reich at one moment, but quickly sussed that it wasn't him; it was a "Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ" soundalike. It was then quickly followed by a similar shadow-piece, a shadow of "Four Organs" this time. I'm guessing that the original pieces were dropped into the temp track, and they didn't want to pay for them, but for some strange reason really wanted something like them in the movie just that way. Both of these background moments were very brief, and since not minimalist Reich but minimalist Glass had a working relationship with Wilson, they were only tangentially relevant, and only to people who had the same recognition I did. I was relieved to be treated now and then to music from Wilson's works, even some of David Byrne's brass band compositions for The CIVIL warS. These were actually released as an LP called Music for the Knee Plays in 1985, and it's an outstanding record that is to this day in dire need of a CD issue.

Ultimately, Absolute Wilson was a success; I gleaned information and insight about Robert Wilson and his art, and was happy for it. But though it was finally respectful towards its subject, the aesthetic choices along the way -- excepting those that came directly out of the oeuvres of Wilson and his collaborators -- were often truly half-assed and, at times such as its opening sequence, wrong-headed. Maybe this sounds unfair or overcritical, but it really got in the way of being able to take things seriously. Can't a documentary about an aesthetic pioneer at least try to be as dignified as its subject?

See? Much better.

(If you're interested in a much more insightful movie specifically about Einstein on the Beach, I recommend tracking down a video of an hour-long TV documentary from 1986 called Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Face of Opera.)