Day 48: C.H.U.D.

So after all my caterwauling and gnashing of the teeth about strong female voices in cinema, fate has forced my hand, denying me Cold Comfort Farm and replacing it with C.H.U.D.  Oh, Movie Gods, you mock me so!

Before saying anything else, let me just state that, for all its weaknesses, I enjoyed C.H.U.D.  It features a god awful score, lacks any verisimilitude when it comes to its homeless characters, and contains some glaringly out of place genre moments that stick out as being motivated solely by commercial interests*.  The pace of the movie stops dead halfway through as an expositional conference room scene stretches on into infinity, repeating the same beats ad nausea.  The look of the film is also a problem.  When the characters enter the subterranean dwellings of homeless people and CHUDs alike, it’s far too bright down there and looks exactly like the set it is.  More than once as John Heard and Daniel Stern clomped about in the sewers, I wondered what could have been done with the gritty, disgusting environment given either more time for the makers of the film to exploit their setting or a more talented D.P.  And, hence, the slickness gives it a feeling of being too cheap.  

Nevertheless, the script is a fun, straight-forward horror script which also contains similarly straight-forward allegorical elements about the neglect of the homeless problem in New York City by the governing bodies.  The characters are appropriately arch, and the script uses them in interesting ways.  I was delighted when Daniel Stern’s hippy Soup Kitchen proprietor joined forces with Christopher Curry’s square police officer Captain Bosch to fight the oppressive forces of the government.  The performances are enjoyably campy; I really enjoyed most of Daniel Stern’s hammy performance and how John Heard looked rumpled all the time.  And I think there’s something inherently creepy about a monster in the sewers, the place where we flush all of our shame.

According to its page on imdb, C.H.U.D. came out in 1984 which would put it out in the same year as Ghostbusters.  I think it’s instructive to compare the movies, since they deal with an uneasy dread that, secretly, something is very wrong with New York City.  And both deal with conflicts of local control vs. national control and come to similar conclusions.

Ghostbusters, being the more mainstream of the two (by far), offers the American Dream as the solution: small business owners solve the (in this case, supernatural [but I believe the movie actually treats the supernatural as an inevitable, natural force as it would if it dealt with tornadoes or rain]) problem with industry and invention and make themselves rich (and famous) in the process.  Their biggest obstacle is the Environmental Protection Agency, represented by Walter Peck, who’s convinced that the whole thing is both phony and a danger to the public health.  When he shuts down the Ghostbusters’ containment grid, he believes he’s helping the public, but is, in fact, endangering them in his zeal to assert his governmental authority over the business.  Faced with a choice between siding with the local Ghostbusters or with the national EPA, the Mayor of New York places his faith in the local boys.  Ghostbusters posits that New York’s problems are unavoidable and can be solved through local free enterprise without interference from dickless government agents.

Entrenched in genre and, thus, outside the mainstream, C.H.U.D. has the ability to be far more cynical.  C.H.U.D. states that the problem is, in fact, a perversion of both humanity and nature and that the national government itself is responsible for the secret problem in New York City.  Indeed, the real monster in the film is the national government since the movie ignores the ultimate fate of the mutated monstrosities, choosing to focus its climax on the way the New Yorkers oust the national government from its seat of power (uniting, for instance, the square cop with the hippy liberal, both locals, against the national forces).  C.H.U.D. ultimately offers no solutions to the monster problem in favor of offering solutions to conspiracy and, as a result, is all the weaker for it.  It serves merely as a cautionary tale about the dangers of national forces meddling in local affairs with monsters representing the result.

And, so, C.H.U.D. isn’t super.  It’s, at best, a mediocre film, but there’s enough wit and cleverness on display in the writing and the acting to make it a fun dose of mediocrity.  Oh, and John Heard has one of the more hilarious freak-out scenes I’ve ever seen.  When he and Stern stumble across some mutilated bodies in the sewers, he tries to run, Stern tries to stop him, and they both fall down.  Then, the two tumble about until Heard calms down a bit.

*I’m thinking particularly about a clumsy moment when Lauren, the main female character, finds a mutilated dog in a space underneath the basement of the building in which she lives, calls the cops, and then takes a shower.  The shower drain is clogged and so she attempts to clear it with a wire coat hanger (this is actually rather interesting imagery since, prior to this scene, we’ve learned that the character is pregnant and has discussed terminating the pregnancy with her boyfriend).  A jet of blood spurts out from the drain and onto her.  I don’t object, necessarily, to the showering here (illogical as it may seem given the course of events and exploitative as it may be) but rather to the unconvincing physics behind the jet of blood and the way this scene is dismissed by the rest of the movie as if it hadn’t happened.  In Lauren’s next scene, she’s casually arranging flowers with no sign of disturbance from previously being showered by blood.  This is clearly a “shock” moment, a cheap one, capitalizing on the vulnerability inherent in bathing, and, abortion symbolism aside, adds absolutely nothing to the film.

The George Miller/Romero post

George Miller made the Mad Max series. Now he's making this: Happy Feet. It's true he made Babe: Pig in the City, but that had, among other things, a nice Dickensian quality that actually felt dangerous at times. This looks like it has a nice Disneyensian quality circa the year 2000.

I was into penguins before penguins were cool.

Then I saw this posted on GreenCine Daily and thought I'd share. An analysis of Land of the Dead. I enjoyed reading it, though the movie's definitely not aging well within me. In particular, I think Big Daddy's makeup was a Big Daddy mistake.

We can only hope that Tom Savini can someday preserve the Romero dynasty with Vampirates. Ah, Vampirates. Why don't you exist right now???

Week 6 Index

Day 37: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Day 38: Who's That Knocking at My Door?
Day 39: Bad Company
Day 40: Day for Night
Day 41: Q: the Winged Serpent
Day 42: Sex, Lies, and Videotape
Day 43: Parents

Day 47: Bringing Up Baby

My face hurt from laughing after watching this.  It hurt most after watching a dinner scene during which Cary Grant left the table frequently to follow a dog.  After leaving a couple times, he returns, looks at the table and complains to the flabbergasted people at the table, “My soup’s gone!”

There’s something so effortlessly charming about this movie, due in large part to the chemistry between Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.  She’s on fire in this role, shooting out fast paced dialogue with a devilish grin and an infectious lust for life.  Her character is impulsive (to the point of madness, I thought) and forgetful.  In lesser hands, the character would be completely annoying in how she disregards the other people around her, but Hepburn adds an element of caring and class to the role that, ultimately, avoids this pitfall (though it’s a close call at first).  Cary Grant is a great match for her too as an ineffectual nerd, bursting with latent aggression.  His bumbling and stuttering would also be annoying in lesser hands, but the way Grant bursts out of it from time to time is a joy to behold.

These characters have a volatile relationship from the start.  But after a psychiatrist informs Katherine Hepburn that the male love impulse often expresses itself in terms of conflict, she decides that Grant loves her and that she’ll love him too.  Then, the plot places a leopard named Baby between the two, and their efforts to control the volatility of the wild animal teaches them how to control the volatility between themselves.  

As you can see, this is an entry in the “couple hates each other until they fall in love” genre, featuring the staple mismatched characters and many plot contrivances to bring them closer together.  But where other movies fail, this one succeeds because most of the contrivances are character-driven.  After our introduction to the characters, we could honestly believe that Hepburn would be sent a leopard by her brother or that Grant’s character is good-hearted enough to see a task through to the end, no matter how horribly he’s treated.  And the leopard is, I must say, a nice touch.  It gives the couple an external force to reckon with, causing them to unite (and it does it without all the super-serious fuss of something like a war to hone in on the fun).

To be sure, it left me a little exhausted with all of the running around and fast-paced talking.  And a couple characters are played so broadly that they were never, ever funny (the Constable being the worst offender to my mind) though they were clearly trying to be.  And, you know, there’s not much on the surface of Bringing Up Baby that differentiates it much from something like Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.  There’s a lot of mugging and a lot of jokes that fall flat because of this.  The action onscreen is, at times, as stupidly zany and reckless as it was in Goldfoot.  And, yeah, some things bugged me, like Hepburn deciding on a whim to love a man she hardly knows.  But it’s all so whimsical, anyway, and the movie hits more often than it misses, so why bother?  This is a solid effort all the way through with good writing, a sure-handed pace, and wonderful chemistry between its co-stars.  The chemistry is so good that I forgave all of the absurd (and ultimately unconvincing – Grant’s fault) declarations of love in the final scene the way everyone forgives them in the last act of Shakespeare’s comedies.

Eh, I’m thinking too much.  This is an utterly charming movie and a funny one at that.  The dinner scene mentioned above is a perfectly pitched, farcical scene.  It’s played so well that peals of laughter came out of me, and I don’t use the word peals lightly.

Serendipitous Mystery

Coincidentally got around to Bringing Up Baby last night and it cured what ailed me.

Today I've been taken by two things: This feature on Reverse Shot Online in which their writers watch canonical films they've somehow missed through the years (something close to this blog's heart). I remembered that I've never seen the original King Kong all the way through (when I was a kid I was too impatient for anything that didn't feature Kong or the Dinosaurs) thanks to this feature. I think I'll do a Kong-a-thon sometime around the release of the new movie.

The other thing I'm taken with today (directly related to reading this feature) is finding movies I've never even heard of. With the exception of The Nesting, I think every single movie on this site I'd heard of in some capacity before watching it. Hence, an upcoming film on the queue is Monsters Crash the Pajama Party. I'm entertaining all suggestions, but if you post something, don't let me know what the movie's like or about or anything... just post the title and the year it was made. I'll see if I can find it if it's a new one to me.

Day 46: L’Age D’Or

The followup film to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou, L’Age D’Or is made in the same semi-narrative style, a stream-of-consciousness collage of images and ideas which build sequentially as the movie plays out.  It’s a way of filmmaking that works in a similar fashion to the way poetry works, taking the representations of a language (in poetry it’s words; in film, photographic representation) and putting them to use in novel ways.  

It’s a lot like a piece of music, too, since it is often dealing in purely abstract messages (the film medium’s concrete representational qualities notwithstanding) and in the way it moves from idea to idea in sequential, temporal fashion.  Additionally, as in some pieces of music, there are themes that reoccur throughout (religion and child-murder featuring most prominently in my memory of the film), commenting on one another and, eventually colliding to form a conclusion.  

Since, like music or poetry, everyone who experiences it will come away with a different impression of what it “means”, I think the experiential aspect of seeing this film and the reaction one has while watching it is, in many ways, more important than further reflection.  It’s eminently interpretable, due more to the human being’s almost insatiable desire to connect two dots than to any ostensible meaning in the film’s text or subtext.  This isn’t to detract from the film, though, because there’s a consistency guiding everything and it’s smart enough to know that the real importance in doing an experimental stream-of-consciousness piece like this is an undercurrent of dramatically satisfying “stream-of-emotion.”

And, anyway, it’s this tendency to connect the unconnected that allows us to understand the language of cinema in the first place, to understand that a cut does not necessarily constitute the beginning of a new movie.  What Dalí and Buñuel have done in both movies is to apply this concept of juxtaposition to the literal meaning of their films.  The way ideas and narrative streams flow one from another is, really, no different than the way all movies move from one geographical location to another.  

The movie’s hilarious too.  After being introduced to a city, a title card informs us, “Sometimes on Sundays…” and then the film cuts to shots of buildings collapsing.  A character in the film is prone to such bouts of anger, he slaps an old woman when she spills a drink on him and knocks a blind man down for absolutely no reason (this despite being honored by the National Goodwill Society [or something like that]).  Additionally, before this movie, I never realized how funny it is to see a cow in a bed. (The movie also features what has to be the funniest use of Jesus in a movie, ever, ever, ever.)  All of these absurdities are used to good effect, beyond simply busting the gut of the viewer.  

I could quibble about a few things.  The ending (featuring the Jesus moment) is a little abrupt, like a rude punchline at the end of a great shaggy dog joke.  The images in the film aren’t exactly beautiful with much awkward framing and mediocre camera work (though it’s hard to know how much of this is due to the image quality on the DVD. It seems they could only find a print of the film archived by Scratchy McCactushands).  But I can’t really work up the passion to dwell on the movie’s faults.  What’s great about this film is how much sense it makes within itself.  In polite society, it wouldn’t make sense for a man with a gun to shoot a kid who’s angered him.  Here, because of every single thing that’s preceded this moment, nothing else would.

Where are all the white women at?

Something that's becoming more and more clear to me with every movie I watch is the absolute dearth of good, strong female voices in film. I'm probably to blame somewhat; the movies I'm choosing are based partly on my own interests and partly out of curiosity about movies I've read about in various books and magazines and it might be this dearth I sense comes as a result of a male-centric blind spot in the movies I'm choosing.

It's just that I'm really getting sick of this whole virgin/whore thing. And so many of the movies I've watched have extended sequences designed to convey the threat of rape. It's as if the sum total of the movies I've watched posit that there are only 3 women in the world and all of them have penises thrusting at them and the one who can hold out longest from being penetrated is the one everyone wants to marry.

So help me out if you're reading this. Suggestions for movies with strong female voices, preferably ones made by women. It's okay if there's virgin/whore/rape stuff in them, I'd just like some new P.O.V.s

Day 45: Murder, My Sweet

The writing of Raymond Chandler, the silly way he throws out similes and metaphors to make his characters sound tough, always makes me smile appreciatively, and then, for a day or so, I hear everything in the rhythm of his writing.  The language is so delightful and skirts so closely to the boundaries of self-parody that it’s no surprise this Chandler-speak has been effectively demolished by pop-culture jokesters since its inception. Still, it’s compelling.  Played straight and played well Chandler’s dialogue has an enjoyably cynical, sarcastic bite to it and when he’s “on,” his writing is as lovely to the ear as Shakespeare.  A typical line from Murder, My Sweet, drawn at random and presumably taken from the book (but is so in keeping with the spirit of Chandler that it’s no matter if it’s not): “My throat felt sore, but the fingers feeling it didn't feel anything. They were just a bunch of bananas that looked like fingers.”  To quote Homer Simpson, “Priceless.”  

Dick Powell, who plays private detective Philip Marlowe in the film, is great at spouting this stuff.  He’s got the rhythm down and nails the self-effacing humor of the dialogue.  As Powell plays him, the character isn’t particularly bright, nor is he particularly tough and from the way he speaks, you can tell he knows it.  There’s no reason he shouldn’t: Marlowe gets knocked around a lot in this movie, and is often confused by the plot.  When Powell utters a glib recap of the situation in which he finds himself, he seems like the last one in the room to realize what’s going on.  The incompetence of the Marlowe character in this movie is very, very funny, never more so than when he spouts nonsense for a good while after a forced heroin injection.

The plot of the movie is standard mystery fare, though it’s nice that, as in all good detective stories, what seem like the larger, more important issues at play really result from a simple emotional conflict between two people.  The solution to the mystery involves the detective playing a relationship counselor of sorts, piecing together the story of how people shattered each others’ lives, expensive jade necklaces notwithstanding.  The movie goes through these paces compellingly enough, with nary a sag in the pace.  It’s also fun to look at; the heroin hallucinations are good, expressionistic fun (used better here than Dali’s dreamscapes in Spellbound, though they’re not nearly as pretty) and I particularly liked the way the shadows of the letters painted on Marlowe’s window landed on the characters in his office.  

The unabashedly romantic coda to this movie feels out of place, or at the very least, unimportant.  Marlowe, having led a life where he’s witnessed the trauma of broken relationships, the dirty deeds of heartache, is so compellingly cynical that when he embraces the “good girl” at the end of the film, it’s almost a betrayal of the character.  But, at the same time, the movie’s run him through the gauntlet hard enough that it’s nice to see the disillusioned private dick get the girl at the end of the movie and partake of the same spoils that James Bond has no trouble indulging in after a strenuous mission.

I think the Google Ads are trying to tell me something.

I just noticed, at least this morning, that my google ads are all for things like life changing books and you can do it pamphlets.

Got rested and caught up this weekend as I'd fallen behind and was writing about movies I'd watched the same evening as the review, rather than having a full day to think about them like I usually do. This results in reviews like the one for Parents where I'm not sure what I'm saying but blunder on ahead anyway.

My netflix queue is lagging behind, so I may actually have to set foot in a theatre sometime soon.

Day 44: L’Avventura

Why?

In L’Avventura, the question “Why?” is asked by most of the main characters, usually in a fit of frustration.  In all cases, there is no answer forthcoming.  Still, the question remains and repeating the question in a mocking tone is the only response the character being asked can muster up.  It’s the only answer that makes any sense.

This is the kind of movie where characters walk around and talk to each other about life, love, and pain.  The conversations the characters have with each other on these topics are honest, and the movie’s funny in the way it never misses an opportunity to cut one character down by using another to contradict them.  The characters lead listless lives (triple alliteration word score!) drifting from location to location with few worries and, seemingly, fewer responsibilities.  It’s appropriate, then, that the movie opens with its characters on a boat trip.  They’re not going anywhere in particular, and they’re not really having any fun.  When they arrive at a remote island, one of their party, a disillusioned woman named Anna, disappears.  Her boyfriend, Sandro, and her best friend, Claudia, obsessively search for her, but there’s no trace.  A few boats may have passed by during their search, and it’s hinted that she was abducted by smugglers or maybe she even left of her own volition on one of these boats.

It doesn’t matter because she’s not as important as the effect her disappearance has on Claudia and Sandro.  After they’ve searched for a few days, Sandro begins putting the moves on Claudia.  She’s resistant to his advances at first, but eventually gives in and they begin an ill-fated affair.  The ghost of Anna remains between them and Claudia, who was once the most ardent advocate of searching for Anna, now fears that her friend will show up and take Sandro away from her.  Her fears aren’t unwarranted.  Sandro is clearly distracted, but it’s not exactly Anna that occupies his thoughts as the movie demonstrates in its closing sequence.  He’s bored, a man who had dreams of being a poor genius, but ended up being rich and unappreciated for whatever skills he thought he had.

All the characters are like this, people inhabiting roles that don’t seem to suit them too well.  A husband constantly berates his wife for being silly and frivolous, but when she flaunts an affair with a young painter (the kind of guy who’s painting, it seems, just to see naked women) he isn’t too much disturbed.  The people at the center of the movie go from hotel to hotel so much, I realized late in the film that I had no idea where any of them lived or what, exactly, it was that most of them did to earn all this money.  They all seem miserable and annoyed at everything around them.  

Movies about the ennui of rich people are often uninteresting to me, being the solidly middle-class bloke that I am.  But this one is more interesting than most; it cuts through the wealth and the privilege and finds the heartache inherent in a life of coasting from task to task, from one lover to the next.  When Claudia says that her mother was “sensible” and is asked what that means, she replies, “It means she had no money.”  She’s joking, but there’s a truth behind the way she says it, a yearning for some kind of stability.  When later, in yet another hotel room, she lies down on her clothes, still stuffed into her open suitcase, it’s as if the suitcase is the only home she’s ever had.  At the end of the movie, Sandro is weeping and Claudia puts her hand on him to comfort him.  As she does, the score swells in contradictory, ominous tones, seeming to say that whatever joy the two find in one another will be short lived.  

It’s well acted, well observed, and well written, though it’s a bit too long in the beginning.  The search for Anna is intriguing at first, as mystery always is, but it occupies three or four scenes too many, especially when it’s clear the whole time that the movie has other things on its mind.  Still, it’s always interesting and always honest.  I liked the way the movie sets the investigation aside to show how the characters fill the holes she’s left behind and how, even with a newfound purpose in finding Anna, Sandro and Claudia are so easily distracted from this purpose.  They don’t really seem to know why it’s so important to find her.  But there’s that question again: Why?

Day 43: Parents

Bob Balaban's Parents is a smart horrorish film, one that wisely sets its foundation in Freudian psychology.  It effectively depicts the creeping unease of a child who’s come to believe that he’s not safe with his parents as his awareness of them grows.  Bryan Madorsky, who plays the kid, is great and the movie also features a genuinely creepy performance by Randy Quaid as the kid’s dad.  It’s a funny movie but also scary, with more than a couple great horror movie moments.  Unfortunately, the movie dives into the pool of convention towards the end and it’s here that the filmmaking itself fails the film and its ideas.

But still, lots to like in the movie.  I was surprised at how affected I was by the horror moments.  A scene in which a social worker is menaced by an unknown assailant in a pantry is as good as any Argento sequence (though only ¼ as long), particularly in the editing.  A few images from the movie stand out to me as well: sausages snaking around a little kid, a hand sticking out of a garbage disposal, and Randy Quaid’s sweaty, angry expression.  And, boy, did I like the moment when, as the camera panned past a wall in a house, the cheerful music that was playing faded out as we entered the next room.

The relationship between the three principles (Boy, Father, Mother) is handled well.  Because the Father and the Boy are at odds with each other, the Mother is constantly picking which side she’ll be on and, more often, it is on the side of the Boy.  It’s all very Freudian, as I said, and acted well by Mary Beth Hurt.  Quaid is a mean dad, telling his kid scary stories to teach him lessons.  The Mother protests, but Quaid’s eventual revelation of why he’s so hard on his son is great:  “He scares me.  He doesn’t look like me, he doesn’t act like me…”

It’s also a nice choice to set the movie in the 50s.  Since the plot deals with the growing realization the kid has that his parents are up to something suspicious, it resonates that all of this is going on in the Eisenhower-era or, if you like, the Father Knows Best era.  The fact that it deals with food seems even more appropriate given the fact that nutritional information and the marketing of the food pyramid feel as if they come from the 50s, even if they didn’t.  

The movie is shaky, though, in filmmaking terms, something that I can overlook if the overall effect isn’t diminished.  Here, diminishment occurs.  Towards the end, the movie devolves into a slow-motion parade that is both cloying and maddening.  I liked everything that was going on in the movie here, conventional though it may have been, but I hated the way it was captured.  This is the most egregious offense, because the movie does have a nice build prior to this and it really destroys all of the movie’s tension.

For most of its running time, Parents is a well-made Freudian horror movie.  I would say it’s the best Freudian horror movie, but Spider exists and covers much of the same ground in a better, more confident way.  Nevertheless, if Freudian horror comedy is what you’re looking for, Parents is worth your time.

Day 42: Sex, Lies, and Videotape

I can now say I’ve seen two movies that feature acting from both Andie McDowell and Peter Gallagher.  Is there a third movie out there that will complete the trilogy that Short Cuts and this movie began?  An episode of The O.C. will do.

I usually dislike Andie McDowell, but can’t deny that she’s perfectly cast in this film as a prudish and moralistic housewife, a character who dislikes discussing or involving herself in all matters sexual and who admits that when she tried to masturbate, she thought the whole thing seemed silly.  Gallagher, also well cast, plays her husband who’s been reacting to her disinterest in sex by cheating on her with her sister (played by a pre-Quigley Down Under Laura San Giacomo).  When an old college buddy comes to visit (played by a post-Tuff Turf James Spader), he, aided by his video camera, inspires all of them to see the truths of their lives that they’ve long ignored.

Summing up the plot like that makes it sound cheap and easy, like a movie where mentally challenged people teach the normies around them how to appreciate life by constantly talking about things of which they have no real understanding or eating apples all the time.  But with a slight exception for the end when everyone gets what’s coming to them, the movie doesn’t feel cheap or easy and it earns the change in its characters by forcing each one of them to face values they find threatening.  Indeed, though he’s the instigating force behind all this self inquiry and, at first, immune to its effects, the movie doesn’t let Spader run away from the effect he’s had on these people’s lives and challenges his own viewpoint.

Just how Spader’s character creates this effect is novel.  He’s completely honest with everyone and asks genuine but disarming questions.  He declares that liars are the second worst kind of people in the world (the first being lawyers) and, so, many of those around him make a concerted effort to be honest (since no one wants to be among the bad people) which causes them to confront issues in their lives that have been unexamined.  
He reveals openly and unashamedly that he’s unable to achieve an erection with another person, a trait that inspires an immediate mutual attraction between his character and McDowell’s, and videotapes women willingly talking about their sex lives for his own autoerotic purposes.  

Enough has been said, I assume, about the sexual aspects of this film (these aspects come off as rather sweet and curiously innocent to me).  And I’m sure that if you look, you can find a well-reasoned analysis of how the camera functions in the film, allowing the characters to speak their mind and freeing them from the bonds of polite society to talk openly and yet keeping Spader’s character distanced from true intimacy.  I’m not convinced I have anything of note to add to either of these discussions.  Video sees things with such clarity and honesty, though, and this connection of the honesty of the camera and the honesty of Spader’s character is hard to resist.  Blair Witch 2 (yes, I saw that movie) said something along the lines of “Film lies.  Video tells the truth,” a thesis Sex, Lies and Videotape agrees with.  The immediacy and accessibility of the video camera has the freedom to capture honesty about the people it’s aimed at in a way (low-rez though it may be) that film simply cannot (there are too many chemicals [read: variables] in film for us to be able to trust it completely).  

Every time the camera is aimed at someone in this film, it transforms them with its honesty in the same way that Spader’s character inspires everyone in the movie to be more honest.  There’s a fantastic moment when the camera is turned on Spader and how the emotional power invested in the camcorder was palpable, due, mainly, to Spader’s reaction to it (as if he was being violated or, perhaps, his soul stolen).  It’s interesting that Gallagher’s character is the only major character that doesn’t have the camera turned on him.  Instead, he watches a recording of someone else who’s been videotaped, and, as a result, he fortifies his own ideological position, distances himself from those who have been caught by the camera’s unblinking eye.

The movie goes by the book as far as the marriage and infidelity plotting goes, but it never defies the tone it establishes from the outset in doing so.  And there’s a weird, confrontational tone throughout the film, helped along by a nice electronic score by Cliff Martinez.  Looking back over my thoughts, I think I can conclude that the film itself feels honestly wrought.  It’s almost as if a dumb American comedy about marriage, infidelity, and sex was captured on video the same way the characters in this film are and forced to look deep inside itself and tell us what’s really going on underneath it all.

  

Day 41: Q: the Winged Serpent

There’s something in nearly every monster movie that affects me tremendously.  It’s a Darwinian sort-of tragedy when the heroes, in order to preserve society, rise up and defeat the monster and I always feel sorry for the damn thing, no matter how many people it’s killed.  In Q, there’s a nice reverse of the King Kong myth as the winged beast flies around the Chrysler Building with men inside shooting at it.  But as Q got pummeled by bullets and it screamed in agony, it happened again.  I felt sorry for this monstrosity.  The thing is, sometimes movies do address this, but it’s always so stupidly weepy (Nobody cries when Jaws dies and all that.).  I’d just like someone in a monster movie to say, “Oh man, this is too bad that we’ve gotta hurt this thing, but, seriously, it ate my dog and I can’t have that.”  And then his partner can say, “Yeah, you know, these constant monster attacks are just seriously annoying.”  And then the main guy could say, “Yeah.”  Then they kiss!  FADE OUT.

Q is good fun, a classic monster movie anchored by a bizarre, unhinged performance by Michael Moriarty.  His character is an unusual and welcome addition to the other standard monster-movie tropes employed.  He’s a wheel man for some crooks but also has some skill at the piano (though his random, chaotic noodling fails to impress a barkeep enough to get him a regular gig).  The character’s angry, paranoid, and strangely impulsive, traits convincingly attributed to time spent in prison.  When he discovers the titular winged serpent’s nesting ground (the monster is apparently Quetzalcoatl, an ancient Aztec god), he holds the city for ransom, demanding money and immunity from the law before he’ll tell the authorities.  

Moriarty’s performance is something to see: the character borders on seeming psychotic at times as he rants and raves about how much he’s suffered at the hands of everyone around him.  It gets annoying at times, but it’s usually good, intense fun.  It’s also a nice choice for the script to center itself on an angry dissolute who’s more interested in getting what he thinks the city owes him than saving lives.

How Quetzalcoatl comes to New York is patently uninteresting, easily the weakest part of the film.  The monster itself is a badly composited and cheaply animated claymation beasty.  But the movie uses the POV of the creature well with a shitload of helicopter footage and one shot where we see the shadow of the thing on some skyscrapers actually gave me the old monster-movie thrill, a feeling I assumed dead and buried since I hit puberty.  My absolute favorite part of Q is how quickly the seemingly no-nonsense cop played by David Carradine comes to accept the theory that an ancient Aztec god is decapitating people in New York.  After a quick lecture by someone at a museum, he seems quite convinced of the possibility, despite the scorn heaped on him by his superiors.  The only question that remains for him is whether it’s an unstoppable God or a creature that can be killed.  

The movie answers his question, and it answers it by making me sad.  I suppose this sadness I feel on behalf of the monsters of the world is misplaced and, when faced with a giant tentacled thing or a zombie incarnation of FDR, I’d get over it and gladly shove an ice pick into one of their eyeballs to save my own hide.  And I suppose that showing the suffering, dying throes of the monster allows one to understand with absolute conviction that the heroes were successful at vanquishing their foe and saving us all from being eaten.  And, going even further, I suppose that my empathy for the monsters of the world is based on a belief that there exists a similar monstrosity within myself.  And I guess that’s why I and many, many other people have always liked monster movies (and Q is no exception, though it’s tough going at times).  And I guess what I wish is to see a representation of that feeling onscreen, the feeling that we’re all monsters on the inside and that most of us empathize with monsters.  The movie actually gets close to this with Moriarty’s character and performance, but in the end, this is still a movie about a hunting party.

Day 40: Day for Night

Ferrand: Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive.

A pleasing, well-told soap opera, Truffaut’s Day for Night follows the lives of the people involved in the making of a film.  It’s a solid endeavor -- every creative aspect of the movie is fabulous -- and it does effectively demonstrate the hardships involved in trying to create a fiction while the lives of actual people are swirling all around, threatening to derail everything.  And, while the lives of the characters are depicted in a pointed, observant, and watery-eyed honesty, the movie never quite reaches beyond the basics of its story to achieve an element of sublimity other than making movies is hard work.  Still, the rapid pace and solid character beats make it great fun to watch and the tone of the film is infectiously deadpan.  

The movie features a cast of characters whose lives are mostly empty except for the cinema.  With a couple of exceptions, they’re all immersed in the world of cinema and talk about little else (to the point that when the crew is recording background crowd noise by talking to one another, they have to be instructed to talk about something other than movies).  Those characters who have found something in their lives to care about besides film (usually a very bewildered spouse) work on the movie under constant threat that it will be snatched away by the intensity of the filmmaking process.  The movie’s effective at showing how the creative force behind making a movie is so single minded that it is destructive to everything except the film itself.  It also accurately depicts how seductive the worldview of fiction is, as the young lead actor of the film is bewildered when his relationship with his girlfriend doesn’t turn out the way it “should” (he’s constantly asking people the ridiculous question, “do you think women are magic?”).

So, it goes through its paces and hits its beats and the characters are all richly and realistically portrayed and, yeah, I nodded appreciatively throughout, having been in similar situations of love lost and gained backstage in the theatre and on film sets, and, truth be told, I laughed a lot and grinned a lot.  But in an age of DVD special features, offering behind the scenes accessibility to the point of overkill, the truth behind the lie of the movies is not really interesting in and of itself.  And, while, the story is interesting, I kept expecting it to come to some sort-of conclusion and instead it just kind of dissipates, like the fluff of dandelion seeds.  Pretty, but useless… except, of course, to the dandelion.

Day 39: Bad Company

Big Joe: I'd like to get my hands on the son of a bitch that told me to go west.

As far as revisionist Westerns go, this is pretty nice.  Bad Company uses its time period and setting to good effect, period details that are often ignored in other Westerns affect the characters and their story.  It works a great deal to interrogate the myth of the American West propagated by countless movies and dime store novels (much as Verhoven’s Flesh + Blood and Tarkovsky’s Andreiv Rublev explode any romantic notions of Medieval society).  It’s also quite funny about the mythology it’s working to interrogate without descending into parody or diminishing meaningful beats within the story its telling.

In a performance that feels oddly like Jason Schwartzman and Johnny Depp combined their powers, Barry Brown plays Drew Dixon, draft dodger and all-around good kid.  He flees to St. Joseph, Missouri in order to avoid fighting for the Union in The Civil War.  The plan is to “go west” and out of Union jurisdiction until the war is over.  The line to get on the wagon train is six months long and the soldiers in town are suspicious of him, so he throws in with Jeff Bridges and his merry band of outlaw youngsters (shades of both Oliver Twist and Robin Hood here).  

They’re all teenagers (and there’s one little kid) trying to be grownups and, accordingly, there’s a lot of self-deception in the movie.  Bridges tells his gang, and himself, that he’s got what it takes to lead them when he’s clearly just making it up as he goes.  Though they’re clearly up to a Dickensian sort of thievery, Brown thinks he can use the gang to get out west (where he thinks he will become a wealthy silver miner) without compromising his beliefs.  The other kids buy into the fun of it all: they think they’re far more competent than they are, but, as we soon see, it takes them a gazillion bullets to bring down one rabbit and none of them know how to clean it.

As they head out West to escape the army and find their fortunes, the reality behind the myth of the cowboy intrudes at every turn.  They can’t find food on the trail, prove to be ineffectual at stealing what they need, and can’t defend themselves from the real bad guys roaming the plains.  Brown finds he has to compromise his principles if he wants to survive and Bridges receives many harsh lessons about the consequences of boastful lies in extreme situations.  There are shifting alliances within the group, motivated by circumstance, and a number of funny complications (the movie also has one of the funniest and most realistic fist fights I’ve ever seen on screen between Brown and Bridges: in one moment, Brown picks up a chair, intending to bash Bridges with it, and instead misses and smashes it into a glass-fronted cabinet.  The chair doesn’t fall apart, either.  Those pioneers knew how to make some sturdy god damned furniture.  Also during the fight, a boot goes into some soup.)

The characterizations in the film are witty.  I was worried at first when Brown’s diary entries were used to frame the story.  The character is uptight and pious and I’m usually bored and frustrated by main characters like him.  Eventually, though, it becomes quite clear that the movie’s poking fun at his attitudes, challenging the ridiculous idealism the character holds to be true.  But the movie doesn’t dismiss him either; in fact, it never takes sides between Brown’s uprightness and Bridges’ shameless audacity.  It sees value in both characters, pitting their ideologies against one another and finding that both attitudes are useful.  

The conflict between Bridges and Brown is also reflected by two great character performances from David Huddleston (strangely reminiscent of M. Emmet Walsh in Blood Simple [notable because he was the “real” Lebowski in The Big Lebowski, which, of course, also featured Jeff Bridges]) and Jim Davis (I assume not the guy who does Garfield) as a Kansas Marshall and a professional criminal, respectively.  Both of these men represent the extreme of the two ideologies in conflict for most of the movie, the Marshall doesn’t care if he hangs an innocent man and the criminal is unconcerned about anyone other than himself.  When confronted with these two men, both boys find a common cause to unite against and find a place where their differences can mesh.

The movie is scored by a solo, honky-tonk sounding piano and it’s easily one of the best choices for a movie score I’ve heard in some time.  It apes, in its composition, conventional Western scores, but the sound of the solo piano struggling to fulfill its obligation to some of the epic shots in the movie reflects the incompetence of the characters as they struggle to become legends deserving of such epic shots.  The score isn’t entirely successful, there are some moments where its simplicity trivializes the events onscreen or where it goes for a laugh when it’s not even needed.  For the most part, the choice adds a layer of meaning to the entire film, instead of just acting as the omniscient and emotional narrator we’re all used to.

I didn’t mean to write so much about this film, but it demanded more of my time the more I thought about it.  It’s a great Western about the Westerns, but it’s not just a meta-criticism of America’s mythology about itself.  It’s also a finely wrought, character-based story and the characters are shaped and affected by their time period more than most movies of this sort.  As a result, it almost seems as if it’s a happy accident that the movie critiques the common Western.  That is, of course, until the last line of the film: a great punchline to a very enjoyable, yet as far as I can tell, unfairly neglected movie.

Week 5 Index: Man vs. Nature

Cheating a bit here to make all the man vs. nature flicks in the same week. It's an eight day week.

Day 29: Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
Day 30: Lost in La Mancha
Day 31: Fitzcarraldo
Day 32: Little Otik
Day 33: Walkabout
Day 34: Go West
Day 35: Gerry
Day 36: The Endurance

Day 38: Who’s That Knocking at My Door?

It’s all there.  In Martin Scorsese’s debut feature, everything that would earn him great renown in the future is on display, rough-hewn, but still mesmerizing.  The impeccable use of music tracks, the camera tricks, the virgin/whore guilt inspired by rampant Catholicism, and the jocular, macho kidding around that leads to unexpected acts of violence: it’s all there.  I felt a similar sort-of joy watching Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and witnessing the birth of the Spaghetti Western.  But aside from the delight in watching the emergence of a world-class director, the movie itself is great.  It’s less sophisticated than later Scorsese, but no less entertaining for it and whatever lack of sophistication exists is easily redeemed by the movie’s artistic purity.

Who’s That Knocking at My Door focuses on yet another drifting, aimless young man.  J.R., in a similarly sublime debut from Harvey Keitel, has no job and spends most of his time hanging out with his two best friends.  When he begins dating a young woman (another case where the female lead is billed as Girl [and in both cases the anonymity of the name represents the worldview of the movie: Walkabout’s a political allegorical worldview and here a case where the girl represents all women to the main character]), things go well until she informs him of a time she was date raped.  This throws him into a panic since his shining virgin has now been sullied and he’s unclear as to whether or not he can “forgive her” (despite his own sexual proclivities).

The movie draws a viewer in with a hypnotic spell, due in large part to the way music tracks are used both to highlight emotion and play counter to them.  There’s a flashback to the date rape and the scene starts with a doo-wop song on the radio.  As things turn violent, parts of the music are looped over themselves, creating a jarring dissonance and an effective counter argument to 50s-era nostalgia.  Religious iconography is piously photographed, but scored with a cheery, uplifting song.  A montage of J.R. in bed with women looser than his girlfriend is set to the music of The Doors, climaxing with J.R. scattering a deck of cards over one of his paramours in slow motion.  All of this is beautifully photographed on location in New York City (and one brief jaunt to the country) and edited with a fine ear for the rhythms of dialogue and music by Scorsese regular Thelma Schoonmaker.

Bridging a gap (that I never knew existed) between Godard’s Breathless and Cassavettes’ Shadows, Who’s That Knocking at My Door borrows from both of these films and to good effect.  When a gun is fired, the movie cuts to a series of stills from posters of John Wayne movies accompanied by gunshot sound effects.  I was reminded of the obsession with film that guided the players in Godard’s tale, but felt its effect on the characters and the decisions they made in a less abstract way in this picture.  The use of locations is energizing here as it was in Shadows, but the city bleeds into every frame of Who’s Knocking, while Cassavettes’ film was more limited in scope.  There are a few moments in the film that stumble slightly, but overall, Who’s That Knocking at My Door is interesting as both a historical curio and a good film in its own right.

New TV

In a whirlwind decision, last night a new TV was purchased. No one will believe this, but thus far I have been watching most of these movies on a 13 inch screen. I've upgraded to 20 inches now, which is easier on my eyes, but harder on my luddite status. It's a fun new toy with a fantastically small remote control that is white and somewhat translucent looking. Tara dubbed it a "ghost remote" and thus, I now feel a little closer to my deceased ancestors as I turn on the TV by pressing down on their ectoplasm. SPOOOOOOOKTACULAR!

Day 37: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Bennie: You guys are definitely on my shit list!

The title alone makes this one worth watching.  The title of this film also makes it worth claiming as your favorite movie, even though you might be lying.  This is not my favorite movie, though it is an enjoyably gritty and grisly crime movie and I loved how it jumps into the existential question that all of cinema’s hardened anti-heroes ask themselves (it’s usually something along the lines of “can I love?” but here it’s “how much is love worth?”) with giddy abandon.  It suffers only from some awkwardness in its first act and obedience to some of the limitations of its genre.  But, still, it’s a finely executed movie with a real film noir-like nihilism to it.

Somewhere in Mexico: Alfredo Garcia impregnated the daughter of a wealthy man, a guy not above having his goons break his daughter’s arm to reveal the name of her lover.  Upon learning the name, he offers one million dollars to whoever brings him the head of Alfredo Garcia.  Thinking I knew what kind of film I would be seeing, I settled in, expecting the familiar beats of some bounty hunter tracking him down, having second thoughts, and maybe doing it anyway for the money.  I was pleasantly mistaken.

Instead, the movie plays around with the familiar beats.  The joke on everyone (both watching the movie and in it) is that the titular head belongs to a man who’s already died.  So, Bennie, our hardened, cynical anti-hero, is hired by some mysterious operatives to bring the head back for ten thousand dollars.  And instead of killing Garcia, he must dig the grave up and chop the head off.  When he arrives at Garcia’s grave with his ready-to-settle-down-and-get-married Mexican girlfriend Elita, she balks at the grisly task.  But, there’s another delightful wrinkle in the plot: he was an ex-lover of hers.  So, rather than just have the woman acting as spiritual guide to the sexually insecure Bennie, it’s now unclear (at least to Bennie) if she wants to prevent him from chopping the dead head off of Garcia for spiritual reasons, or to preserve a man she might have loved.  Indeed, Bennie’s severing of the head becomes a strange effort at macho posturing, proving his permanence in Elita’s life by destroying the corpse of her ex.

This sort-of storytelling continues throughout the film, with the movie twisting genre conventions in order to dig deep into what motivates Bennie, what he lives for, what he would die for.  It’s always fun to have one’s expectations thwarted in a movie like this and I was never more pleased in this way than when Bennie was confronted by Alfredo Garcia’s family (They wanted the head back).  The movie is also successful at joyfully mixing the sacred with the profane.  To wit: Bennie strides through the party following the baptism of Garcia’s baby with Garcia’s head in a sack swarming with flies.  

Warren Oates shines in the role of Bennie, grimacing under a huge pair of dark sunglasses for almost the whole picture.  He growls menacingly at the severed head, his only companion for a long car ride home, asks it questions, and, in a weird way, befriends it, much as Tom Hanks befriended the volleyball in Castaway.  He physically embodies the desperation well. Looking at him, you can almost smell the alcohol oozing out of his pores.

This is all good stuff, twisted and unapologetic.  But the movie falters at the beginning in finding its pace, establishing the main characters in fits, starts, and oblique gestures that don’t really connect until half-an-hour in.  (Bennie’s musicality at the beginning of the movie is all-but forgotten, replaced by a tough-guy machismo that doesn’t mesh well with how he’s characterized at the start of the flick)  It’s also got some improbable gun fights and car chases, stuff that I can overlook for the sake of genre, but still bother me since it seems like they’re stuck in for sensationalist reasons or pure plot, rather than informing or developing aspects of the characters involved.  This is not to mention the misogynistic streak that runs through the movie (though to its credit, it is struggling with its misogony and not explicitly endorsing it, though it comes close a few times).

I liked Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia quite a bit.  It felt like a meshing of the grittiest film noir with the emotional and visual landscape of a Leone film.  It’s my third Peckinpah film (following The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs), and he’s certainly a competent director and good at getting male frustration out of his actors and onto the screen.  But for all the fun trickery and twisting, the movie never goes inward deep enough for my tastes or tries to be anything much more than a solid, three-dimensional genre film.  This is something to be appreciated (particularly in this age of films slavish in their adherenece to genre, or acting as if meshing many genres together automatically questions the genre [oh George Lucas…]) but not necessarily applauded.  Since the movie dips its toes into the pool of complexity, I waited for it to wade further in.  I got a bloodbath ending, one borne of questioning the character a wee bit.  Not bad.  Not entirely good.  Still, ask me what my favorite movie is.

Day 36: The Endurance: Man vs. Nature 7

A straight-forward, Discovery Channel-style documentary about a failed early twentieth century Antarctic expedition in which, through good leadership and good luck, everyone survived, The Endurance is beautiful, but sterile.  In its running time, there are two or three moments that pop out amidst the way too familiar drone of talking heads, zooms into still photographs, and narration by Aslan, but these do not make the movie more interesting as a whole.  This is such a deadpan retelling of the journey, more than once I wished I was reading a book about it since the movie glosses over many details that seem rich in order to get to the next plot point.

The story itself is not uninteresting.  Ernest Shackleton, having failed to be the first to reach the South Pole, leads an expedition to be the first to cross the entire Antarctic continent.  On the way, their ship is stopped by the icy waters surrounding the continent.  A freak cold front sweeps in, and the ship, named The Endurance, eventually collapses under the pressure of the ice surrounding it.  The expedition, now stranded with only a few row boats, retreats to an island and Shackleton, with a few others, crosses 800 miles of treacherous ocean in a tiny sailing vessel to the closest inhabited island.  All of this is efficiently told by the movie through narration, still photos, talking head interviews with the descendents of the survivors, and some archival film footage actually taken during the expedition.

If there’s a reason to watch this film at all, it’s to see the archival footage.  Being able to see the people and some of the events the movie describes lends the movie an air of authority and weight that it would otherwise struggle to have.  Watching the ship break apart or the crew members chopping at ice to free The Endurance from its icy bonds on old film stock is definitely a thrill.  This is offset, however, by the movie’s decision to introduce sound effects to these silent images, a distracting and disagreeably populist choice, diminishing the eeriness from these images by making them aurally familiar.  In addition, the footage is so front-loaded (the photographer lost much filmstock when the ship broke apart) that the rest of the movie feels too much like watching the Discovery Channel or PBS.  

I hold nothing against those things, and, really, nothing against this movie.  It does the job it sets out to do in reciting what happened.  I’m fascinated with all things Antarctic anyway (blame Lovecraft), but for the entirety of the movie’s running time, I wished that the film had chosen a point of view or found something unique to express about the expedition, some thesis or a really fascinating insight into the character of Shackleton or even the photographer who took the film.  There’s some lip service given to the class struggles that existed among the members of the expedition (we’re led to believe that the crew made up a cross-section of the different classes in British society) and how Shackleton was able to assuage the fears of his men, but the movie rarely takes the time to explore what any of this actually means, aside from its surface story value, for the people living through the ordeal.

Beautiful, but annoying, is the modern-day Antarctic footage, stuck into the film as illustration of Antarctic landscapes.  Because it is shot so beautifully, and because the events depicted are decidedly not, the footage serves only to remind us of where the people were, something no one is in danger of forgetting.  (They were in Antarctica)  There’s a sense of isolation and barrenness from the footage, but nothing remotely related to the human element, and nothing that holds a candle to the actual film taken on the voyage.  It’s filler, filler that works at cross purposes to the film at that.

The movie did nothing to further my understanding of the events it described other than that they happened.  As such, I think it’s fine, but not interesting.  In reading a bit more about the movie, I discovered that there’s a silent movie called South that is made up entirely of the actual footage taken by Frank Hurley during the expedition.  Now that’s interesting.

Day 35: Gerry: Man vs. Nature 6

Gerry: I thought maybe you'd succumbed.
Gerry: I almost did succumb, but then I turbaned up, and I feel a lot better.

Gerry is a breathtaking film, demanding in its simplicity and its persistence.  I know I am nearly four years late in saying this, but I think this movie is a big step forward in the art of filmmaking and will be, hopefully, one day remembered as taking the first confident and reckless steps toward a new aesthetic.  I don’t believe it was shot on digital equipment, but within this film is the promise of the future digital age.  Forget Sin City, this movie reaps the benefits of a digital culture.  It narrows in on the details of reality without screaming about them, shows the boring, repetitive, and monotonous nature of living without commenting on it.  The movie features a plainly presented, yet completely subjective narrative, long, strenuous shots that go on for ages, and an offhanded, naturalistic acting style that puts the “reality” of so-called reality TV stars to shame.  It’s the kind of movie you can imagine being shown to you after traveling to the future (or the past) and, upon watching it, feeling as if you don’t have the proper frame of reference to watch correctly.

The plot of the movie can be described as simply as “Two guys get lost in the wilderness and try to find their way home.”  There’s not a whole lot else that happens in the film.  Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (both named Gerry) go out to the woods, make a wrong turn, get lost, make several other wrong turns, can’t find water, and wander about.  The movie is, really, that simple.

But, sweet baby Jesus, how the movie goes about showing this!  First of all, the relationship between the two guys is depicted in a fashion that is evocative of every single relationship with another male of my generation that I’ve been in.  They connect to each other in a vaguely aggressive joking style that only grows more outwardly aggressive as their situation becomes more dire.  Kudos, also, to the movie for getting correct the absurdity of hearing people talk about video games.  Casey Affleck has a speech toward the beginning of the film where he relates how he conquered Thebes but couldn’t defend his home base because he needed twelve horses, but only had eleven.  This puts it into my good books automatically.  Then, there’s a gut-bustingly hilarious bit where Affleck is stuck high up on a rock and is scared to jump down.  Damon tries to fashion a “dirt mattress” by hauling dirt in a “shirt basket”.  The two are constantly inventing new uses of language to describe their situation, another pleasing and accurate touch to their characters.

The photography in this film is immaculate, so-gorgeous-you-want-to -jump-in-your-screen-and-be-there outdoor photography.  The dialogue in the film is sparse and most of the shots are epic, unbroken, and long, so this becomes a key component to the success of the film.  The environment becomes like a malevolent God, surrounding them, trapping them no matter which way they turn and adapting to reflect the emotional quality of their relationship, like some kind-of amoeba mood ring.

However, where the film shoots off to the moon in terms of breathing new life into an art form that tends to spin its wheels because of business concerns, is in its pace.  As mentioned, there are many shots that go on for ages, depicting nothing more than Affleck and Damon walking great distances.  This had two effects on me.  First, I got bored and my mind began to wander… What am I doing at work tomorrow?  What time is that meeting?  Where are my shoes, did I put them in the closet or did I leave them in the kitchen?  Then, because the shot continued, my mind returned to the movie, but not in an entirely active way.  The style of the film allowed it to sweep over me and into my brain, to the point that there are large sections of this movie where I forgot that I was watching a movie.  The photography, acting, sound, and pace were completely immersive, once I settled in.  Further, because there are so few of them, the cuts in this movie actually mean something.  The film takes back the power of editing, something cheapened by the appropriation of fast, arty cutting by pop culture business interests, by emphasizing the power of the shot.  I was often staring, mesmerized, hypnotized by the film, scrutinizing frames for things I thought I saw but turned out to be refractions of light in the lens.  When one character says, “It’s just another mirage,” I nodded.  I understood and not in one of those intellectual ways.  I’d just seen a mirage.    

I imagine that many, many, many people despise the movie.  It’s definitely not for people with short attention spans, nor is it for those who desire the safety nets of genre, plot, or, hell, the traditional language of filmmaking.  But all of these things, in movies, have become so oversaturated in our culture, so predictable and stale, that when a new dialect emerges, it’s reason to stand up and applaud, applaud as loudly as that one guy who starts clapping when the hero isn’t as victorious as you thought he’d be, and then inspires everyone else to join in.  And where is the applause for this movie?  Are we really so boring and suckled as a viewing public that no one has the courage to say, “this movie said something by saying absolutely nothing, and saying it for long stretches of time”  

I’m so excited by this film and have this gut feeling that someone will somehow show me that Gus Van Sant didn’t do anything new here.  But for me, it’s like he went into the desert and came out with a new paradigm for filmmaking.  I wish I’d known sooner.

The wiggling, loose ends of timespace

The dirty not-so secret of doing this blog is that watching a movie-a-day is easy, writing about a movie a day is hard. As the President would say, it's hard work.

But in the process of writing about a movie a day, there are a few things that I meant to say in a review but didn't get around to or couldn't fit into the loose structure that emerged randomly from my clackity-clackings.

For some reason, something I wanted to say about First Blood has refused to die in my mind.

And that is this: There's a truck chase in the middle of First Blood that contains elements so similar to the truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The way it's shot, edited, and especially how Stallone acts in this sequence are so very alike to the Indiana Jones one, that I wondered if a lawsuit had ever been filed. And if not, if I could file one on behalf of a movie. There, I said it. I can sleep now.

Day 34: Go West: Man vs. Nature 5

Watching Go West was a trying experience for me, through no fault of Buster Keaton or the movie itself.  As I’ve written about earlier today, the DVD I received was scratched to the point that it crashed my DVD player and, for about twenty minutes of the film, I had to struggle to make out the images through the boxes, lines, and ghost images of previously onscreen boxes and lines.  Additionally, the company that produced the DVD put a synthesized score to the film that, while written well and evocative of the silent-movie sound, was more distracting than not (especially those snare hits!).  It’s a choice that feels incongruous with most silent movies, especially one set in the rustic, rural environment as this one is.

So, it’s really not fair for me to review this, since the dominant emotion I feel is one of frustration unrelated to the movie.  From what I saw, this is a totally endearing movie with a hilarious sequence at the end featuring thousands of cows marching down the streets of Los Angeles.  I particularly enjoyed this, given that I’ve been watching so many movies with the theme of Man vs. Nature.  Most of those movies have dealt with people going out to the middle of nowhere and trying to play god, trying to create some artificial world of their own design.  Here, it’s nature that invades as cows take to the streets, invade department stores, and stand around in a barber shop, looking at a man who’s waiting to be shaved.  I suppose I could analyze how the sequence climaxes: a thousand cows chasing Buster Keaton, dressed in a devil suit, toward a slaughter house and, thus, their ultimate doom. But, really, it's funnier than it is meaningful (though if anyone has any theories, let's hear 'em! The sillier the better).

My impression is that this is a lesser Keaton vehicle, as the jokes didn’t seem as funny or consistent or honest as the few other Keaton movies I’ve seen.  However, I was greatly amused at one point when a man points a gun at Keaton and tells him to smile.  Keaton was known for playing comic characters with a deadpan, and the movie pokes fun at this.  He’s unable to smile, even at gunpoint, and, so, must push the sides of his face up with his fingers.  It’s a funny joke and it epitomizes the Keaton character.  He never gives up on whatever task he’s faced with and, at the same time, he never compromises himself to achieve that task.  And, ultimately, it’s hard to dislike a movie where the victorious hero rides away in a car with the love of his life: a cow named “Brown Eyes”.

Finally, please take care of your Netflix DVDs so I can actually write about the movies I’m trying to watch.

Wow

Last night while watching a Buster Keaton film, Go West, the DVD from Netflix was so badly scratched it crashed my DVD player.

I didn't know that could happen.

I managed to get through the movie, despite the fact that watching it was at times like trying to see a movie through a post-modern video game of squares and lines and bad synthesized music.

Day 33: Walkabout: Man vs. Nature 4

White Boy: Well, where are we now?

Where, indeed, to begin with Walkabout?  The fantastic cinematography?  The experimental editing that, while a bit showy at times, more often than not perfectly compliments the aimless wanderings of three young people through the Australian outback?  The effortless, breezy acting?  The fact that there’s a whiny little boy in this movie who is somehow not annoying?  Like all Grrrreat movies (and I mean that capital G and those extras Rs with a capital M) you could write a chapter in a book about each of these elements and, probably, still be frustrated that you didn’t have enough space to write about them (be on the lookout for my upcoming book, Non-annoying Children in Film and the Lack Thereof).  And, like all Great films (extra Rs omitted for brevity’s sake) these elements coalesce into such an intoxicating witch’s brew of engaging and thought-provoking cinema, that to talk about any of these individual pieces on their own does a disservice to the way it interacts with the whole.

(Meta-blog note: you can tell when I am having trouble writing something by the amount of parentheticals I use.  The more parentheticals, the harder a time I’m having [parentheticals make me feel uber-hip and, so, give me confidence through the difficult stretches by amusing me{and when I put many, many parentheticals nested inside one another, it usually means I’m making a half-assed attempt to be witty (not always successfully)}])

So what is the whole then?  On the surface, it’s a tale of two city kids, a teenaged girl and a young boy (billed in the credits as “Girl” and “White Boy” respectively), abandoned in the Australian outback.  As they struggle to survive in this harsh climate, they come across a teenaged Aborigine boy (billed in the movie as “Black Boy”) who aids them on their quest to find a way home.  This aspect of the film is well executed; at first, the outback is depicted as an extremely hostile place with awful, frightening looking bugs, lizards, and snakes under every rock.  Once the city kids meet the Aborigine, the depiction of the outback changes: the hostile environment can now be exploited for basic survival purposes, and thus, appreciated for its beauty.  Additionally, their relationship develops as they spend more time together.  The little boy starts to pick up on the Aborigine language, the sexual tension between Girl and Black Boy builds and builds, and when they do, eventually, reach some vestige of “civilization”, what happens there is delightfully unexpected.

Underneath this is a keenly observed movie about the clash of two very different cultures and its inevitable consequences.  There’s the usual cultural clash stuff with Black Boy finding the clothes of the city kids weird and the kid’s toys amusing, but the movie goes further on each one of these.  The kid wants to go about without a shirt on, like Black Boy does.  Despite Girl’ warnings, he ends up with a horrific, debilitating sunburn.  When White Boy offers Black Boy a toy British soldier, Black Boy is startled by the image and throws it aside in disgust, though there’s never any indication other than this that he’s been personally harassed by British soldiers.  

The sexual politics at play between Black Boy and Girl are just as subtley and realistically portrayed, culminating in a surprising and rich sequence in which he attempts to woo her with a mating dance.  She’s as aroused and curious about him as he is of her, but the movie concludes that these two people (and thus, these two cultures) can never truly coexist.  The film argues that, while the Western culture can take and learn many, many things from the Aborigines, it has nothing it’s willing to offer to them in return.  With its last shot, the movie also makes a case for culture-free, naturalistic utopia that is both a naïve wish of Girl and a satisfying conclusion to the story that’s taken place between Girl and Black Boy.

Furthering the culture clash theme, the movie makes some startling digressions from its main plot, following characters completely separate from the narrative at what seem like random times.  But each of these diversions serves to illuminate the main plot, contextualizing the conflicts the three main characters face in terms of the larger culture issues at play.  When we see a man working on what look like ceramic souvenirs and treating his Aborigine helpers like inhuman slave labor, it adds new thoughts and ideas to the relationship between Girl and Black Boy.  These points of divergence never feel apart from the movie, either, tangentially related to the main plot as they may be.  They’re shot and edited within the same style, but, more important to their success is the way they’re edited into the movie at thematically appropriate moments.  Though there’s a dangerous “telling the viewer what to think of the preceding and following scenes” element to these narrative breaks, they’re, on the whole, oblique enough that you can come to your own conclusions.

All of these things are part of theme, just another element at play, like the cinematography or the acting.  I could bluster on for pages (and maybe I’d quibble with John Barry’s sometimes just right but sometimes too-beautiful score), but my abilitiy to convey the delicate, deliberate nature of this film’s rhythms and the jaw-dropping images on display would not improve.  Everything comes together: the theme serves the editing, the editing serves the camera work, the camera work serves the acting, and the acting matches the sound design.  I cannot say this loud enough: see this movie.  On the biggest screen imaginable.  Watch it once a year and remind yourself that within all of us lies a naïve and simple wish to prance about naked in the wilderness, animals free of the fear and madness that culture brings and, yet, still basking in the safety it provides.

The Movie Gods grant me favor

Yesterday I pined for something life-altering, and boy, did I ever get it. No, it's not Reflections of Evil (I swear I'll get to that, probably in December) but Walkabout. The movie was a revelation to me and one I will not forget for many a year.

And then there's this. An article claiming all of Star Wars as one big postmodern art film. I don't agree, but I love the concept.

Day 32: Little Otik: Man vs. Nature 3

Little Otik is, for the majority of its running time, a wonderful film, fantastically conceived and executed with some really fun stop-motion effects to boot.  This strongest section of the film has a psychological intensity that builds horrifically, but just when it feels like the movie’s reached its boiling point, the movie shifts gears and the tension is lost, never to be recovered.  The end result is a piece that feels like two very good, but separate movies shoved together to the detriment of both.

The really compelling part of the film follows a childless couple, desperate to conceive a baby but both biologically unable to do so.  When staying at a house in the woods, the husband unearths a tree stump that he crafts into a vaguely humanoid shape.  He presents it to his wife and she, in her desperation, believes the piece of wood is a new baby for her.  She diapers it, puts a pacifier into its knothole mouth, bathes it, and admonishes her husband when he fails to treat it with the same affection.  When she begins telling the neighbors that she’s going to have a baby, the husband blusters and fumes but, ultimately acquiesces to his wife’s lie (the more to protect her feelings).  Eventually, the piece of wood comes alive (enter the stop-motion sequences), acting rather like a real child would, crying and demanding to be fed.  When they are unable to satiate their child, Little Otik’s appetite, things take a turn toward of the people-dying variety.

This is potentially laughable stuff, but it’s pitched perfectly, existing in a filmic world of reproductive dread somewhere between Eraserhead and the “caring for a zombie baby” scenes from Dead Alive (with a touch of Basket Case thrown in for good measure).  Both the husband and the wife are off-put by Otik’s existence, and both seem to recognize that it’s unreal.  The difference between the two is that the wife jumps into the fantasy whereas the husband resists.  This part of the film feels much like a fairy tale about the horrors of unnatural reproduction made literal and set in modern time.  

So it’s a bit off-putting when the movie’s perspective switches from the parents to that of the little girl who lives in a nearby apartment.  Not only has the movie invested a fair amount of tragic pathos in the relationship between the husband and wife that is frustratingly set aside for long stretches after this switch, when the movie does get around to resolving their story, the shift in narrative focus drains the power from the resolution, changing the tone of the parents’ story from excruciatingly bleak to just interesting.  Further, the movie tips its hand far too soon when the girl discovers a fairy tale that mirrors the plot we’ve seen and telegraphs the ending of the film.  Once this happens, the movie changes from depicting a delightfully nasty fairy tale to talking about this delightfully nasty fairy tale and what it has to say is unsurprising and pedestrian.

It should be noted, though, that the sequences involving the little girl are rife with inventiveness and a sure-footed depiction of the way powerless children find power through myth.  She’s frightened of the ever growing Little Otik at first, but after she reads a story about him, she knows how to handle him, befriends him, and endeavors to take care of him as her own.  Mirroring this is the threat of an older pedophile that lives in the building, a threat she’s able to disarm and, eventually, eliminate as her understanding and acceptance of Little Otik grows.

I wish that the movie was an hour and forty minutes, rather than two hours and five minutes.  There’s a classic film about the horrors of reproduction buried inside.  The first half of the film is scary, funny, and immensely absorbing.  The second half is endearing as well, but the two parts don’t work well together.  Both halves utilize sickening camera shots that emphasize the disgusting and consumptive nature of food (the way food is shot in this movie grosses me out more than anything Argento or Fulci have ever thrown at me) , but there’s very little else tying them together, thematically.  Still, there’s plenty to like in this movie and it’s, ultimately, a lot of fun.  I’d especially recommend it to anyone who’s considering having a baby.  The movie effectively demonstrates that, no matter how monstrous your child may be, any amount of justification will be employed to protect it.  After all, that postman was pretty old… and the social worker, well, she was just a mean person who got what was coming to her.

  

The remains of the day

I'm not entirely sure where the confusion lies, but I've seen a couple of comments and emails over the course of the past month indicating that the commenter thought I was only doing this for 1 month. Well, the plan is to keep doing it until January 1st, on the verge of tears though I may be. The first month rocked, but one thing I didn't expect is that the month would fly by in a cinematic daze. It's November 1st and I have about 60 more days of this, which will also surely fly by. I mean, I've forgotten entire movies that I've watched. Rasputin? Did I watch that? And what's striking is how memorable some movies are... the other day out of the blue I made a reference to Who's That Girl?!

I'm still waiting for that movie that rocks my world so hard I can't forget it for the rest of my life, though. But, then, I wonder if I will be able to appreciate something in that way given my current oversaturated state.

Day 31: Fitzcarraldo: Man vs. Nature 2

Martin: "I feel like I'm in Fitzcarraldo."
Nelson: "That movie was flawed."

It’s Halloween, I’m pressed for time, and it’s now officially been a month of movie-a-day madness, so I’m not really going to review this movie in terms of filmic quality or thematic content.  Briefly, this is an amazing movie, beautifully made and featuring a Klaus Kinski performance as the titular character that cuts right to the bone.  What I want to do is talk about what this movie did to me as I watched, bleary eyed, and struggling to stay awake.

Fitzcarraldo, actually named Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, loves the opera.  He’s willing, as the movie shows in its opening, to paddle two and a half days down the Amazon to see a performance by his beloved Enrico Caruso.  He dreams of opening an opera house in the rugged, undeveloped Peruvian city in which he lives.  He’s failed at many things -- when someone mentions his failed venture to build a transcontinental South American railway, the sadness he feels about this failure is quite evident on his face – and the thought of opening this opera house drives him to obsessive and ludicrous behavior.  A lot is made (and rightly so) of this movie’s crowning achievement, in which a steamship is dragged over a mountain by an elaborate pulley system, but what comes before this set piece is so perfectly delineated, so delicately presented, that it seems moot to even mention the steamship sequence.

Nothing defines this better for me than the moment when Fitzcarraldo, in an effort to raise money for his opera house, brings his phonograph to a party full of rich people, and plays the opera recording to the disinterest of the party goers.  When someone walks up to turn the phonograph off, Fitz flips out, screams at and nearly attacks the man, and, therefore, loses all hope of finding the funding he’s seeking.  The sight of Kinski, desperate and fragile, nakedly presenting a group of people the object of his intense obsession, I felt such a kinship to this obsessive madman.  He’s so focused, so singular in mind, that everything in his life is devoted to getting the opportunity to open the damned opera house.  

The movie renders Kinski’s point of view so well that when, earlier in the film, he stares lovingly at an opera performance, the camera work, editing, and acting in the film represent his passion in such a way that I understood, for the first time in my life, what people see in opera.  Obsession is the name of the game and it’s something I understand.  But Fitzcarraldo’s obsession is not one of those dirty secrets, hidden from only those closest to him.  The whole town knows what he wants, and how could they not?  He, in a fit of desperation, barricades himself inside the church, screaming from the steeple that the church will not reopen until he has his opera house.  After all of this, after all the humiliation he suffers, why on earth wouldn’t he drag the steamship across the mountain if it would get him closer?  And why wouldn’t he trust the natives who respond to the same phonograph record with curiosity and, perhaps, a bit of worship instead of dismissing it outright as the so-called cultured people do?

The movie’s never clear on exactly why the opera is so important to him (not that it matters, I mean, obsession is so random, he might as well have been obsessed with sweet potatoes or robots and very little about the movie would have to change).  I think the key to understanding his obsession is that party scene.  He wants everyone to understand what he does.  He wants them to listen, to hear the beauty, to experience the ecstasy that he feels when he listens to the opera.  And when someone wants to shut off this pure, undistilled joy, he gets mad enough to dash all of his hopes to the curb.  That is, I realize as I’m writing this, exactly how I feel about Robocop, strangely enough.  And, when I think about it, sharing that feeling is exactly why I’m doing this blog in the first place.  Naked, honest obsession.

Happy Halloween

Here's a little present. Be warned, it may get stuck in your head!

Day 30: Lost in La Mancha: Man vs. Nature 1

Terry Gilliam: At least if we're going to be fucked, let's know we're fucked ahead of time.

I’m very glad that I did not watch this movie in the theater.  While it is a worthwhile film to watch, structured and edited competently, it never quite achieved a scope beyond “best DVD extra ever” and, as such, belongs on the DVD format as surely as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly belongs on the big screen.  

I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t like it.  I did.  It’s an honest and rich post-mortem of a film that was seemingly doomed to be incomplete from the start, pushed into its inevitable fate by the Gods.  It’s refreshingly blunt, showing the hardship of making a movie the way few of these behind-the-scenes pieces do.  The story of the piece is also a compelling tragedy, in which the hubris of Terry Gilliam, trying to make a dream film called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, is punished by rain, disease, and insurance people.

Like any good tragedy where men defy the Gods, the movie is full of ominous premonitions.  At the start, all involved worry about repeating the mistakes of a previous Gilliam film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, that went out of control and exorbitantly over budget.  Don Quixote, we’re told, is a film too ambitious for its budget.  Director Gilliam asks his crew to tell him immediately when he asks for something that can not be done.  Then, as the production date draws near, the assistant director is asked what worries him the most.  He replies in a deadpan, “Pre-production.”  He speaks of their first shooting location.  It’s near a NATO base where he’s assured jets fly over for only an hour or so.  The crew tours a studio where they’ll be filming and it’s basically just a warehouse with terrible acoustics.  Gilliam admonishes members of his crew, insisting on the importance of good sound.  Jean Rochefort, the actor who would be Quixote, comes down with strange pains just before shooting will commence.  Most ominously, though, is a moment when, as clouds gather on the horizon at a remote shooting location, Rochefort says, “…strange weather today.”

And like all such tragedies, these premonitions are ignored due to the hubris of the people in power.  The NATO jets fly over at the worst times and Gilliam, under the pressure of time and budgetary concerns, contradicts his earlier statement that sound is very important.  “I don’t care about sound,” he says, and, so, the cameras roll.  Storm clouds gather in the distance, and Gilliam assures his Director of Photography that blue skies surely lay on the other side of the storm.  The torrential rains that follow flood the location and, along with it, the production’s equipment.  Rocheport becomes increasingly ill to the point that he requires two people to help him off of his horse.  He is flown back to his doctors in France and his return seems unlikely.  Gilliam continues shooting, despite the fact that every one around him seems to know that, without a Quixote, the project is doomed.  And then the insurance company comes in to check up on their claims and everything comes to a stop.

There are passing references to Gilliam embodying Quixote, ignoring reality for the sake of his own purposes.  It’s not an unfair comparison.  It’s obvious, at least from the movie’s perspective, that Gilliam is complicit in the disaster, unable to compromise on his vision despite his earlier plea that his crew members warn him when he’s asked for too much.  When disaster strikes, he just wants to shoot something, anything, to salvage the day, plunging heedlessly into the making of the film.  However, as things get increasingly hairy, Gilliam shrinks away from the project, not ready to wash his hands of the movie, but lacking the strength to fight for its survival.  

All of this is well-wrought and candidly displayed.  What the movie misses, I think, is a sense that there is a very fine line between this disaster laden production resulting in an incomplete film and a similar production that results in an absolutely brilliant film.  Gilliam has, reportedly, been involved in more than one troubled production that had fine results, but the only movie discussed in relation to Quixote is Baron Munchausen.  My memory of Munchausen is spotty, at best, but I doubt anyone would hold it up as an unqualified success in the face of so many difficulties.  (I type that knowing that someone will contradict me in the comments, so have at it!)  I think a wider focus would have taken this from feeling like a very good DVD supplement to feeling like an actual movie.

Lost in my pants

Had fun at a Halloween party last night. The highlight was hearing the main theme to Beetlejuice with the volume turned to 11. I also did a vaguely sexual, spasmodic dance to the murder music from Psycho. Well, it was blatantly sexual but mercifully short for all involved. And all involved would be me. There were a couple moments of fire breathing and a few pumpkins were set on fire as well. As a result of partying, I now have to watch two movies during the day: Lost in La Mancha and Fitzcarraldo... but at least I get an extra hour due to some idiotic government program which, I'm sure, served its function when electric lights were still rare but now feels to me like some vague "we control time, we can also control you" plot.

Unfortunately, no pictures for you, kids. I was dressed as either Magnum P.I. or a rapist, depending on who you asked. Tara was either the rape victim or the Magnum P.I. victim, again, depending on who was asked.

Day 29: Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter

Jesus Christ: If I'm not back in five minutes, call the Pope.

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is like a good novelty song you might hear on Dr. Demento.  It’s roughly made and a little obvious, but it’s genuinely funny and makes up for its shortcomings with a ham-fisted enthusiasm.  It’s less religious satire and more a parody of inane kung-fu and action movie conceits in the same spirit as Team America or a lesser episode of The Simpsons, giving Jesus the action movie hero role and teaming him up with some very likable companions.  The overall quality of the movie exists somewhere between a decent student film and a bad Roger Corman film, but the writing is sharp enough, the use of locations is great, and the tone is spirited enough that none of this matters.  I was genuinely engaged by the film and stopped looking at the clock to see how much longer the movie would be playing at about the halfway point.  That means, judging it on this scale, the movie worked better for me than Hell Comes to Frogtown.

It reminds me of watching King Kong vs. Godzilla when I was 8.  All I wanted to see was King Kong and Godzilla fight and, well, they did.  They fought a couple of times and, so, the movie worked for me.  What I want out of Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter is to see Jesus slay vampires and that’s here in spades.  When he fights scores of atheists, that’s just gravy, as is the song and dance number when he arrives in the city.  Throw in a Mexican wrestler as his sidekick, a spot-on parody score, and the movie ending with a Journey-esque song with lyrics that sum up the plot, and you’ve got a nice dish with gravy, two scoops of ice cream, and a cherry on top.  So tasty.

Special mention goes to the moment when Jesus is seen, apparently, fighting two baddies in two separate locations at once.  When one of the characters asks Jesus how he can be in both places at the same time, Jesus replies, “I’m everywhere.”

Week 4 Index

Day 22: Dressed to Kill
Day 23: My Dinner With Andre
Day 24: Tess
Day 25: Alphaville
Day 26: The Battle of Algiers
Day 27: Robocop 2
Day 28: Female Trouble