Day 11: Danger: Diabolik

Song: You, only you, deep down… in my heart deep down, in my blood deep down, very deep deep down...

Danger: Diabolik is a winning, lurid movie. It’s exciting, funny, absurd, and so very of-its-time that its retro-charm destroyed my retro-charm meter (which looks curiously like a mood ring). Any movie that opens with its hero, an arch criminal, stealing ten million dollars from under the noses of the authorities and laughing at them — no, cackling at them in a full-throated MUAHAHAHAHA — is off to a good start as far as I’m concerned. If the movie then launches into a title sequence featuring random spinning colors while a song, written by Ennio Morricone, blares out, grabbing you by the ears to tell you, “listen, dammit, LISTEN OR I’LL JUST GET LOUDER...” I’m confident I’m going to like it. This is one very fun comic book movie.

Effectively combining the worlds of Batman and James Bond, the world of Danger: Diabolik is a colorful, archetype-filled landscape of cops and robbers, cool cats and squares. In this world, it is possible for one man to bring down the tax system of an entire nation by exploding a series of buildings with signs that say “TAX”. It’s the kind of world where mob kingpins own planes with trapdoors to dispose of their disobedient associates (and the air pressure problem is somehow fixed too). And in this world, it’s not unlikely to come across a round bed, rotating around a not-too-distant-futuristic hi-fi system.

This movie is ridiculous, to be sure, but there’s wit to it. One sequence has Diabolik trapped on top of a castle spire after stealing a necklace. The cops are in hot pursuit. He glances at a catapult. No way, I thought, he’s going to catapult off the roof! Sure enough, the cops break down the door in time to see Diabolik’s white-costumed body flung off the top of the building. The effect is fake-looking and laughable, but it fools the cops. They run down, unaware that a naked Diabolik is crouched behind the catapult, grinning, and, I assume, barely restraining another MUAHAHAHA. I had no reason to restrain my delighted laughter.

Yes, the pace lags occasionally. Yes, it’s the highest of high camp as Diabolik runs around in a black mask and suit, cackling at the authorities. Yes, the acting is bad and, yes, there are some real questionable plot and editing choices in the movie. But does it matter? When the pace lags, it’s because the movie is pausing to show off its mod stylishness, John Philip Law plays the titular character with infectious gusto, and if there are story problems, Morricone’s silly, in-your-face score covers up any ill-will you feel. Anyway, there’s a surprising sweetness to the relationship Diabolik has with Eva, his blonde bombshell partner-in-crime. The dialogue is also more clever than you’d expect, though the movie’s full of howlers (“I had the gold radioactivated”).

So, yeah, the movie’s not a triumph. It’s outrageously cheesy, but every time I thought I was laughing at the movie, it winked right at me, telling me I was laughing with it. When Diabolik flipped over the side of his car, it made me laugh, it thrilled me, and it reminded me of why the hell I watch movies anyway. Some things are just cool.

The 16mm Shrine

Just thought I'd give a throw to this blog by "Ash Karreau"

The 16mm Shrine

My blog is like his, only his is devilshly funny and mine is like a puppy that tries too hard.

Day 10: First Blood

And what best to follow up the belabored sufferings of an ancient martyr God than with America’s very own prototype of a martyr, the Vietnam Veteran. Before watching First Blood, I’d never actually seen a Rambo movie all the way through. I caught parts of them on TV when I was younger, but never actually sat through them. Imagine my surprise that First Blood (which I refuse to call Rambo: First Blood) is actually a halfway decent movie. Literally.

The first 50 minutes or so of this 97 minute movie are nicely paced, edited, and shot. Sylvester Stallone plays John J. Rambo, a Green Beret/Special Forces type who’s come to a small Oregon town to find an old Vietnam buddy. After learning that his buddy has died of cancer, Rambo, with nowhere to go, walks around aimlessly until he is picked up by the town’s sheriff. The sheriff, played by Brian Dennehy in an over-the-top performance that is still somehow convincing, apparently hates drifters with a passion most people reserve for suspected child killers and so, unaware of Rambo’s past, arrests him for vagrancy. When Rambo is abused by the other officers in the small town police station, he snaps, fights back, and flees to the wilderness.

All of this is handled with an admirable efficiency, as is the ensuing sequence when Rambo stalks the pursuing cops in the forest. He sets traps, hunts them down, and immobilizes each one without killing them. It’s a fun meshing of the classic formula of a falsely accused man on the run and slasher movie conventions. It also reminded me of the old adage (I think from Hitchcock) that you will enjoy watching someone who is good at his job. Rambo is very good at his job and it’s enjoyable to watch him turn the tables on the coppers.

This section of the film has some effective location photography. It also best showcases a fun score by Jerry Goldsmith, fun because it is slightly too “big” for the scale of the movie. For instance: the music swells into an epic Western/Americana theme after Rambo steals a motorcycle from an innocent bystander and rides away from the chasing cops. The disparity between the epic music and the small motorcycle made me smile.

But the movie can’t keep this up for too long, and eventually, too many characters diffuse the essential conflict between Dennehy and Stallone. There’s a hefty chunk of time where nothing much happens as Rambo is hidden and Dennehy and others keep looking for him. A final confrontation that has Rambo blowing up a gas station and knocking out power in the small town to draw Dennehy out is kind of exciting but doesn’t amount to much. The movie concludes with a monologue from Rambo in which he cries and shouts about injustices, the terrible things he saw in Vietnam, and his treatment when he came back home. This monologue really is something to see. It’s embarrassingly funny as Stallone slurs and screams his lines at a rapid-fire pace, rendering most of it incomprehensible. The emotional beats are just right, though. So, even if it's not expressed with the best of care by Stallone and is transparently manipulative, I can’t deny that the tearful speech got to me a little.

I think it’s fascinating that this movie found the audience it did back in 1982. It tapped a zeitgeist of some sort and became a cultural watermark, no doubt there. I think there’s something about the way it puts a Vietnam Veteran in the same position the North Vietnamese were in (outgunned, outmanned, using a familiarity with the land to gain his advantage, and setting traps like the North Vietnamese) and has him, ultimately, come out on top that appealed to people. Perhaps the movie hit an undercurrent of atypical American self-flagellation over mistakes made in Vietnam. Perhaps I’m thinking too much about a Rambo movie.

Day 9: The Passion of the Christ

For a non-Christian, watching The Passion of the Christ is a lot like watching a Star Trek movie when you’re not really familiar with the show. Sure, you might recognize some characters and thrill at some space battles, but ultimately, you’re left a little confused. What’s the big deal here? I certainly felt that way about The Passion of the Christ. It’s hard for me to write this without taking into account the vast success of the film or its place in the political landscape of the United States, but I’ll do my best.

Full disclosure: I made every attempt to engage with this film on its own level since, as a staunch atheist, I’m predisposed to disliking religious propaganda. Still, I feel safe in saying that this is not a good movie. Its biggest problem is the way it takes a spiritual subject and literalizes every damn thing to the point that any higher meaning or metaphysical implications are sublimated. It also gets several demerits for an egregious use of slow-motion throughout that is annoying at first (Judas is thrown thirty pieces of silver, struggles to catch it, drops the bag, and the coins go flying out, all in slow-mo… where’s the slow-motion “NOOOOO”, huh?) then tiring (as Jesus is being tortured, a figure meant to be the devil walks in slo-mo through the onlookers, gazing menacingly at him) then just silly (Jesus, tortured to the brink of death, falls down in slow motion! And again! And again! And again! And…). There’s a cool scene depicting Jesus saving Mary Magdalene, done silently and played with the right amount of action-movie gravitas from James Caviezel, and I enjoyed a couple of parts that had demons in it (though this is part of the literalization problem… Judas is literally chased by zombie-demon-children onto what looks like the set of Conan the Barbarian and then hangs himself. I suppose it’s hard for audiences to relate to guilt unless there are zombie-demon-children to indicate the character’s state of mind… but I digress) but, for the most part, this movie is full of cheap sentiment, and it’s plodding and dull, hitting the same notes over and over again.

I can’t write about this movie as its own entity, though. I got super-mad after watching this because I remembered The Last Temptation of Christ being a pretty awesome movie and that it couldn’t make any money because some jerks decided that depicting Jesus as having any sort-of sex at all, even if it was in a vision inspired by Satan, and even if the sex was, like, nice happy marriage sex, was a bad thing. What made me angry was that this movie, which was wildly popular with many of these same types of jerks, does exactly the same thing as The Last Temptation of Christ. Both movies focus on the humanness of Jesus to further explore the sacrifice the God-man made. In Scorsese’s version, it’s an emotional humanness fraught with sorrow, doubt, isolation, fear, and anger as a result of Jesus’ divinity. In Gibson’s version, it’s about the human physicality of Jesus, the pain of being whipped, scourged, and having your hands nailed to something. There’s a shameless use of Jesus’ mother (who’s named Mary) being sad that her son is in pain (at one time reminiscent of a scene in Dumbo (of all things)). And, of course, Jesus is in a constant state of pain, starting around 52 minutes into the film and we are given many close-ups of him wailing in agony (sometimes in slo-mo) as he’s beaten. All of this serves to emphasize Jesus’ humanity over his divinity. And yet, this fallible, frail humanity is acceptable while Scorsese’s is not? What the fuck people?

It’s actually pretty instructive to look at the endings of both movies: At the end of Last Temptation, Jesus, played by Willem Dafoe, is given a chance to renounce his crucifixion, a choice that has disastrous consequences for the world while allowing him to have a happy human life for a while. When he sees the consequences, Jesus takes that choice back and dies on the cross, allowing the world to live on at the expense of his own happy life. The Passion ends with God shedding a single raindrop tear for the death of his son, said tear resulting in an Indiana Jones-esque earthquake destroying the temple of the Pharisees (I think), and causing the devil-figure to scream at us, now isolated somewhere in hell (again, I think). The movie then cuts to Jesus rising from the dead, looking out of his tomb as action-movie music builds and builds. Jesus then stands, naked (though the movie never shows his junk, making it better for kids!) and walks off and the music kicks into overdrive like we’re watching Gladiator or something as it fades to black. It’s like Jesus is going to KICK SOME ASS on the people what tortured him!

At least with Scorsese and Dafoe, we had an idea of the life Jesus was actually sacrificing by allowing his fate to befall him. Here, we get flashbacks to Jesus making a table and saying ponderous things to his followers. There’s a Sermon on the Mount scene where Caviezel delivers his lines like a quirky dead-language-speaking high school professor. For a movie that so desperately wants us to empathize with the humanity of Jesus’ body, we are given little-to-nothing to see about Jesus’ mind and so the too, too solid flesh that melts away at the hands of gleeful of Romans is attached to nobody important. Of course you sympathize with Jesus on the same level you’d sympathize with anyone being crucified by a mob. In fact, I can make a direct cinematic parallel here: I felt as bad for Jesus as I did for the Brain Bug at the end of Starship Troopers.

Day 8: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

br/>Walking out of Wallace & Gromit, I had a big grin on my face that I’d been wearing for the duration of the movie. It’s a delightful movie watching experience, perfect in nearly every way. It works as a clever, original animated comedy, as a spoof of horror movies, and even, at times, as a serious werewolf movie.

If you haven’t seen any of the previous Wallace & Gromit short films, you’re doing a disservice to yourself and those who love you. It’s been scientifically proven that watching any of the Wallace & Gromit movies makes you a better person. Really. Science.

Here’s the basic setup: Wallace is an inventor who lives with Gromit, his dog. Gromit never speaks, but is animated with such care that you always know what he’s thinking. Wallace creates Rube Goldberg-like inventions that tend to go awry or have consequences different than they’re intended. Gromit is often tasked with taking care of the cheery, optimistic, and, accordingly, short-sighted Wallace. Their relationship is charming and feels as rich and wonderful as that of any Classic Comedy matchup you can think of.

This is supposed to be a “family” film, no question about it, but it is written, directed, voice acted, and animated so well that it avoids the pandering and restrictive tone that has become so commonplace in movies that children are supposed to watch. The movie is unafraid to explore fear, sorrow, and anguish in this movie and it’s refreshing to see that amidst the usual hyperkinetic imagery that one finds in Animated Films for the Whole Family™ these days. It is a spoof of many horror films, but it also takes its plot seriously and never betrays its characters to make a joke. Thus, when things get just a little serious, it’s easy to take them seriously. Even after a vast amount of zaniness, late in the film, Gromit makes a sacrifice to save Wallace and, as he does, their friendship becomes even more resonate than it was earlier. And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the pathos of lycanthropy (I guess I should say lepusanthropy here) realized so well. But, here I’ve gone on about how serious it is when it’s mostly a very funny movie.

If anything, the movie has the feel of the great comedies made between 1940 and 1960, movies like Some Like it Hot or The Lady Eve. It’s a solid piece of work through and through with characters who make sense, a storyline that’s at once funny and engaging, and a genuine sweetness to it that’s rare to see these days. It’s a brilliant use of the medium of claymation. I wish someone could give an award to Gromit and his animators for one of the very best animated performances I’ve ever seen. I can’t think of a single person I would not recommend this movie to. So, in other words, go see it. Remember… Science.

Day 7: Zombi 3

Roger: Hey, this Blueheart's music is great, huh?
Bo: Yeah, it's making me horny.

Comedy is a subject that is very important to me, something I’ve spent a lot of time pondering for many years now… what is it that makes us laugh, why is something funny and something else tragic? Why do those two intermingle so often? It all boils down to absurdity for me. We laugh because some things defy our expectations as to how the world is structured and, when confronted with those things, we respond by being terrified or laughing (depending, I imagine, on how threatening these things are). I laughed harder watching Zombi 3 than I’ve laughed in response to any movie for quite some time. I’m aware that a few days ago I made clear my feelings about watching bad movies for the purposes of laughing at and feeling superior to them. I am comfortable with the fact that, while I was laughing at Zombi 3 and while the laughter was borne of the movie’s incompetence, what I was really laughing at was its illogic and its absurdity.

I love zombie movies as a general rule and so I am no stranger to the work of Lucio Fulci. The maker of Zombi 2 (here in the States, it’s just called Zombie… the reason for this is that Dawn of the Dead was originally called Zombi in Italy and abroad…Fulci’s Zombi 2 is an in-name-only sequel if I remember correctly.) and The Beyond, he specializes in making films that are like a crossbreed of Dario Argento’s and George Romero’s, though his movies are nowhere near as good as either of those two’s films. Fulci’s zombies are the slowest of the “slow” zombies, moving with the speed of snails and, somehow, becoming ten times as creepy for it. When Fulci brings in a gore scene, it can go on for minutes as the unconvincing effects spill out in a torrent of red before our eyes. It’s rather endearing sometimes, like in The Beyond, there’s a scene in which spiders eat a man’s face for what seems like an hour. Some of the spiders are clearly made of rubber and being bounced up and down on fishing line. The spiders also squeak while they eat the poor man. And their entrance into the movie is quite, um, random. The randomness and the extremity of the gore can lend Fulci’s movies a dreamlike quality not unlike Argento’s.

For the first hour of Zombi 3, I was a bit upset because this movie did not feel like a Fulci movie, though he was the credited director. No dreamlike pacing, the gore was weaker, and the zombies were not Fulci zombies. These zombies were moving super-fast! One of them was involved in a choreographed fight scene in which he menaced a woman with a machete. A lot of zombies leapt down from above the camera just when one of the characters was nearly safe. A couple of them talked. Later, I learned that this was only a half-Fulci movie, that he’d left after shooting 70 minutes, and only 40 minutes were used in the final product. And this shows quite a bit in the movie.

Before I go on to talk about Zombi 3, I’d like to describe to you the following scenes.

• A woman in an abandoned gas station, looking for water for her soon-to-be zombie boyfriend. She walks around in the darkness for a bit doing the standard, “hello, is anyone there” routine. A zombie, chained up, lunges at her. She screams. It grabs her and she wiggles away, out of its reach. The zombie then lunges forward again, pulling against its chains. A large quantity of debris, seemingly out of nowhere, then falls on the zombie’s head, causing the zombie to fall down.


• A soldier guy in the jungle is attacked by a zombie. He wrestles with it for some time until they come to a dock by a river. The soldier throws the zombie off of the dock into what appears to be two or three inches of water. The movie then cuts to a shot of the soldier looking relieved, like the fight is over.


• A group of people (including the soldier from the previous description) have just found respite from constant zombie attacks. They are lying outside in some grass. We hear the noise of a chicken. The movie cuts to a shot of a man in glasses who starts making chicken noises at the chicken and chasing it around, unable to catch it. This is intercut with shots of the others in his group smiling and shaking their head as he struggles to catch the chicken. That guy!


• At the end of the movie: a soldier is running away from some zombies toward a helicopter where his friends are flying off to safety. The helicopter has ascended a little and he is forced to leap onto the landing strut of the helicopter. As he struggles to climb into the helicopter, a group of zombies emerge from a pile of hay below the man and they get him.

In each of these instances, I laughed and laughed hard. Particularly at the chicken thing, but also at the zombies hidden in hay. I don’t know why they were in the hay, but I believe it’s a new breed of zombie that we can all call the “hay zombie”. The scene descriptions don’t even begin to account for the amount of inanity in the film. There’s a flying zombie head with no visible means of propulsion other than its desire to consume human flesh. There are zombie birds. And, most importantly, I may be wrong, but I believe one character dies at the hands (eh) of the severed flying head, only to come back moments later and then die again at the hands of a zombie-mob. It occurs to me that I haven’t even mentioned the scientist who created the means by which the dead come back to life, whose acting abilities reside in his index finger or the way the main soldier characters in the film start rolling around everywhere.

I’m glad I watched this movie. It’s helped me figure out some of my movie-watching philosophy. I generally like to respect the filmmakers when I watch movies, so if a movie is working in a way that you can tell it’s trying to be scary, exciting, whatever… I will try to engage with it on those terms. When I am given inconsistencies and shoddy craftsmanship, it is fair game for me to enjoy on whatever level I like. Therefore: Zombi 3 is a comedy. Things happen for no reason in this movie and they’re decidedly not scary. It even appears as if it switches from being shot on film to shot on video at random. The movie has no merit as a horror movie. It has no new horror ideas in it, no tension, no scariness. It is structured more as an action movie, with its fast zombies, soldiery shootouts, and pounding score similar to Day of the Dead, but it has no merit as an action movie either. However, it is so shoddily put together that it does have merit (at times) as an absurdist comedy. And since we’ll never get to see The Marx Brothers starring in A Night with the Living Monkeys, this will do just fine.

Linkages

I've been trying to coordinate some of these movies so that there's a nice linkage between each one. This hasn't exactly worked out. I've been delighted to find some connections in the movies I have watched, though, that were unexpected. For instance: watching Seven Up! I was fascinated at the nature film aspect of watching seven year olds interact with one another and play at being grown ups. The next day, I watched Zardoz and it featured a lot of talk about the evolution of man that felt like a tangental connection to Seven Up. Zadoz features a floating head quite prominently and so I was delighted last night, while watching Zombi 3, when a severed flying zombie head attacked some people. Additionally, there was a scene in this movie where people barricaded themselves in a hotel to escape the zombies, much as the characters in Hotel Rwanda found a hotel to be a safe haven from an overwhelming threat. I began to think that Zombi 3 might contain links to every movie I've watched so far, but, upon further reflection, that would be far too much of a stretch and I don't have the time to engage in those sorts of mental gymnastics.

The most disappointing thing about all of this is that I was planning to follow Zombi 3 with The Passion of the Christ since, as Superman is really an alien, Jesus returning to life after dying would denote him zombie status. Unfortunately, this didn't come to pass and, tonight, I will be inadvertantly finding links between Zombi 3 and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. And then from that movie to The Passion of the Christ. Which is probably better for some reason.

Day 6: Fucking Zardoz, man.

Zed: Stay behind my aura!

In short: Zardoz is a trainwreck movie. It may even be the perfect example of a trainwreck movie. In order to discuss Zardoz, I think it's necessary to first state what I mean when I call something a "trainwreck movie". It's pretty simple: a movie is going along for a while and in your mind you're thinking to yourself "this is pretty good!" and then, at some point, the movie jumps the tracks and at the end of it, you're shaking your head and saying something in a disappointed tone, like, "fucking Zardoz, man..." There are a few examples I can think of right now... The Hulk, The Keep, and Lifeforce(that one's a BIG TIME trainwreck). All of these are not bad movies, per se, they're just movies that lose the way at some point while maintaining very good intentions. What denotes a trainwreck movie from a bad movie is that it is always internally consistent (just as a train doesn't cease being a train when it leaves the tracks, The Hulk doesn't stop being the movie that preceded it when Nick Nolte and Bruce Banner have a metaphysical special effects fight and, in fact, if the movie ended any other way it would be a betrayal of everything that came before it) and full of intriguing ideas that never seem to make it to the screen in a coherent fashion.

Zardoz is probably the perfect trainwreck movie because, as soon as it starts, you can see that it's going to wreck somewhere along its path. You can feel it the same way you feel like you're in the most competent of hands when Touch of Evil starts with that uncut tracking shot. It's hard not to know that disaster looms when the floating head of a man, dressed up like a genie and claiming to be immortal, tells you that Merlin was his idol and that the story you're about to see is an allegory and a satire. It's even harder to put aside feelings that disaster is going to eventually beat this movie into a bloody pulp as a giant stone head flies over gorgeously photographed landscapes like a hot air balloon with a guidance system and lands near a bunch of people on horseback wearing nothing but red underpants and bandoliers. And when, after said people on horseback bow before it, pledging allegience to the head they call Zardoz, that floating head responds to them by saying "the gun is good, the penis is bad" and spewing gun after gun after gun from its giant mouth, it's difficult to shun the knowledge that you are going to dislike this movie for the very same reasons that you are going to unabashadly love it.

The movie's plot is one of a science fiction utopia/dystopia in which, sometime in the future, humans have divided into two camps. One group is barbaric and is policed by the horseback people, known as Brutals. Their leader, Zed, sneaks into the giant floating head and finds himself among a second group of people, the Immortals. The Immortals are just that, immortal. Everytime they die, their bodies are regenerated by a supercomputer/A.I. thing known as The Tabernacle. They're also telepathic and like to meditate. They're superintelligent and super bored, living in a 1970s science fiction dreamland, a combination of colored plastics and old architecture, glass and stone. Their food and wealth is provided to them by the barbaric outsiders who, to appease their god Zardoz, give offerings of wheat to the giant stone head. They're obviously patterned after hippies or hippy ideals and, as Zed arrives, they're unsure of what to do with this bummer of a brute. Study him or kill him with telepathic powers?

The movie is one of these science fiction movies that is mostly about ideas. I would wager that a majority of the running time is spent explaining the world and it's landscape. It is fascinating for a while, but eventually the explanations of whatever new wrinkle to the world is presented start seeming repetitive at best, dull at worst and, in the second half, just confusing. What little narrative tension that exists in the second half is borrowed from popular mythology, The Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings, etc. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and it's neat in a "oh they snuck that in nicely" kind-of way. But the people never resonate on a human level... The Immortals are mostly too remote and clinical to care about. Zed spends too much of his early screen time not doing anything but following Immortals around as they explain what he (and we) are seeing.

Zed is played by Sean Connery in, unfortunately, the worst performance I've ever seen him give. He is a killer and a rapist who, eventually, learns to be the smartest guy on the planet, but Connery just looks bored or confused most of the time. Perhaps I'm projecting. His acting is more interesting as the character grows smarter, but by that time, I was so busy keeping up with the overly complicated and expanding plot that I hardly noticed. Connery is also saddled with an unfortunate costume, spending the entire running time of the movie in red underwear that makes him look like a cheap Tarzan (though there is one moment when he wears a wedding dress that allows me to cross off "see Sean Connery in a wedding dress" from my list of things I'd like to see before I die).

It's too bad, too, that the movie buckles under the weight of all its concepts because there is so much to like here. I had the most fun watching this movie than any of the others I've watched so far for this blog. The movie is terribly earnest, sometimes to the point of campiness. There is a logic and a cleverness to everything and it's beautifully shot and produced. The first hour is delightful as the movie introduces us to the world it's devised, but, again, once the plot starts to take off and Zed inspires a civil war among the Immortals and is taught the secrets of the universe while inseminating women Immortals with his seed, it just flies right off the rails. It flies so far off the rails, in one scene an Immortal tells Zed that they built a spaceship. Zed says, "did you use it?" The Immortal replies, "yeah, it was a dead end" the way you might say you once ate a pear and didn't quite care for it.

There are three scenes I need to describe here that might give you an even better idea of what kind of movie this is: First scene: an Immortal man enters a room of other Immortals and speaks in "dubbed". His lips don't match the sounds he's making and the sounds are incomplete and garbled. The other Immortals applaud it as if it was a performance of poetry. Second scene: at dinner, the Immortals go into "second level meditation" and make loud moaning noises. One man doesn't want to go into second level meditation and they wiggle their fingers at him as he struggles under their psychic weight. Third scene: Sean Connery in red underwear running around a hall of mirrors with various images projected onto them, shouting over and over again, "TABERNACLE!!!" while looking confused and angry.

Pauline Kael apparently said that if this movie wasn't in English, we all might have thought it was a maserpiece. I'm inclined to agree somewhat. It's a fascinating movie, to be sure. It's thougtful, serious, witty, insightful, and honest... and these are all the reasons it's a bad movie. Whatever it happens to be being thoughtful, serious, witty, insightful, or honest about at any given time in the movie, it is ignoring everything else that is important. Still, something in me thinks that someday, fifty years from now, people could resurrect it as an overlooked classic. It's too good to be this bad. It's Fucking Zardoz, man... and there's nothing else like it.

The wait is over.

So, last night I watched Zardoz. To most people, saying you watched Zardoz would not be anything of note, but to me it was significant. When I was about 12 years old, I had a VHS copy of the movie Aliens, which, at the time, was my favorite movie. I watched that thing over and over again.

The important thing to note re: Zardoz is that at the beginning of the tape there was a 5 minute or so promotional thing about 20th Century Fox’s video line. They ran through many movies that had just been released to own and Zardoz was on there. It looked interesting, Sean Connery on horseback, a giant stone head, people in long flowing robes, and a generally weird sci-fi feel to it. I was very into sci-fi at the time and thought Zardoz looked quite interesting. But I never watched it.

Over the years, Zardoz took up some space in my mind. Every now and then I’d think about watching it, but other movies always took priority. In the past few days up to Zardoz’s arrival (via Netflix), I thought to myself... oh man, it’s coming... Zardoz... fucking Zardoz man. I had waited almost 15 years to see this film. And as the day of Zardoz’s arrival approached, when I spoke of it I referred to it not as Zardoz, but fucking Zardoz, man. And today as I sit here, I realize, I’ve finally seen fucking Zardoz man. That’s a good feeling. I’ll post about my thoughts about fucking Zardoz later tonight, but right now I’m just satisfied that fucking Zardoz will no longer be one of those movies that I’ve never seen. Fucking Zardoz, man.

Day 5: Seven Up! & 7 Plus Seven

Someone: Give me the child and I will give you the man.

The Up movies are a fascinating film experiment in which a documentary crew follows the lives of a group of English people from childhood (at the age of seven) and catching up with them every seven years. I'd heard of the "Up" series before and thought it sounded like a fantastic use of the preservational quality of film. One of the movies came out when I was in college, but I didn't want to see it before seeing the others and, so, years later, I am finally (ugh I can't believe I'm going to type this) catching up. (ba-da-bing!) I find that I don't have much to say about the filmmaking in the two movies I watched last night and this afternoon as the movies were competent and nothing stood out in terms of great filmmaking or bad filmmaking. The very premise of the project overshadowed everything while I was watching it.

Seven Up, made in black and white in 1964, introduces us to the group of people when they're seven years old. It's a nice selection, encompassing a variety of children from different economic backgrounds. A narrator informs us that the purpose of the whole thing is to reveal those who will be adults in the year 2000. The children are interviewed about a selection of topics, from what careers they want to pursue (there's a lot of astronaut replies here), how they feel about the opposite sex, and the violence that seems inherent in childhood (I think all of them agree that violence is necessary sometimes) to questions about the economic and racial diversity in Britain (one well-to-do girl's response to what she thinks of "colored" people was quite shocking to me when she replies, "I don't know any colored people and I don't want to, thank you very much." Kids say the darndest things!). The movie was 40 minutes long and felt just right at this length, though, knowing that there would be many follow-ups, I wished that I had gotten to know their names a lot better so that I could keep track of them in later movies.

The thing that intrigued me the most while watching this movie was the way it resembled one of those nature documentaries about zebras or some other animal. I mean, seriously, I didn't realize this, but seven year olds act so much like baby animals it's ridiculous. They "play" at everything. I know that many animals learn how to do the things they'll do in adulthood by playing at it and I know that humans are just socially advanced primates, but watching a little boy talk about how he likes to read the Financial Times or another boy talking about being a missionary , it really comes through clearly how much they are playing at the roles of adulthood. Though the parents are never seen and other adult figures in this movie are primarily absent, it's hard not to see the influence certain adults must have had on the way these kids see and emulate adulthood.

The first follow-up, 7 Plus Seven, is in color and reunites the filmmakers with these people when they are 14. One of them has moved to Australia and many of those who were friends and interviewed as a team in Seven Up! no longer go to the same schools. The differences apparent and the similarities still there after seven years is amazing. They are asked, basically, the same questions. Some of their attitudes have changed, others remain the same, and others remain the same but are nuanced a bit (the well-to-do girl says she has nothing against colored people, but if she never met one she'd be okay with that). One of the boys recants his wish to be an astronaut, saying it was just childish dreaming, while another is pursuing being a jockey just as he said he would when he was seven. One interesting addition to the questions is whether or not they believe in God and why or why not. I was amazed at the way most of them answered the first part with assurance, but when asked why or why not, they seemed to struggle, finding answers deep within themselves.

Of note here is the way these teenagers seem to be so uncomfortable with themselves. Many of them who, previously looked at the camera or the interviewer when they were seven, now gaze down, afraid to make eye contact with anything. This is particularly present in the girls, I noticed. They are asked what they think of the documentaries themselves and many of them express concern that they don't see the point. Several express displeasure in having the repsonsibility of representing kids who share their background. There is often a struggle to express individuality that leads to a near argument between two of the boys about whether labor strikes are a democratic right. In this scene, the two that are debating are on the ends of a couch and the third boy, in the middle, looks at the camera and the interviewer uncomfortably.

I love this. All of this. I can't wait to see the rest of them. It's strange to think that these people that I can see as children and teenagers from the vantage point of young adulthood will, in the course of 2 more movies, outgrow me. I am interested to see if the filmmaking grows further as the people do, beyond the leap from b&w to color. These two films are part of a bold concept, executed cleanly, and fascinating to watch for anyone interested at all in what people are, how they live, and what it means to grow.

Nick Nolte's Hotel Rwanda II: Awww Hell on Earth

Stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt has talked about the quintessential Nick Nolte moment that you can see in every Nick Nolte movie. Oswalt grimaces and mumbles in a Nolte-esque way, something along the lines of "awwwwgeeeeessssawwwwhelll" As Oswalt puts it, Nick Nolte has a moment in every movie where he just can't take it anymore.

I couldn't help but chuckle when, during Hotel Rwanda, Nolte, playing a beleagured U.N. officer, does indeed have one of these moments. He's told that he can have no troops to defend the Rwandans and suddenly, you see on his face that he just can't take it anymore. However, he doesn't make a sound. Is this a step toward a more mature, nuanced Nick Nolte? I like to think so.

Day 4: Hotel Rwanda

Brian Wilson: Help Rwanda, help help Rwanda.

I’m against genocides. I’d like to state that up front, just so there’s no confusion. In fact, to my mind, genocides are among the most vile and disgusting things that human beings do to one another. Hotel Rwanda is a movie about an attempted genocide in the country of Rwanda, one that took place while I was in high school and, due to the fine, fine journalism we have here in the United States, an attempted genocide I had little knowledge about prior to watching the movie. The movie plays a little like Schindler’s List in Africa, though it lacks a lot Schindler’s weight and panache and substitutes for these things a few genre tropes borrowed from other movies and filtered down to a PG-13 rating. It’s based on a true story, but doesn’t get into much of the nitty gritty that would make it feel as if it was based on a true story. The movie is certainly compelling and has a fantastic lead performance by Don Cheadle, but ultimately feels too pat, too safe, and too pandering.

Don Cheadle plays (pardon me as I check IMDB for the proper spelling here) Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of a Belgian-owned hotel in Rwanda that caters to wealthy clientele. There is a growing conflict between the Hutu people of Rwanda and the Tutsis, divisions among the people created, we are told, by the Belgians who used to run the country. Paul happens to be a Hutu, but we see very early on that he has no particular allegiance to this group, beyond what they can provide for the hotel. His job gives him access to many important political figures and he is very good at giving these people the sense of refinement they feel they are due. Through Paul’s dealing with these people, the political situation in Rwanda is efficiently delineated and we get a sense of the arbitrary, yet deadly, nature of the conflict. When things turn serious, Paul will turn to all of his associates on both sides of the conflict for aid and, more often than not, he is able, through bribery and bluffing to get it.

And, thankfully, things turn serious pretty quickly. We get a sense of Paul’s love for his family, for his belief in style and money as problem solvers, and the people he is connected to, and then, an order is given and the Hutus begin slaughtering the Tutsis. Paul’s wife and, by extension, his children, are Tutsis so, naturally, they must run, lest they be caught and killed. They eventually wind up at the hotel where they begin sheltering refugees from the conflict, surrounded on all sides by Hutu militants bent on killing them.

The rest of the movie details Paul’s attempt to keep the handful of refugees, particularly his family, at the hotel alive while planning for an escape. As he does this, the movie turns the screws on Paul pretty well and Cheadle is more than up to the challenge of expressing this. His anguish and fear is palatable and ratchets up nicely with each new obstacle until, at the characters lowest point, he begs for a solider to shoot him, telling him that it would be a blessing to be dead. In another moment after being confronted with the extent to which the atrocities in his country are occurring, Paul struggles to tie his tie and Cheadle shows first the amusement that such a simple act should give him trouble, then the frustration, until finally, he vents his anger, fear, and frustration at the clothes he is wearing.

These are nice moments, both hinging on Cheadle’s performance. This is where the movie succeeds. Where it fails is, I think, is in a certain lack of cinematic aggression. From what I know about it, the Rwandan genocide was a horrific event. Much of the killing was done by machetes. Machetes! That would hurt! One of the characters says “The machete is an awful way to die.” I would agree, but the movie provides nothing to support this. Despite a nicely implied moment where we witness through Paul’s eyes some rape cages, there’s a curious coyness to the movie about cruelty, barbarism, and sheer human awfulness. A moment that seems lifted from The Killing Fields shows us the extent of the damage, but there’s nothing, really, showing us the cause.

If this seems like I’m wishing for a movie that depicted more cruelty for the sake of displaying cruelty, I’m not. I just can’t get over this feeling of patness to the whole thing and am trying to pinpoint certain areas that seemed lacking. It may be that the character of Paul (who, I’m aware, was a real guy) never engages with any serious moral decisions. There’s a moment where he leaves his family that comes close, but the movie (and, I suppose, life) give him the opportunity to retract this decision that takes away whatever weight that decision had earlier. There’s a feeling of “Paul and his people good, other people bad” that seems far too black and white to truly reflect the situation at hand.

Additionally, at many points in the film, I was thinking of Assault on Precinct 13, Night of the Living Dead, a handful of other zombie movies, Schindler’s List, The Killing Fields, and The Road Warrior. This movie is aiming higher than many of those movies were, but could have used some of what they offered to intensify the conflict, cinematically. All of these movies have the distinction of depicting their conflicts to extremes, often grotesque, to ratchet up the viewer’s empathy for the besieged. Here, I felt a remove most of the time. I was watching a really well made recreation of an event, but never got right down into the dirt, the mud, the blood.

I liked this movie while I was watching it. I think it’s admirable for trying to bring attention to a conflict many Americans weren’t aware of. After I watched it, though, I felt a little conflicted about my feelings. I wondered about the PG-13 rating, wondered if the movie was toned down in an attempt to bring its message to a larger audience. I wondered if it was worth it. Liberal white guilt says, yes. The cinephile says no.

Questions, questions, questions

So, I'm wanting to make it a habit to write a "discussion question" in the mornings, simply to blog about thoughts I'm having with regard to movies. I'd love to hear thoughts from other peoples out there so, if something strikes you, I'd love it if you commented like it's 1999.

Last night, I was discussing good movies, bad movies, Gates of Heaven and the ending to A History of Violence with my girlfriend, Tara, and she said something that I liked a lot. It was something along the lines of "All movies ask questions of the audience. The good movies explore these questions, the bad ones try to answer them." I like that a lot. You could certainly apply that to all works of art, but for the purposes of this blog, I'll think about it in terms of movies.

I don't know if attempting to answer its questions makes a movie "bad" automatically, there are many other things about movies that can save them from that label (including something about pure kineticism that I'll probably start talking about when a couple of Rambo movies come in from Netflix [which will be pretty soon, actually]), but I believe that most of the great movies I've ever seen state their questions, show several possible answers, ask new questions of those answers, and, ultimately, throw their arms up in frustration and say to the audience, "well, what do you think?"

I think it's a particular problem in mainstream Hollywood fare, to be sure. I mean, I like mainstream Hollywood fair 99% of the time (I'm easily entertained) but Hollywood no longer produces great movies. The best you can hope for is something that, while it's telling you the "right" answer to the question it has posed, is speaking in a way that's entertaining. Perhaps the reason mainstream Hollywood movies have such a problem, on a whole, is that the questions they're asking are not conducive to exploration (Aliens invading? Your smarts will save you. Or your love of family. Or your love of family & God) They ask questions that can have only a "right" or "wrong" answer. Or questions that don't apply to anyone (when did you stop beating your wife?). Or maybe they're not even asking questions, mabye they're just assuming we all have the same questions and telling us the answers to them by showing how loveable retarded people can teach us all important lessons.

I'm not sure and am now throwing up my arms in frustration. What do you think? har har har.

Day 3: Gates of Heaven

Pet cemetery investor: Death is for the living and not for the dead.

Gates of Heaven is a documentary about pet cemetaries by the (rightfully) acclaimed filmmaker Errol Morris. I'm a fan of his work. In fact, I think that his The Fog of War is one of the best movies ever made. Now that I think about it, a case could be made for every movie of his that I've seen (The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control) being placed among the best movies ever made. His body of work is so honest, compassionate, and reveals so much about all kinds of human nature that it crosses over to the world of high art.

Gates of Heaven is both big and small at once. It is a quiet, contemplative film, but it deals with the way the living handle death in such a focused and nuanced way that it feels epic in scope. It's a beautiful movie, with exquisitely framed shots and no music but that which comes from an onscreen guitar. It's a masterpiece.

The movie details, through interviews with the particpants, the opening of a pet cemetary, its ultimate closure due to financing troubles, the movement of the dead animals to a second pet cemetary, and, along the way, the personalities of all those involved. In the middle, there is a priceless interview with an older woman that, while it may go on a bit too long, nearly had me believing that the whole thing was staged a la Christopher Guest;her manner and speech seemed so real it must have been faked.

On the surface, it is about these things, but really, it's about the way people live, what they choose to do with their lives. One segment of the film focuses on the Bubbling Well pet cemetary, run by the patriarchal Cal Harberts. The movie’s focus on the contrast between his two sons -- the older one worked in insurance for a while, the other flunked out of college -- as they both talk about working at the pet cemetary is exhilerating. The older brother, who has not worked there as long and, thus, is forced to work under his younger brother, talks in analytical terms about how much he has to learn, how he is trying to understand the "dealing with people" part. He is clearly excited when he talks about his work in the insurance business, bringing potential hires into his office where he has deliberately set up many trophies for the interviewee to see. The younger brother gets excited talking about his stereo, the songs he's written, and, when no one's around, plays music on powerful speakers into the valley where the dead animals reside. While these differences exist, they also seem linked in the same sadness of bad choices and failed aspirations.

The movie can best be summed up in a scene where Floyd McClure, who opens the doomed cemetary the movie begins with, talks about how awful he found the experience of visiting a rendering plant. He speaks at length about how awful the plant treats the dead animals, tearing them apart. He remarks that the smell of the place was awful. He says the smell of the place was so bad that, when he sat down for dinner, before he could enjoy the smell of a nice piece of meat... and here he pauses, looks away from the camera for a moment as if he’s just realized what he’s said, and then quickly adds, “or vegetables”… he had to take a sniff of his wine to clear his nostrils of the rendering scent. This moment, where you see a man take stock of the choices he's making in his life, unfolds cleanly before your eyes. The movie is full of these moments and, as a result, inspires similar thought in the viewer.

Going even further, the same man claims that God put these pets on earth solely to love and be loved. Throughout the film, the relationship of the owner to the pet is depicted as one of God to man. The owner is referred to as the pet’s master, and “good” pets are the ones that provide absolute fealty to the wishes of the owner, allowing total trust between the two entities. (This is nicely contrasted as the (priceless) older woman talks of betrayals she’s experienced at the hands of her very human son.) There’s much talk from grieving pet owners of whether or not their pets will be with them in heaven (and much agreement that the pets will, indeed, be there). The talk of God and the relationship of people to pets made me think that perhaps what we witness in a pet cemetery and, perhaps, all funerals, is an expression from the living of what they hope they, themselves, will experience from a grateful deity when they die.

Much to ponder, much to think about, and I don’t feel as if I’ve done the movie justice even with the help of my brilliant writer girlfriend. The movie reveals so much about these people by simply letting them talk. And the longer they go on, the more they reveal themselves. That very thought makes me want to stop right now. But it also makes me want to go on…

Quick post

A friend of mine admitted to me that he watched bad movies to feel smarter than them (which is fine). He made an interesting point while talking to me about it. He said that he liked bad movies because he liked being in awe of their illogic. And I think that's something I do as well. There's something about movies that are just so insanely awful, they feel as if they were made by space aliens trying to approximate our culture or something. Thoughts, comments?

Day 2: The Nesting (1981)

Lauren Cochran: I may be sick, but I’m not retarded!

The irony of low expectations

I’m not really into the whole watching bad movies for irony’s sake thing. Not really. I mean, I love MST3K and I’ve been guilty of watching something in this mindset a time or two (to wit: the ending of Stayin’ Alive… oh man is that just brilliantly bad). But, I don’t get the point of intentionally sitting down to watch a bad movie just to prove to yourself, or those with and around you, that you’re smarter than it. Ha ha ha! What a dumb looking effect. Ha ha ha! What a cheesy line! Generally, I try to watch movies I suspect will not be up to par with the same diligence and attention I’d give to, oh, Broken Blossoms. Sometimes this enables me to be receptive to little gifts that these movies have to offer (see my post about The Mind Snatchers) but then…

Some movies are really, really, really trying on my intentions to not watch them ironically and The Nesting is definitely one of them. It’s a ghost story dealing with neurosis made in the early 80s and, so, it’s hard to know if it’s trying to cash in more on the success of Friday the 13th or Woody Allen. This isn’t a screamingly bad movie. It’s mediocre at best, bad at worst, but never awful. That translates into boredom. And in that boredom, ironic comments grow, flourish, and multiply. Nevertheless, let’s pretend that I didn’t say anything to my TV (you broke a window with your bare elbow and didn’t get cut? What?) while this movie was playing and move on.

Lauren Cochran is a writer with a book called The Nesting. We first see her suffering from agoraphobia. She sweats profusely as she walks toward the front door of her house. When she walks outside, we learn that one of the things agoraphobics suffer from is seeing the world through wide-angled lenses. After failing to get into a cab that she’s successfully hailed, it’s off to see her psychiatrist. Somehow. I don’t know how, she’s just in his office suddenly. He stridently informs her that agoraphobia can be treated and we immediately see her back in her apartment with hypnotherapy tapes and books in her house, soon to be interrupted by her overbearingly jovial friend, Mark.

At this point, I had learned 2 things about the movie. The first was that lead actress Robin Groves reminded me of an odd combination of Sally Field, Judy Davis, and Judy Garland (2 parts Field, one part Garland, a pinch of Davis). The second was that this movie was going to have one of those “oh they didn’t shoot enough coverage” editing styles. After the scene with her questionably platonic friend Mark in her apartment, the movie cuts directly to her back in her therapist’s office talking about going to the country. It’s one of those cuts that feel so jarring because there seemed to be no reason for her to be going back to her therapist’s so soon and there’s no transition material from one scene to the next. Not in the shots, not in the dialogue, not in the editing. Bam. Back to the therapist.

Anyway, Lauren decides (despite her therapist’s objections) to go to the country to treat her agoraphobia. She and Mark drive up to the country where she rents a suitably spooky house in the middle of the woods. The nicest scene in the entire movie happens around this time. The annoyingly jokey and cheerful Mark is about to leave to go back to the city. There is a discussion about who will drive Mark to the train station, Lauren or the quantum physicist(!) who rented the house to her. It’s a very naturally done scene and actually managed to evoke a bit of nervous empathy in me for Lauren who was going to be separated from Mark, a representation of everything safe for her. Though I found Mark’s character annoying, I also didn’t want him to go away. Nicely done, The Nesting!

But soon after this scene, it dawned on me that Lauren’s walking around and interacting with a few locals, including the friendly quantum physicist, with no problems whatsoever. I immediately understood that the agoraphobia she was suffering from earlier would be ignored until it suited the plot. You know, like the car that doesn’t start when the hero needs it to (a cliché this movie uses two times in quick succession, getting quite a groan out of me both times). I was correct about this. The agoraphobia happens at the worst times imaginable. But then, I guess, there’s never a good time to have agoraphobia.

Then the haunted house stuff begins and it’s pretty standard stuff. Creaking noises, strange dreams, doors opening and closing, and a mysterious cackling woman who appears at unfortunate times. In true 80s horror fashion, Lauren disrobes at one point in front of a three-way mirror (giving the movie three-times the nudity for the price of one willing actress) and there’s a ghost-related gory death here or there. One local tries to rape her, another tries to kill her and both are offed in grisly fashion. There’s a car chase with zero kinetic energy and obvious repetition in the sound effects of squealing tires. After learning of all this horror, Mark comes rushing back to save Lauren, but, on the way, his own car develops a bad case of sound effects, thus delaying his return and forcing Lauren to fend for herself.

The weirdest and most illogical thing about this movie is the way the ghosts in the movie act. They, like all movie ghosts, just want to communicate something to her that they feel she needs to know. And, accordingly, the ghosties start out trying to protect her, but, toward the end they start attacking her after she’s learned what they wanted her to know. This seems a very ineffective method of communication to me. Maybe there’s a psychological thing going on there that I didn’t pick up.

Ultimately, The Nesting is a movie with one or two nice scenes and a quantum physicist who serves no purpose, really, other than a brief philosophical discussion about the nature of the unknown in science. Hmph. Why waste a good quantum physicist in this way? He could probably have built a time machine to save them all from the perils of the past. The movie’s not bad, not good, and not very enjoyable unless you’re feeling extra-generous one evening or are a Gloria Grahame completist. She’s the cackling woman.

sneak preview

I am currently watching a movie called The Nesting for tomorrow's blog.

Week 1 index

Day 1: A History of Violence

Day 2: The Nesting

Day 3: Gates of Heaven

Day 4: Hotel Rwanda

Day 5: Seven Up! & Seven Plus 7

Day 6: Zardoz

Day 7: Zombie 3

Day 1: A History of Violence

Carl Fogaty: You should ask Tom... how come he's so good at killing people?

A fair warning. I may have spoilers in here. Sorry. There is too much about this film to talk about without them. Go see it and then come read this.

The American Dream
David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence is a film that demands a second viewing. There’s nothing “twisty” to it, nothing gimmicky demanding a second viewing like the ending to The Sixth Sense. It’s the bigness of the movie’s emotional weight that calls me back to it. It’s the way it escalates and ends so perfectly. But mostly it’s the way it explores its many ideas about the seductive power of violence, the futility of this violence, the deconstruction of the American family, and the myth of a noble protector. Some are placed under complete scrutiny, some are working deftly in the background, and still others are brought up to be examined and then quickly swept aside for the next idea. This is a very rich movie. The reason I want to go back to it someday is the implicit knowledge that this movie will only get better with each viewing of it.

The story centers on Tom Stall, an average Joe with a loving family who lives in the prototypical Hollywood Small Town™. He runs a small diner, commiserates with regulars, tells his blonde daughter that there are no monsters, and struggles with accepting his teenage son’s growing maturity. Nothing new here. Though Tom’s life is depicted with a certain mawkishness and the kind of reverence for the simplicity of small town life that has, as far as I know, never existed outside of cinema, there is an uncomfortability that permeates each beat we go through with our main character. A lot of this can be attributed to Viggo Mortenson’s performance. Here he acts like a man who has been given the perfect American life and isn’t quite sure that he belongs there. As a result, the opening of this movie feels a bit muddled, and at times, plodding. That’s on the first viewing. I imagine on the second, it will carry a greater significance since each bit of information it drops pays back tenfold later in the film. (Last chance: spoilers ahead)

As the movie reveals (after adeptly teasing us with mystery for a few scenes), Tom is not who he says he is. He has kept secret a former life where he was known as Joey Cusack (one assumes that he’s the missing third in the John-Joan-Joey Cusack trifecta of brilliance), a man who engaged in violent acts and had some connection to the mafia. At some point, Joey repented and reinvented himself as goody Tom Stall and, at the time of the movie’s beginning, considers “Joey” dead.

The plot machinations are interesting enough, but they pale in comparison to the way the movie considers acts of violence. I was grateful for the ways in which Cronenberg never let acts of violence pass without serious consequences. If there was ever an argument for the use of graphic gore effects, this movie is it. When someone gets shot in the face, the result is horrific. Whenever a gun appears onscreen, the tension rises palpably. There is real pain and real horror here (with a special nod to the scene in the diner as building to its climax exactly right).

Additionally, the movie explored not only the horror of violence, but also the seductive quality it has. Tom’s son physically demolishes a bully in school in a very satisfying scene for anyone who’s ever been picked on and Tom’s wife, while being suitably furious and disgusted at Tom for lying to her, is not exactly turned off by the situation.

The audience I saw it with was telling. It’s odd to me when an audience is audibly more uncomfortable with acts of sex than with someone being killed, but hey... that’s something else the movie deals with in a fascinating way. In fact, there’s just too much to write about. One could go on about the view this movie takes of the ideal American family, the way violence permeates our society on a very fundamental level… but I'm afraid those things will have to wait for my graduate thesis when I have more time.

The movie does have its flaws. Mortenson’s performance is a bit uneven and some of the dialogue is a little clunky. The structure of the movie seems a bit odd at times… the beginning gives the killers Tom later disposes of an emphasis that they don’t seem to deserve for their purposes in the larger storyline. Howard Shore’s score doesn’t quite work at the beginning. And, of course, the beginning itself may be as awkward and clumsy as I felt on my first viewing. Having said this, the movie is otherwise well crafted by all involved and William Hurt nearly steals the movie from Cronenberg in his role as Joey's brother late in the film. It’s certainly among the best of Cronenberg’s films and I know I’ll be thinking of it for years to come.

Oh yeah, the movie really, really knows exactly how to end.

first review later today!

first review should be up around 6 p.m. Mountain Time today.

edited to add:
Make that 8 p.m. Mountain Time. The theatre I was going to see History of Violence in had technical difficulties requiring me to see a later show. Apparently, they can't show movies when the toilets don't work. Jerks.