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.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Day 31: Fitzcarraldo: Man vs. Nature 2
Sunday, October 30, 2005
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.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
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.”
Friday, October 28, 2005
Day 28: Female Trouble
Dawn Davenport: “Pretty pretty?”
I went to elementary school at a time when VCRs hadn’t yet taken over completely. There were times when a film projector was brought into class, the teacher would thread a movie up, the lights were turned off, and soon the rapid click-click-click of the projector would fill the room as we watched an educational film. The subjects were wildly divergent, and the only ones I remember specifically are a grisly eye injury film and a bus behavior film that both, at least in my memory, featured gore effects worthy of Tom Savini. What sticks in my mind particularly is the aesthetic of the educational film. It was a simplistic one featuring static camera shots, bad acting, and severely degraded film stock. While watching Female Trouble, it dawned on me that the film played like a mix between one of these old educational films and feature-length cautionary films like Reefer Madness, but from a culture vastly different than the one I grew up in. Female Trouble is an early John Waters film, a gleeful, kitschy mess that borders on annoying and boring, but is far too endearing to really quibble with.
If you’re wanting to watch a movie for revolutionary (or even competent) filmmaking, then move on. The movie is staged like an early sound film with static camera shots and characters gathered around a central location, talking to one another. The sets are cloistered and claustrophobic, as cheaply made or photographed as any Ed Wood production. The acting is, well, as far from naturalism or Stanislavski as you can get. This is all beside the point. It becomes apparent from the moment the title song plays, sounding as if it were recorded in someone’s basement, that it’s foolhardy to watch this movie with any attention or expectation with regard to production values. I bring it up only because it took me a few scenes to get into the movie’s rhythms and appreciate what was going on. (It should be noted that I’d blown my capacity for critical thinking on Robocop 2 the night before.)
The movie coasts on a joyous, sometimes shrill performance by Divine, playing “Dawn Davenport.” It tracks Dawn’s life in stages, from a high school student to a single mother living a life of crime, through a career as a model for grotesque forms of beauty. The climax of the film occurs when Dawn is given her own stage show, and it is marvelous. Divine jumps up and down on a trampoline, sits in a box of dead fish, and delivers a passionate monologue about the beauty of crime. All of this is met with thunderous, enthusiastic applause, hilarious in its improbability and, as far as the movie’s concerned, its inevitability. Female Trouble sketches a world of repellent characters celebrated for their audaciousness: there’s a hair salon where people have to audition to get their hair cut, but they’re chosen based on their repulsiveness. Dawn is a shoo-in, and after some time as a client (and a marriage to one of the hair dressers), the owners invite her to be a model for their photography project. Their project is a kitschy, ironic, post-modern deal in which Dawn is asked to commit crimes for the purposes of photographing them. It’s not entirely clear if the owners of the salon are taking these photos for their own enjoyment or if they plan on exhibiting them, but the joke is that Dawn takes their offer to be “in show business” seriously, believes she’s a famous and celebrated model, and, even after having her face scarred by acid, thinks she’s beautiful in response to the egging on from those involved in the project.
So, things get pleasingly out of hand. Along the way, the movie deals with topics as audience-friendly as bodily mutilation, sexual fetishism, incest, intravenous drugs, and child murder. What’s enjoyable in Female Trouble is how, despite a pervasive feeling that some of these things are included in the movie, partially, to shock people, they’re shocking in the same way a two-year-old is when it swears loudly in public. The makers of this film, it would seem, can’t help it, and so an aw-shucks cuteness emerges amidst all the (surface level) ugliness. It’s a bit like seeing a seven year old tell the joke from the recent movie The Aristocrats. Unsettling, but hilarious.
There’s a pretty awesome story here too about the nature of beauty and the insidious, influential nature of cloistered groupthink. Dawn’s character is similar to the one Nicole Kidman played in To Die For. Unlike To Die For, Female Trouble sides completely with the character and her point of view as she quests for beauty, fame, and freedom from her annoying and disturbed daughter (this is the kind of movie where the daughter is played by an adult wearing little girl’s clothes with her hair in pig tails).. When her fame develops into the criminal sort of fame, Dawn embraces it; loves every minute of her trial and eventual imprisonment. No such thing as bad press and all that. Because the movie sides so completely with this character, the pathos that emerges from the collision of Dawn’s worldview and that of society’s is genuine, even though the movie exists in an ironic, repurposed world in which the quest for beauty involves mainlining eyeliner.
Overall, Female Trouble is a very good time. Funny, irreverent, and purposefully, unabashedly silly. It suffers from bloat quite a bit, with scenes going on far longer than they should on a regular basis, and the crux of the narrative doesn’t really kick in until about halfway through. It gets a bit shrill at times, and so crosses from endearing to annoying during some scenes. But this is a movie that knows it’s a “bad movie” and revels in it, laughing at itself from the outset. At the same time, it believes in its badness the same way Schindler’s List believes in its goodness, and so it rises above being a kitsch-for-kitsch sake movie. It uses its unconventional quality to successfully examine a character that, due to the influence of powerful people, begins to believe that “bad” is “good.” And, accordingly, the movie had the same effect one me while I watched it.
Ooops: Woman vs. A Box of Dirt
I realize now that I've made an error, that the timing of the man v. nature week will start for the readers of the blog, not on the 29th, but on Sunday, the 30th. For the record here's the final list:
1. Lost in La Mancha
2. Fitzcarraldo
3. Little Otik
4. Walkabout
5. Go West
6. The Endurance
7. Gerry
Thanks to Rebecca earlier for suggesting a Shackleton movie (though not the one I chose). And Ash for inspiring me to keep Gerry on the list. I'm sad to lose C.H.U.D. but it might come back when I do a horror movie theme in time for Christmas.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Day 27: Robocop 2
So, the thing about Robocop, as portrayed in the original movie, is that he’s a symbol for the power of humanity over the cold, heartless mechanisms of technology and corporate enterprise. Robocop tells us that a corporation works much like a machine, treating the human elements as cogs within the machine and that eventually, due to the capacity for emotion in the human brain, these cogs will fail to function as they’re intended and will eventually take down the inhumanity of the machine by appealing to things like loyalty and compassion, or at least have the audacity to question what the machine is doing. Further, the movie Robocop depicts an iconic police hero while simultaneously deconstructing said police hero by creating the perfect cop who, like Dirty Harry, is remorseless, unstoppable, and driven by a sense of duty that overwhelms every other aspect of his life and also happens to be as robotic as these traits imply. But, ironically, where the robotic cop’s perfection fails is in a conflict of identity: Robocop is swayed by fleeting memories of a life lived in which stopping crime was not the only thing that motivated him, a life where he felt things that he is no longer able to. Robocop shirks his duty as he seeks answers to the inevitable questions, “Who am I? Where do I come from?”--the answers to said questions being two-fold: that he is first a product of corporate manufacturing and, second, a being with a name (Murphy) and sentience and, thus, an identity beyond his technological components or programming. So, when Robocop shoots Dick Jones at the end of the first movie and is asked by the leader of the heartless corporation what his name is and Robocop replies “Murphy,” it’s a symbolic victory of the power of human identity, no matter how tenuous, to override whatever programming may be inflicted on us by life and/or genetics. The movie also states that free will is an integral part of being human, one that will overcome all programming and that this is preferable, even at the great risk it entails, to the alternative (witness the failure of the purely robotic [and thus, anti-human] ED-209 due to its inability to take in
new information and Robocop’s persistence to get around his own robotic limitations).
Additionally, Robocop was a sly, though not subtle, critique of Reagan-era policies, realistically projecting the effects of favoring pure capitalism as the means to solve the problems of society to the point that the police department is privatized and ineffectively managed by Omni Consumer Products (OCP), causing the police to strike. There are quick digs at a society based on “cowboy-style” militarism (a family board game depicted in the film is called Nuke ‘Em) and the Star Wars missile defense system (which, when it malfunctions, only adds to the robotic/human crisis in the movie). Robocop also pokes fun at the very idea that corporations can effectively provide social services, since Robocop is prevented by his programming from arresting any members of OCP, at least one of whom is involved in illegal activities, particularly with the notorious criminal Clarence Boddicker (the man who happens to have killed “Murphy,” thereby providing the opportunity for Robocop to exist at all). The equating of crime and corporatism, technological failure and inhumanity provides a rich subtext over which a conventional Western (the cowboy kind) revenge story plays (reminiscent of the plot featured in the movie Hang ‘em High) as the noble sheriff relentlessly seeks closure to a crime that personally affected him.
To take it even further, the story of Robocop is a reinterpretation of the Christian myth (something I never thought of until I heard the film’s director, Paul Verhoeven [by all accounts, a madman] mention it on the Criterion Collection’s DVD commentary track), depicting Murphy as spiritually pure (he arrives in the tempestuous city from the beatific suburbs), tortured to death, and resurrected to administer judgment on the crimes of humanity, this time in a very literal sense. The movie wisely casts the members of the OCP corporation as members of the heavenly arena, working above the common folk of Detroit in lofty towers, led by Dan O’Herlihy’s benevolent “Old Man” character, designing a new, utopian paradise called New Detroit, something that would be rather simple for them to build were it not for this pesky problem of misused free will (i.e. crime) among the human population. When tasked with ridding Detroit of this problem, the #2 guy at OCP, Dick Jones or, if you will, Lucifer, comes up with ED-209, a purely robotic solution that hilariously malfunctions at a board meeting, causing the Old Man, or if you will again, God, to come up with a new solution, one that can make decisions based on the experience of having lived in the shoes of a man and thus, Robocop or, if you will one more time, Jesus.
In fact, the ending of Robocop encapsulates the thesis of both The Passion of the Christ (that the sacrifice of Jesus is instrumental in containing the devil in hell) and The Last Temptation of Christ (that Jesus’ sacrifice was the act of a superhuman making a conscious decision to create a better world for mortal mankind) as Robocop eliminates the Lucifer character (the Old Man’s favored staff member) from heaven. Dick Jones is even, funnily enough, depicted as falling out of the heavenly towers, plummeting to the earth, cast out of Heaven and sent to hell. Heaven is therefore purified of a corrosive, jealous element and Robocop has found a way to combine both his human-like free will and his robotic super powers (which carry the limitations of programming) by taking on the mantle of the people’s protector.
I fucking love this movie!These are half-assed, undeveloped, sophomoric reads on the film, each one of which can be elaborated on, all of which are firmly supported by the film, all of which play with and against one another simultaneously in the film, and there are probably a great many more reads one could apply to the movie. The movie is a superb example of how a surface-level, stupid, simplistic and commercial idea (PART MAN, PART MACHINE, ALL COP!) can be developed into something far beyond its facade by taking a plot chock full of conventions and clichés and using it as a framework on which to hang something that says much, much more than the simplistic narrative would. Robocop, the character, is taken from human, to robotic, to a synthesis of the two that is compelling, exciting, and, like a Shakespeare play, appeals to every aspect of my psyche, from the groundling desire for Old Testament-style revenge to the high-minded desire to see society and humanity seriously and effectively examined. I mean, I like to see men mutated by toxic waste and smooshed by cars and to see the bad people in the world get what’s coming to them as much as anyone, but at the same time I want to think about why I feel that way and what it means to be a “bad guy” and where “get what they have coming to them” comes from. Robocop is a movie that provides all of this and it’s funny too. I’ll buy that for a dollar.
So what the fuck happened with Robocop 2? There’s a scene about halfway through the movie where OCP needs to reprogram Robocop and they take the opportunity to make him “friendlier,” to have him shoot less and solve conflicts in a more non-violent fashion. The result is something that should be a funny comment on design by committee, but is not (I’ll explain why in a second), as Robocop consequently walks around smiling, teaching hoodlum kids lessons about hygiene or saying to a man whose shooting at him, “we should talk this out.” This isn’t funny in the movie because prior to this scene in the movie, the script has already neutered Robocop into being the lamest, squarest Joe fucking Friday by-the-book cop you’ve ever seen! He’s got these lame one-liners as he offs baddies, like Robocop has watched a bunch of cop shows or, hell, even the original Robocop (where the one-liners like “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me” originate from the Murphy character in a naturalistic way [by that I mean, Murphy actually means “dead or alive you’re coming with me” when he says it, even though Murphy’s personality is also informed by watching a show called T.J. Laser {the key to, perhaps, a further read of the original Robocop}] so, when Robocop says these things, it’s depicted as nothing more than a distorted reflection indicating that some of Murphy’s memory has been retained and furthers the movie’s robotic/human questioning) and Robocop 2 emphasizes Robocop’s disdain for those who break the law to such a point that whatever nuance and humanity he learned (or remembered) during the events in the first film have, apparently, been tossed out the window. For God’s sake, before they reprogram and defang Robocop, he’s already admonishing children in an arcade to go back to school, he’s already defanged by, for some reason, not being able to assault a child who menaces him with a gun (Robocop’s three prime directives are “Serve the public trust”, “Protect the innocent”, and “Uphold the law,” which means that in the eyes of this movie, children are alwaysinnocent, even when they’re clearly not, a perspective that’s furthered by the tenderness with which the menacing child’s death scene is depicted [a scene so unintentionally schmaltzy, I wanted to throw my TV out the window] and a perspective which would seem to defy all logic in face of the fact that the movie is constantly depicting children breaking the law and hurting others [and one wonders at which age Robocop is suddenly allowed to hurt someone... is it 18?]!), so this “funny” bit where he’s a “by the book” socially mannered nice cyborg is painfully boring, as Robocop has already been depicted as someone with a robotic “users are losers” or “crime doesn’t pay” attitude, despite his ascension from one who rigidly follows the code of law to someone who learns how to negotiate subtleties within the law in the first film.
Additionally, gone is the sly critique of the Reagan-era policies; instead we have the most strident endorsement of them since Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” educational videos. Robocop encounters a cache of a futuristic drug called “Nuke,” sighs and shakes his head ruefully, and then says “Nuke” in a mournful tone. He might as well say, “Those kids today, when will they learn?” Additionally, though the police force is on strike again (in both cases I’m reminded of the air traffic controller strike that happened during Reagan’s term) Robocop is quite content to be a scab, one of the only cops working. Later, Robocop even indirectly inspires his fellow police officers to break their strike in order to fight the evil force that is soon to
plague the streets. Take that, you pinkos!
I think the problem with this movie is that someone, somewhere in the production took the whole concept of Robocop seriously. Verhoeven’s film was parodying itself while it played, constantly poking fun at its own moral code and asking the question of whether or not a robotic enforcement of the law would be such a good thing. This movie doesn’t get the joke and treats Robocop as seriously and with as much reverence (and as unsuccessfully) as The Passion of the Christ depicts Jesus. Yes, the movie says, Robocop is a good cop, particularly when he’s obeying his prime directives. The movie apes the original in style, but never what was going on underneath the style. To wit: the commercials and newscasts in the first film were satirical and brilliantly expositional, projecting a world where violence and technology were more commonplace than the time the movie was made. Here, they’re just silly, Saturday Night Live parodies of television commercials and newscasts exaggerated to the point that they’re completely unbelievable (though they are funny), nowhere near as smart as what was going on in the original film. The same thing goes for the corporate stuff: it’s all so arch, it’s as if it was made for kids. Strike that: it’s as if it was made by kids. The movie ends with Robocop stating, “we’re only human,” referring to the question of whether Robocop is a human or a machine. But this is one question Verhoeven’s film did answer. It concludes that he was both, but he got to choose how he saw himself, and I think it also suggested that this is true for all of us. It makes me angry because the sequel ignores this. I’m also angry because the original Robocop asked a lot of other interesting questions, and Robocop 2 either ignores them or answers them as if they weren’t tough questions to begin with. In fact, the sequel acts as if there are no tough questions at all as long as you’ve got a tough cop to gun them down.I fucking hate this movie.
The bastards
It's been a long time since a movie has made me as angry as Robocop 2. I have such vitriol and hatred for that movie, I cannot even begin to describe it, though it will probably be readily apparent in the "review" I will be posting later, a review that I had to start writing while the movie was playing because my feelings about what I was seeing were so strong. So, in response to yesterday's post about feeling like I'm on the cusp of something, I think I've fully embraced whatever it was I was bordering on since I have been unable to think of anything outside of Robocop 2 today. I think every single cell in my body is now magnetically attuned to my television screen at home, such that when I'm not in front of it, everything feels "off" somehow. It may be that I'm beginning to live in that cave Plato talked about, the electric shadows on my tv becoming my reality.
In other news, we carved a pumpkin last night. God I hate Robocop 2.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Day 26: The Battle of Algiers
Note: This review has not been thoroughly edited or proofread.
It’s impossible for me to watch this movie without thinking of the current American campaign in Iraq. Of course, it’s also a relevant film if you want to talk about Vietnam or the American Revolution, or any case of asymmetrical warfare. But yesterday, when I watched this film, the 2000th soldier was killed in Iraq and new details about the whole Valerie Plame investigation leaked out. This film depicts a struggle between a powerful Western force, in this case the French (insert joke about the French and war here if you like and then shut the fuck up), and a growing Islamic insurgency, screaming for independence. The location is Algiers, capital of Algeria where the French have established a prosperous colony. The movie is a prescient, patchwork look at the future of warfare, switching perspectives from the revolutionary Islamic side to the French side. The movie is fairly even handed, giving credence to both perspectives, though it’s weighted toward the revolutionaries.
But, sociopolitical concerns aside, the movie is a feat of faux-documentary style. A lot of the movie is shot on the streets with a shaky, handheld camera. The movie has some spectacular set pieces involving large crowds on the verge of rioting and some footage of terrorist attacks with large-scale explosions. Like <i>My Dinner with Andre</i>, the aesthetic of the film is pulled off with such skill and accuracy that, had I not known differently when I sat down to watch it, I would have been convinced that there was some true documentary footage mixed in with the narrative.
The movie is commendable for showing both sides of the conflict with equal compassion. As the terrorist attacks in Algiers increase, the French send in Colonel Mathieu to be in charge of the armed forces there. Mathieu has respect for the revolutionaries, but he knows the job he has to do and endeavors to complete it. He tells his men, quite plainly, that they will need to torture people to get the information they need in order to find the members of the insurgency. Meanwhile, on the other side of the conflict, we see the effect of bombings on the Islamic population and the cathartic sway of violence on a young Arabic man named Ali La Pointe. Ali is exposed to revolutionaries in prison and, once out, joins up with them. As he rises in power in this organization, he gleefully avenges the mistreatment he’s had at the hands of Europeans, gunning down enemies with abandon.
But herein lies another wrinkle presented matter-of-factly by the film. Due to the asymmetry of the battle being fought, my cultural and personal inclination is to side with the underdog (Americans being the descendents of dissidents and terrorists, after all). Yet there is a fantastic scene in which we’re shown exactly what the revolutionaries are fighting for. The revolutionaries ban drinking and prostitution among their people and, shortly thereafter, a drunken man is attacked by a throng of children who identify him as a wino and, thus, an enemy. This is followed by Ali ruthlessly gunning down a pimp in the name of the revolution. Now, my cultural and personal inclination is to not side with them since I loves me some hookers and beer. Or at least the option thereof. And then there’s the fantastic... excuse me, FANTASTIC... sequence in which three women take off their shawls, cut and dye their hair, carry timebombs in their handbags, and place them at strategic locations. The bombs are timed in such a way that after the first bomb explodes, the citizens nearby have enough time to dismiss it as a propane tank explosion before being caught up in the second. And yet, who are our sympathies with here? The civilians or the women who planted the bombs? For me: both.
The movie achieves this straddling of sympathies by presenting honest and coherent motivations for everyone involved. It’s as matter-of-fact as most documentaries, brilliantly shot and edited. I have a few quibbles. The score (otherwise wonderful) does fall prey to sentimentality a couple of times. I was also not pleased by the ending of this film: it presents documentary-style riots long after the characters we’ve been following are gone from the scene, depicting an event that could have been properly explained by a final title card. It seemed a bit show-offy and tipped the hand of sympathy squarely to the side of the revolutionaries. The way Ali’s backstory was placed in the movie felt a bit more arch than necessary. But these are all minor issues, nothing that detracts from the fundamental core of the film. This is a fantastic film.
(Author’s note 2: I’m going to make the controversial statement that I’m against torturing people, but the candidness of the commander’s plan to commit torture was refreshing in light of current events. So was his intelligence. He studies the enemy, analyzes the structure of their cells, and works to understand them better so that he can defeat them. When word of the torture leaks out, the press questions him on the subject. And, while he’s very coy about the whole deal with the press, he also asks the press (and, thus, the world) if France should even stay in Algeria anymore. His message is that France should withdraw from Algeria if the people are going to be too concerned with the humane treatment of the enemy. Additionally, he never, ever engages in any dehumanization of the people he’s fighting and speaks of his respect for the leaders of the revolution often. This is so starkly contrasted with the bumbling, overzealous, and ultra patriotic rhetoric coming from certain portions of the government [and the news media] as to make me wish for the umpteenth time that I were a sissy Frenchman with an understanding of nuance and subtleties. End of line)
Mentality bites
The experience of watching a movie a day is getting to me. I've got this feeling coarsing through me today that I'm on the verge of something, mentally speaking. Like, I'm in some kind of a border zone right before a grand change in thought comes over me. Perhaps I am on the verge of becoming part of the cathode-ray "new flesh" from Videodrome and soon I will have a vagina that accepts Betamax tapes in my tummy! I hope the new flesh comes with HD because if my flesh will become new, I don't want it to be low-rez. Also, I'd like to have an extra mouth on the inside of my throat so I can taste food twice. And a cookie.
Tonight is going to be one of those nights where I have no fucking clue where I'm going to find two hours of time to sit down and watch Robocop 2 or Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. Expect tomorrow's review to be shocking. The Battle of Algiers will be up later today.
MAN VS. A PUDDLE OF WATER!
Here's the tentative list for Man v. Nature week:
1. Lost in La Mancha
2. Fitzcarraldo
3. Little Otik
4. Walkabout
5. Go West
6. C.H.U.D.
7. Gerry
Couldn't find Birds II, even at the all-inclusive Video Station though I'd love nothing more than to see that one as part of the week. I watched The Mosquito Coast about 3 years ago during a Peter Weir kick, so no luck there, either. If there are any more suggestions, I'm still interested since I'm looking for, maybe, a snowier or underwaterier movie than a couple that I've got here.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Day 25: Alphaville
My interest in seeing Alphaville was two-fold. It often comes up on lists of the best science fiction movies, a genre that’s been dear to me for most of my life, and it’s a Godard film. I’ve always been curious to see more of Godard’s films. Up until last night, I’d only seen Breathless, a movie that I enjoyed on a purely intellectual level. It’s been a long time, but I remember feeling that it was, basically, a movie about other movies searching for an identity of its own.
So, here’s the deal: Alphaville is a good science fiction film, but that’s not saying much considering the way the genre is often cheapened in films by a reliance on special effects and pretty lights. The story focuses on a film noir-ish secret agent who, sometime in the future, journeys to Alphaville with orders to kill an evil scientist living there. The film jettisons the standard trappings of sci-fi. Everything in the movie looks contemporary with the time the movie was made. This is an interesting choice, visually, since the landscape is so familiar, but the attitudes and structure of the society of Alphaville are not.
The whole time I was watching it, I was delighted by how the movie played with (and put the emphasis on) language. The whole movie is about the power of language: the way it shapes our worldviews, the violence found in the logic of scientific language, the illogic of poetry (and by extension, the illogic of emotion). The residents of Alphaville refer to the dictionary as The Bible (and words deemed too challenging are stripped from it on a daily basis). They are sort-of ruled by a computer, but the computer is really just an Internet-like compilation of information that makes decisions for the populace based on mathematically derived projections of how to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The citizens adhere to these decisions with apathetic obedience, even when other members of the population are killed for disobedience. Yeah, we’re firmly in Orwell-lite territory, but I enjoyed the way this movie sought to examine more deeply the effect of language control on the population. Godard’s random, chaotic style also makes this one of the only science fiction films (the original Solaris being another) that actually plays as strange as the otherworldly events it depicts. The film sometimes feels as if a foreign influence has infected it and it’s working hard to rid itself of the intruder, mirroring the plot.
But, having said this, Godard’s style makes watching Alphaville akin to being prodded in the ribs with a pointed stick every few minutes. Godard’s filmic digressions from the plot are rewarding when he focuses on poetry and language since these are thematically consistent, less so when the digressions are incidental to the internal concepts of the movie itself. The movie has an obnoxious score that has to be a (not funny) joke, punctuating everything in the first twenty minutes with loud, overbearing horns. There are random cutaways to blinking neon lights and other, even more contextless, meaningless insertions throughout the movie, the intentions of which I wouldn’t begin to guess. At times, the sound of the film erupts into beeps for no discernable reason. A fight scene staged in stills and a wildly cut-up car chase are as inept and misguided (and unintentionally funny) as anything in Zombi 3. There’s a mania to the film as it seesaws wildly from conventional plot mechanics to bouts of pretension.
Alphaville is a frustrating film. It’s occasionally great but often dull. I’m left, again, feeling intellectually satisfied by a lot of the movie, but angry at the idiocy with some of the choices here. What’s particularly frustrating is the fact that this incompetence gets in the way of some really fertile material. In addition, there are moments where the movie really connects with the illogic that must exist in a society founded on logic, solely due to Godard’s chaotic and ill-advised choices. Call it a wash. Anyway, I’m done thinking about this movie for a few days.
Corsetted madness
I just realized that I forgot to praise Tess for not having a scene where she protests the corset. But then, part of the problem with the movie was that she symbolically embraced it, so I'm not sure what to think.
The Perfect Snob
Head over to Hollywood Elsewhere for Jeffrey Wells's honest and thoughtful evaluation of "The Film Snob's Dictionary", a book coming out next year. He includes quotes from the book's introduction which, among other things, talks about the film's snob's pride in having "populist, un-arty taste". Though I don't think I've ever been a film snob (I'm more of the Scorsese-style enthusiast also mentioned in the introductory text), I'm no stranger to having pride in populist, un-arty taste. But this is a trait I've been moving away from in the past few years of my life. Super-arty things like Bergman's films or My Dinner with Andre hit me harder, emotionally, than anything else these days (though like any decent human being, I'll shout the virtues of the very populist Sergio Leone or Dario Argento to anyone who will listen and sometimes to those who don't care.). I'm not entirely sure why this is, other than I'm tired of seeing people wrestle over who gets to hold the gun at the end of the movie.
Anyway, this sounds like a book I'll have to pick up when it comes out.
Monday, October 24, 2005
Day 24: Tess
Roman Polanski’s Tess is a trying film, overlong and dry. It’s based on Thomas Hardy’s book Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a book I am unfamiliar with, but now know is one I won’t be reading. Most of the problems I have with this movie can probably be attributed to the source material, though that isn’t to let the makers of the film off the hook. I had a hard time caring for the main character here, a shy, retiring young woman whose naïveté is only surpassed by her capacity for self-martyrdom. The movie lacked any kind of traction in its narrative. At times I felt as if there were a checklist of plot requirements being checked off somewhere in the engine of this film. The movie has a sumptuous design and period detail to spare, but, when, twenty minutes into a two-hour and fifty minute film I am admiring the period detail, I think something’s gone wrong.
One thing that’s very wrong here is the lead performance by Nastassja Kinski as Tess. The character is withdrawn and depressed for most of the movie and Kinski plays only the surface levels of these emotions. She’s quiet, shy, withdrawn, but there’s never any indication that there’s anything motivating these character traits. Additionally, the few moments when Tess actually does make a decision and works to enact it are, for the most part, painfully confined to off-screen status. Very often, the movie abruptly cuts forward in time with little warning. At first it’s a great use of editing, but after three or four of these cuts, there’s a sense that all the developments the movie's skipping over would be more interesting to watch than the bits we do get to see.
And, so, we have a movie of inaction as Tess shuffles from job to job, is lusted after by various men and then abandoned by them. One sequence that stands out and illustrates the paucity of narrative friction in the rest of the movie is when a pious young man named Angel courts Tess. Previously, Tess had a child out of wedlock (the father was a louse and the baby died) and she decides to confess her history to him in a letter. When she discovers that, when she slid said letter under Angel’s door, she also slid it under the rug and, therefore, he never received it, the camera pans over, away from her and blinding sunlight fills the full frame. It’s a surprisingly effective evocation of her feeling, something the movie doesn’t engage in enough. Polanski has a gift for understatement, but in this movie, his stately, artful approach to filmmaking only serves to deaden the tale.
I couldn’t get over the feeling that this movie felt like a well-produced PBS version of the book. The movie’s narrative has a bit more weight when taken as a whole; Tess’s story is more moving in retrospect than during the piece. It’s the kind of feeling you have after reading a good book that is, at times, hard to get through. A book has the advantage of being an art form entirely out of time: one can set down or pick up a book at a whim, after all. Here, after the fourth or fifth time the movie depicts a character walking down long stretches of abandoned road, it becomes as plodding and dull as such a journey on foot would be. It's a feeling that the entire movie suffers from.
More dining with Andre
Got the following info from Phoenix about My Dinner With Andre for thems as is curious.
From Ebert:
Gene Siskel and I did a question-and-answer session with Gregory and Shawn after the first anniversary screening of the film's New York run. What I remember best from that night is that the two men, asked what they might do differently a second time around, said they would switch roles--``so that no one would think we were playing ourselves.''
Not in real time but filmed with exquisite attention to the smallest details by director Louis Malle over a period of weeks. And not in a New York restaurant but on a studio set. The conversation that flows so spontaneously between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn was carefully scripted. ``They taped their conversations two or three times a week for three months,'' Pauline Kael writes, ``and then Shawn worked for a year shaping the material into a script, in which they play comic distillations of aspects of themselves.''
Thanks Phoenix!
In other news: I haven't talked about this, but I've been watching these movies from the floor of my office. Over the weekend, back pain and leg pain inspired Tara and I to go buy some viewing chairs. They should be in sometime this week, at which time, I will give my thankful ass the opportunity to post on the blog.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Day 23: My Dinner with Andre
Wallace Shawn: I don’t know what you’re talking about!
Now this is how you do a movie about ideas. Two men, who were friends some time ago, sit down, have dinner, and talk for an hour and fifty minutes. Their conversation, philosophical and heady, contains some of the most riveting moments I’ve ever seen in a movie. I sat, rapt, leaned forward in an attempt to soak in every word. At times, it wasn’t even what they were talking about that held me in such sway, but how they were talking about it. There’s a frankness, an honesty, and an earnestness to the discussion between the two men that’s moving. Though they’re talking about concerns that can be readily dismissed with a flippant remark or a hostile joke, both men are game to probe their own minds and to take each other seriously. When they challenge each other’s positions, it’s in a friendly enough way but, nevertheless, still contains a great deal of suspense and tension. I never knew how extreme the emotions would get or how they’d be expressed.
Wallace Shawn (who actually utters the word “inconceivable” at one point in this film, bringing a meta-chuckle to everyone who’s familiar with his role in The Princess Bride) and Andre Gregory play the two men, presumably as themselves. Shawn is a struggling New York playwright, Gregory a once successful stage director who’s gone away for five years to indulge in consciousness expanding experiences. He’s done things like go out into the woods for days with a large group of people who don’t speak the same language, where they do… whatever feels natural. They talk about the state of the theatre, the way people conform to certain roles, science, and the nature of perceptual experience. Shawn starts off the movie distant from Andre (he’s going to the dinner out of obligation) and, for a while, humors the other man as he talks about things like the power of meditation and mind-over-matter. Soon enough, Shawn is swept along by Andre’s enthusiasm and engages with him. It’s here, where the two men begin challenging each other’s points of view, when the movie really takes off.
The overall theme of the conversation is consciousness itself. It’s amazing that, for its subject matter, the movie never comes off as pretentious or overly simplistic. A lot of this can be attributed to the two actors in the film. I don’t know how this movie was made, but the acting in it is so natural and honest, it feels like the director, Louis Malle, sat down with four cameras and just recorded these two intelligent men talking. Andre, in particular, is absolutely spellbinding as he relates his consciousness expanding experiences, nutty as they may seem to us and Shawn. He does most of the talking in the movie, and the way he talks about these moments in his life is evocative, creating images in the mind that are far more compelling than any filmic representation could be. Indeed, most of the experiences he describes would seem cheesy or cheap if they were shot on film, but how they affected him is so clearly written on his face that they can’t help but feel entirely genuine. One moment, in particular, when he describes a moment when he was buried alive, is so effectively delivered that it’s impossible not to share the fear and terror he felt.
But, if watching the movie is a great experience, what happens afterward is even better. When Shawn tells us, in a voice over closing the film, that he went home and told his girlfriend Debbie all about his dinner with Andre, I wanted to know all about that conversation (I thought it was too bad Malle didn’t make a follow-up film featuring Shawn and Debbie talking about the dinner with Andre). When the movie was done, I felt the way I always do after having one of these conversations myself, only, not being allowed to participate between these two men, I hadn’t yet gotten to say what I had to say on these subjects. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence or a desire for self-exploration will surely ponder the questions this movie asks, talk about these questions (as I did) with a similarly intelligent loved one, probe the thoughts and feelings this movie brings up. There’s a certain privilege in being able to think about the topics brought up here (a point the movie makes by having Andre, who’s clearly coming to the conversation having thought these subjects through more than Shawn has, pay for the expensive dinner at the end) and the film inspires one to take full advantage of that privilege.
