Day 39: Bad Company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week 5 Index: Man vs. Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New TV

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

Day 37: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Bennie: You guys are definitely on my shit list!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 36: The Endurance: Man vs. Nature 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 35: Gerry: Man vs. Nature 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wiggling, loose ends of timespace

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

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

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

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

Day 34: Go West: Man vs. Nature 5

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

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

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

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

Wow

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

I didn't know that could happen.

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

Day 33: Walkabout: Man vs. Nature 4

White Boy: Well, where are we now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Movie Gods grant me favor

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

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

Day 32: Little Otik: Man vs. Nature 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

The remains of the day

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

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

Day 31: Fitzcarraldo: Man vs. Nature 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Halloween

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost in my pants

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

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

Day 29: Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter

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

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

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

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

Week 4 Index

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