Choking The Alligator

2009-02-01T13:24:00.011-05:00

Movies watched, January 2009

Love and Death, Woody Allen, 1975
In czarist Russia, a neurotic foot soldier and his wife plot to assassinate Napoleon, filtered through the zaniness of vintage Woody Allen. Woody, why don't you make movies like this anymore?

Who Is Bozo Texino?, Bill Daniel, 2005
This hour-long documentary is an exploration of the history of train graffiti, as well as a search for the identity of the person behind "Bozo Texino," a sketch of a character with an infinity symbol-shaped hat that has been seen on railway cars for decades. Shot with a Super 8 camera over a 16-year period, it includes interviews with legendary boxcar artists Herby, Coaltrain, and so on. I found myself wishing it was a bit more in-depth, as well as more of an investigation into the mystery behind Bozo Texino, and found that the zine Bill Daniel's Mostly True, makes a nice supplement to the viewing experience. (It even has fake hobo ads!)

Dirty Work, Bob Saget, 1998
After reading Artie Lange's Too Fat to Fish, my boyfriend checked out a few of Artie's movies. That's all I'll say.

The Times of Harvey Milk, Rob Epstein, 1984
This documentary was made just a few years after the assassination of Harvey Milk, California's first openly gay elected official, and I find that I prefer it to Gus Van Sant's Milk, which actually features much of the same archival footage. Free of the cheesy narrative devices I disliked about Milk, this film tells the story in a more straightforward manner, and it's just as, if not more, powerful as the recent biopic.

Beer League, Frank Sebastiano, 2006
Way better than Dirty Work. A baseball classic in the same league as The Bad News Bears. (I'm serious.)

Berkeley in the 60s, Mark Kitchell, 1990
A documentary chronicling the student protests at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Interesting, but a little bit too long--there were definitely parts when it dragged a bit.

Bananas, Woody Allen, 1971
All you need to know can be found in this interview.

Woyzeck, Werner Herzog, 1979*

Punk Attitude, Don Letts, 2005
Another shitty punk documentary leading you to believe that punk music started in the 70s in England and New York and died there too.

Y Tu Mama Tambien, Alfonso Cuaron, 2001
This bittersweet road movie skillfully conveys the ways friendships change and people move on, how someone you were once so close to can become a stranger. I love the little asides, in which a small personal detail or anecdote is told about the characters. Much of the storytelling reminds me of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and it's not just because the characters are Hispanic.

The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975
A journalist (played by Jack Nicholson) takes on the identity of a man he meets in a hotel in Africa, about whom he knows practically nothing. Whether it's because he is bored or wishes to escape his personal problems, or something else, I find the abruptness of his decision intriguing. Of course, the consequences of this decision become more than he may have bargained for.

Lessons of Darkness, Werner Herzog, 1992*

Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Werner Herzog, 1972*

Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog, 1982*

Stroszek, Werner Herzog, 1977*

Who Gets to Call it Art?, Peter Rosen, 2006
A pretty straightforward documentary about Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he served as from 1960 to 1977. Nothing special here, other than a nice history lesson about modern art in the 60s and 70s, as well as a fine tribute to the man who breathed new life into a dinosaur of a museum.

Gate of Flesh, Seijun Suzuki, 1964
This colorful film from legendary Japanese B-Movie director Suzuki takes place in the years after World war II. A band of tough Tokyo prostitutes live by a strict code, which consists of no pimps, defending the abandoned building where they live, attacking other hookers who come into their territory, and punishing anyone in their group who gives away sex for free. Of course, one of them falls in love with a thief who has been hiding in their home (he's killed an American G.I. and needs to lay low for awhile), which presents some problems.

Burden of Dreams, Les Blank, 1982*

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974*

F for Fake, Orson Welles, 1974
One of Orson Welles' last films, this free-form documentary focuses on the subject of fakery, weaving together a story about an art forger, whose biographer wrote a fraudulent book about Howard Hughes (the subject of which was made into this feature film a few years ago), the reclusive Hughes himself, and Welles' own career, which was launched on the grounds of a falsified resume, not to mention his legendary radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, which had many listeners running to hills believing America truly was under extraterrestial attack. Throughout the film, Welles plays a few tricks on the viewers as well.

Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes, 2008
I was a little disappointed with this movie. Based on the 1961 novel by Richard Yates (which I have been meaning to read for some time but have not done so yet), it tells the story of a young couple with lofty aspirations who move from New York City to the Connecticut suburbs to raise their children, because that's what you're supposed to do. Naturally, they're miserable, whether riding the commuter train amidst a sea of gray flannel and hats to their mindnumbing office job in Manhattan or wearing an apron and washing dishes and playing housewife in their well-manicured and smartly decorated house. They feel as though they're above suburban status quo normalcy, that they're destined for better things, but they slowly begin to realize that there is nothing special about them, and that's the real disappointment. No one will remember them, they will have no great legacy, after they die their memory will live on in the lives of their children but eventually there will come a time when their impact on the world is forgotten completely, (this point is emphasized when Frank asks his boss if he remembers his father, Earl Wheeler, who worked for the same company in the same department for years--the name does not ring a bell). All of this would have made for a powerful movie, the sentiments of which still ring true (many of the things I've just said mirror my own anxieties about mortality), but it misses the mark. The movie opens with the Wheelers already hating their lives and each other's guts, which immediately turns the viewer off to any emotionally empathy. Maybe that's how the book is structured too, but I think it would have been more effective if the viewer had seen more of a transformation, starting with happy and hopeful times. If we could have seen them age and disintegrate, their hopes squashed, the life squeezed out of them, we might feel the same pain for them. As such, I could have predicted the ending, and left not feeling numb so much as dissatisfied. I will be reading the book though.

*More on these to come.

2009-01-04T20:13:00.009-05:00

Year-End Catch-Up

It’s 2009 and, going back through last year’s viewing list, there were nearly 60 movies that I did not write about here. Pathetic, I know. What’s also pathetic is how every single post I make has some kind of intro about how I never post anymore (getting promoted=no more time to write on your lunch hour). So I figured the best way to handle this would be to list them all, writing about a few of them—not necessarily the best of the bunch, just the ones I feel compelled to write about, though some of these will be saved for the next couple of posts. This thing is long enough as it is!

I also plan to return to my original formatting, with weekly viewing lists and selective writings—a little less ambitious, but more realistic. That said…

The Inner Life of Martin Frost, Paul Auster, 2007
Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler, 1969
Blue in the Face, Paul Auster and Wayne Wang, 1995
In the Heat of the Night, Norman Jewison, 1967
Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach, 2007

Night of the Living Dead, George Romero, 1968

I saw this while vacationing in Pittsburgh, the setting for just about every George Romero movie ever made. This one was actually filmed about 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh, in the rural town of Evans City, PA. Six years ago I actually made the trip out there, somehow managing to find the cemetery from the opening scene (a few wrong turns were made but considering the vague directions I think we did pretty well), where my friend and I took some silly photos in which we pretended to be zombies. In the same weekend we also went to the Monroeville mall, site of Dawn of the Dead; I’m told that until a fairly recent renovation, the interior looked almost exactly the same as it did in the movie. I was sad that I missed it, but this minor setback did not deter us from taking some more silly photos.

Night of the Living Dead is really the quintessential zombie movie, the one that all others must live up to. The classic black and white image of the little girl eating her father’s brains is just as creepy today as it was 40 years ago. The other point that comes to mind is the fact that the hero of the film was portrayed by a black actor, something that was considered controversial at the time. The ending—I won’t ruin it—has been construed by many as a social commentary on racism. While Romero says that’s absolutely not the case, and that the ending had been written before casting Duane Jones in the role—because he “simply gave the best audition,” which, I might add, is an even better and more democratic reason than trying to commit an act of social significance—I can’t help but think about the implications when viewing that scene. And thus I’d say it inadvertently conveys that message, whether intentional or not.

Lastly, has anyone seen Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D? It’s a hilariously redubbed version of Night of the Living Dead peppered with random interruptions like fireworks, moments in history, and footage of a dancing lady. This 1991 spoof was distributed to 500 video stores nationwide, including one in suburban New Jersey where I grew up. I haven’t seen it in about ten years and had nearly forgotten about it until now. And then I remembered about a little thing called YouTube.

Strange Culture, Lynn Hershman-Leeson, 2007

Crazy Love, Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens, 2007

I was worried that, like most of the “personal documentaries” I’ve seen, this might be a bit boring, failing to interest anyone besides the filmmaker. But I was quickly drawn in by the dark story—the obsessive creep lurking in the shadows, the poor, lonely lady in the dark glasses, the media frenzy that unfolded around the case (as Jimmy Breslin says, “It’s great, it sells your papers”).

The abbreviated story is as follows: in 1959, a beautiful young woman named Linda begins dating an older man named Burt. She discovers that he’s married and leaves him. He hires thugs to throw lye in her face, permanently blinding her. He goes to prison for 30 years (“I thought it wasn’t long enough,” says Linda) but gets out much earlier on parole. He’s not allowed to contact her, but that does not stop him from doing so and professing his undying love to her. And, despite all expectations, she agrees to meet him and the two eventually marry.

The fact that a woman would marry the man who intentionally blinded her might seem completely insane, but consider the facts. After the incident, Linda was still a beautiful, lively woman, striving to remain independent. She tried going on dates but as soon as men saw beneath the dark glasses, they were scared away. By the time Burt got out of prison, she was feeling lonely and desperate—so she gave in and agreed to meet him. On this particular day she wore her clear glasses, revealing herself to him. When he told her he still thought she was beautiful, that was enough for her. In a way it’s a marriage of convenience, providing financial security, safety, a pair of eyes, and a little company. According to Linda, “he’s a good husband…I probably do love him, but I find it hard to use that word.”

They seem happily married—we see them arm in arm, slow dancing, going on cruises. “It’s Burt and I against the world,” Linda professes. As ever, she remains a strong character, never appearing frail or crippled, constantly nagging Burt (“Where’s my coffee?”), staying as active as she can—and for a blind lady she’s a pretty good painter. But one cannot help but remember that Burt made her who she is today, which begs the question: are they soulmates, or did Burt force her into the marriage, making sure that no one else would want her, taking away all other options? Regardless of one’s views on the matter, no one can deny that theirs is a very complex relationship. None of their friends or family approves, but then, no one but Burt and Linda can truly know the whole story.

As for the film, there’s nothing very innovative about the style. One technique worth mentioning is that Burt and Linda are interviewed separately until the film comes to the point in the story when they get married, communicating a feeling of separation and then coming together. But essentially this is a straight up, meat and potatoes documentary that’s carried by the story—thankfully, a particularly engrossing story.

The Wild World of Hasil Adkins, Julien Nitzberg, 1993
Hollywood Vice Squad, Penelope Spheeris, 1986
Soylent Green, Richard Fleischer, 1973

Pineapple Express, David Gordon Green, 2008

Like Superbad, this Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg penned script is totally over-the-top, precariously toeing the line between funny and ridiculous (but managing to stay on the funny side). Part buddy movie, part stoner comedy, part spoof on action films, one of the things that sets it apart from previous efforts is the degree of bloody, exaggerated violence: an ear is shot off (hello Reservoir Dogs), a character is shot seven times and lives (“Am I seeing shit because I’m stoned or because I have no blood left in my body?”), lots of shit gets blown up. That and it’s directed by David Gordon Green, whose previous works—Snow Angels, All the Real Girls, George Washington, etc—are dramatic, poetic, and serious. Pineapple Express marks a pretty major departure for Green, and he seems to revel in the gloriously brutal comedy. I hope he makes more films in the vein of his earlier oeuvre, but I certainly enjoyed this change—maybe not the greatest comedy I’ve ever seen, but I’m definitely glad I saw it.

Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn, 1967
The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula, 1974
El Mariachi, Robert Rodriguez, 1992

Man on Wire, James Marsh, 2008

On August 7, 1974, French high wire artist Philippe Petit illegally walked a tight rope between the then recently built towers of the World Trade Center. Actually, walking isn’t quite an accurate description—he ran, danced, lay down, and juggled across the 3/4 inch cable, nearly a quarter mile off the ground, moving back and forth eight times in the span of 45 minutes, while bewildered policemen watched and waited until they could make their arrest.

Part documentary biopic, part thriller, Man on Wire is comprised of both archival footage and dramatic reenactments, switching between the hours leading up to that infamous day and a more chronological portrayal of Petit’s life. According to him, the inspiration for his most notorious feat came to him while flipping through magazines in a dentist’s office. He came upon a picture of the proposed design for the Twin Towers, and, drawing a line between them, knew he had to “conquer” them.

Completing this mission proved quite difficult. As Petit says in the film, “It’s impossible, that’s sure. So let’s start working”—an apt representative statement for this story. After two practice runs at the Notre Dame de Paris and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, he began to tackle his prime objective in a manner not unlike one might see in a bank heist movie—scouting the area, acquiring fake IDs, and assembling a crew, including a “man inside” who worked in an office in one of the towers. Though we already know the outcome, that he did indeed accomplish his goal, it’s nonetheless thrilling to watch the drama and tension unfold.

Some might wonder what the point of all this might be. The term “senseless acts of beauty” is what continues to come to my mind—in other words, there is no point other than to do something wondrous and incredible, to create beauty in the everyday. Petit strikes me as the type of person who exudes joy and creativity; throughout the movie he is constantly animated, almost frenziedly elated, as he tells his story. Ultimately, it’s a demonstration of the will of humanity to commit the impossible, to do whatever it takes to realize a vision.

Planet of the Apes, Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968
Planet of the Apes, Tim Burton, 2001

Late one night while checking my email I discovered that the Walter Reade Theater was hosting a series of Charlton Heston movies. In celebration they were also conducting a trivia contest, the winner of which would receive two complimentary tickets to a screening of their choice. Instead of going to bed as I should have, I decided to try my hand at the quiz. I’m not exactly a Charlton Heston buff, but with the Internet you can find out just about anything. (Is that bad? Did I cheat?) The bonus question, “Six Degrees of Charlton Heston,” required that one provide a chain of actors linking Heston to Steven Spielberg. With a little strategy and help from IMDB I was able to come up with the answer fairly quickly (for those interested: Charlton Heston :: Burt Lancaster :: Kevin Costner :: Tim Robbins :: Tom Cruise :: Steven Spielberg). So, feeling proud of my nerdy Internet sleuthing skills, I emailed the New York Film Society people, and the next day found that I had won. (I’d be curious to know how many other people responded to the quiz—am I the only one with nothing better to do?)

Just before the movie started, the series curator gave a little introductory speech, at one point announcing there was a special guest in the audience that night. For an instant a feeling of horror and embarrassment came over me—until I realized he was talking about Norma Jacobs, an actress who played a chimpanzee in the movie. (This provided for a rather comic moment, when an elderly man sitting a few rows behind her got her attention and proceeded to beat his chest while making ape noises.)

As for the movie itself, while campily amusing, there were a few moments where I had to struggle to stifle my laughter, whether at cheesy dialogue or Heston’s over the top cackling. (Hey, I felt bad laughing at this poor lady’s movie, even though she only played a bit part in it.) I have to wonder if it would have been more effective had I not known the ending already (the same goes for Soylent Green—is there anyone out there who doesn’t know what soylent green is made of?) Would it have been that much more powerful?

What I do know is that I’m pretty disappointed with Tim Burton. Apparently his remake was more faithful to the book, which I’m guessing is just a pulpy sci-fi paperback that no one would remember if it hadn’t been made into a classic movie. (I do love my 60s paperbacks although I tend to buy them for their great covers, not the amazing storytelling contained within.) Sometimes being faithful to the source material is not the best move, which is unfortunately the case here.

3:10 to Yuma, James Mangold, 2007
Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment, Karel Reisz, 1966
Desperado, Robert Rodriguez, 1995
Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen, 2008
Who Are You Polly Magoo, William Klein, 1966
Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Robert Rodriguez, 2003
Night on Earth, Jim Jarmusch, 1991
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Robert Altman, 1976
The Haunting, Robert Wise, 1963
The Saddest Music in the World, Guy Maddin, 2003
The Innocents, Jack Clayton, 1961
Home Movie, Chris Smith, 2001
Vanishing Point, Richard C. Sarafian, 1971
Dr Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick, 1964
The Education of Shelby Knox, Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt, 2005

The Man Who Laughs, Paul Leni, 1928

Based on a Victor Hugo novel, this 1928 silent film tells the story of Gwynplaine, the son of a 17th-century lord who betrays the king, who in retaliation has a smile permanently carved on the face of young Gwynplaine and leaves him for dead in the desolate winter tundra. Fortunately he’s taken in by a traveling carnival man, but forever haunted by his disturbing appearance.

My interest in the film stemmed from my discovery that the character of Gwynplaine was the main inspiration for the creation of Batman’s arch nemesis the Joker. And dare I say, he is quite the spitting image.

The Model Couple, William Klein, 1977
Synecdoche New York, Charlie Kaufman, 2008
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry, 2004
The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry, 2006
Pitfall, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962
Annie Hall, Woody Allen, 1977
Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino, 1997
God's Angry Man, Werner Herzog, 1980
The Stranger, Orson Welles, 1946
Spoorloos, George Sluizer, 1988
The Face of Another, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966

Milk, Gus Van Sant, 2008

I’m not the biggest fan of Gus Van Sant’s movies. And so my take on Milk is that it’s good in spite of its director, that its subject transcends the movie-viewing experience and takes over from beyond the grave. You can’t help but love Harvey Milk, just as you can’t help but feel overcome with emotion, whether triumphant, joyful, or painful—and sometimes all of these at once.

There are some clichéd aspects: the obligatory slow motion death scene (isn’t there some other way to communicate drama?), scenes when Sean Penn starts Acting with a capital A, and my least favorite moment(s): at the beginning there is a scene in which Milk offhandedly comments to his boyfriend Scott that he won’t live to see his 50th birthday. Later on in the movie, Scott says “Looks like you’ll make it to fifty after all.” And then, after the fatal shot, the first scene replays in its entirety. The first time I thought the comment was a bit heavy-handed. Then when it was referenced again I thought, “Is that really necessary?” By the end I was on the verge of cringing. Filmmakers should assume that their audience has the ability to recall scenes they’ve witnessed only hours before, and not only that, to pick up on thematic points. There was absolutely no need to replay that scene, or even to reference it again—it would have been playing in the back of everyone’s minds throughout the film, a grim reminder of the climax it was heading toward. I firmly believe that any film would be better served by such lessons in subtlety.

The use of documentary footage is effective, particularly in the opening, which depicts men covering their faces in shame as they’re led out of gay bars by policemen, crammed into a paddy wagon until there’s no room left to move. Overall Milk demonstrates how far we’ve come since that time, yet, troublingly, how far we still have to go. Echoes of the recent passing of Proposition 8 are acutely perceived in the battles against Proposition 6 (I can only assume that the film was completed long before the election and that any resemblance to the present time is by disturbing coincidence). I suppose that, ultimately, mandatory firing of gay teachers and any public school employees who support gay rights is just a tad worse than banning same sex marriage. But that’s a pretty thin silver lining (maybe nonexistent); we’ve taken some relatively minuscule steps in the greater scheme of things.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Jeremiah S. Chechik, 1989
The American Friend, Wim Wenders, 1977
Expelled, Nathan Frankowski, 2008
The Pool, Chris Smith, 2008
Good Morning, Yasujiro Ozu, 1959
Scrooged, Richard Donner, 1988
Nightmare Before Christmas, Henry Selick, 1993
A Christmas Story, Bob Clark, 1983
The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky, 2008
Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton, 1996
Downtown 81, Edo Bertoglio, 1981

2008-11-02T23:35:00.004-05:00

American Movie, Chris Smith, 1999
Storytelling, Todd Solondz, 2001

“The common sensibility of these filmmakers is that they invite the audience to share their feelings of superiority to the people they put on screen. And too often, the largely white, urban, liberal, educated audience these filmmakers attract have been happy to join in, looking down their collective noses at the hicks and rubes and bourgeoisie trapped on the screen like specimens under glass.”—Salon.com

I can’t help but feel that this quote (and the rest of the longer review from which it was extracted) drastically misses the point of the films it condemns: the works of Chris Smith, Todd Solondz, Errol Morris, Michael Moore, and so on. These are all directors whose movies I happen to enjoy (I count Morris as one of my favorite filmmakers of all time), so does that mean that I’m among the guilty—that is, the nose-thumbing, smugly laughing urban white liberal audience?

Here’s my take on Chris Smith’s American Movie: it’s an inspiring portrayal of a unique character’s intense and dogged quest to make a film. Despite his lack of means, Mark Borchardt is determined to fulfill his dream, and while the resulting short film, Coven, isn’t exactly a masterpiece, he accomplishes his goal. (There are some great shots in Coven, by the way, and I don’t think it’s too farfetched to speculate that if he were to make a movie using a better script, he might have ended up with something really remarkable. So he’s not a great writer—that’s only one part of making movies.) Sure, the documentary is peopled with some strange and inimitable characters, and some of the things they say are very funny, whether or not it’s deliberate. Much of the humor stems from Borchardt’s extreme earnestness (and come on, wouldn’t anyone who had been present on the day one actor’s head was smashed through the “prop” kitchen cabinet, barring said actor himself, have thought the scene unfolding before them was completely hilarious?). But these quirks are endearing, only making me like the characters even more—sure, I laughed throughout the movie, but not patronizingly (really!). Responses such as the Salon review seem kind of knee-jerk—the viewer is so afraid of offending someone that they fail to see the film for what it is.

I’m sure there are some who do laugh at these characters unsympathetically. But is that the fault of the filmmaker? Some, Todd Solondz among them, seem to think that intention is only one factor, that once the film has an audience, that audience’s reactions are as much a part of the film as what’s onscreen. I, however, must disagree—the stunted response of some brainless douchebag has nothing to do with the greater work of art. It’s just one opinion, one response among many.

Solondz’s Storytelling tackles this issue of culpability, of mocking one’s subjects for comedic purposes. It seems to be as much of a reaction to American Movie* as it is to criticisms of his own films. “I’m not looking down on them, I love them!” Toby Oxman proclaims a little too defensively (ahem) when someone challenges his intentions in tackling his current project, a documentary about a suburban New Jersey family. In one scene, Scooby, the disaffected, aimless teen of the family, walks into an early screening of the documentary and is horrified to find the audience cracking up as he’s interviewed. But the difference between this and something like American Movie (or Vernon, Florida, or Roger and Me) is that not only is the audience laughing much harder than would realistically happen (especially since the scene they’re watching isn’t all that funny, which I suppose could have been intentionally exaggerated within Scooby’s mind), but that unlike Mark Borchardt, Scooby isn’t endearing—he’s just annoying. (And come on, why doesn’t he just grow a pair? I can’t stand all this sensitivity!) For me, the appeal of the aforementioned documentaries is the sheer joy of catching a glimpse into lives that I know nothing of, that I would never see unless someone like Chris Smith or Errol Morris aimed their camera at it. It’s thrilling just knowing that there are people like this in the world—and you know what? Some of them are really fucking funny.

*As if to drive the point home a little more, Storytelling co-stars Mike Schank, the real-life stoner friend of Mark Borchardt who appears in American Movie.

2008-10-13T16:45:00.013-04:00

All right, all right. I'm a slacker. I haven't been keeping this thing up, and I want to get back on track. In my attempt to play catch-up, here are brief reactions to some of the movies I saw this past summer, as succinctly as possible. (More to come soon—I hope.)

Rocket Science, Jeffrey Blitz, 2007

I think I’ve moved on from the quirky Wes Anderson style of comedy, which this movie about a kid with a severe stuttering problem who tries out for the debate team really strives to emulate. Eh.

Zodiac, David Fincher, 2007

I liked this movie a lot more than I thought I would. The cinematography was gorgeous, the suspense high, and the subject is innovatively handled (I love that the zodiac killer was portrayed by multiple actors to match the varied physical descriptions given by eyewitnesses and surviving victims). My one (very minor) qualm is that Jake Gyllenhaal doesn’t appear to age a day throughout the course of the film. I mean, come on. Not a gray hair on him.

Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock, 1972

One of Hitchcock’s last films, and perhaps one of his most disturbing. This tale of a serial killer known as the “necktie murderer” (i.e. strangler) terrorizing London is chilling, suspenseful, and yet still retains a touch of the black humor Hitchcock employed in his later films.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Ridley Scott, 1982

With its atmospheric bleakness and eerie, post-apocalyptic ambiance, Blade Runner remains one of my longstanding favorite films, but I have no idea what is different about this version. I had been expecting some extra scenes, but didn’t notice anything that sets it apart from the 1992 director’s cut.

The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, 2008

Not that I’m the most diehard Batman fan, but I’ll agree that this is the best one to date. I could take or leave Christian Bale as Batman but Heath Ledger’s Joker is far superior to Jack Nicholson’s. He’s fittingly darker, more disturbed, and more unkempt, with his smeared makeup and stringy, sickly green hair, deftly portraying his character’s madness.

The Wendell Baker Story, Andrew and Luke Wilson, 2005

What a piece of shit. Sorry, Luke Wilson.

What We Do Is Secret, Rodger Grossman, 2007

This biopic of the Germs’ Darby Crash is more or less an adaptation of Lexicon Devil (though not actually intended as such), which is a bit troubling since that book features various contradictory statements. This is very much the nature of oral histories, so they really must be taken with a grain of salt, not interpreted as gospel truth (and it also seems to indicate that the person writing this screenplay didn’t know very much about the subject if he had to copy it almost entirely from a book—and I don’t care if Michelle Baer shares a “writing credit”). Even if the film were factually correct (and it isn’t, as some key figures are glaringly absent), it fails to capture the feeling, the essence of punk, and certainly does nothing to develop Crash's character and delve into his psyche (other than the alleged "five-year plan" at the heart of the film, which I can't help but feel is total bullshit, or at least grossly exaggerated).

The Bad News Bears, Michael Ritchie, 1976

A “family film” like this could never be created today (the sorry excuse for a remake of this movie is proof). This scrappy gang of kids swears, the coach drinks too much, and it doesn’t close on some clichéd happy note—perfection.

Wait Until Dark, Terence Young, 1967
Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman whose husband unwittingly comes into possession of a doll containing a bag of heroin. In an attempt to get it back, three thugs stage a ridiculously elaborate plot in which they play a police officer, her husband’s old buddy, and so on, moving in and out of her senselessly unlocked apartment. Hepburn’s character is infuriatingly helpless, even though she’s meant to be a strong character who’s become increasingly independent despite her going blind, and she continues to make all the wrong moves—for the love of God, why doesn’t just lock her front door? Oh yeah, because then the movie would be over.

What’s New Pussycat, Clive Donner and Richard Talmadge, 1967

Woody Allen’s first cinematic writing credit is a perfect example of the type of comedy that seems to have been so popular in the 60s but feels very dated now—zany, madcap, silly, etc, are all words that come to mind. I much prefer Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther over this one, but it's not all bad.

The Simpsons Movie, David Silverman, 2007

As one might expect, this feels like an especially lengthy version of a not especially great episode of the show. Seems a bit pointless, other than to make some money.

2008-09-07T18:07:00.024-04:00

Okay, I'm about four months late for the 40 year anniversary of the student revolts of May 1968, but now seems as good a time as any to discuss these cinematic interpretations of a time in history that feels not too far off from our own.

Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel, 2005
The Dreamers, Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003

Philippe Garrel has made nearly thirty films since 1964, yet he is virtually unknown in the U.S. (at least when compared to contemporaries such as Godard, Chabrol, etc.) According to the Village Voice, when Garrel showed his movies in New York in 1970, Jonas Mekas called them “very sad cries from the past, one almost pities them”—yet Garrel persevered, and in 2005 made his first Lincoln Center appearance in thirty three years with Regular Lovers, a film that one can only assume must be an extremely personal and true-to-life portrayal of Paris in May 1968, as well as its aftermath. The film stars Garrel’s son Louis as a self-described poet named François who passively dodges the draft and talks of revolution with his friends (though when he takes to the barricades he refuses to launch a Molotov cocktail at the police).

The movie opens with extended scenes depicting the famous 1968 uprisings, then switches to the private lives of the protesters as they create art, smoke hash, and hang out. The film is more about the characters than about the political goings-on—there’s no real explanation as to the background of the revolt, no social commentary on the events taking place. The heart of the film is the love story (or lack thereof) between François and a sculptor named Lilie. With little action and a barely existent plot, the film’s chief merit is its style. The black and white cinematography, the gorgeous lighting, and authentic set design mirror the look and feel of a late 60s film to a T (unwitting viewers might mistake it for a lost work of the Nouvelle Vague—paradoxically, many of the scenes feel oddly contemporary, perhaps a result of our continued obsession with the past, manifested in current 60s-inspired clothing and music).

Garrel is a veteran of that era; he participated in the aforementioned revolt, he was romantically involved with one-time Velvet Underground singer Nico for ten years until her death, he lived the life of these characters. Thus, I don’t doubt that this is an accurate representation—but surprisingly, it’s just not that interesting. I suppose this must be intentional, to refrain from making some kind of explosive love story or grandiose action movie, in favor of something more muted and understated. I just found it hard to retain interest.

It is said that Garrel made Regular Lovers as a reaction to The Dreamers, another film about the May 1968 protests from a veteran director whose work dates back to the early 60s—Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci of Last Tango in Paris fame—because he thought it hadn’t succeeded in portraying the time period. In The Dreamers, a young American studying in Paris strikes up a friendship with a French sister and brother (also played by Louis Garrel), whose strange, creepily close relationship is reminiscent of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles. When their parents go on an extended holiday, they invite their American friend to stay with them, free to let their inner fantasies and extreme, almost freakish isolation take over.

The Dreamers is more of a tribute to the films of the 60s. Its characters are devout cinephiles, and the story is peppered throughout with clips from such films as Band of Outsiders, Breathless, Freaks, and more, as the characters try to live inside of their favorite films, mirroring these beloved scenes in their own lives. The cinema is what brings them together in the first place—they meet at the start of the film while protesting the closing of the famed Cinémathèque Française.

The revolution might have completely passed them by if they hadn’t essentially been forced into participating by a brick crashing through their window. Otherwise they probably would have been content to drink wine, fuck, and watch movies. Instead, their isolation is shattered, both literally and figuratively—it seems they can no longer ignore the outside world. And yet they seem to be pretending, feigning this sudden interest in the revolts because it’s hip to do so—their hearts are more in the protest of the beginning of the film.

The Dreamers has a stronger narrative than Regular Lovers, but is perhaps less authentic, more of a period piece than an attempt at embodying the style of an older film. Perhaps the best representation of this era is yet to come, comprising an amalgamation of Garrel’s style and Bertolucci’s storytelling. Or, more likely, these events just may not easily lend themselves to dramatic interpretation—one of those moments in time that cannot truly be described with any combination of words and pictures, as something intangible will always be lost in translation.

La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard, 1967

This film represents a transitional period for Godard, as he moved away from the style of his earlier work toward more dialectical and political films. Here, a group of French students discuss Maoism and plot a revolution from their apartment, planning terrorist attacks of which they have not begun to consider the consequences. The students seem not to represent Godard’s point of view so much as his observations of young radical students at the time—more of a reading of the burgeoning youth culture than of the political situation. The film seems to be a kind of fond critique of the characters; they’re extremely naïve, proselytizing from the bourgeois comforts of their university education that their parents probably paid for. (This same assessment is present to some extent in the two aforementioned films.) Godard acknowledges that they’re misguided, but at least well-meaning: “their arguments were a mess…they were a bit like children.” Their plans are criticized by a knowledgeable journalist (perhaps a stand-in for Godard, or at least the voice of reason), who explains to them that they’re “not prepared...the lessons you draw are very abstract...you’re heading towards a dead end.”

The characters are shown being interviewed, with cameras and microphones in view, lending the film a documentary feel, as well as emphasizing its subtitle: “a film in the making.” It boasts great cinematography, with striking images and bold colors—in particular, lots of red (hence the Maoists). Much like Godard’s other films of this period, each section of the film is preceded by a title card typed out in bold, capital letters.

One of my favorite moments comes in the form of this satirical pop song sung by Claude Channes:

Vietnam burns and me I spurn Mao Mao
Johnson giggles and me I wiggle Mao Mao
Napalm runs and me I gun Mao Mao
Cities die and me I cry Mao Mao
Whores cry and me I sigh Mao Mao

Chorus:
The rice is mad and me a cad
It’s the Little Red Book
That makes it all move
lmperialism lays down the law
Revolution is not a party
The A-bomb is a paper tiger
The masses are the real heroes

The Yanks kill and me I read Mao Mao
The jester is king and me I sing Mao Mao
The bombs go off and me I scoff Mao Mao
Girls run and me I follow Mao Mao
The Russians eat and me I dance Mao Mao
I denounce and I renounce Mao Mao

It’s the Little Red Book
That makes it all move.

Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, Alain Tanner, 1976

This Swiss film takes a look at the aftermath of the 60s, as former revolutionaries contemplate what they’ve become. The film’s eight central characters, all somehow affected by or associated with the events of May 1968, are linked in various ways (not to mention that their names all start with the letter “M”)—Mathieu is employed by Marcel and Marguerite, their neighbor Marco has a crush on Marie after meeting her in the grocery store, and so on. Each has taken a different path since those heady days of protest, from that of a disillusioned gambler and former journalist, to a history teacher, to a blue collar worker (i.e. shit shoveler), to organic vegetable farmers, to an anarchic grocery store clerk who steals from her employer to benefit others, etc.

Each of them tries to remain political in their own way, whether tilling the soil, teaching young people about politics, or stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Mathieu in particular is somewhat of a visionary—he tries to teach the children himself instead of letting them go to school, and later, while looking at the film’s characters standing in front of a wall, he envisions a mural depicting those people in those exact positions, Max with his arms outstretched; we see at the end that the mural has been created.

Towards the end, Mathieu rides his bicycle and sings a song about the film’s characters: “Marguerite the witch / Marco the philosopher / Marie the thief / Marcel the hermit / Mathilde my love / Max the former prophet / Madeleine the fool / I’ll try to keep your hopes together so they don’t disappear.” The last line in particular seems to refer to him as a kind of shepherd, looking out for his friends when they might not be.

The film holds up fairly well over time, so it seems odd that it’s so hard to come by. One doesn’t have to know much about the events of May 1968 to understand it. The film could be applied to the present time, in its depiction of a group of people struggling to come to terms with the fact that they’re growing up, while applying their youthful ideals to reality. The world has seemingly changed around them, some of them evolving with it, and some not—through its final scene in which the young Jonah of the film’s title begins writing on the aforementioned mural with a piece of chalk, the message is ultimately one of hope in the future, though not exactly of earth-shattering optimism.

2008-07-24T22:41:00.020-04:00

New(ish) movies watched lately.

Son of Rambow, Garth Jennings, 2007

This somewhat whimsical and warmly nostalgic portrait of England in the 1980s centers around Will, a timid little wisp of a kid whose family belongs to some kind of strict and oddly cultish religion that doesn’t allow television—not even educational films, as we see when Will has to sit in the hall while his class watches a video—or any form of entertainment, for that matter.

While banished to the television-free hallway, Will meets Lee Carter, the school fuck-up whom everyone seems to hate, and despite the odds, they hit it off in their own weird way. Lee makes bootleg videos for his older brother whom he idolizes, but who treats Lee like shit (but since their mom is more or less nonexistent, “he’s all I’ve got!”, as Lee mawkishly cries). Lee shows a bootleg copy of First Blood to Will—I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through 14 or 15 years of life without ever seeing a minute of celluloid, and then to plunge right into a Sylvester Stallone action film. Will already possesses an intense creative impulse, stealing away to a shed in his backyard to make crazy, feverishly charged cartoonish drawings in his Bible (the only materials he has to work with), which he often imagines coming to life, moving around via wiggling, animated lines. But Rambo pushes him over the edge—the movie sets Will free, empowering him with a newfound strength, releasing his own barbaric yawp. With tinges of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, Will and Lee start working on a movie, which requires some significant rule breaking and parental defiance on Will’s part in order to get away, as he’s not supposed to be cavorting with sinners. Their movie was initially supposed to be a remake of First Blood, but then Will has an idea for his own movie—called, as one might guess, Son of Rambo.

Meanwhile, a group of French foreign exchange students have arrived. On the whole much hipper than the bland and mild English, one of them, named Didier, is kind of a new wave Michael Jackson worshipper. Possessing a bit more world-weariness than the rest of them—he even has a pencil-thin mustache—Didier develops a following of schlubby English kids who mimic his hairstyle and look, while the girls swoon over him and line up to kiss him. As always seems to be the case with anything that’s somewhat clandestine and cool, they eventually discover the Son of Rambo project and try to glom onto it. While Will is excited about collaborating with others, thinking the more the merrier, not to mention relishing his sudden popularity, Lee does not react well to the additional participants. He knows they’ll only ruin it, steal it out from under them and turn it into something else, changing its dynamic irrevocably.

The film has a tone of hyperbolic slapstick, with a touch of the maudlin (for instance, when Lee proclaims to Will, “this has been my best day ever!”—heartwarmingly nauseating). Overall it was cute, fun, and entertaining, but nothing momentous, certainly nothing I’ll ever really feel the need to see again.

Mister Lonely, Harmony Korine, 2007

Harmony Korine’s third feature film entails a Michael Jackson impersonator living in Paris, who meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator while he's entertaining a group of senior citizens. (“Live forever! Don’t die!” he chants, inviting each half of the room to join in chorus.) “Marilyn” invites “Michael” back to her commune in Scotland, a refuge for a motley group of celebrity impersonators that includes Charlie Chaplin (Marilyn’s husband), Shirley Temple (their daughter), the Pope, Queen Elizabeth, a surly Abraham Lincoln (“I’m Abe fuckin’ Lincoln!”), and Sammy Davis Jr., among others. They’re currently at work building a theater in hopes of attracting new visitors and showcasing their talents for the world (somewhat unexpected, considering their self-imposed isolation).

There’s also a second plotline involving a priest, played by Werner Herzog,* who is training a group of nuns to fly by jumping from an airplane. As much as we might somehow expect them to, the storylines never come together, remaining wholly unrelated to one another. Despite these scenes’ perceived irrelevance to the main narrative, the image of a woman falling through the sky, her habit billowing around her, is arresting and bizarrely poignant. And did I mention that Werner Herzog is involved?

Mister Lonely is much more accessible and less disturbing than Korine’s previous films—one could chalk it up to maturation, or perhaps just his cleaning up and getting into a healthier state of mind—yet it still retains the strangeness of his earlier work. Moreover, it is not without elements of tragedy and melancholic overtones—a dark tale disguised as sweet and sentimental.

The film’s highlights are its striking, weirdly beautiful images—for instance, the falling nun, or the memorable opening scene in which our Michael Jackson look-alike rides a tiny bike around a track, a stuffed monkey with angel wings hanging off to the side by a wire, almost appearing to fly. This moment is inexplicably funny, moving in an intangible way. As Korine explains in an April 2008 New York Times article, “The story always comes from pictures I want to see,” which seems to account for the slight disjointedness, almost a random succession of stunningly oddball moments—the art lies in the unexpected manner in which such moments are placed into the film.

Despite its striking imagery and relatively straightforward plot—for this director, at least—the film seems flawed, almost a little bit boring, and I think I prefer the grotesquerie of his earlier works. Gummo has its own moments of beauty, though in a much darker and more perverted sense. Perhaps a happy medium of the two would be ideal—in the aforementioned interview, Korine states that “I think the next one will be more provocative,” so perhaps I’ll get my wish.

*Herzog was cast in Korine’s 1999 film Julien Donkey-Boy, and as then, he still can’t act. But I’m such a fan of Herzog’s own films that this doesn’t really bother me. I can forgive him this one shortcoming—which might be the case with Korine as well.

2008-07-06T22:46:00.010-04:00

La Jetée, Chris Marker, 1966
Twelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam, 1995

Chris Marker’s “photo-roman”* is comprised of a series of gorgeously framed images, each one a museum-quality photograph, shot in that grainy black and white that I love so much. With the exception of one scene, in which a woman opens her eyes, the story is entirely told through still images accompanied with voiceover narration—yet they nonetheless suggest the impression of movement.

Humanity has been wiped out by a nuclear holocaust. “The victors,” as they are called, have established some kind of underground penal colony, and have begun conducting time travel experiments using the prisoners as guinea pigs, in hopes of gaining information about the source of the catastrophe, and ultimately to change the course of history. One man in particular is chosen for his strong mental image of the peacetime world—he has been haunted by a childhood memory, in which he witnessed a man die—the logic being that “if [he] were able to conceive or to dream another time, perhaps [he] would be able to live in it.”

This short yet accomplished film—and, as far as I can tell, one of the director’s most accessible, not to mention thrilling—focuses on issues of time and memory, involving a classic time paradox. It has been called the greatest science fiction film ever made—whether or not this is the case, it is definitely the most elegant, beautifully shot, and philosophically complex one that I have seen.

Inspired by and partially based on La Jetée, Twelve Monkeys expands upon the former, fleshing it out into a full-length feature with conventional movement and sound. Gilliam’s film adds various elements to the plot, such as the cataclysmic event being a plague rather than a nuclear bomb, the main character’s ending up in the wrong year and being incarcerated in a mental institution (naturally, everyone assumes he’s crazy when he explains that he’s come from the future), and of course the “Army of the Twelve Monkeys,” a militant animal rights group assumed to be the source of the deadly virus.

As in La Jetée, this film involves multiple time paradoxes. James Cole, the aforementioned man from the future, accidentally travels back to a World War I battlefield; in 1996 he can be seen in photographs of that battle. Cole is shown pictures of graffiti spraypainted on a wall days before the epidemic began; it turns out that the graffiti exists because of him. Then of course there is the film’s central paradox, which I won’t go into so as not to spoil it.

These paradoxes present some mind-bending questions about the nature of time. The film seems to imply that time cannot be changed, that all events are predetermined, that there was never a 1997 when James had not traveled there from the future, just as he had always been involved in that World War I battle. (In La Jetée the narrator avers that “there was no way to escape Time.”) Thus, these attempts at gaining information about the virus in hopes of thwarting it are futile; James was always part of that chain of events, and he will always fail.

Despite all of their similarities, these are two very different films. While I ultimately prefer the stark and graceful beauty of La Jetée, Twelve Monkeys is not without merit. It retains a nice apocalyptic feel, and while the plot additions certainly change the story, they don’t detract from it. I don’t even mind that Bruce Willis is in the movie, although it should be noted that Terry Gilliam reportedly gave him a list of “Bruce Willis acting clichés” that were not to be used in that performance—good advice, Terry.

*This translates to “photo-novel,” which could really refer to any film, as they are all comprised of thousands of still images—this one just annunciates that aspect more pronouncedly.

2008-07-04T00:51:00.013-04:00

After watching the terrifying masterpiece that is Black Christmas, I was inspired to check out a few more horror films from the long list I've been compiling. I have to say, Black Christmas still wins.

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Bob Clark, 1972
Bob Clark’s first film isn’t quite up to par with Black Christmas, but we’ll call it a practice round. A pretentious theater director wearing some ridiculous striped pants drags a troupe of actors to an island that serves as a burial ground for criminals, where he digs up a body and performs a ritual to raise the dead that doesn’t seem to work. While it was most likely intended as a joke—he’s hired someone to pop up out of one of the graves—the director seems disappointed and takes it out on the actors, going to great lengths to debase them. Of course, it turns out that while the ritual doesn’t take effect immediately, that doesn’t mean it won’t take effect eventually.

Martin, George Romero, 1977
This psychological horror movie about a teenager who may or may not be a vampire is somewhat of a departure for George Romero. Unlike his cinematic predecessors, Martin does his bloodletting with syringes and razor blades rather than fangs, which seems to imply that he’s just a bit of a weirdo. His uncle, however, is resolutely convinced, calling him “Nosferatu” and harping on the alleged family curse. While the truth is left somewhat ambiguous I’d lean more towards his being human—disturbed, but human. The industrial suburbs of Pittsburgh are put to good use, serving as a fittingly desolate backdrop to this strange and captivating story.

The Last House on the Left, Wes Craven, 1972
Inspired by (or maybe just based on the same source material as) Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring, two girls go to a rock concert—except before they even make it inside they try to score some grass off of a guy who brings them back to his apartment, where they’re kidnapped by a gang of sadistic escaped convicts who tie them up and put them in the trunk of their car.

The film’s most harrowing moment arrives when the car breaks down and Mari emerges from the trunk to realize that she’s parked in front of her own house and there’s nothing she can do about it. Feet from the solace of her loving parents, she’s instead dragged into the woods to face degradation and her ultimate demise.

After raping and murdering the girls, the killers clean themselves up and unwittingly knock on the door of Mari’s parents’ house to ask for a place to sleep. The parents quickly figure out what’s going on and exact their revenge; these scenes, which entail a chainsaw and a blow job that ends in castration, are somehow anticlimactic and disappointing—this can be said of the whole movie, I think. I suppose I could have just hyped it up too much in my mind, but I was not impressed.

The tone wavers between sadistic and incongruously slapsticky, due in part to the soundtrack’s almost upbeat hillbilly music. There’s also the ridiculous subplot involving a couple of bumbling, donut-munching cops that could have been out of something like Super Troopers. They see the killers’ car but think nothing of it, realizing their mistake when they hear a radio dispatch describing the abandoned vehicle. They attempt to head back but run out of gas on the way, unsuccessfully trying to hitchhike with a group of teenagers who extend their middle fingers at the pigs, and a grossly stereotypical toothless black lady driving a truck full of chickens. I’ve read that the contrast between the film’s soundtrack and its disturbing imagery is intentional—which is certainly interesting, but I nonetheless found the result to be rather ineffective.

The Day the Earth Stood Still, Robert Wise, 1951
Not exactly a horror film but I’m including it in here anyway. This space age classic is a little bit high-minded in its messages about mass hysteria and man’s inability to cohabit peacefully with other nations. And I must say, I found it a little weird that the important announcement that this moralizing alien traveled all the way to Earth to communicate is that if humans don’t shape up and dispose of their nuclear weapons, his planet will bomb the shit out of them.

Regardless, I enjoyed the vintage sci-fi imagery, replete with flying saucers, massive killer robots, and a silver-clad spaceman wearing what amounts to a goldfish bowl over his head, and was rather amused to discover the origin of the phrase “klaatu barata nikto.”

The House by the Cemetery, Lucio Fulci, 1981
This is the first movie directed by Lucio Fulci that I’ve seen, and I found it to be pretty unimpressive. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he hasn’t done better—I’m not totally dissuaded from seeking out other films in his oeuvre. (I hear there’s a pretty good one involving a killer who quacks like a duck.)

It has a particularly memorable opening scene, wherein two people sneak into a vacant house to have sex but somehow get separated. Thinking that he’s playing a trick on her, the girl goes to look for her beau and is stabbed in the back of the head, the knife coming out the other side through her open mouth. However, it kind of goes downhill from there.

Dr. Norman Boyle and his family move into a quaint New England house so that he can continue with a research assignment that one of his colleagues was working on (the colleague having just committed suicide). Immediately, the family notices some weird goings-on, and tries unsuccessfully to move to another house.

One of the high points is a creepy little girl (who I guess is really a ghost?) who used to live in the house and makes a habit of visiting Boyle’s son, who might be one of the most annoying children in cinematic history. The girl continually conveys a message of warning, but it’s wasted on the kid, whose parents of course dismiss his silly antics.

So apparently this perverted doctor, whose name is a pretty good amalgamation of two other famous doctors, once lived in the house (I guess he was the father of the creepy little ghost girl?) and was known for performing controversial experiments on his patients. As it turns out, he’s still there in the basement, kept alive by consuming fresh human blood. Although he’s not really living in the strictest sense of the word—when Dr. Boyle tries to kill him, a clump of maggoty innards resembling a nasty-ass sausage link oozes out of his side.

This movie had the potential for greatness—creepy ghost children are always a nice touch—but the film would have benefited from some more careful plotting. While unexplained phenomena can definitely be a good thing in horror films, in this case I’d say it errs on the side of too much vagueness.

Blacula, William Crain, 1972
In this melding of horror and blaxploitation, an 18th-century African prince meets with Count Dracula, who turns him into a vampire and seals him off in a coffin, where he remains for centuries until two gay interior decorators buy the castle’s contents, unwittingly shipping him to 1970s Los Angeles. When they open the coffin, which they had been thinking would be a pretty fierce guest bed, they unleash a vampire whose intense thirst for blood has not been satiated for about 300 years.

Blacula, as it turns out, can be pretty sexy when he’s not in vampire mode, and despite his odd getup (i.e. a flowing black cape), he manages to seduce a woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his wife. Her sister’s boyfriend, however, is the cop investigating some of the odd murders that have been happening, complete with missing bodies—a.k.a. victims who are turned into vampires and thus wake up and disappear from their own funerals. It’s not exactly scary, but pretty entertaining and campy—I couldn’t help but let out a few utterances of “Let the cartoons begin!”

2008-06-04T22:01:00.007-04:00

Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris, 2008

The latest installment in Errol Morris’ ceaseless quest for the truth investigates the infamous Abu Ghraib prison photos, delving deeper into the story than others might have dared—or even thought—to tread. One of the most severe condemnations of the photographs in question is not simply the torment that the inmates are being subjected to, but the fact that their captors are smiling and giving the cameraman the thumbs-up. But Sabrina Harman, one of the women featured in these photographs, claims that she was trying to document the atrocities being practiced in the prison, fearing no one would believe her if she did not provide some physical evidence. As for the cheery demeanor, she states that she simply didn’t know what else to do with her hands, that she automatically did what you’re supposed to do when being photographed: smile and say cheese.

This seems to me an oversimplified and implausible assertion, especially after noting that in a letter to her wife, Sabrina writes that “The dead guy didn’t bother me, even took a picture with him doing the thumbs-up. But that’s when I realized it wasn’t funny anymore, that this guy had blood in his nose.”—which would imply that she had at one point thought it was funny. In his New York Times blog Zoom, Morris concurs that he’s dubious as to her claim—naturally, he seeks the expertise of Paul Ekman, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, and expert on facial expressions. Upon studying a photograph of Harman leaning over a mangled-looking corpse while grinning for the camera, Ekman upholds that hers is not a true smile of enjoyment, but rather a social smile, the kind of fake grin everyone puts on for the camera. (Apparently this is evident in the movement in the skin right above the eyelid.) Of course, most people, upon casual glance, cannot easily tell the difference between the true enjoyment smile and the fake posed smile, and identify the person in this photograph as a sadistic brute gleefully inflicting torture upon her prisoners, as opposed to a moral crusader trying to reveal the crimes of the military to the world.

This is the sort of intriguing observation brought to light by the consultation of a specialist that I wish had not only been explored in the film, but pushed even further—why do people feel so strangely compelled to smile simply because they’re in front of a camera, even if there’s really nothing to smile about? This could have made for a fascinating examination of the nature of photography, as well as significantly aiding in the viewer’s understanding of these notorious images—I for one came away from the film feeling unsatisfied, still not really comprehending why the photos were taken (yes, to document evidence, but why the bizarre poses?). Perhaps this also lies in the fact that Charles Graner, the person whom everyone claims was responsible for orchestrating the photo shoots (he reportedly distributed prints like collectible trading cards), is incarcerated in a military prison and the army would not allow Morris to interview him.

There has been much debate regarding the film’s use of re-enactments. This is certainly not a new practice for Morris, but I’m unsure I can find a clear purpose in the highly stylized imagery seen in the film—impressionistic shots bathed in gorgeous yellow light, beads of water slowly falling from a shower, settling dust that almost seems to sparkle, an extreme close-up of a bushy eyebrow being shaved. These images strike me as too visually stunning for the subject matter within them—not that they’re necessarily meant to mimic reality. In his blog, Morris explains that his “re-enactments focus our attention on some specific detail or object that helps us look beyond the surface of images to something hidden, something deeper—something that better captures what really happened...[The re-enactments] are not asking us to suspend our disbelief in an artificial world that has been created expressly for our entertainment; they are asking the opposite of us—to study the relationship of an artificial world to the real world.” But what is being conveyed in these particular re-enactments? In Morris’ brilliant The Thin Blue Line, for instance, he focuses on a milkshake dropped at a crime scene in order to question the official report of what transpired that evening. What is Standard Operating Procedure’s falling milkshake? What striking image is depicted in such a way as to question our previous understanding of what happened? I can’t come up with one.

Nor can I say that the film gets too much closer to the reality of what took place, at least not definitively. The commentators suggest, either outright or more implicitly, that those who were actually guilty were never charged, that all of the blame fell upon the low level officers whose ill-advised actions brought about severe embarrassment for not only the military but the whole country. The accused claim they were just following orders, that they were supposed to be preparing the prisoners for interrogation, lowering their morale in order to make them more susceptible to the line of questioning they would soon be subjected to. Officers like Charles Graner only prepared them for the real torture they would undergo at the hands of their interrogators—in other words, the idiots who took pictures were used as scapegoats in order to avoid revealing the crimes of those more powerful than them. As Harman describes it, she was charged with tampering evidence that the military had already tampered with before her.

The title does signify a rather surprising revelation that comes near the film’s conclusion: after analyzing the thousands of photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, Special Agent Brent Pack of the military’s Criminal Investigations Division labels many of them, as one would expect, “criminal acts”—but still more are actually considered to be Standard Operating Procedure. According to Pack, it is unacceptable to sexually molest people by forcing them to masturbate publicly, but it is okay to humiliate them by chaining them to a bedpost and placing ladies’ underwear over their heads. Incredibly, one of the most iconic photographs of the group, of a hooded man standing on a box with wires attached to his outspread arms, is considered run-of-the-mill activity. Pack goes on to say that he doesn’t expect civilians to understand such things, but I’m nonetheless going to contend that there’s nothing to understand—these acts were, plain and simply, inhumane.

In many ways, this story verges upon the pith of Morris’ work—distinguishing the truth from what is simply perceived to be the truth. As he writes in his blog, “Photographic evidence—like all evidence—needs to be seen in context. It needs to be evaluated. If seeing itself is belief-laden, then there is no seeing independent of believing, and the “truism” has to be reversed. Believing is seeing and not the other way around.” I only wish he had employed more investigative work revolving around this idea, in the vein of his close scrutiny of a pair of Roger Fenton photographs taken during the Crimean War, the process of which was documented in his blog. But while Standard Operating Procedure isn’t my favorite of Morris’ films—in fact, it’s probably my least favorite—it’s certainly not without merit.

2008-06-01T16:26:00.012-04:00

It's been awhile. In my defense, I'd been holding off because I'd jotted down what I recall were some great notes on Hated, a documentary about G.G. Allin, but I'd since misplaced them and was determined to locate them before making my next posting. Unfortunately I think they're gone forever, so I'll just have to watch it again.

Movies watched, April 29 to May 4, 2008
(The gap between April 12, the latest date covered in my last post, and April 29 was mainly comprised of watching Twin Peaks, which I plan to write about once I've finished the series, not to mention the feature film, Fire Walk With Me.)

Black Christmas, Bob Clark, 1974

Nearly ten years before Bob Clark directed one of the most beloved—or at least most frequently watched—Christmas films of our time, A Christmas Story, he made another holiday film, one that’s not likely to be included in the usual seasonal TV programming.

One of the original slasher films (perhaps the original), and definitely the scariest film I’ve seen in recent memory, Black Christmas opens with a sorority holiday party, an ostensibly harmless event—until we realize we’re watching the girls through the front window, from the viewpoint of a stranger who is stalking their every move. In a camera technique utilized a few years later in the opening of Halloween, we then climb a trellis on the side of the house and into an unlocked attic window that no one ever thinks to check—even after the house’s residents are picked off one by one.

There are a number of factors that contribute to the horror: for one, the viewer knows very little about the killer. He reveals his name (“it’s me, Billy”), and he often refers to someone named Agnes. And that’s it—we never even see his face. One can imagine a Halloween-like scenario, wherein the escaped mental patient returns to his childhood home seeking his long lost sister (and, while he explicitly states that John Carpenter did not steal his idea, Clark claims that he'd envisioned a sequel to this movie—it was even to be called Halloween—that did exactly that).

Sound is also a significant aspect. The girls have been receiving frequent disturbing phone calls from Billy (perhaps the first instance of the whole “the calls are coming from inside the house!” urban legend—it precedes When a Stranger Calls by five years), in which he speaks in a variety of different voices, from a whimpering child, to a crying girl, to a reprimanding figure of authority. The distinctly separate voices are unnerving, especially when you realize it’s one person making all of them. One can attempt to piece together the events being ranted about: the little girl screams, “No, don’t Billy!”, the young boy moans about “the baby,” and the shrill, screeching adult shrieks “What your mother and I must know is, where did you put the baby? Where did you put Agnes, Billy?” From this we can surmise that as a child, Billy’s younger sister Agnes died while left in his care, either by accident or through some malicious act—why he’s returned, and what’s led to his extreme psychopathy, is another story, one we’ll never know*. Other auditory and visual factors include the subtly creepy soundtrack of strummed piano strings, and frequent use of ominous camera angles, often looking downstairs at the girls, as if from a voyeuristic viewpoint.

But perhaps what’s truly terrifying is the way that it challenges the viewer’s sense of security. One’s home is the place where one usually feels most comfortable, safe, and protected—but this film makes you question that, makes you wonder if your basement windows are actually locked, if there isn’t someone lurking down there in some dark corner, waiting for the right moment to come upstairs and stab you in the chest with your own glass unicorn figurine.

*A remake from a few years ago attempts to, like Rob Zombie’s recent Halloween does with Michael Myers, expand upon the characters of Billy and Agnes. I haven’t seen it, but I’ve read some detailed plot descriptions and it sounds ridiculous. As in the case of Halloween, the moral of the story is that less is more.

Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah, 1971

In this rather dark exploration of what happens when people are pushed to their limits, American mathematician David Sumner and his attractive British wife Amy move into a farm house in the English countryside. They experience some immediate hostility from the handymen who are working on the house, one of whom, Charlie, knows Amy from her younger days. They seem to have a bit of a history, which he reminds her of somewhat aggressively (“you were begging for it”)—she brushes him off, but perhaps not as repulsedly as one might expect.

It quickly becomes evident that David is far more interested in his work than in his wife. Before having sex he stops to check that the alarm clock is set, to ensure that he won’t oversleep and cut into his work. Another time Amy wanders into his office in a playful mood, and he sharply asks her to leave him alone with his equations. Their marital issues are heightened as they continue to face the harassment of their neighbors. When they find their missing cat strung up in a closet, Amy wants her husband to question the handymen, but he chickens out, which makes her even more furious.

One day the repairmen ask David to go hunting with them, which he seems to interpret as a feigned gesture of reconciliation—I have to say, I wouldn’t trust the guys who likely murdered my pet cat to take me out into the woods with guns—and, of course, this isn’t quite the case. Charlie shows up at the house, and Amy inexplicably invites him inside, insisting that he stay even when he offers to leave. When he comes onto her, she tries to fight him off, unsuccessfully. One gets the feeling that despite her motions of protest, she’s really enjoying it, that she only wants him to stop because she’s married and knows she’s not supposed to be enjoying it. But then Norman, another one of the repairmen, comes in and sodomizes her, which she certainly does not enjoy, particularly because this person she has albeit complicated feelings for has just allowed—perhaps arranged for—her to be violated. Oddly, her husband doesn’t notice any marks on her, which seems odd, and perhaps kind of unbelievable, but I suppose it’s consistent with the lack of concern for her that he’s displayed so far.

The mounting tensions ignite towards the end of the film, when the townspeople try to hunt down a mentally slow man who accidentally killed a young woman, a la Lenny from Of Mice and Men. David rescues the man and tries to shelter him inside his house, which, considering their feelings toward him, only serves to provoke the rage of the townspeople, who have become a lynch mob by this time. They start smashing windows, pounding on doors, trying to breach the Sumners’ home. David responds in kind, rather unexpectedly, as until this point he’s been kind of a pushover—which illustrates that everyone has a breaking point. His home is being invaded, and he is prepared to defend it to the death, his primal instincts emerging from his usually mild demeanor.

Boxcar Bertha, Martin Scorsese, 1972

For his first Hollywood film, Martin Scorsese was given $600,000 by legendary schlock producer Roger Corman and told to make an exploitation movie, no doubt to cash in on the success of the Oscar-nominated Bonnie and Clyde of a few years earlier. Loosely based on the autobiography of Bertha Thompson, who robbed the railways with her lover and his gang during the Great Depression, it certainly retains many hallmarks of the exploitation genre—plenty of sex and violence, as well as some offbeat humor—but manages to go beyond it as well. Picture a low-budget B-movie filtered through Scorsese’s albeit nascent directorial vision.

In Jim Sangster’s Scorsese, the director says that “I attempted to show the characters as people acting like children, playing with violence until they start getting killed—then they’re stuck in a real game, a life and death game.” This is effectively communicated—for instance, in Bertha’s childlike grin as she busts into a room full of rich people and announces, falteringly over a giddy laugh, “This is a stick-up!”, as she piles the women’s jewels and tiaras on like a little girl playing dress-up, and likewise in Bill’s pronouncements that “I’m not cut out for this” as things start to go amiss.

The film isn’t without its flaws, but one can detect many of the elements that Scorsese would develop and expand upon in later films. In the end, I’d have to agree with John Cassavetes, who, after seeing Boxcar Bertha, reportedly told Scorsese “You just spent a year of your life making shit!,” urging him to make a more personal film—he then went on to make Mean Streets, possibly one of his best.

2008-05-05T20:46:00.006-04:00

Movies watched, March 23-April 12, 2008

Snow Angels, David Gordon Green, 2008

Snow Angels’ journey from book to film is rather interesting. David Gordon Green had initially written the script in 2003 for another director; the project was scrapped, then revisited several years later, this time with Green directing as well. The book, though I haven’t read it, is narrated by the teenage protagonist Arthur Parkinson, but as a grown man looking back on a rather painful time in his life—as his parents were divorcing, which also coincided with an incident involving his former babysitter. It’s one of those novels where the first-person narrator is omniscient, commenting on scenes and conversations he couldn’t have been privy to. In order to translate the story to the screen, the structure is altered so that it occurs in the present, from the perspectives of both Arthur and the aforementioned babysitter, Annie. Arthur and Annie are brought together in their current lives by working together at a Chinese restaurant, which might seem somewhat arbitrary as a plot device, but it doesn’t feel that way, especially considering that they eventually become linked in another, more unfortunate sense as well. (For more on the adaptation process, see Bookforum’s article, available here.

The film is framed by a rather uncoordinated marching band practice on a snowy field. The coach’s corny reprimanding speech is interrupted by the sounds of two gunshots in the distance—we are then presented with the series of events that culminated in said gunshots. In addition to the marching band, it also starts with several brief scenes depicting wintry small town life—picking up the newspaper, pumping gas, and so on. These scenes are echoed later in the film, and while they’re the same, shot-for-shot, they somehow feel different. They don’t have that same innocence, or neutrality, but are marked with what has happened, possessing a kind of weariness, an impression of trudging along through one’s routine even in the midst of tragedy.

Annie has recently separated from her emotionally unstable husband, Glenn. A recovering alcoholic who thinks he’s found God, Glenn is extremely attached to Annie, seemingly unable to function without her (they’ve been together since high school). He tried to kill himself when she left him, and though he claims he’s better now, his behavior is nonetheless erratic. Annie, on the other hand, seems much more together, at least on the surface—one can’t imagine why she’s still in this crappy little town—but her flaws are gradually revealed.

Annie and Glenn have joint custody of their four-year-old daughter, Tara, which forces them together on a weekly basis. Towards the beginning of the film, Glenn forgets to bring the stuffed rabbit he’d bought for Tara; he mutters “you forgot the rabbit” at various points throughout the film, this seemingly innocuous string of words transforming into a symbol for all of his failures and shortcomings. Every time he utters the phrase, it generates an almost tangible feeling of anguish; one can’t help cringing.

While we do get a bit of emotional relief in the scenes depicting Arthur’s and Lila’s burgeoning romance, the film mainly fluctuates between merely everyday depressing to soul-numbingly bleak, its conclusion rendering the viewer more or less speechless. It’s devastating to watch, its effects on my frame of mind lingering for hours after the credits rolled. This movie ruined a beautiful, sunny afternoon, although I don’t regret seeing it at all—I might recommend, however, that one watch it at night, so as not to carry its feelings of despair with them for too long before sleeping it off.

Snow Angels bears the same level of emotional intensity as David Gordon Green’s previous films—so it’ll be interesting to see his next movie, Pineapple Express, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg of Superbad fame. I’m definitely curious to find out how the stoner comedy hit of the summer will look when filtered through Green’s directorial lens.

Halloween, Rob Zombie, 2007

The problem with most remakes of already great films is that they bring nothing new to the plate, serving no purpose other than to make money, and perhaps to introduce a new generation to an unknown classic. Thus, I had actually been looking forward to this movie as, working from John Carpenter’s advice to Rob Zombie that he “make it his own”, it contains original material delving deeper into Michael Myers’ past and psychology, exploring the root of his psychopathy, what drives him to kill—not so much a remake as a reimagining.

Unfortunately, what Zombie comes up with is boring and unoriginal. In this new scenario, the whole Myers household is screwed up. Michael’s mother is a stripper, his sister Judith is a slutty dresser (perhaps a stripper in the making), and his mother’s boyfriend is just kind of gross—he makes a pass at Judith at the breakfast table, and otherwise seems to be a worthless sponge on the Myers’ already meager funds. In addition to his stereotypically bad home life, Michael is picked on by school bullies—thus he snaps and kills the bullies, and his family, and anyone else who does or says anything mean to him.

That Michael’s upbringing was troubled seems the clichéd way of thinking, as if he were a Columbine case taken to the extreme. The film would have been much creepier if his family was seemingly normal and wholesome, that his violent tendencies were unexplainable, at least in a clearcut manner. Also, I’m pretty sure that not everyone whose mom is a stripper becomes a violent psychopath.

Zombie also attempts to develop the origin behind Michael’s face mask. Here, Michael becomes generally obsessed with masks while in the mental hospital, fashioning hundreds of them out of papier mache and newspaper, kind of like a bizarre version of a therapeutic arts and crafts project. He says he doesn’t want to show his face because it’s ugly—which, like the bad home life, seems like a clichéd, oversimplified explanation. I wish there weren’t so much analysis behind his wearing of masks—he finds one, he puts it on. End of story. Debra Hill, co-writer and producer of the original film, explains that the “idea was to make him almost humorless, faceless—this sort of pale visage that could resemble a human or not.” The idea stemmed not from an attempt at character-development but at creating a creepy, unsettling visual element, of which there is a paucity here. The way to make a film truly terrifying lies in the craft of filmmaking itself—use of sound, setting, visuals, and camera angles and movements. Then there’s the fact that making Michael seem more human ruins the mystery behind the character—part of the horror is that we don’t understand him, or how he came to be this way, and perhaps we shouldn’t. Basically, this was a very misguided, though possibly well-meaning, effort.

Coffy, Jack Hill, 1973
Foxy Brown, Jack Hill, 1974

Coffy is a sexy black nurse who seeks vengeance when her younger sister becomes involved with drugs and is sold contaminated heroin. Foxy Brown is a sexy black woman who seeks vengeance when her government agent boyfriend is shot down by gangsters.

There’s a good reason why the plots of these two films are so similar: Foxy Brown was initially intended as a sequel to Coffy (titled Burn, Coffy, Burn!), but at the last minute the studio decided that they didn’t want it to be a sequel after all. The character’s name was changed, and the script no longer revealed where she worked, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same character, if not the same movie—at the very least, the same basic premise.

Both Coffy and Foxy find themselves immersed in the seedy criminal underworld, taking out drug dealers and pimps, mobsters and crooked cops. It seems that in the realms of these films, there’s no such thing as an honest politician (except for Foxy’s dead boyfriend)—everyone is making deals with the mob, taking bribes, and turning a blind eye to drug trafficking and prostitution.

Coffy/Foxy is a resourceful and quick-witted lady, willing to use her body to lure criminals in and trick them into letting their guard down. In Coffy, she pretends to come onto one of the cops who are holding her hostage. Just as they’re about to do the deed, she grabs a bobby pin hidden in her afro—in a previous scene, she’d found it on the ground in the shack she was locked inside, sharpening it on a piece of stone—and stabs the cop in the neck in order to escape. And in Foxy Brown, she goes undercover as a high-class call girl in order to get to those responsible for her boyfriend’s death.

Despite her violent tendencies (and hey, she’s driven to these actions by the brutality of the world around her), she’s an appealing character, sticking up for the little guy, and sticking it to the crooks and thugs who plague our society. As Foxy says, vigilante justice is “as American as apple pie.”

While for the most part serving as pure entertainment, the films also touch on themes of racial and social injustice. For instance, Link’s lament over the plight of the black man: “I don’t know how to sing, and I don’t know how to dance, and I don’t know how to preach to no congregation. I’m too small to be a football hero, and too ugly to be elected mayor...I just get so full of ambition. Now you tell me what I’m supposed to do with all this ambition.” His character isn’t really all that sympathetic though, as in addition to directing his ambition toward dealing coke, he turns in his own sister, who just happens to be our heroine, Foxy Brown. Luckily, Foxy is not a force to be reckoned with—as Link says, “that’s my sister, baby, and she’s a whole lotta woman.”

Charley Varrick, Don Siegel, 1973

Charley Varrick opens with a bank robbery committed by masked men, some of whom don’t make it out alive. When the robbers, led by Charley Varrick—played by Walter Matthau, who on the surface seems an odd choice for the role, but it works beautifully—check out their loot, they find that they’ve made off with a lot more money than they’d expected to, a good sign that they’ve inadvertently knocked off a mafia-run bank. And if you have something of theirs, the mob doesn’t stop looking for you until you’re dead.

The remainder of the film addresses the process of dealing with this debacle. Varrick wants to play it safe and wait a few years before they even touch the money; his rather unwise partner, the weaselly Harman Sullivan, is itching to spend it, and insists that he’s not afraid of a bunch of gangsters. Throughout the film, up until the climax—which involves a memorable chase scene between a car and a cropduster plane—we’re convinced that Charley’s made a terrible mistake, that he’s been too trusting and fallen prey to some dishonest people—even more dishonest than he is—but in the end, his casual gum-chewing demeanor prevails. And one begins to wonder, to question whether the information we’ve been given can be believed—did Charley survive by the skin of his teeth, or was it all carefully planned to happen exactly as it did?

2008-04-17T21:12:00.010-04:00

Movies watched, March 9-22, 2008

Story of a Junkie, Lech Kowalski, 1987

Documentary filmmaker Lech Kowalski (of such punk movies as D.O.A. and Hey Is Dee Dee Home) chronicles the day-to-day activities of John Spaceley, a.k.a. Gringo, an eye patch-wearing junkie living on the Lower East Side in the early 80s. Cloaked in perpetual darkness, teeming with graffiti, and populated by junkies, thieves, and freaks, the film accentuates the real Mad Max qualities that New York once possessed (particularly in the scene in which our eye patched hero is skateboarding down a dark, gloom-laden street with a motorcycle gang in tow). In this way, much of it feels less like a documentary than a B-grade Escape from New York.

The film does include straight documentary footage, but much of it falls into murkier territory. One could call it a quasi-documentary, as all of the people portrayed are real “street characters,” as Kowalski describes them in the DVD commentary, filmed in real locations and circumstances—basically, Kowalski would bring these people together, put them in situations that they would often find themselves in anyway, and let the camera roll. It’s authentic, yet not quite—essentially set-up only in that the participants were aware of the camera’s presence. A few scenes were, admittedly, outright stagings—the murder scene, for instance—based on real events that Kowalski witnessed and recreated for the film. Spaceley was never in on this though, so as to capture his true reactions to his surroundings—in the aforementioned murder scene, as soon as the shot is fired Spaceley takes off down the street, genuinely terrified.

As one might imagine considering the subject matter, the film is often disturbingly graphic. One witnesses people shooting up, suffering through withdrawal (with the inevitable profuse vomiting), and flagrantly sharing needles at shooting galleries, a particularly uncomfortable moment knowing that many of these people will later die of AIDS as a result of these activities.

The film is shot in a pre-gentrified Lower East Side and Soho, when they were vastly different from the chic locales they’ve become today. Yet they’re still vaguely recognizable—the funny thing about Manhattan is that despite all the development, how much these neighborhoods have changed in the past 20 years, there are still elements of the past preserved “like a seasoning” (as Luc Sante writes in his essay “My Lost City”), so that if you were to squint you could almost imagine Spaceley hustling on the corner, crouched over a comic book, or uncertainly making his way down the street in his snazzy white boots.

Not a Photograph, Jeffrey Iwanicki, 2006

“What happens when the most influential band you never heard reunites after 19 years?” This documentary about Boston’s legendary Mission of Burma attempts to answer that question, but unfortunately I’m far less interested in what they’re doing now than in what they were doing then. Not that I haven’t appreciated the newfound chance to see one of my favorite bands play—and for a bunch of 40 year olds, they monumentally surpass most of their contemporary competition. (I especially enjoyed their rendition of the Dicks’ “Hate the Police” onstage in Austin. Granted, I’d just seen the newly reunited Dicks play it too, but it was nonetheless cool.) And perhaps that’s the issue: I was there for the reuniting. I wanted the film to show me what I wasn’t there for: the history, the context, the early live footage, and so on. Not a Photograph does allocate a brief chronicling of the band’s beginnings and significant musical legacy, but not in enough detail for me.

Veronika Voss, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982

An aging German film star meets a sports writer, who, after a brief affair with the unstable actress, becomes suspicious of her doctor and self-proclaimed “best friend,” believing her to be keeping Voss pumped full of
morphine in order to slowly deplete her assets. The film uncannily captures the look and feel of an old film, despite its being released in 1982, evoking a kind of German Sunset Boulevard.

Minority Report, Steven Spielberg, 2002

While this movie is enjoyable as a suspenseful, futuristic thriller, there’s too much of Steven Spielberg in there to transcend beyond pure entertainment. It’s too slick, and maudlin at times, failing to capture the paranoid, druggy atmosphere of a Philip K. Dick story.

The Elephant Man, David Lynch, 1980

While The Elephant Man is one of David Lynch’s more conventionally plotted films, there are elements of his distinctive style present, such as a slow, nightmarish montage of marching elephants superimposed over women’s faces. This sequence seems to depict the explanation of how the Elephant Man came to be, according to Bytes, the sideshow man: “Consider the fate of this creature's poor mother, struck down in the fourth month of her maternal condition by an elephant.”

The film is more or less faithful to the story of the Elephant Man, though the events of his life are represented somewhat out of order, with perhaps a few embellishments. John Merrick (whose name, apparently, was actually Joseph) suffered not from any elephant attacks, as Bytes would have one believe, but from Proteus syndrome, a disorder that causes skin overgrowth and atypical bone development, often accompanied by massive tumors. In short, he was severely disfigured, the growths on his head so enormous that he could not sleep lying down for fear of breaking his neck (more on this in a moment). Despite his ailment’s being of a physical nature, many presumed him to be mentally deficient as well, perhaps simply because they did not want to imagine the horror of a normal, intelligent man trapped inside such a grotesquely malformed body. (“Pray to God he’s an idiot,” as Dr. Treves says, following Merrick’s first exposure to the medical community.)

Unfortunately, he is far from an idiot. As the film’s quintessential anguished line goes, “I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!” Beneath the misshapen façade, Merrick is a sensitive, refined, and loving son, with a love of poetry and theater, and a talent for drawing (he builds a cathedral made of cards based on the spire he sees from his window, using his imagination to supply the rest—the card cathedral can be see on display at the Royal London Hospital Museum).

Merrick died at 27 in his sleep when his neck was dislocated, due to the weight of his massive head. Merrick was well aware of the risk he was taking by sleeping on his back, but he did it anyway, his desire to be normal was so intense. (According to Wikipedia, Merrick had expressed the desire to visit a hospital for the blind so he could find a woman who could not see him, who could love him for who he was.) And thus was the plight of the Elephant Man—people tried to abuse him and exploit him, while others wanted to gape at the spectacle of his hideousness, but few truly cared for him.

Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck, 2007

I really can’t figure out what people saw in this “critically acclaimed” movie. I found it to be a rather predictable thriller, plagued by unlistenable Bahston accents, and implementing every silly plot effect (for instance, blocking out sound and then letting it back in for maximum effect) that you’ve seen countless times before. Boring.

2008-04-11T20:41:00.013-04:00

Movies watched, March 1-8, 2008

Funny Games, Michael Haneke, 1997

In this Austrian horror film, two preppy-looking young men take a family hostage inside their own vacation home and torture them throughout the course of the night. Far from a conventional thriller of this ilk, Haneke takes a self-examining approach, employing various techniques that force the viewer to contemplate their responses to the film’s violence. For instance, one of the killers dislikes the outcome of a particular scene, so he “rewinds” the film so he can redo it. This interruption in the plot not only draws attention to the fact that we’re watching a movie, but sparks the viewer to stop and reflect on it a little longer than they might otherwise have done. At least that’s the intention—I found the rewinding to be kind of annoying.

The killers often address the audience directly, shifting responsibility for their actions upon the viewer. It implies that by watching a violent film, the viewer is somehow complicit, allowing the violence to happen—as if we can protest. I suppose one could challenge our reasons for finding such films entertaining (this is often attributed to an inherent desire for emotional stimulation), but to suggest culpability for the fictional characters’ crimes is a bit farfetched. Maybe I’m oversimplifying a complex idea, but regardless, I think I’d rather just watch a film and analyze it as I see fit. I don’t need the director forcing me into philosophical reflection.

Sicko, Michael Moore, 2007

Michael Moore’s most recent documentary addresses the many flaws of the American healthcare system, in which insurance company staff are rewarded for denying coverage to their customers. In addition to interviewing various victims and employees of this profit-driven system, Moore visits several countries that practice universal healthcare.

In a British hospital, the only cashier he can find actually exists to give out, rather than collect, money; if patients can provide a receipt for taking public transportation to the hospital, they will be reimbursed for their expenses. This is rather bewildering for someone who is used to patients being charged for ambulance rides—in one scene, a woman describes how her insurance company denied coverage for her ride from an accident scene to the hospital because she hadn’t pre-approved it, despite the fact that she was unconscious for the trip.

Residents of countries with a universal healthcare system generally seem not only healthier but also happier, the result of a vastly different mindset and approach to life. Europeans, for instance, work less—they have a 35-hour work week and often enjoy upwards of four weeks vacation a year—as opposed to the doggedly work-minded Americans who often spend upwards of 60 hours a week in the office (and two weeks or less on vacation). There’s a clip included in the film in which George W. Bush meets a woman who works three jobs in order to make ends meet. While to me there is something horribly wrong with this picture—to put it simply, the cost of living grossly exceeds the average wage—Bush praises the woman for her steadfast work ethic, proudly beaming as if hers is an admirable situation we can all aspire to: “Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic.” Uniquely American, indeed.

As in any Moore documentary there are a few gimmicks employed, and while I’m not a particularly big fan of this practice, they’re nonetheless effective. For instance, Moore transports a group of ailing 9/11 volunteers to Cuba, where they receive better healthcare than they did in the United States, one woman finding that her $240 a month inhaler costs five cents in a Cuban pharmacy. Never mind that Moore rather sneakily draws on our sympathies with dramatic stories of these American heroes turned out in the cold—the five cent inhaler drives the point home pretty clearly.

And so, as this film illustrates, it is possible to efficiently and effectively provide universal healthcare to the masses, yet America severely falls behind in its practices—we’re perversely more concerned with profits than with our own citizens’ wellbeing.

Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972

A weathered-looking, middle-aged man named Paul (Marlon Brando) and a beautiful young woman named Jeanne are brought together by fate in an empty Paris apartment. Paul’s wife has just committed suicide, and Jeanne is about to be married to an obnoxious filmmaker (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, whose performance is somewhat derivative of that of his previous characters—a little more about this below). They don’t know this about one another though—they don’t even know each other’s names, which is the driving force of their affair. Their relationship exists solely within the walls of this large and barren apartment; it could not subsist in the real world.

The film is best known for its graphic depictions of sex, which in this case is not nearly as romantic as it is brutal—instead of passion one witnesses two lonely souls desperate for human contact. It’s difficult to mention this aspect without referring to the infamous “butter scene,” in which Paul and Jeanne have anal sex, using butter as a lubricant. The actress playing Jeanne later revealed that despite the simulation she truly felt violated by this act, that her tears of humiliation are real.

Brando’s anguished performance is intense, most notably a powerful, grief-stricken monologue over the body of his dead wife, in which he cycles from berating her, calling her a “cheap, goddamn, fucking, godforsaken whore,” to mournfully removing her makeup (“you never wore this fucking shit”), and sobbing uncontrollably (“I don’t know why you did it!”) His character is much more complex and multi-faceted than that of Jeanne—whether this is because of the script or their performances, I can’t say, but Brando definitely makes the character his own.

As I said before, their relationship could not exist outside the apartment—and when they eventually meet up again, and Paul reveals his name and tells her about his life, the change in dynamic is palpable. It’s also a case of “too little too late”—he wants to pursue a normal relationship (“We left the apartment and now we begin and love all the rest of it”) but at this point she is desperate to put it behind her, to forget he ever existed.

The Mother and the Whore, Jean Eustache, 1973

Released a few years after the French New Wave and the protests of May 1968, this film looks back at these heady times with romantic nostalgia, referencing them on various occasions: “After crises one must forget everything quickly. Erase everything. Like France after the occupation, like France after May ‘68. You recover like France after May ‘68.” It emulates the films of the Nouvelle Vague in style and technique, with its black and white cinematography, natural lighting, lengthy exchanges of intellectual banter, and the casting of classic New Wave actors Jean-Pierre Léaud and Marie Lafont (who starred in Truffaut’s first short, Les Mistons). It’s difficult to separate Léaud from the performance he’s most associated with—Antoine Doinel, a character (and to a certain extent an alter-ego of Truffaut himself) whose development is portrayed over the course of five films spanning 20 years. He conveys a frenzied, romantic aura in his distinct movements, gestures, and manner of speaking—perhaps a bit pretentious, yet charmingly so.

The film spans a few days in the life of a 20-something French intellectual named Alexandre, who lives with—and is supported by—his lover, Marie. Alexandre spends his days idly chatting at the famed Deux Magots café, where at the start of the film he scores the phone number of a young woman at a nearby table. Marie is fully aware of his romantic pursuit after Veronika (the “whore” to Marie’s “mother”); as one might guess, their relationship is rather complicated, not to mention one-sided. Alexandre is up front about his interest in other women, which Marie initially seems not to mind, but she gradually begins to voice her frustrations, which seem to go unheard. At one point, the three of them actually share the same bed, which is carried out rather awkwardly, with Marie unsuccessfully attempting suicide immediately afterward.

The film is an effort to recreate events from Eustache’s life, down to specific conversations. Most remarkably, perhaps, Francoise Lebrun was actually reprising her role as “Veronika,” as she had been Eustache’s real-life lover as well—I can only imagine that this must have been an uncomfortable role to play.

It's debatable as to whether or not these attempts at mirroring reality are the cause, but the film achieves an improvised, documentary feel, despite a definite prepared script, calling to mind the early work of John Cassavetes. There's also the fact that The Mother and the Whore is one of just two narrative films in Eustache's oeuvre, the rest of them comprised of documentaries and shorts. Regardless, I found myself engrossed by the film, despite its length (3 and a half hours) and extreme talkiness, and am saddened to find that Eustache's work is not only difficult to come across but fairly small (in number, that is) due to his suicide in 1981.

2008-03-31T23:37:00.009-04:00

Movies watched, February 24-29, 2008

Fast Cheap and Out of Control, Errol Morris, 1997

This documentary explores the inspirations and ideas of four specialists whose expertise fall on unusual and idiosyncratic subjects: a topiary gardener, a lion tamer, a robot scientist, and an expert on the social behavior of the naked mole rat. Like all of Morris’ films, this one feels particularly his own, showcasing his unique knack for mixing science and philosophy with a touch of poetry. These interviews with four people who on the surface seem to have nothing in common with one another are weaved together in such a way that Morris expertly conveys his own ideas, the audience beginning to draw connections, to grasp the sheer genius of Morris’ visionary mind.

Auto Focus, Paul Schrader, 2002

I’ve never seen Hogan’s Heroes—though I’m now certain that somewhere, perhaps in an episode of The Simpsons, I’ve seen the show parodied—nor had I ever heard of Bob Crane prior to viewing this film, a biopic of the star of the aforementioned Nazi prison camp sitcom. Crane’s life took a fairly sordid turn after the show left the air in 1971—his career bombed, he was reduced to touring the dinner theater circuit, and was eventually found murdered in an Arizona motel room under mysterious circumstances that to this day have not been determined. At the heart of the story is Crane’s obsession with being filmed—not on the set, but with burgeoning home video technology he was introduced to and supplied with over the years. In particular, he liked to film himself having kinky, orgiastic sex.

At the start of the film, Crane, a Los Angeles DJ, seems to be kind of a square family man who married his high school sweetheart and was never with anyone else (this may or may not be true, of course). His life is transformed when he meets John, a video equipment salesman who not only grants him access to state of the art (at the time, at least) recording devices, but also introduces him to a sleazier side of life—except for a brief, token “but I’m married,” Crane happily takes the plunge into this new uncharted territory.

John is rather creepy, and seems almost unreal. One could imagine him, in another kind of film, as a weird imaginary friend character who convinces Crane to indulge his secret fantasies. The two have an oddly codependent relationship, feeding off one another, and not just for video equipment and celebrity friend status—there’s a deeper, darker basis to their friendship that provides much of the film’s unsettling quality.

It’s interesting to see the evolution of video technology as portrayed in the film—only the beginning of a narcissism-fueled technological movement that’s evolved into phenomena like MySpace and YouTube. People love seeing themselves on camera, even if it provides incriminating evidence for them later.

Cruising, William Friedkin, 1980

A cop goes undercover to investigate a series of murders targeting New York’s gay community by posing as a homosexual and probing into (no pun intended) the world of leather bars. This cop, played by Al Pacino (who I more and more find myself disliking as an actor), immerses himself in this lifestyle, growing increasingly absorbed by and attracted to it, causing him to question his own sexual identity in the process.

As a thriller, the film is pretty mediocre. The man who is caught at the end is clearly not the person we’ve seen committing the murders—but don’t jump to any conclusions about how complex the film must be. I suppose it could be argued that this indicates that the crimes were not all committed by the same person, but then our culprit is depicted remembering the previous murders, not to mention that his fingerprints are found on a coin machine which, in a previous scene, we see the killer handling.

Cruising’s only real point of interest is in its portrayal of gay bars in the late 70s, serving as a time capsule, a snapshot of uninhibited, openly sexual behavior that very nearly vanished in the aftermath of the AIDS virus. The film sparked protest within the gay community, who felt that it cast a negative image of them for the public at large, particularly in its portrayal of a gay serial killer, not to mention the aforementioned Dionysian behavior. While I wasn’t there, and can’t vouch for the degree of accuracy this film possesses, I also can’t say I found anything particularly offensive about it, unless you count the sloppy narrative.

The French Connection, William Friedkin, 1971

The French Connection is a bit of a step up for Friedkin (actually, I guess chronologically, Cruising is a step down from this one). One could consider it a pioneer in the genre of gritty cop movies, though with the countless imitators emerging on both the large and small screen in the years since, it’s hard to imagine a time when audiences were more accustomed to seeing the bland Dragnet-esque style of police work on camera. The film is best known for its legendary chase scene involving a car weaving through city traffic in order to keep up with an elevated subway train—and to be honest, that’s all I can remember about it weeks later.

2008-03-26T00:01:00.012-04:00

So I'm a little behind here. I won't even try to remember which days I watched these movies, but it was some time in mid to late February.

A Taste of Honey, Tony Richardson, 1961

Here’s another one of those “kitchen sink” dramas I was talking about the other week, though this one differs slightly in that the focus is on an angry young woman. In this “Victorian melodrama” (as one of the characters refers to it), a teenage girl named Jo is impregnated by a black sailor she’s particularly smitten with. She befriends a gay man who looks after her—she’s pretty incompetent, it seems—after her sailor has left port and her mother has kicked her out so that she and her brand new husband can have the place to themselves. Jo argues constantly with her mother, who calls her a whore—her husband, might I add, is a loser with a glass eye who laughs like Beavis and makes comments like “look who’s got a bun in the oven!” I suppose the viewer should be sympathizing with Jo, but she’s just so obnoxious and shrill, to the point where I really can’t say I like her at all, even beneath her flaws.

While the film’s tone is fairly serious, the ill-fitting soundtrack seems like something repurposed from a wacky comedy of the same period. In unrelated trivia, I managed to catch a line of dialogue (“the dream is gone but the baby is real”) that was used in a Smiths song 20 years later, which is probably knowledge of which I shouldn’t be admitting possession.

Chicken Hawk, Adi Sideman, 1994

This documentary about NAMBLA (the North American Man Boy Love Association, for those unfamiliar) is most notable in its nonjudgmental, objective approach towards an extremely sensitive and taboo subject. This conveyed impartiality is most likely the reason why those interviewed were willing to discuss this controversial issue so openly on camera.

The film explores possible reasons as to why these men are partial to young boys. Many of them profess to have become sexually active as children, experimenting with their male peers, which is where this activity seems to originate. They remember how much fun these early experiences were, their sexual preferences never maturing past that point.

One man seems deluded about the motivations of young boys he comes across—he imagines that they’re flirting with him, that they appreciate that he supposedly understands them. But judging from interviews with the boys, that doesn’t seem to be the case, leading to some uncomfortable scenes in a convenience store parking lot.

Regardless, NAMBLA members assert that they’re not doing any harm (one of them proclaims, “I’m not a child molester, I’m a child lover!”). This statement remains debatable, though the film certainly falls into gray area, with no concrete conclusion achieved. Certainly, these men aren’t merely interested in sex; they become romantically attached, falling in love with little boys, as well as the memories of youth and playfulness and innocence they evoke.

East Side Story, Dana Ranga, 1997

As the film’s narrator states, “This is the odyssey of a filmmaker searching for music, fun and colors in the world of ambiguity and suspicion”—in other words, a documentary about the Iron Curtain musicals popularized in Communist countries in the mid-20th century. These movies mimicked the Hollywood musicals of the day, effecting bizarre scenes depicting comrades driving tractors, harvesting crops, and toiling away in factories, while cheerfully singing the joys of socialism to choreographed dance moves.

I say bizarre, yet I suppose there was nothing bizarre about them to the audiences who loved them. They provided a mode of escape from the grim reality people living in Communist countries faced every day—hope through hit musical numbers. Outsiders like myself, though, were often astounded by these strangely familiar yet utterly foreign films, while central committees condemned them as “the most flagrant offspring of the capitalist pleasure industry.” Stalin, however, was a fan, developing a taste for wacky musical comedies—quite a contrast from his historical legacy. As the film’s often witty narrator says, “Even Jean-Luc Godard once said that the history of film was the history of boys photographing girls. But Stalin had another fantasy: boys photographing tractors.”

Not to over-quote the film, but there’s another great line that sums up its clever, lively tone, both commemorative and analytical: “Who knows how things might have turned out if Socialism could have just been more fun?”

Performance, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970

Chas, a gangster on the run from the mob after fouling up a job, seeks refuge in a vacant room in the home of a reclusive rock star (played by Mick Jagger). His plan is to hide out there until he can get a passport and fly to New York, dyeing his hair with red paint and adopting the ludicrous story that, like Jagger, he’s also a performer: a professional juggler. But Chas is soon sucked into the hedonistic lifestyle of excess that this household observes, ingesting psychedelic mushrooms, and losing his sense of personal identity in the process.

For the most part I found the movie kind of unwatchable—it’s attempting to achieve something profound, but falls short. Or maybe it’s just really dated.

2008-03-08T15:07:00.009-05:00

Gimme Shelter, Albert and David Maysles, 1970

Sympathy for the Devil, Jean-Luc Godard, 1968

The Rolling Stones have provided the subject of nearly a dozen films—some legendary and some falling into obscurity—still captivating filmmakers to this day: in April Martin Scorsese will release Shine a Light, a career-spanning documentary that focuses on their recent Bigger Bang Tour. There’s just something about them that draws people in (even now, in their geriatric stages): their charisma, their sexual energy, some intangible, as-yet-indefinable quality.

Gimme Shelter grew out of the Maysles brothers’ desire to cover the Rolling Stones’ 1969 U.S. tour, but ended up focusing on that tour’s culmination: the Altamont Free Festival, a concert outside of San Francisco that the band organized, and which has since gone down in infamy as the symbolic end of an era. The documentary is structured as a framed story, moving back and forth in time between footage of the notorious concert and the band’s reactions to witnessing said footage. Also included are the preparations made in setting up the show, such as the difficulty in securing a location, especially one with ample parking—the film contains a scene shot from a helicopter that pans over the miles-long stretch of cars leading up to the raceway.

I’d never realized that Altamont happened in December, which strikes me as an odd time of year to hold an outdoor concert—despite the Bay Area’s slightly milder weather conditions, people can be seen draped in blankets. Perhaps the wintry conditions contributed in part to the hostile atmosphere, although it certainly was not the only factor, not even the most significant.

Organizing a free concert attended by hundreds of thousands of people seems difficult in itself; it becomes even more complicated when you consider that the attendees will for the most part behave...eccentrically. The throngs of concertgoers are fairly representative of the stereotypical picture of “dirty hippies”: they’re drugged out, rolling around in the grass, dancing hypnotically, many of them in various stages of undress. Unofficially hiring the Hell’s Angels to perform security duties was a vastly misguided move, resulting in a series of poorly handled debacles spiraling out of the promoters’ control. In the commentary, Albert Maysles mentions that the London branch of the Hell’s Angels had served as “honor guards” at an outdoor Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park with no incidents, implying that the Stones were unaware that the California Angels were markedly different from their British counterparts. But there must have been someone in California who could have alerted them to this ill-advised decision.

The hostility between the concertgoers and the Angels is palpable at the outset—someone dances a little too close to the stage during the Jefferson Airplane’s set, so the Angels start beating him with sticks. This bears a particularly ominous portent, yet little action is taken to prevent it from escalating, other than Grace Slick’s lukewarmly asking them to stop, predictably to no effect.

The tension, of course, does escalate—in one scene, the crowd parts to make way for a procession of Hells Angels aggressively riding through on motorcycles. By the time the Rolling Stones, the last band of the night, take the stage the energy is frenzied and anxious. The audience stares at the band in disbelief, one girl with tears streaming down her face—Mick Jagger seems to notice this but begins strutting around like a chicken as if nothing is happening. They interrupt their set at several points, bewilderedly asking “who’s fighting and what for?”, but at this point, it’s beyond them—they’re powerless to stop it. When an audience member is fatally stabbed near the front row by a Hell’s Angel, the band inexplicably keeps playing, finishing their set before immediately being whisked off to safety by helicopter. (They claimed later to have not realized the stabbing was fatal, and felt that if they hadn’t finished their set, a riot would have ensued.)

This film illustrates the degree of prescience a great documentary filmmaker possesses—how did the Maysles have the insight to not only film the Altamont Free Festival, but to actually capture the stabbing? It’s as if they were so in tune with this generation—despite the fact that they were not really of it—that they could better predict the significance of this occasion than those involved. I suppose it simply could have been luck that they were there with their cameras, but I’d like to think it was intentional. Regardless, Gimme Shelter transcends the simple rock documentary, marking the downfall of the 60s, the failure of brotherly love—people believed they could peacefully coexist outside conventional laws, but they ended up fighting one another like something out of Lord of the Flies. The footage of concertgoers leaving the field resembles zombies stumbling along in the eerie light of the Stones’ getaway helicopter—strangely symbolic in and of itself.

Sympathy for the Devil*, another namesake of a classic Rolling Stones track, isn’t so much a documentary but a genre-defying exploration of the 60s with the Rolling Stones playing a character, just one component of the story—I would have expected little else from Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave. The Stones footage is shot in a recording studio amidst colorful squares placed throughout like sculpture, lending the scene an abstract quality. Throughout the film they seem to be more or less writing “Sympathy for the Devil,” picking it apart, breaking it down to its essence and then building it back up until they have the brilliant track we know today. The repetition has kind of a numbingly hypnotic effect—I’m also pretty sure that I had the words memorized by the end of the movie. The awkwardness of recording vocals is illustrated by periodically letting certain tracks drop out of the soundtrack—one of my favorite moments is watching the band stand around in a circle “whoo-whooing” the backing vocals.

These scenes are politically charged in the subtlest of ways, most notably in the deliberate change in lyrics from “who killed Kennedy” to “who killed the Kennedys”—a chilling reference to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, which had just occurred that same month. It’s extremely fortunate that Godard showed up in the studio when he did, as the title track’s lyrics possess weightier and more provocative content than some of their other songs. As Mick Jagger recalls in a 2003 interview in Rolling Stone, “[it was] very fortuitous...We just happened to be recording that song. We could have been recording ‘My Obsession.’ But it was ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and it became the track that we used.”

These scenes with the Stones are broken up with scripted, more conceptual threads depicting divisive issues of that era. Black revolutionaries at a riverside junkyard toss rifles to one another, reciting passages from Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, as the camera pans over ruined cars stacked up in majestic, hulking towers. A character named Eve Democracy wanders the city, stealthily spraypainting provocatively combined words, such as “freudemocracy,” “cinemarxism,” and “sovietcong.” Many of these scenes contain a voiceover that dryly reads from a dirty paperback, perhaps a kind of neutralization of its content.

Watching these two films back to back articulates the pronounced differences between them. Each of these directors has a strong, identifiable cinematic voice (there’s no question as to whose is whose), and each tackles more or less the same basic issues in his own distinct way. Godard takes the intellectual, more didactic approach to communicating his ideas, whereas the Maysles choose to allow the events therein speak for themselves. They never address the issues directly but they’re inherently present, acutely felt.

*The film was originally titled One Plus One, with Sympathy for the Devil being the version that the producers changed in an attempt to create more commercial value. The soundtrack was altered to include the final version of the title track at the end, the title changed as well to incorporate a more obvious reference to the band. Godard was furious at these changes, and actually punched the producer responsible, stating in an interview with The Guardian that “they want to make one plus one equal two. I don’t.”

2008-02-29T23:44:00.009-05:00

Movies watched, February 9-22, 2008

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 1996
This haunting documentary chronicles the trial of the West Memphis Three: Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Miskelly, three teenagers who were convicted of brutally murdering three 8 year old boys, despite a lack of physical proof. The film suggests that the police hastily pointed the finger at the Three because they were under intense pressure to find the killer(s) and needed suspects. These outcast teenagers listened to Metallica, dressed in black, and one of them expressed interests in Wicca; sensationalized accounts of satanic rituals quickly spread, painting them as depraved devil-worshipping degenerates.

No actual concrete or DNA evidence implicating the Three is ever presented, with the only incriminating information being hearsay from various teenage girls, and a confession from Jessie that Damien and Jason had murdered the boys, while he had merely observed, providing occasional assistance—except that this confession is riddled with errors and inaccuracies. Jessie changes the time of the murders on multiple occasions, gradually shifting towards the time that the police suggest is correct. He says he saw Damien and Jason rape the boys, but medical examinations of their bodies suggest otherwise. And he says they were tied with brown rope, when in fact they were tied up with their own shoelaces. It’s hard to believe that someone would confess to a horrific crime that he didn’t commit—which in the end is the nail in his coffin that he just can’t pull out—but considering his low IQ (which is hearkened back to rather excessively) and high level of susceptibility, his lawyers argued that he may have been coerced into giving a false confession just to get the police off his back, assuming everything could be straightened out later.

As for the hearsay, several teenage girls claimed that they’d overheard Damien say he had killed the children and that he would kill two more whom he’d already picked out. But none could recall the circumstances, or who they were with, or how close within earshot they were standing to Damien, which all sounds a bit fishy to me. Moreover, Damien strikes me as fairly smart, so I find it highly unlikely that he would admit this in public, so loudly that others around him could hear him.

Troublingly, the Three don’t do a very adept job of conveying their innocence in the courtroom, in their fairly cold, detached mannerisms, the way they carry themselves so nonchalantly. Jason seems pretty timid and quiet; he is the one we hear from least in the film. Damien, on the other hand, comes across as intelligent but rather immature and naive (but then, he was still a teenager at the time), and makes various ill-advised comments—such as how he’s to become a kind of West Memphis bogeyman, the stuff of ghost stories and urban legend for years to come—of which most people don’t really grasp the humor. I can understand the inclination towards making these smartass remarks—he feels contempt for these people who blindly typecast him, so he in turn feeds their fears, messing with their heads. But unfortunately this stuff gets taken pretty seriously; his notebooks scribbled with pentagrams and Metallica lyrics, as well as quotes from Shakespeare, are simply the product of an angsty teen, standard fare for any high school outcast—and yet said notebook is produced in court as evidence of his guilt.

As with any documentary, it’s possible that the film is biased, although there is a lot of interview footage of the victims’ families, as well as with the law enforcement officials involved (but one can always conjecture that the filmmakers left things out, or that it was edited a certain way). And yet, I just can’t see any evidence that the West Memphis Three are guilty. The only strike against them is Jessie’s confession, which is full of holes and contradictions. After that, all the plaintiffs have are their prejudices, their hatred, their extreme desire to capture someone, to finally have a person to direct this anger toward. Early on in the film, one of the victim’s mothers is asked if she thinks they’re guilty, to which she replies something along the lines of, “Of course they did it—just look at them!” With remarks such as these, it seems like they never even had a chance.

Paradise Lost II: Revelations, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 2000
While I found the original Paradise Lost documentary to be chilling and thought-provoking, I’m not really sure why this sequel exists. Most of the content is fairly pointless, focusing on John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the victims, as he plays up for the camera (as Jason says, “play acting”), ranting and raving about how the West Memphis Three are going to hell, even burning makeshift effigies in the ravine where the children’s bodies were found. Byers is actually implicated in the crime at one point but fiercely denies it, almost to the point of suspicion, so passionate are his proclamations of innocence. He’s undoubtedly a strange character, but I’m not sure I needed to see him raging incoherently for several hours.

What I did find interesting were the examinations of the crime scene photos by a forensic expert contacted by members of Free the WM3, and wish the film’s focus would have fallen more along these lines. It does have its harrowing moments, mainly in interviews with Damien, who’s still on Death Row to this day. Every time I remember this fact, my stomach turns—he’s running out of time, which is pretty depressing.

Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston, 1990
In late 80s and early 90s New York City, there existed (hell, maybe it still exists, I don’t know) a subculture of poor, gay, black people who organized fashion shows (or “balls,” as they like to call them), wherein they could become whoever they wanted, masquerading in relation to themes running the gamut from military to high fashion to business executive to Dynasty. The appeal is simple: in real life you’re nobody, but for one night you can be a star. The styles and music depicted onscreen are fairly dated, but it’s still a fascinating portrait of a bygone time and place, both joyful and sad. The sadness stems from many of the participants’ actual fates: poverty, drugs, prostitution, and in one cited case, murder. And yet, the joy overpowers the melancholy, exuding an ecstatic and vibrant energy.

Bright Leaves, Ross McElwee, 2003
Documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee discovers that there’s a 1950 Hollywood movie, Bright Leaf, that may be based on his great-grandfather, once a leading figure in the tobacco industry who lost the family fortune to the Dukes. Thereon McElwee explores the implications of this discovery, that his family may be responsible for years of suffering and addiction at the hands of tobacco—and they aren’t even enjoying any of the benefits (a strange preoccupation, admittedly). The Dukes, for instance, have a huge estate and a university named after them, while his family lives in a modest home in the shadow of the Duke mansion—there is the small, almost nonexistent McElwee Park, which “even has a few benches!”, yet otherwise the McElwees’ legacy goes largely unnoticed in this city.

McElwee becomes obsessed with Bright Leaf’s being about his great-grandfather, and contacts film critic Vlada Petric in hopes of discussing it with him. This results in one of the film’s most memorable scenes—Petric turns out to be quite the eccentric (to say the least), and insists on conducting the interview while wheeling McElwee around in a wheelchair, to create the effect of movement. But Petric proves himself a wise sage when, after McElwee explains the reason for his curiosity about Bright Leaf, he replies, “Who cares?” Seriously—who cares? Even if it truly were based on the story of his great-grandfather, this hokey Hollywood film would not play the role of a surreal home movie, or artifact of his family story, as McElwee asserts. Regardless, Bright Leaves is a humorous exploration of family legacy, the tobacco industry, and what it is to be Southern, not to mention a few other things thrown into the mix. It defies neat categorization—a kind of meandering diary, whose entries circle around a particular preoccupation.

The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris, 1988
Here’s another film that illustrates the faults of our legal system, in which we can convict a man of a crime even though all the facts point toward someone else. Unlike Paradise Lost, however, this film resulted in the innocent party’s exoneration, an amazing achievement that transcends its role of a mere film. Morris is a tireless seeker of truth, and will go to the ends of the earth (most recently, Croatia) to find it. He managed to secure a tape of what is, ostensibly, the real killer’s roundabout confession: “[The police] didn’t blame him. I did. A scared sixteen year old kid who would sure like to get out of it if he can...they didn’t have nothing else until I gave them something, so I guess they get something, they run with it.” Maybe it’s unfair to insinuate that if Morris had directed Paradise Lost, the West Memphis Three would have been acquitted—but who else could have accomplished such a feat by making a film?

Vernon Florida, Errol Morris, 1982
I wrote about Vernon, Florida (aka Nub City) last year. While perhaps not my favorite of Morris' films, it's still a great one.

2008-02-22T23:30:00.013-05:00

Movies watched, February 9 to 15, 2008

There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007

I just finished reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and while it’s obviously a different story from this one (not to mention that the film is only loosely based upon Sinclair’s novel Oil!), There Will Be Blood does bear similarity in tone, style, and scope, in that it is a kind of saga that spans many years, chronicling the characters’ various ups and downs, as tragedy continues to befall them, and set against the backdrop of a volatile period in American history.

The film’s first 11 minutes contain not a single word of dialogue, only the soundtrack’s strange, almost avant-garde string instrumentations, amidst the sounds of a pickax hitting stone, of oil bubbling to the surface. This first image of oil is intoxicating—it’s beautiful yet dark, hypnotically drawing one into its slippery blackness. Perhaps this is what lured Daniel Plainview in—more likely, though, was the prospect of money.

Daniel purports to have a heart of stone. He sleeps on a hard floor, not out of necessity, but by choice, as if he can’t allow himself any luxury or comfort, so as to keep his hatred burning. And yet one can detect some instances of empathy behind this veil of misanthropy—he says that he abhors most people, yet seems to have some feelings for his adopted son H.W. But to acknowledge this would be an admission of weakness, so he repeatedly abandons the child, eventually claiming that the only reason he even raised him was because he needed a sweet face to sell his product. (This may in fact have been the case initially, but I’m certain that the boy eventually grew on him.)

With echoes of Citizen Kane, There Will Be Blood is a film of epic proportions, depicting the rise of an oil tycoon who has forsaken his family, past, and anything that ties him to humanity—perhaps not as perfectly or innovatively executed as Welles’ masterpiece, but an admirably strong attempt.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Karl Reisz, 1960

It would seem that in the decades after World War II, England’s young men had little to look forward to besides slaving away in a factory, drinking, and, ultimately, death. In this British drama, Albert Finney (later on of Big Fish, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, etc.) plays Arthur Seaton, a cynical factory worker whose defiant attitude sets him apart as a kind of working class antihero. His antics won’t change the way things are—no protest rallies for this one—but he does manage to disrupt the day-to-day activities of his workplace (though perhaps more to amuse himself than anything else). He lives for the weekend, which he spends drinking and womanizing: “I’m out for a good time. All the rest is propaganda.”

This routine is disrupted when the married woman he’s been having an affair with tells him she’s pregnant, and that the child is his. At this time in history, it’s not so easy to resolve this predicament, so they desperately pursue quick cures, like drinking a pint of gin while soaking in a hot bath, eventually resorting to the quintessential back alley abortion.

Finney’s character is strangely charismatic—he’s a bit of a bastard yet extremely likable. Perhaps we’re drawn to his fighting spirit, though it’s debatable as to whether this will aid him in escaping the dreary monotony of his current lifestyle. More likely, he’s been doomed to live out his days in this manner—working, drinking, and slowly dying.

Look Back in Anger, Tony Richardson, 1958

Another example of the “kitchen sink realism” (as this genre is often characterized) of 1960s British cinema. But unlike Arthur Seaton, there’s nothing to like about the savagely hateful Jimmy Porter, an amateur musician and scholar who’s settled for the bleak existence of a flea market vendor selling candy. Angry at this sorry fate, and perhaps even angrier about his father’s death (which occurred when Jimmy was just a boy), he seems to take it out on the world, psychologically torturing his wife, Alison. Alison has turned her back on the upper middle class world in which she grew up, but it’s clear that Jimmy not only resents her upbringing, but is envious and fearful of her as well.

The film is based on a play, which seems fairly obvious from the unnatural sounding dialogue. The performance is a bit over the top, and distracts from the dismal reality the film is supposed to be portraying.

The Party’s Over, Rebecca Chaiklin and Donovan Leitch, 2001

Philip Seymour Hoffman acts as a journalist in this documentary, covering the 2000 presidential election via interviews with politicians, voters, protesters, fellow Hollywood actors, and so on. Hoffman says he’s doing the film because he feels uninformed, and wants to learn more about the issues, as well as the election process itself, which are both explored here.

It’s strange to watch this now, simply because of how much has happened since then. The people involved have no idea how significant this election really is. It serves as a fairly depressing reminder of how close we came to electing another candidate, leaving one to wonder how different the last eight years could have been (and then again, how they might have turned out disturbingly similar).

2008-02-14T22:18:00.014-05:00

Movies watched, January 27 to February 8, 2008

Death Race 2000, Paul Bartel, 1975
I first became aware of this movie through the video game that it (loosely) provided the basis for, which is available for play at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens—I strongly recommend the trip. One of the first arcade games that inspired a great deal of controversy and parental outcry for its violent content, it was eventually banned, and few units were ever made. The violent content, by the way, is really more in theory, as the graphics are pretty simple—no blood or guts, just stick figures you have to run down, with little gravestones popping up in their places.

Death Race 2000 the movie is a black comedy from Paul Bartel (see Eating Raoul and Rock and Roll High School, in which he co-stars with Warhol actress Mary Woronov, who also appears in this one as driver Calamity Jane) about a transcontinental road race wherein the more pedestrians the drivers mow down, the more points they score. The extremely cheerful announcer (apparently modeled after Howard Cosell), explains that “women are still worth ten points more than men in all age brackets, but teenagers now rack up 40 points, and toddlers under twelve now rate a big 70 points. The big score: anyone, any sex, over 75 years old has been upped to 100 points.” When the first points of the race are scored, he laments, “too bad the guy was only 38; just two years older, and he’d have been worth three times the points!”

While the nation seems to embrace this tradition (safely from their homes, that is), there is a resistance movement forming that is morally opposed to this rampant disregard for human life. Their techniques for sabotaging the race include blowing up the drivers, resembling a Death Race Carrie Nation.

Produced by the legendary Roger Corman, the original treatment was reportedly much more serious in tone, and, as Corman put it, “kind of vile”—which I can certainly imagine. He decided the story would be more appropriate as a comedy, and called for a rewrite—and I’m glad he did, because this is one of the funniest movies I’ve seen recently.

Helvetica, Gary Hustwit, 2007
This documentary opened my eyes to the ubiquitousness of Helvetica, pointing out all the places it appears, from street signs and subway stations, to advertisements, to legal documents. It shows up nearly everywhere, quietly communicating, and one never really notices it—which means it’s doing its job successfully. The other day I drove through a town where the street signs featured an oddly decorative typeface, which, while readable, was immediately noticeable—an issue that was still fresh in my mind after recently viewing this documentary.

I’d always wondered how one creates a new typeface, and so I enjoyed seeing a few of the initial steps one takes in order to do so—starting with certain letters that are representative of the rest of the alphabet’s characters, determining whether or not to use serifs, and so on. It made me want to do a few experiments of my own in this regard.

The film also explores different schools of design—some people embrace Helvetica, viewing it as clean and refreshing (one commentator particularly loves it, gushingly comparing it to an oasis in the desert), while others see it as institutional, inhuman, and boring, rebelling against it by developing unconventional, handwritten typefaces. (Though perhaps impractical in the long run, I love that one of the commentators laid out a magazine article in Zapf Dingbats because he didn’t like the article and felt it wasn’t worth reading.) While Helvetica can certainly serve its purpose, I think it’s nice to experiment with other, more interesting types of lettering—it just depends on the purpose of the text. In all, for a movie about a font, Helvetica is actually pretty fascinating and thought-provoking.

Confessions of a Superhero, Matthew Ogens, 2007

This documentary follows the lives of four superhero impersonators who make their living by hanging out on Hollywood Boulevard and trying to get people to pose for a picture with them for tips. There’s an unwritten code of etiquette for these people that some follow, while some don’t. (Actually, it’s not all that “unwritten,” as the police are watching them to ensure that they follow the rules.) Basically, they can’t harass people—they’re not allowed to solicit photos, nor can they force anyone to pay them if they don’t want to (but boy does “Marilyn Monroe” get upset when people don’t tip.)

This motley cast of characters claims to all be aspiring actors, but the likelihood of their finding real acting work seems unlikely. They come from varied backgrounds, but they’re all pretty desperate—lost souls futilely striving for fame that never comes. Wonder Woman is an impulsive and unrealistic teenage girl who moved to Hollywood on a whim—she decided to move to California and was on a plane the next day, with no work prospects, no contacts, and nowhere to live. In a similarly rash and not-too-well-thought-out decision, she married a guy several weeks after meeting him; when they stop getting along she seems surprised.

The Hulk was homeless for a long time and his teeth are kind of fucked up (this may or may not be a result of his homelessness though), but in the end he does actually get a call to be in a movie (which is indeed listed as a credit in IMDB). Not exactly an Oscar-winning role, but nonetheless not a bad start.

Batman mirrors the character of Batman in that he’s kind of a psychopath. Dark and violent, this Batman has some deep-seated anger issues as well. He claims to have been involved with the mob and to have killed a man, but this seems rather doubtful—I’d peg him as more of a compulsive liar with a temper than a hitman.

Superman is by far the strangest one of the four. A kind of sheriff for the impersonators, he prides himself on following a strong moral code, policing others when they stray from his righteous path. He claims his mother was the actress Sandy Dennis (see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), but Dennis’ relatives say she didn’t have a son. And if it were true, couldn’t he simply reach out to some of his mother’s more prominent friends for a helpful contact in the business? Even more suspiciously, he says that when his mother was alive she wanted him to get into acting but he wasn’t interested at the time because he wanted to do professional lawncare (a little bizarre, if you ask me). Not to mention that, unlike the other superheroes, he’s obsessed with his super-identity. He wears the costume when he’s not working, and his apartment is filled with collectibles—he eerily even resembles Christopher Reeve a little bit.

This is ultimately a pretty sad story—none of these people are very likely to score any acting gigs beyond the one they’re already doing. And yet hundreds—maybe thousands, I don’t really know the actual statistics—of people like them flock to Hollywood every year to pursue their acting careers. I guess I just don’t understand their self-assurance and optimism, because the prospects look pretty grim to me. But it makes for a good story, and I guess there’s nothing wrong with following your dreams (ugh that sounds so sappy) despite how impractical they are.

Oddly enough, there’s another documentary on Hollywood Boulevard impersonators in the works from Dave Markey, director of 1991: The Year Punk Broke, Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, and various other gems. Maybe he should have conferred a bit with Ogen—hopefully it won’t be too repetitive, focusing on its own unique content.

The Last Detail, Hal Ashby, 1973
Two surly, self-proclaimed “badass” navy men are assigned the “shit detail” of escorting an 18 year old former Seaman named Larry Meadows from their naval base to a prison in Portsmouth. His crime: stealing $40 from his commanding officer’s wife’s favorite charity box, for which he is sentenced to eight years in jail. At the beginning, Larry (played by a young Randy Quaid in a serious role—I almost can’t stop picturing cousin Eddie from the National Lampoon movies, which I imagine has severely pigeonholed him) is oddly bland and pathetic, almost as though he refuses to allow himself any feelings or opinions. Though he says he’s angered by “injustice,” he doesn’t seem to feel that he has been wronged in this situation (they were just doing their job!). Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) takes pity on him and vows to show him a good time, the last one he’ll have for a long while. Throughout the course of the movie, they begin to teach him how to live, which may do more harm than good, as now he knows what’s at stake. He’s finally tasted the exhilarating freedom of what life can bring, but it’s about to be taken away from him. The pain in his eyes as he stares longingly at the first naked female body he’s ever seen—yes, it’s a prostitute—is intensely palpable. The poor bastard has squandered his youth, and now he actually knows it—pretty heartbreaking stuff.

Persepolis, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, 2007
This film adaptation of the two Persepolis graphic novels looks remarkably like the comic, which I think is much stronger and more visually compelling than a live-action version would have been. I don’t really have too much more to say about this one—it was entertaining but as is so often the case, the books are better.

First Person, Errol Morris, 2000
Technically not a movie, but a criminally short-lived television series from acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris, which basically consists of 18 mini-documentaries in which he interviews a person via a TV monitor with his head on the screen. This is a great format for Morris, an opportunity for him to explore all the subjects he finds fascinating yet nonetheless might not warrant a feature-length film.

These shorts contain all the components of Morris’ films: his distinctive use of music, slow motion reenactments, and clips of old movies, as well as similar themes and subject matter, from crime scenes, to people with strange fixations, to, quite simply, strange and intriguing stories. We meet the guy who fired Thomas McIlvane, the infamous postal worker who returned to murder his co-workers after being let go, the woman who falls in love with serial killers (wittily titled “The Killer Inside Me”), a lawyer for the mob, a former game show contestant who continues to write to the show claiming that his losing question was flawed (this same man is also obsessed with high school and impersonated a high school senior at various schools around the country until he was 27 years old), a bartender who believes he may be the smartest man in the world, and so on. I only wish there were more than 18 episodes.

2008-01-28T23:14:00.000-05:00

Movies watched, January 1, 2008 to January 26, 2008

Sins of the Fleshapoids, Mike Kuchar, 1965
The Secret of Wendel Samson, Mike Kuchar, 1966
The Craven Sluck, Mike Kuchar, 1967

Mike Kuchar and his twin brother, George, are often credited as pioneers of underground, low-fi cinema, having created dozens of campy, experimental films from age 12 and on (George seems to have continued making films into the present, whereas Mike’s credits end with 1971’s Tales of the Bronx). Sins of the Fleshapoids is a campy sci-fi film, set a million years into the future, where androids significantly outnumber people, and yet they are employed as slaves to the few humans left on the planet. Like The Tenth Victim (perhaps it was even influenced a little by it, as the two films were released in the same year—scroll down a little for a write-up on that one), the costumes and set design depict a swanky 60s version of the future, here with ancient Greco-Roman overtones, in which the last remaining people on Earth wear ridiculous leaf and flower costumes and sprawl out on leopard print sheets while decadently sucking down grapes from the vine—it’s like a freaky, psychedelic bacchanal.

At the opening of the film, unbeknownst to these hubristic humans, the android slaves have developed senses and emotions—and surprise, surprise, they don’t want to be slaves anymore. Xar (who wears a helmet with chin strap and a leotard) has fallen in love with Melenka, and together they stage an uprising against their cruel masters. One of my favorite lines of the film is uttered by Melenka, in perhaps one of the most bizarre sex scenes portrayed on film: “We are robots…and yet we are in love”—they then have sex by waving their fingers at each other and generating an electrical current (a particularly potent current, I guess, because the final scene depicts Melenka writhing around the floor until a tiny robot toddles out from between her legs).

Sins of the Fleshapoids features crayon drawings (in this case, of demonlike figures) in the opening credits, somewhat reminiscent of something you’d find in a bored, geeky high school student’s notebook (and maybe that’s not so far off the mark, as the Kuchars were in their early 20s when they made this one). The crayon typeface recurs throughout the film in the form of word bubbles popping out of the characters’ mouths. There’s no spoken dialogue otherwise—besides a voiceover that’s kind of hard to listen to—and I love that they resolved this technical dilemma in a manner that was both functional and stylistically interesting.

My favorite of the three films is The Craven Sluck (also the shortest of the three), in which Adele, a bored and unhappy housewife, stages an unsuccessful suicide attempt, then meets a man named Morton (played by George Kuchar) while out walking her dog. (In a brilliant cut that I can only imagine was unplanned, in one moment Adele and Morton are embracing, and the next we see the dog taking a shit on the beach.) Adele plans a secret rendezvous with Morton, but then he meets someone else who’s hotter than her and calls it off. She’s furious but doesn’t have time to tell him off because Earth is suddenly invaded by flying saucers and she’s instantly vaporized (this last part is so sudden and unexpected that it’s totally hilarious). The Craven Sluck employs creative opening credits using a voiceover narrator, which adds in humorous little witticisms like “Marilyn Marmoset, spelled like the South American tree monkey.”

In contrast, my least favorite of the three films is The Secret of Wendel Samson. I’m pretty sure that Wendel’s secret is that he’s gay, hence the large fake spider web they frequently show him stuck to (to illustrate how he’s caught in a “web” of lies, maybe?—either way it’s pretty silly). The soundtrack to this one features some strange robotic noises similar to that of Sins of the Fleshapoids, except this isn’t a sci fi movie, so they seem incongruously placed (although in a way it's oddly appropriate). The film has its comedic moments though, such as when Wendel is picked up by a random stranger off the street, who robotically offers him a cup of coffee—seconds later we see Wendell and the stranger lying in bed with their shirts off, with Wendell, cup in hand, ardently proclaiming “this coffee is great!”

These films remind me a bit of the early work of John Waters (who is said to have been influenced by the Kuchars), particularly in the trashy aesthetic, low budget production style, and recurring cast of actors (who, like Waters’ Dreamlanders, seem like they were probably all friends who hung out in the same circle). They’re ultimately different styles, with the Kuchars leaning towards the science fiction camp, but I like to think they share a kindred spirit, fundamentally of the same nature.

The Tenth Victim, Elio Petri, 1965
This odd, futuristic film reads like a satire of reality television, but clairvoyantly so, as it was released in the 60s. In this world, people can sign up for “The Big Hunt,” in which they are assigned a human target to hunt down and kill. Their prey is notified that they are now a “victim,” but not given the identity of their hunter. Whoever survives ten hunts is awarded a highly coveted prize (only fifteen people in the world have survived all ten). The rarely achieved tenth hunt receives corporate sponsorship, turned into a huge, vulgar spectacle with dancers and round the clock interviews, all televised for the viewers at home. The hunt is also dragged out for the sake of these TV viewers—in this case, the huntress, Caroline (Ursula Andress), could easily have shot her victim (played by Italian film star Marcello Mastroianni, whose previous credits include La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, The Organizer, and so on) on her first attempt, as she finds him carelessly out in the open. But instead, she toys with him, pretending to seduce him, perhaps a little careless herself.

The theory behind “The Big Hunt” seems to be that if people are assigned legalized victims, the crime rate will drop. Moreover, only people who have willingly registered may be killed, with no innocent bystanders allowed—if one kills the wrong person, they will receive a 30-year prison sentence, so participants must be absolutely certain they have correctly identified their hunter. One rather humorous scene occurs in front of a police station, in which a woman is shot to death while walking up the steps. The police officers don’t bat an eye, as it is an authorized killing—however, they do rush to give someone a parking ticket.

Other dystopian, 1984-esque plotlines are thrown in, such as the characters’ having to hide their aging parents because they are supposed to turn them over to the state once they reach a certain age. The film generally has a space-age 60s pop feel to it, with a modern jazz score—kind of bizarre, but entertainingly so.

Who Killed the Electric Car?, Chris Paine, 2006
The answer to the question posed by the title seems obvious before you even see the movie: oil companies (electric cars=no need for their product). Car companies and consumers are also to blame, according to this documentary, although I’d say the car companies are a little more in the wrong, as the electric car, or EV1, was barely promoted (I’d certainly never heard of it). In fact, it almost seems as though the car companies were doing everything within their power to keep people from purchasing these products at all. The film portrays the bizarre manner in which GM refused to allow willing customers to buy this merchandise (who ever heard of such a practice?), and then instead of renewing the leases, they confiscated the cars and crushed every last one of them, so that they disappeared without a trace, as if they’d never existed. Granted, people are also extremely resistant to change, as evidenced by the fact that some still don’t believe in global warming (somehow, scientific research is not valid to them). And thus, many people killed the electric car, whether heads of companies, government officials, or reluctant consumers. The film doesn’t so much mourn the loss of a car, but our refusal to initiate positive change.

The Jerk, Carl Reiner, 1979
I was inspired to re-watch The Jerk after reading Steve Martin’s memoir, Born Standing Up. The book isn’t the most compelling read—to me, the most interesting parts occurred when Martin discussed his comedic theories, but this comprised only a few pages—but it did trigger some fond memories of one of my favorite comedic films. All of the jokes have an innocence about them, perhaps stemming from the protagonist’s lack of worldliness. Navin Johnson strikes one as kind of a naïf: trusting, optimistic, and maybe a little stupid, but ultimately endearing.

The best scene by far occurs when a sniper randomly selects Navin’s name out of the phone book (“Navin R. Johnson—sounds like a typical bastard.”) and perches on a hilltop across from the gas station where Navin works, shooting at him but hitting cans of motor oil instead. Navin misinterprets these actions at first: “He hates these cans! Stay away from the cans!” Just hearing these lines in my head puts a smile on my face.

The first time I saw this movie was at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin; admission included free pizza in a cup, with Twinkies and Tab as the specials on the menu. Man, that was a great night.

A History of Violence, David Cronenberg, 2005
I find it interesting that the opening scene is somewhat of a red herring. We’re made to believe that the film is about the two characters we encounter here, but while they are indeed the impetus for the story, the catalyst, we never see them again after the first ten minutes or so. We don’t even know anything about them (and neither did the writer, it seems—the actors actually made up their own back stories for their characters). Yet they are nonetheless vital to the film.

The film sparks some intriguing questions about dual identity: can a person live two different lives, with two different personalities, and nonetheless be both of those people?

Sick, Kirby Dick, 1997
Performance artist and self-proclaimed “supermasochist” Bob Flanagan lived far longer than most people diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. As the film suggests, his penchant for bondage may have assisted him in coping with the pain of his disease—not only did S&M allow him to disassociate himself from his illness, but it strengthened him as well, arming him with the resilience to fight it for 43 years (well, okay, he didn’t exactly participate in S&M for all 43 of those years).
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Much of the film is difficult to watch—the nail being driven through Bob’s penis still turns my stomach a little whenever I think of it, and I don’t even have one of those!

2008-01-23T21:57:00.000-05:00

Movies watched, December 2007

Control, Anton Corbijn, 2007

There are many myths surrounding the story of Joy Division, particularly in the manner in which their singer, Ian Curtis, killed himself. I’ve heard various stories over the years—that he stood on a block of ice and waited for it to melt, that he carved a smiley face over his own with a pen knife, and so on—but it seems that he simply listened to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, wrote a long, rambling note to his wife, and hung himself from a clothes rack in the kitchen. It would have been interesting to explore these untruths in the film, but I like that Control ignores them entirely, achieving as close to realism as you can get in a film such as this one. (Well, I guess they did include the apparently false legend of Tony Wilson signing their record contract in blood—it does make for a pretty amusing scene though.) Based mainly on Curtis’ ex-wife’s memoir, the film’s perspective might be slightly skewed, but Corbijn also spoke to Curtis’ Belgian girlfriend, Annik, for her own insights into their relationship, which seems to provide a bit of a balance.

One of the strongest aspects of the film is the music. The soundtrack includes some greats, like Bowie, the Buzzcocks, and the Velvet Underground. But more importantly, it actually features Joy Division—there’s nothing worse than seeing a film about a band that doesn’t even have the band’s music in it. The live Joy Division shows appear rather authentic, the actors mimicking the band’s onstage motions near-perfectly. If I’m not mistaken, they were taught to play their instruments and actually performed the songs live—an interesting technique, and a testament to the extent of the actors’ efforts.

Filming in black and white was a smart choice, as it effectively conveys the dreariness of the industrial British town from which the band hails. In many ways, Control follows in the long tradition of films about dreary British industrial towns and the angry young men who are dying to escape them, a la The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Look Back in Anger, and so on.

Ian feels trapped in a variety of ways, but often in situations he could remedy, in theory at least. He doesn’t want to be in the band anymore (he could quit), he doesn’t want to be in Macclesfield anymore (he could move), and he doesn’t want to be married anymore (he could get a divorce). The last one might be the most complicated, as he seems emotionally conflicted over leaving Deborah, and yet very much in love with his girlfriend. Perhaps he just wants to be frozen in time, before his band got big, when he was still madly in love with his wife, when he was young and hopeful—and before he was stricken with epilepsy. As for the epilepsy, he is, unfortunately, trapped inside his own mind and body. There’s no escaping the seizures, which most likely were the main driving force that led to his suicide—his life seemed fairly miserable anyway, but that pushed him over the edge, especially since he feared the seizures would intensify over time.

The film’s conclusion is a bit melodramatic, with Deborah discovering Ian’s dead body and running into the street screaming. It’s unnecessary to see this, as it doesn’t shed any light on the situation, doesn’t tell the viewer anything they couldn’t have inferred (I mean, how else would you expect her to react?). The ending could have been made stronger by cutting from the sound of the rope to the wisps of black smoke curling from the chimney as Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” plays into the credits—a rather poetic image to close with, I think.

No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007
This adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel remains very close to the source material, in some cases taking dialogue word for word from the pages of the book. Sometimes this approach does not work—I have no qualms about filmmakers implementing changes to the plot as they adapt it to film, which is often necessary—but here the result is extremely successful, especially as the book is rather cinematic (as I was reading it I remember wondering if it would be made into a movie).

At the heart of the story is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), as close to evil in human form as one might ever encounter. Chigurh has a slow, deliberate way of speaking, one that instills goosebumps in its listener, particularly in his nerve-wrackingly cryptic practice of bargaining with another man over his life with the toss of a coin. His cruel, cold, humorless mannerisms are accentuated by his odd choice of weapon, the cattle gun, which propels a metal cylinder into an object (often a person’s skull) and then sucks the cylinder back inside, and his bizarre 1970s porn haircut (apparently modeled after a photo of a 1979 brothel patron), adds the right amount of weirdness to his appearance.

Bardem’s performance is so strong that his character’s presence is palpable even when he’s not there—in certain instances the viewer can almost feel that the camera has just missed him by a few minutes. Llewelyn Moss, the man who had the misfortune of discovering Chigurh’s money (though he probably feels it is good fortune at the time) is clearly making a mistake by trying to outrun Chigurh, for even if Moss manages to flee from him once, it’s never long before he catches up with him—the man is like a machine, unstoppable. Each narrow escape is thrilling and suspenseful—even for me, and I already knew the story’s outcome.

Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach, 2007
Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is even darker and more depressing than his last film, with not even a redeeming moment at the end for its characters, who spend their time spitefully bickering, preying on each other’s vulnerabilities. I guess this is what's contributed to its "box office flop" status, but I thought it was one of the best films released in 2007 (maybe right after No Country for Old Men).

Margot and her precocious son Claude travel to the Hamptons for her sister Pauline’s wedding to Malcolm, who Margot deems unsuitable (he is unemployed, unstable, and has a hideous mustache that he has grown just to be ironic). One wonders, though, why Margot cares: she hasn’t seen her sister in years (it becomes clear that the only reason she has shown up is because her extramarital lover lives nearby). The source of their squabbling seems not to originate from some singular painful event, but simply because the two sisters are too alike. They have been competing with one another their entire lives, and cannot let the other one win. For instance, Pauline obliquely challenges Margot to climb a tree, and inwardly gloats when the fire department arrives to rescue her from it; later on, Pauline confides in Margot a secret she is hiding from her family, which Margot conveys to Claude, who then spreads the rumor even further (although one wonders why Pauline told Margot in the first place, as she must have known what the outcome would be—perhaps this was her way of telling her family in a roundabout way).

Like The Squid and the Whale, the film is extremely visceral—we see the characters masturbating, examining whether their balls hang lower than their dicks, saving their fingernail clippings, and so on. The characters are human, and all of their disgusting habits, both physical and emotional, are displayed rather nakedly for the viewer.

The Savages, Tamara Jenkins, 2007

I was attracted to The Savages by its title, a bit of a double-entendre referencing the characters’ last name, and even more so by its director, Tamara Jenkins, whose previous credit, Slums of Beverly Hills, is a favorite of mine.

The film opens in Sun City, Arizona, a town that appears to be populated entirely by senior citizens. Golf carts drive down the streets, and old leathery women languorously bob up and down in swimming pools, slowly dying in the sun. This essentially artificial environment is characterized by slow, calm sounds, like that of a tinkling music box, as though the town is a fairyland for the elderly. This is where Ben and Wendy Savage must go to pick up their aging father, after his live-in girlfriend of 20 years dies and her children immediately put the house on the market, to bring him back to Buffalo, New York. The contrast between Buffalo and Sun City is profound: upstate New York is freezing and covered in snow, signifying death for the old man in more ways than one.

The film doesn’t shy away from all the embarrassing and painful experiences that accompany caring for aging parents, providing some squirm-inducing scenes, such as when Wendy’s father’s pants fall around his ankles on the plane, and she has to bend down and lift them back up for him. Ben and Wendy also felt like actual people, rather than characters in a script, dimensionalized with subtle details like Wendy’s flowery thermal shirts that she’s always wearing, and Ben’s perpetually wrinkled, untucked attire (he’s a college professor, and yet he’s not wearing a tweed jacket—incredible!). Their father, however, did not seem fleshed out enough. We know he was once a formidable figure but has since been weakened by old age and dementia—a plotline that we’ve seen countless times in film. We need more specific details about the family dynamic, about their past, because his character is too one-dimensional to pique the viewer’s interest, to indelibly affix itself into our memory.

The film’s momentum dwindles a bit towards the end, which I imagine could have been improved by tightening up the script a bit. In all, I prefer Slums of Beverly Hills to this, but it’s not without its own merits.

Juno, Jason Reitman, 2007
A fairly universal criticism of this movie falls on its first 15 minutes or so, in which the dialogue is way too heavy on the teen slang—do people really say things like “for shizz” these days? Thankfully, the lingo tones down pretty quickly (or maybe I just got used to it—scary). The pop culture references are also a tad excessive, and seem kind of awkward when they occur, maybe even a little unnatural. More importantly, how could someone whose band opened for the Melvins in 1993 not listen to the Stooges? And how can I take such a man seriously?

Speaking of which: the characters of Mark and Vanessa—the childless couple that has agreed to adopt Juno’s unborn child—are not explored nearly enough. How did they end up together, when they seem like such opposites? Their situation is undoubtedly more complicated than is let on, and the film could have provided a few more hints that Mark was unhappy in the relationship. In hindsight, I can see some attempts at doing this via Mark’s awkward initial greeting to Juno and her father, in which he stammers about how he’s excited about one day helping the kid with science projects “and stuff.” But these clues aren’t so much subtle as they are barely there at all; the viewer is so far removed from Mark’s head that his confession to Juno is out of left field, and kind of unbelievable. I found the slow dance scene rather stomach-turning, which is a bit of a disappointment, as up until that point I kind of liked Mark. I could see that Juno reminded him that he wasn’t satisfied, that he sold out with his music, and that his wife kept him on a short leash, but come on, is he really that much of a creep that he’d want to run off with a 16 year old girl?

Despite its flaws, the film was cute and made me wish I were young again (well, except for the whole pregnancy thing—that’s not something I’d like to experience). Some great endearing details include Juno’s and Paul’s matching hamburger phones, Juno’s licorice noose, which she facetiously employs upon discovering that she’s pregnant, and Paulie’s favorite orange tic tacs and car bed with personalized license plate.

I guess my main gripe with the film, which funnily enough occurred to me as more of an afterthought, is this: why does this movie exist in the first place? Why have there been so many “hip” movies popping up lately that seem to advocate carrying unplanned pregnancies to term? It almost feels like some kind of weird way of winning the youth vote on the pro-life issue (almost—I’m not some wacky conspiracy theorist, nor am I a rabid baby killer). But where are the Stacy Hamiltons of today’s teen movies? It would make for a less heartwarming story, but, you know, just sayin…

2008-01-13T15:22:00.000-05:00

Movies watched, November 11-30, 2007

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Sidney Lumet, 2007
While this is certainly no Dog Day Afternoon or Network—but then, what is?—Sidney Lumet’s 49th feature film (by my count, via IMDB) is somewhat of a return to form for the acclaimed director. The botched robbery is a plotline employed in countless films, yet in this case it feels fresh and complex and innovative. While certainly not a pioneering technique—see Reservoir Dogs—the conveyance of multiple points of view is rather effective here, gradually revealing the many facets of earlier scenes. However, the weird scrambling effect used to indicate the change in viewpoint is not only annoying but unnecessary—the viewer should be smart enough to figure out which character is being focused on by simply watching the scene.

American Gangster, Ridley Scott, 2007
From the New York magazine article “The Return of Superfly”: “A couple of days later, eating at a T.G.I. Friday’s, Lucas scowled through glareproof glass to the suburban strip beyond. ‘Look at this shit,’ he said. A giant Home Depot down the road especially bugged him. Bumpy Johnson himself couldn’t have collected protection from a damn Home Depot, he said with disgust. ‘What would Bumpy do? Go in and ask to see the assistant manager? Place is so big, you get lost past the bathroom sinks. But that’s the way it is now. You can’t find the heart of anything to stick the knife into.’”

This excerpt recalls the opening scene of American Gangster, in which Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson expresses his distaste for a discount electronics store, one aspect of a newly developing variety of shopping experience, the predecessor of the “big box” stores of today. He laments about how these stores buy straight from the manufacturer, cutting out the middle man—an obvious analogy to the operating procedures of drug dealers (the “middle man” who sells directly to the consumer). Frank Lucas, Bumpy’s driver and protégé, is listening, but later ends up doing exactly what Bumpy bemoaned: buying pure uncut heroin straight from the source, deep in the jungle of Vietnam. Frank aspires to be like Bumpy, and while he resembles his mentor in some ways, he differs in many more.

Frank is made out to be an evil man who’s also suave and likable. He talks about entrepreneurship, how he’s starting a business and making profits like any other red-blooded American capitalist. This is supposed to somehow legitimize him for the viewer, but it makes me like him even less. Here’s the archetypal industrialist getting rich off the blood of his people, peddling junk (literally) to susceptible buyers who slowly kill themselves with the product. He rapidly spreads a veritable epidemic, breeding disease and crime and sorrow. I have no sympathy for a man who achieves his wealth from the deaths of others, no matter how ingenious his ways of achieving it might have been. In that sense, the film fails simply because of its protagonist’s nature.

Now that I’m off my soapbox—American Gangster often feels like an episode of the HBO series The Wire, if it were set in 1970s New York. Detective Richie Roberts and The Wire’s Jimmy McNulty are of the same essence: the indefatigable “good cop” who refuses bribes and lives for his job, sacrificing his home life in the process. They’re both divorced and struggling with child support and custody battles (not to mention they’re both fucking their lawyer). The film attempts to blur the lines between good and bad, cop and criminal, but not as successfully as in The Wire. Whereas I often find myself cheering for Omar, I’m far less sympathetic to Lucas and his compatriots. American Gangster is also not nearly as dense and engrossing as The Wire, but it would be pretty difficult to achieve the degree of complexity of an entire TV series in a quarter of the screen time. In the film’s defense, it was highly entertaining—just not masterfully so.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala, and Jayson Lamb, 1982-89
In 1982, three 12-year olds from Mississippi fell in love with Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark. Their passion was so great that they were inspired to make films, to essentially become Steven Spielberg (let’s forgive them, they were only 12)—and what better way to achieve this than to recreate the film that they worshipped? The boys naively assumed this could be completed in one summer—seven years later they were finally finished with the editing. The Adaptation then sat collecting dust for years until it somehow ended up in the hands of Eli Roth, who prompted its second screening ever at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. (I unfortunately would not move to this great city for more than a year after that fateful night, thus missing out on the fun.) This screening furnished the film with a rebirth, reports of its existence slowly filtering into the consciousness of many a film fan via blogs (hey, like this one!) and the like, bestowing upon it a cult classic status—which brings us to a packed house at the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan.

Keeping in mind that this was created by a group of kids operating with few resources (they didn’t even have a copy of the movie, as this was in the pre-VHS dark days), the result is impressive—mind-blowing, even. They performed their own stunts, set their basement on fire, threw themselves from moving trucks, and blew up a variety of things. They got permission to film on an actual plane and ship, secured live snakes from a local pet store, and built a giant fiberglass boulder. The film’s quirks—for instance, its lack of continuity, with characters aging and regressing from scene to scene, due to their hitting puberty over the course of the filming—are endearing rather than distracting. Same with the video quality, which at some points appears pretty blown-out. The appeal of this project is the level of ingenuity and dedication that this group of teenagers possessed, and executed—and it’s just so goshdarn cute to see little kids pretending to slug back shots of whiskey and hatch nefarious plots (see the November/December 2007 issue of The Believer for more on the cuteness of small things).

I eagerly await the feature film about how The Adaptation came to be, which is currently in development (Daniel Clowes is reportedly still working on the script, so I guess I’ll be waiting awhile). It will be interesting to learn the impetus for the project, as well as how they achieved the various effects, which, as crude as they might appear, are pretty remarkable considering what they had to work with.

Being There, Hal Ashby, 1979

While vacationing in San Francisco for a week, I had the good fortune of visiting the historic Castro theater during a series of Hal Ashby films. One of the few 1920s movie palaces still in operation, the theater is gorgeously and ornately decorated, with a huge Wurlitzer organ rising out of the stage before the first feature for a 15-minute pre-movie concert (which certainly beats the advertisements and boring Hollywood trivia they like to show at mainstream theaters while you’re waiting for the movie to start).

Based on the Jerzy Kosinsky novel of the same name, Being There is about a mentally retarded gardener whose employer dies, displacing him from the only home he’s ever known. His name, Chance, is quite appropriate, as not long after his first excursion into the real world, he is, for all intents and purposes, rescued by Shirley MacLaine and whisked off to live in another beautiful mansion, simply because of the misguided assumption that he is a well-to-do businessman. His simpleminded aphorisms about gardening (“In the garden, growth has its seasons”) are perceived to be insightful metaphors regarding the U.S. economy, and he ends up becoming one of the President’s closest confidantes. The film operates on a single gag, gradually escalating—and while perhaps it grows a little farfetched at times, it manages to work, at least on a satirical level.

This is, essentially, a film about a man raised by television. He was mentally slow before television came about, so it didn’t necessarily corrupt his mind, but it is interesting to imagine how TV might have shaped his understanding of the world. He can practice mimicking all the things people do—shaking hands, aerobicizing, whirling the woman you’re madly in love with around the room, and so on—but he has no concept of what they mean. In a particularly revealing scene, Chance points his remote control at some street urchins he encounters, in an attempt to “change the channel.”

The other pervading theme is uttered by Louise, formerly Chance’s employer’s maid, upon seeing Chance on television: “Yes sir, all you’ve gotta be is white in America, to get whatever you want.” I might amend this statement a bit by adding “and rich” after “white.” If Chance had been dressed in rags, as opposed to the impeccably tailored suits left to him by his dead boss, he would certainly not have been invited back to the Rand mansion to recuperate. But he exuded the appearance of a wealthy Washington, DC politician, and that was all he needed to be successful.

Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby, 1971

The second of the Hal Ashby double feature and one of my favorites in general, Harold and Maude is way ahead of its time, very much a predecessor of the “quirky” Wes Anderson-style films of today (though exponentially better, if you ask me). It’s a movie that any punk rocker would love, an affirmation of life and individualism over death and conformity.

Harold Chasen is a young man from a wealthy, somewhat suffocating family. His favorite pastimes include attending the funerals of strangers and faking suicide attempts—clearly efforts at acting out against his overbearing mother. He’s looking to torment her, or perhaps he simply wants attention, but either way he’s not succeeding in doing either. For instance, after coming upon Harold hanging from a noose (he’s very convincing-looking, I might add), Mrs. Chasen dryly says, in her exaggeratedly bourgeois tone, “I suppose you think that’s very funny, Harold,” adding, “Oh, dinner at eight...and do try and be a little more vivacious.” No one asks him what he wants out of life, or if he’s happy. His entire life has been decided for him—his mother thinks that he needs to find a woman, so she tries to set him up with one through a dating service, a process which seems rather excruciating for Harold, though he makes the most of it, in his own way. In a rather telling scene about the dynamic of their relationship, his mother begins to read from a personality questionnaire but fills in the answers herself instead of waiting to hear Harold’s response. Despite his attempts at acting out via the faux suicides, it is assumed that Harold’s life would have continued in this miserable fashion, if Maude had not come along when she did.

Maude is a 79 year old woman who also attends funerals for fun (which is where they meet) though she does it not because of an obsession with death, but because they, too, are a part of life—and Maude’s favorite pastimes involve embracing life: digging up trees and re-planting them in the forest, “borrowing” cars and taking them for a spin, and so on. She explains, in reference to the latter practice, “If some people get upset because they feel they have a hold on some things, I‘m merely acting as a gentle reminder: here today, gone tomorrow, so don’t get attached to things.”

In a rather poignant scene, Maude asks Harold what kind of flower he’d like to be, and he answers, rather blandly, that he supposes he’d be a daisy. When further queried about his choice, he answers, “because they’re all alike.” Maude wisely explains that, “Oh, but they’re not. Look. See, some are smaller, some are fatter, some grow to the left, some to the right, some even have lost some petals. All kinds of observable differences. You see, Harold, I feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this [she points to a daisy], yet allow themselves be treated as that [she gestures to a field of daisies].” This is followed by a rather poetically brilliant cut to a shot of a field of gravestones in a military cemetery.

There is much speculation about Maude’s life prior to the events of the film. She refers to attending protests in her youth, and her childhood in Austria, but many of the film’s nuances take on new meaning when the viewer catches a brief glimpse of a tattoo of a number on her arm, unmistakably that of a concentration camp survivor. At the time the film was made, the Holocaust had ended just 25 years earlier, so it seems that Maude was in her 50s when she was imprisoned. And so one wonders about her past—who was she as a young woman? Was she always so spirited and life-embracing, or did she change her ways after narrowly escaping death?

This film always manages to bring a tear to my eye—I can’t imagine anyone not identifying with Harold in some way. And when it seems that he has transformed, I can’t help feeling a little triumphant as well.

2007-12-26T14:53:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy couple of months: I moved, went to San Francisco for a week, painted three rooms in my new house, and knitted a scarf for all of my co-workers. But now that the year is coming to a close, things are quieting down, and I have a brand-new hour and ten minute train ride to work in which to keep up-to-date on my blog entries. In other words, it's my New Year's resolution (haha) to have no more two-month long lapses on this thing. And now, without further adieu...

Movies watched, October 23-November 10, 2007

The Darjeeling Limited/Hotel Chevalier, Wes Anderson, 2007

The Darjeeling Limited is visually arresting, with exquisitely beautiful imagery and cinematography in almost every scene. It almost feels like it’s cheating to set the film in India, as everything there seems gorgeous and interesting and strange—for instance, the colorful and meticulously arranged objects on their dinner trays. Or perhaps that’s Anderson’s intention, to skew the eye towards the beauty of the country. Regardless, his characteristic attention to detail is present, such as when Francis (Owen Wilson) loses a shoe in the beginning and throughout the film wears an unmatched pair. The train itself is also used effectively and artistically. In one scene, the camera looks into two compartments, showing each character’s actions. Later on, we travel from car to car, for an intimate and somewhat whimsical portrayal of every character involved in the story.

And yet, The Darjeeling Limited is a little too much of the same. There’s a difference between having a trademark style and repeating yourself from film to film. There are, for example, way too many slow motion scenes here, rendering the technique ineffective. I can also sense an attempt to balance the whimsy with actual emotional conflict, but the result is maudlin and rather predictable. The brothers embark on an emotional journey and become closer as a result…how heartwarming. At the end, Francis (who had previously tried to hold his brother Jack’s passport hostage), now tells him to keep it. But Jack smiles and passes it back: “No, you keep it.” I could see that line coming from the beginning of the scene, but more importantly, it’s so boring and saccharine that it made me want to throw up. Seriously.

As for Hotel Chevalier, the short film that accompanies Darjeeling, while I didn’t particularly love it as a standalone story, it creates a nice effect while watching the feature film. The viewer, in a way, is remembering the experience just as Jack is; one can imagine what he’s thinking about whenever he gets a forlorn look in his eye, in a way that I can’t recall having experienced before while watching a film.

Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood, 1971

This prototype of the modern thriller is kind of predictable, though I imagine it seemed rather groundbreaking upon its initial release. It moved me enough to scream at Clint Eastwood: “It’s a trick!”, “She’s behind the door!”, and “Why haven’t you freakin’ changed your name and relocated already, dumbass!” In other words, the characters are not very smart and almost seem to set themselves up for trouble.

I did love seeing Jessica Walter (i.e. Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development) in her younger days. When she angrily calls Clint Eastwood “Buster Blue-eyes,” I’m pretty sure that I must have let out a little squeal of amusement. I’m also pretty sure that they must have parodied this film in the TV show at some point, which has inspired me to watch all three seasons again. Except I have to wait until I finish re-watching Lost in time for the Season Four premiere.

Julien Donkey-Boy, Harmony Korine (unofficially), 1999

Harmony Korine’s second feature-length film was created in adherence with the Dogme 95 manifesto, a filmmaking movement begun by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. The manifesto calls for, among other things, the use of handheld cameras, available light and sound, and props found on location—essentially purifying the filmmaking process, eschewing all of those unnecessary and bloated effects we so often see in modern movies.

Depicted from the viewpoint of a schizophrenic teenager, the film is murky and abstract-looking, with twitchy, jumpy camera movements and beautifully grainy colors. The family’s highly dysfunctional operations also add to the weird, uncomfortable feeling that’s conveyed. Julien’s sister (Chloe Sevigny) is pregnant and aspires to be a dancer, only to be debased by their father (Werner Herzog), who drinks cough syrup out of a slipper and plays mind games with his children. But much of the action takes place completely within Julien’s disturbed mind, so that it’s unclear as to how much of the film is “reality.”

While I love Werner Herzog, his portrayal of the father is somewhat distracting for me, since I find his voice to be so distinct that I can’t really imagine him as anyone other than himself. Thus, I was seeing Werner Herzog and not Julien’s father, which I felt significantly distanced me from the story. But that may not be such a bad thing, as theirs is not a family I want to get too close to.

Knocked Up, Judd Apatow, 2007

This was a lot sappier than I was expecting—while there are definitely some humorous moments, it’s more of a “warm and fuzzy” kind of movie. Entertaining, but not my favorite of the trilogy (okay, I guess it’s not really a trilogy).

Deathdream, Bob Clark, 1974

Bob Clark might have one of the most diverse oeuvres that I can think of—in addition to this Vietnam War-era horror film, his directorial resume also includes A Christmas Story, Porky’s, and Baby Geniuses. Go figure.

In Deathdream (originally titled Dead of Night but renamed upon its reissue) the Brooks family is notified that their son Andy is killed in battle—except that night he returns home, seemingly unscathed. The Brooks assume the message must be a mistake, meant for some other more unfortunate family. But Andy isn’t the same person, acting withdrawn and cold. His father suspects that something is up but his mother clings to the hope that their son is okay, even when it’s clear that his face is beginning to decompose.

A loose take on “The Monkey’s Paw,” Deathdream reflects the country’s views on the Vietnam War when it was actually still being fought. There’s an interesting parallel between the soldiers’ aftermath—some did, I’m sure, return home as a different person, zombie-like, their innocence lost. There’s also a not-so-subtle analogy between Andy’s use of a syringe to inject himself with blood to keep his flesh alive, and the increase in drug use among soldiers as morale waned. Deathdream is insightful and creepy—perhaps one could say it’s creepily insightful.

Don’t Need You: The Herstory of Riot Grrrl, Kerri Koch, 2005

I’m not the biggest fan of riot grrrl—other than Team Dresch, who weren’t mentioned in the movie at all, I can’t think of any other such band I’ve ever really listened to. I’m all for girls playing music (I’ve been in bands on and off since I was 15) and generally getting out of the kitchen, but I can’t say I identify with feminism as a political movement. So while I admittedly went into the movie with a bit of a bias, I wasn’t really persuaded to delve deeper into riot grrrl either—mainly because it’s an amateurish documentary that, in my mind, barely scratches the surface of the complexity of this scene. From now on I’ll be steering clear of any film that includes the word “herstory” in its title.

2007-11-16T21:45:00.000-05:00

Movies watched, week of October 6-13, 2007

Abre Los Ojos, Alejandro Amenábar, 1997
Vanilla Sky, Cameron Crowe, 2001
Usually the “it was all a dream” explanation seems like a cop-out, but while that is essentially what’s going on in Abre Los Ojos, it’s much more complex than the typical dream scenario. For César, a former pretty boy whose face was maimed in a car wreck, and who may or may not have been made pretty again through plastic surgery, it’s never totally clear as to how much of his experiences are a dream and how much is reality, or if any of it is reality at all. Sometimes he dreams that he’s dreaming, or dreams that he’s awake. With elements of a Philip K. Dick novel—Ubik, in particular—the bizarre, nightmarish dreamscapes of disjointed sequences of images become frighteningly real for César.

This is much subtler than the American remake; there are hints that something is amiss—for instance, the empty city streetscape—but in Vanilla Sky, you’re hit over the head with it. Crowe goes to great lengths to ensure that the viewer doesn’t miss the fact that things are not as they seem (i.e. Tom Cruise running through an empty Times Square and screaming to the heavens), sacrificing the film’s eerie, uncanny atmosphere. Then again, deserted Times Square is pretty damn eerie.

Labyrinth, Jim Henson, 1986
I love David Bowie, Jennifer Connolly, and modern fairy tales, but “Pan’s Labyrinth meets Ziggy Stardust” this ain’t.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick, 2006
Of the recent onslaught of documentaries being produced, this funny yet infuriating film about the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its rating system is one of the more engaging and well-crafted ones that I’ve seen. Amidst interviews with “controversial” filmmakers (John Waters, Kimberly Peirce, Allison Anders, and so on) and a primer on the history of the ratings board, a story emerges in which the director hires a pair of private investigators (who also happen to be a lesbian couple…gasp) to identify the members of the ratings board, which is shrouded in secrecy.

Throughout the film the same question is asked repeatedly: why does the MPAA deem the cinematic depiction of graphic violence to be suitable for younger viewers, but not consensual sex (or even any hint of nudity)? It seems like a somewhat clichéd argument, yet there’s definitely some truth to it—we’re in many ways still living in Puritan times.

The MPAA seems to be pretty deluded regarding the effect that their ratings have on the life of a film. Their president, Jack Valenti, asserts that you can slap any rating on something and people will still see it if they want to, but this is obviously not so. If a film gets an NC-17 rating, it will never see the light of day. No distributor will carry it, forcing the director to either throw in the towel or alter the movie, to sacrifice the art. I’m left wondering about all the amazing films I never got to see due to some arbitrary decision made by people who know nothing about filmmaking.

Mutual Appreciation, Andrew Bujalski, 2005
Andrew Bujalski’s films are associated with a new wave of ultra low budget filmmaking (if there’s a name for it yet, I don’t know it) that I’m intensely curious about, yet have some mixed feelings towards. Filmed on a shoestring budget, much of the films are unscripted, or at least invoke an improvisational feel, as though you're just peeking in on a conversation, on people living out their lives. And I like this idea—in theory.

Shot in stark, grainy black and white 16mm, Mutual Appreciation reminds me a lot of early Jim Jarmusch films in terms of its look. But the similarities end there; it lacks Jarmusch’s wit and distinctive style. There’s a lot of talking, a la the French New Wave, but I find myself wanting out of the conversation. Maybe I just have a cultural bias—having lived in Williamsburg I’ve developed a bit of a distaste for the disaffected hipster type.

The film becomes more compelling towards the end, when an actual conflict arises in the form of a love triangle among the three main characters. This is achieved rather organically, subtly hinting at the aching sense of longing between Alan and Ellie. The foreshadowing comes through right from the opening scene, when they’re lying side by side in bed and Ellie’s boyfriend, Lawrence, walks over and gets in between them.

I have high hopes for Bujalski’s works to come, but I wasn’t moved by the saga of these hipster twenty-somethings’ awkward attempts at romance. They seem to be floundering in their acute awareness of the complexities of their emotions, trying to figure it all out—and I just don’t really care. Or maybe I just desperately don’t want to be them.

Love and Anger, Carlo Lizzani, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Marco Bellocchio, 1969

A collection of five short films by some of the leading European filmmakers of the 60s—which is pretty much proof that it’s near impossible to create a truly great short film, simply because of time constraints. These are definitely attempting to create something ground-breaking and innovative, but fall somewhat short. That and they feel extremely dated, particularly Bertolucci’s "Agonia", in which a dying priest is surrounding by members of New York’s Living Theater troupe (i.e. a few dozen hippies moaning and writhing around on the floor). It's an interesting compilation, but not essential viewing.

2007-11-01T19:19:00.000-04:00

Back in March, I mentioned I would be writing about Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King and The Devil and Daniel Johnston in an "upcoming" Terminal Boredom column. Well, eight months later, it's finally available for consumption! Go here.

2007-10-27T18:48:00.000-04:00

Movies watched, September 25-October 6, 2007
The Landlord, Hal Ashby, 1970

Hal Ashby’s debut film is a social—and somewhat clairvoyant—comedy about gentrification, in which a spoiled rich kid buys a row house in Park Slope before it was chic (one of his neighbors correctly predicts how hip the neighborhood is destined to become). While he does assert that “everyone wants a home of his own” as he suns himself in the family pool, Elgar Enders never quite makes it clear as to why he’s chosen this particular place as his home. He seems to be feigning a personal rebellion against his stereotypically rich and brainless family, and while I suppose that having their son living in the ghetto could be a blemish on their name, he can’t seem to pull it off, can’t handle the consequences. He falls short of accomplishing any real defiance.

Elgar admits to the building’s tenants—who include a palm reader, Miss Sepia of 1957, and a Black Nationalist who’s married to Miss Sepia—that he eventually intends to oust them so he can knock out all the floors and install a “great big psychedelic spectacular son-of-a-bitchin’ chandelier.” However, he manages to establish a bond with them, albeit a brief one.

The film’s premise could easily have floundered near the surface of the subject, remaining predictably zany and sitcom-ish. But instead, it pushes the barriers of what a comedy can do, ever so subtly beginning to address the underlying implications of Elgar’s purchase—and our ways of thinking about race and social class.

Much of the film is rather surreal: in my mind, one of the most memorable scenes is the rent party that Elgar’s tenants throw for him (they gladly charge him a door fee). As the scene intensifies, the characters momentarily step out of their roles and begin speaking to the camera, describing to Elgar what it feels like to be black: imagine that you have a mole in the middle of your forehead that everyone is disgusted by, but then one day moles become fashionable and you’re suddenly the envy of everyone.

The Landlord is just as, if not more, relevant today, as developers are looking further and further into the outer boroughs of New York City, changing the faces of many neighborhoods and displacing lifelong residents due to skyrocketing rents. In one scene, Elgar, wearing a white suit and carrying a large potted plant, is chased down the street by his tenants. In a New York Times article, actor Beau Bridges, who played Elgar, recalls that “I looked up on the rooftops, and the locals were cheering and yelling ‘get that white.’”

Though Elgar seems to grow up a little throughout the course of the film, he’s bought the tenement as more of an experiment than anything else—and one that fails. He’s not prepared for the sociopolitical baggage, coming across as more of a vacationer than a permanent resident. Park Slope, for the time being, is not really his home.

Requiem, Hans-Christian Schmid, 2006

Not a straight-up horror film (as the cover would have you believe), but more of a psychological study of the effects of religion, social pressure, and illness on a college student. A strict Catholic, Michaela’s mother prevents her from blossoming into a modern, independent woman by constantly reminding her of her epilepsy (and thus her difference, her stigmatism). She disapproves of her going to college in a city, throws her fashionable clothes into the trash, and generally instills in her an immense feeling of Catholic guilt over her burgeoning sexuality, so that the girl eventually believes she is possessed by the devil. The film feels very naturalistic, with hand-held camera work and gorgeous, softly muted colors.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Judd Apatow, 2004

It had its moments, but Superbad was funnier.

Gummo, Harmony Korine, 1997

I’d seen this movie about eight or nine years ago and felt kind of indifferent towards it, but this time around I’m a little more open to its singular, grotesque vision. While there’s no coherent narrative arc, per se, this portrayal of a strange, dark region of America—the parts we like to forget exist—is bizarre, engaging, and, like a gruesome accident scene, commands one’s attention.

At the film’s opening, we learn that Xenia, Ohio was destroyed by a tornado in recent years—which immediately sets the mood and tone of the film. I love to think that the town and its inhabitants were once normal, and that everything went to hell, everyone went a little crazy, after this natural disaster—as though something else, like a curse, were swept through with the storm. The grainier segments scattered throughout come from actual documentary footage of people living in the town where Gummo was filmed. These people blend in with the fictional characters, speaking and acting just as they do—frightening, yes, but evidence of the film’s authenticity. And yet, much of it feels so surreal—for instance, the scene in which Solomon’s mother shampoos his hair while he eats spaghetti in the bathtub, a piece of fried bacon affixed to the tile wall, with severed doll parts decorating the soap holders.

People tend to react strongly to the scenes of cat torture, but while they’re extremely troubling and hard to watch, I take comfort in knowing that they weren’t using real cats. More importantly, these images capture the cruelty and ugliness that exist in the world, and particularly in the world of Gummo.

Wild Style, Charles Ahearn, 1983
This film is not so much about the story—which is somewhat nonexistent anyway—as it is about its footage of breakdancing, graffiti, and rapping, a document of a particular place and time. Like The Landlord, it also tackles issues of gentrification, depicting attempts by hipsters and rich (white) people at infiltrating hip hop culture. Most obvious is the bleached-blond reporter, portrayed by FUN gallery founder Patti Astor, who is seen throughout the movie attempting to interview people and generally act “down” with the New York hip hop scene. The rich woman supporting Zoro as he begins to produce work for a gallery instead of the side of a subway car (which kind of defeats the purpose anyway; public space as canvas is inherent to graffiti) echoes what was actually happening in the downtown art scene at the time (see Basquiat for another cinematic example).

Even Dwarfs Started Small, Werner Herzog, 1970

In this film cast entirely from midgets and dwarfs (along with a few malformed barnyard animals), the inmates of a prison—which is strangely and rather cruelly designed to hold normal-sized people—wage a revolt, locking the director inside and taunting him as they gleefully set fire to their surroundings.

This rebellion, while extremely liberating for the inmates, eventually compels them towards annihiliation; by the end, they’re destroying for the sake of destruction, with no thought to their actions. Even the animals succumb to these cruel urges, as the chickens torment a one-legged peer.

Most memorable is the truck that seems to move by itself on an endless circular track—the dwarfs take joy in crowding inside of it, riding on the roof, and tumbling from the open back.

Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg, 2007

This started out as more of a conventional thriller—compelling yet somewhat unremarkable. I’m much more interested in the character of Nikolai than I am in Anna, and wish the plot had focused more on him. Instead of waiting until nearly the end of the film to bring in the unpredictable plot twists, they should have come in the middle, producing somewhat of a Psycho effect, with the female lead dropping out of the story midway through. But alas, that’s not how it's structured, and thus, what could potentially have been a great, noteworthy film is instead merely good, if forgettable.

Rushmore, Wes Anderson, 1998

I decided to watch this old favorite in preparation for The Darjeeling Limited. While it doesn’t necessarily produce the same excitement I felt when I first saw it, the film holds up with time. I still find myself saying “O, R they?” every now and again, even if it doesn’t really make any sense in context with what I’m responding to.

Jackass: The Movie and Jackass Number Two, Jeff Tremaine, 2002 and 2006

This brought me back to fond memories of my high school days, when my friends and I would gather around in someone’s parents’ basement to watch the new CKY video. I imagine those stunts pale in comparison with some of the footage in Jackass (especially now that they’re working with a bigger budget) but it’s all carried out in the same spirit. Some of the scenes are downright gnarly—I was actually left feeling a little queasy at the end of Number Two, having witnessed the (censored) consumption of cow semen, the placement of a leech on Steve-O’s eyeball, and so on. Some general highlights include off-road tattoo with Henry Rollins, and, of course, any segment with the raunchy old people (I’ll be forever haunted by the sight of “old man balls”).

2007-10-01T19:37:00.000-04:00

It seems like every time I make a post I include some kind of disclaimer about how I’m behind on posting—well, today is no exception. I won’t go into all the details/excuses about how summer was too much fun, and that now work is too busy (well, not too many details at least), but as I’m almost two months behind, I’m going back to the good ol’ list format for this one, with brief commentary on selected films. Make sense?

Movies watched, August 12-September 15, 2007

Be Here To Love Me, Margaret Brown, 2004

Border Radio, Alison Anders, 1987

The King of Kong, Seth Gordon, 2007
This documentary about two men who seem to be polar opposites of one another competing to break the Donkey Kong world record is, ultimately, a battle of good and evil. The good guy is Steve Wiebe, an everyman (and somewhat of an underdog) who’s experienced a string of bad luck: most significantly, he was laid off the same day as the closing on he and his wife’s new house. As his good friend says, “I’ve never seen anyone cry as much as Steve” (which serves as a bit of unintentional foreshadowing). Newly unemployed, Steve decides to pass the time by playing Donkey Kong in his garage, in a quest to achieve the new world record.

On the other side of the country is the villain, “hot sauce mogul” (as the movie poster describes him) Billy Mitchell, who was a rock star in the gaming world in the early 80s, and has held claim to the highest score ever played in Donkey Kong since 1982. Unlike Steve, it seems like Billy has always had all the breaks, and he doesn’t hesitate to lord it over everyone (the cocky bastard). It seems Billy will stop at nothing to maintain his title as the top scoring Donkey Kong player in the world, from confiscating Steve’s game console, to suspiciously materializing an old tape in which he beats his own championship score, to refusing to drive the ten or so miles from his house to publicly challenge Steve (even though Steve has traveled thousands of miles to be there). It’s clear that he feels threatened by his new opponent (it seems he’s never really had one before), and rather than nobly facing the situation, he resorts to plotting and scheming, sending his obsequious henchmen in his place to scope out the situation.

Billy is such a stereotypical villain that it’s almost hard to believe. One could argue that his portrayal could be the result of clever editing, but dialogue like “He is the person he is today because he came under the wrath of Bill Mitchell” (he frequently refers to himself in the third person) cannot be faked. I like to think that he’s carefully cultivated this formidable, enigmatic persona, which his many fans/cronies/underlings have perpetuated.

Many people might find this movie hilarious simply because the thought of grown men still playing Donkey Kong and taking it extremely seriously seems so ludicrous—which, to some extent, is understandable. But I can (almost) relate to this, not because of any shared video game fanaticism (in fact, I don’t even like video games...gasp!), but because many of those closest to me are collectors of rare vinyl, another traditionally marginalized pastime; both hobbies involve expending a lot of energy and concentration on something that most would view as trivial or unimportant, something that doesn’t really matter in the long run. But you could say that about almost anything—so what does matter in the long run?

Lenny, Bob Fosse, 1974

Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story, Jamie Meltzer, 2003
In the middle weeks of August I watched a number of documentaries about weird, esoteric music, from obscure blues records to pioneers in electronic music, Leon Theremin and Robert Moog. The most memorable by far was Off the Charts, a bizarre, comic, and at times heartbreaking look at the art of the song poem—that is, the end results of magazine advertisements inviting readers to send in their poetry as a means of getting their foot in the door of the music industry. These people would often receive notice that their work was worthy of recording by professional musicians, along with a proposal to do so in exchange for a fee. Eventually they would receive a copy of their song, pressed onto vinyl (or, later on, a cassette tape).

So many aspects of this strange practice are introduced in this 52 minute film, from the people sending in their writing, to those who actually create the music. A wide array of people are attracted to these advertisements, yielding many religious songs (“I’m devoted to TV so I have no time to serve God, so I dwell in confusion forever”), efforts at serious love songs, and others that are downright bizarre. “Jimmy Carter Says Yes” (I still sometimes get that one in my head) and “Annie Oakley” are among my favorites, the latter mainly because of the lyrics (okay, maybe both because of the lyrics), in which a young man channels his obsession with firearms into a nonviolent form of expression: “I have taken a vow of celibacy until marriage / However, if Miss Annie tempted me into her carriage / I might lose to Miss Oakley, it’s not funny / Annie is one of my historical honeys”). This is all quite amusing, until people begin to hint that they’re hoping to start a career in music, and they believe that this is the way to come out with a hit record. You can see both hope and unease in their eyes, as if they’re trying to remain optimistic, clinging to their dreams, and yet, the worry that all of their efforts have been futile remains.

It’s quite fascinating to witness the process of writing and recording song poems: the span of time elapsed between first reading the lyrics to recording a finished song is less than an hour. Everything is recorded in one take with machinelike intensity, churning out song after song after song. These musicians also have an air of sadness about them, regaling the filmmakers with tales of bygone days when they were hobnobbing with celebrities, “bygone” being the operative word here.

As for the songs themselves, their peculiarity is difficult to pinpoint. Regardless of how outlandish the lyrics are, there’s always something amiss—the songs mirror popular musical genres, but the nature of the songwriting is so bizarre that while the style might be familiar, there is nonetheless something vaguely alien about them.

Moog, Hans Fjellestad, 2004

Summer of Sam, Spike Lee, 1999
While I’d heard some unfavorable reviews of this movie, I decided to check it out after reading Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx is Burning, which allots a few chapters to the Son of Sam case—unfortunately, my expectations were exceeded. The depictions of David Berkowitz ranting in his sordid apartment and receiving visits from a dog that orders him to kill are incredibly cheesy, especially since Berkowitz eventually admitted that he’d made up the whole demon dog story so he could plead insanity. More importantly, people should refrain from making films about punk rockers when they know nothing about them. In 1977, New York punks did not look like they’d just stepped out of Hot Topic—you could make a case that there was one guy in all of New York who wore his hair in a stupid-looking mohawk and spoke in a fake British accent, but that is clearly not what the film is implying. This is just barely a step up from the Freaks and Geeks punk episode.

Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese, 1990

Medea, Lars von Trier, 1988

Kramer Vs. Kramer, Robert Benton, 1979
Perhaps the quintessential divorce film, this story of how a man’s relationship with his son changes in the aftermath of his wife’s leaving him, and the bitter child custody battle that later ensues, impressively manages to avoid becoming overly sentimental and saccharine. This could so easily have been a Lifetime original movie (or the 1970s equivalent thereof), but instead is an engaging drama.

Theremin: An Electric Odyssey, Steven M. Martin, 1994

Desperate Man Blues, Edward Gillan, 2003

Thieves Like Us, Robert Altman, 1974

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, Steven Shainberg, 2006
The concept of an imaginary portrait is intriguing; a straightforward biopic highlighting the major events of one’s life tells the viewer nothing about the character’s inner experiences, and is often flawed and inaccurate anyway. So why not take it a step further, using elements of myth and fairy tale to fill in the holes. The enchanting, carnivalesque imagery employed in the film is particularly appropriate to the subject matter of Arbus’ photographs. The ornate, winding staircase leading up to the mysterious masked—and very hairy—neighbor, the secret key that falls out of the pipe, and other such images evoke impressions of Alice in Wonderland, some of it a bit silly and over-the-top, though I didn’t really notice that until reflecting back on the film once it was over.

I’m now in the middle of reading Diane Arbus: A Biography, which has led me to think that Nicole Kidman’s performance didn't really capture the complexities of Arbus’ character. She’d been an artist long before she began taking these pictures, not just a bored housewife who decided to break out of her role (although that was true of her as well—did I mention she was a complex woman?). If you can get past the fact that the film is about a real person, and just regard it as fiction (which in many ways it is), it seems much stronger.

Superbad, Greg Mottola, 2007
I’d previously avoided movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, probably because I’m a snobby snob, but my love for Michael Cera’s character on Arrested Development piqued my interest in this comedy from the creators of the aforementioned two movies. While I hope this doesn’t reflect badly on Cera, he’s pretty much playing the exact same character—imagine George Michael Bluth a few years older than when we last saw him. Nonetheless, Superbad is hilarious and raunchy in the best way—highlights include the many drawings of penises (a little girl holding hands with a giant cock, a penis riding a torpedo like a bucking bronco, George Washington with a two-foot schlong, and so on), and every time someone referred to Fogell as “McLovin” in complete seriousness. I also loved the bored (and somewhat incompetent) cop characters, although they got to be a little bit over the top, even for this movie, in which they’re driving drunk and shooting at road signs.

I’ve actually watched The 40 Year-Old Virgin since then and while it was mildly amusing at times, it’s not on the same level as Superbad. I guess Knocked Up is next on the list.

Scanners, David Cronenberg, 1981

Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson, 1970

Borat, Larry Charles, 2006
Whenever a movie comes along that is so celebrated by my peers that I can’t enter a conversation without someone urging me to see it, it’s a surefire sign that I will avoid it like the plague. I finally got around to watching Borat over Labor Day weekend, and yes, of course it made me laugh—I enjoy a good dose of shit jokes now and again. But it’s kind of depressing that this is what is being hailed as comedic brilliance these days. The jokes are cheap, and the so-called political content is more or less nonexistent. I can see that Borat is taking a shit in front of the Trump Towers (ooh, the symbolism), and that masturbating in front of Victoria’s Secret mannequins could be construed as a comment on the voyeuristic nature of such window displays, or that the whole movie could be interpreted as a slap in the face at political correctness and American culture. But that seems a bit of a stretch: it’s really just a lot of sophomoric dick jokes and cheap laughs—not exactly fodder for genius.

Torment, Alf Sjöberg, 1944
Written by Ingmar Bergman early on in his career, this film is somewhat of a prototype of the modern prep school movie, with faint echoes of Dead Poets Society, right down to the cruel foreign language teacher (in this case, Latin) tormenting his students to the brink of insanity. The story is nothing we haven’t seen before—except it was actually pretty revolutionary for the time.

Loves of a Blonde, Milos Forman, 1965

The Call of Cthulhu, Andrew Lehman, 2005
Created by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society and modeled after a 1920s silent film, this movie does a remarkable job of capturing the look and style of the era, though it’s quite clearly not an old movie (the only way to really do that would be to use the same equipment used in the 20s, which wouldn’t be all that practical or accessible). The amount of detail is impressive, especially considering that everything was filmed on an extremely low budget—there’s a boat sailing in the ocean, an island inhabited by a monster, all created using cardboard, fabric, and ingenuity. Adapting this classic Lovecraft tale to film in this manner was a little stroke of genius, not only because it fits the period and spirit of the story, but because it’s an extremely forgiving form allowing for the lack of funds available; there are no fancy special effects here, but then, such technology did not exist at the dawn of cinema, rendering the film even more authentic.

Fletch, Michael Ritchie, 1985

Marathon Man, John Schlesinger, 1976

Little Murders, Alan Arkin, 1971

Alice’s Restaurant, Arthur Penn, 1969

Okie Noodling, Bradley Beesley, 2001

A Prairie Home Companion, Robert Altman, 2006

Fear of a Black Hat, Rusty Cundieff, 1994

2007-09-07T16:24:00.000-04:00

Hairspray, John Waters, 1988
Polyester, John Waters, 1981
Desperate Living, John Waters, 1977

Every summer, the Alamo Drafthouse, a Texas theater chain (and perhaps my favorite theater chain in existence), hosts a film series called the Rolling Roadshow, wherein a giant inflatable screen tours the country, showing movies in the spots that inspired them (i.e. North By Northwest at Mt. Rushmore, Escape From Alcatraz at Alcatraz Island, Close Encounters at Devil’s Tower, WY, and so on).

The closest stop to New York on the 2007 roster was a John Waters marathon in Baltimore, which I interpreted as a sign that I was destined for a road trip. My love for all things Waters started in high school when I saw Pecker and nearly fell out of my seat laughing as Memama proclaimed, "You're a mother, and a virgin, and you're all mine!" I was soon introduced to Pink Flamingos, despite the warnings I received from the introducer, and was hooked. Since then I’ve managed to see every single John Waters movie, especially thanks to the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2004 exhibit, “John Waters: Change of Life,” which included continuous screenings of Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, and Eat Your Makeup.

And thus, I set off for Baltimore on Friday morning, with my boyfriend, Dave, and best friend, Jessica, who was also present for my first viewing of Pink Flamingos nearly ten years ago. (Around the same time, we began shooting a movie that was never finished called Roadkill, which was very much influenced by early Waters films, right down to the experience of rushing to finish a scene before cops arrived).

Somewhat disappointingly, the crowd was kind of sparse—not empty, but not nearly as packed as I had expected. Perhaps Baltimorians hear enough about John Waters that a marathon of outdoor movies isn’t quite as exciting as I think it is (or maybe the average person is generally less apt to care about the same things that I do). I think (or hope) it might have been more widely attended if there were scheduled themed activities, like the Repo Man scavenger hunt, the Deliverance tube ride, and other Roadshow events of summers past.

In lieu of such aforementioned activities, we decided to conduct our own tour of John Waters' Baltimore before the event. Our first stop, naturally, was the Prospect Hill Cemetery in the suburb of Towson, Maryland, the final resting place of Divine. Sadly, the headstone is rather defaced, covered in lipstick kisses and graffiti, none of which is very creative (if I were so compelled to leave a semi-permanent mark on someone’s grave, I hope I’d come up something a little better than “fucking fierce”). We paid our respects and left him some eyeliner, as a nice gift seemed more appropriate than tagging his headstone.

We also made a quick drive-by past the “Dreamland Studios backlot,” aka John Waters’ childhood home, located in a charming little neighborhood in the suburb of Lutherville. The house that occupies the address we were going by is a large building, adjacent to a huge lawn with picnic tables, resembling more of a bed and breakfast or unique apartment complex then a single-family home. (I loved the giant stuffed animal sitting on the front porch.) I don’t even know if his parents still live there (judging by the appearance of the grounds, I’d guess not), but it was interesting to see the origins of our beloved director.

The following day we took a walk past the Marbles’ residence in Pink Flamingos (and the house that Waters owned and lived in at the time of the filming), located near Johns Hopkins University. It seems that the current residents are well aware of what took place in their home in years past, hence the lawn ornaments and pink patio furniture in front of the house (either that or it’s a mighty awesome coincidence). We then took a detour to the corner where Divine ate dog shit, which is also in a hip little neighborhood slightly west of downtown, populated by coffee shops and book stores. While this might not come as a surprise to some, I found it interesting that these early Waters haunts all seem to be located in the few nice areas of the city. I had expected to be taken into grittier locales, which makes me feel uncomfortably similar to Patty Hearst’s character in Pecker (“I want to see lowlife—show me 'down and dirty'!”). I also don’t know what these neighborhoods looked like 30 years ago—at the screening, longtime Dreamlander Pat Moran pointed out that the park that booted the Roadshow was once frequented by hustlers.

Shockingly—well, to me, at least—the event was moved to another location at the last minute, because the administrators of Wyman Park, where it had initially been scheduled, decided that the content of the films was too scandalous for the park’s patrons. The new location, Middle Branch Park in South Baltimore, was in a more rundown area; I guess the city doesn’t care about sheltering those residents as much—perhaps all too appropriate to one of the themes of Hairspray. There were a lot of families in attendance, some hanging in until the very end, which I loved to see—in particular, the two little kids who rode up on their bikes, bought a Badass Cinema blanket (it was pretty cold out, as you might be able tell by the photo), and seemed to be totally loving the experience. They left after Hairspray, but it was probably past their bedtime, so who can blame them?

The movies in the screening gradually got raunchier, which was probably the strategy—if you stick around until 2 a.m., you’re likelier more of a die-hard fan than someone who happened to be walking by and got curious about the free movie in the park. (The lineup originally included Pink Flamingos as the fourth feature, but it was cut due to concerns about noise restrictions. This saddened me a little, but I was likewise thankful to get to sleep earlier than I was expecting to.) The night began with the family-friendly Hairspray, Waters’ tribute to rock n roll “before the Beatles ruined it,” alive with pimply-faced teenagers with foot-high hairdos doing dances like “The Roach” and “The Madison.” While this might be one of his tamest films, his distinct style of humor and trademark filth are still present—for instance, the scene when Amber Von Tussle’s mother assists her in popping a zit, accompanied by over-the-top sound effects.

Right now it seems as though a mention of the remake is inevitable, but I've been striving to ignore it on principle (although not to much success, since I felt compelled to mention it just now). As with most remakes, it's completely unnecessary, and can't possibly capture the feeling of the original—moreover, the still images I've seen of John Travolta in drag are disturbing.

I already wrote a bit about Polyester when I saw it in Austin in June. While there are many great things about this movie, Edith Massey as Cuddles Kovinsky, the cleaning lady who inherited a huge sum of money, is unquestionably the highlight. Whether she’s complaining about all the lowly commoners (“God I wish I lived in Connecticut!”), impatiently waiting for her monocled chauffeur Heinz to open the limo door (“Hurry, Heinz, hurry!”), or practicing her detective work by flipping up her collar and hiding behind a tree (which barely begins to camouflage her), it’s a brilliant, endearing performance that only she could have accomplished. As before, I received an Odorama card, but this time decided not to use it, in an attempt to save this bit of ephemera (I’m a terrible packrat when it comes to saving movie ticket stubs, pamphlets, and other little scraps). Unfortunately, the card still stinks, even without the scratching and sniffing—maybe if I laminate it, that’ll seal in some of the odors (but let’s face, it I’m not going to do that).

Desperate Living is one of my favorite Waters films, next to Female Trouble. Except for Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, it’s the only one of the early films that Divine does not appear in, which gives the rest of the Dreamlanders a chance to exercise their style and flair for the dramatic. Mink Stole is great as Peggy Gravel, the wiry, insanely right-wing, anxiety-stricken housewife—her breakdown in the beginning of the film, in which she mistakes a fly ball accidentally sailing through her bedroom window for an assassination attempt, finds her son and daughter playing doctor and wails, “the children are having sex!”, and scolds the unfortunate sloppy dialer who calls her house ("How can you ever repay the last thirty seconds you have stolen from my life? I hate you, your husband, your children, and your relatives!”), is hilarious. (She can’t, however, outdo the cop with a fetish for women’s undergarments.)

Waters’ love for Disney villains is plainly apparent in this movie, as Peggy gradually transforms from hysterical to diabolical, later seen in a tight black outfit while stirring a cauldron full of rabies (yes, rabies). The wicked Queen Carlotta, whose tyrannical reign over the town of Mortville is rued by all of its residents, also echoes the evil queens of movies like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty (except she's much dirtier). Mortville, by the way, is a kind of shantytown for the desperate, the downtrodden, and the out of place (Peggy and her maid, Grizelda, take up residence there after Grizelda accidentally kills Peggy's husband by sitting on him). It’s not too much of a stretch to find parallels between Mortvillians and Dreamlanders—without their evil queen, Mortville is a kind of paradise for freaks and misfits, a joyous haven of filth.

We met Susan Lowe, who played Mole, at the screening (she parked next to us). While I’d seen footage of how she looked offscreen, it was still a shocking contrast from her onscreen persona as Mole, the extremely butch lesbian with scars (and moles) on her face.

Seeing these movies in their natural habitat while surrounding myself with Baltimore culture and character enriched the experience, better capturing the feeling of the films than watching them on a TV in my living room might have—which, I suppose, is the whole point of the Rolling Roadshow.

2007-08-27T20:15:00.000-04:00

Movies watched, week of August 5 to 11, 2007

A Touch of Greatness, Leslie Sullivan, 2003

A tribute to what is increasingly becoming a rarity, yet so essential to building our capacity for learning: a phenomenal teacher. Albert Cullum, an elementary school teacher in Rye, NY, in the 50s and 60s, was an innovator in American education, emphasizing elements of play in the classroom and inspiring children to channel their “touch of greatness.”

Most memorable is the black and white archival footage shot by Robert Downey Sr. (quite a difference from Putney Swope) of Mr. Cullum’s students putting on Shakespearean plays. The performances transcend the typical grade school assemblies that I remember; these children demonstrate impressively haunting acting skills, especially for fifth-graders with little to no prior experience; the images of children in such serious roles (and taking the roles very seriously) is remarkable. But then, it’s remarkable just to see fifth-graders who are passionate about Shakespeare to begin with, which speaks to the effectiveness of Cullum’s approach.

Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple, Stanley Nelson, 2006

While this PBS documentary about Jim Jones and the strange, disturbing legacy of People’s Temple may not provide a lot of new information or insight into the tragic massacre at Jonestown, the archival video and audio footage, much of it only recently declassified, absolutely makes it worth seeing. The sounds of Jonestown’s final hours, of children screaming while Jones preaches, chanting “Mother, mother, mother, mother, please” and “Where’s the vat, the vat, the vat...Bring it so the adults can begin” are hauntingly devastating.

Jones is portrayed as a poor Indiana child born into a family of alcoholics and bigots, who aspired to something greater. He would grow up to be a charismatic preacher promising a utopian community, free of prejudice, where people took care of one another. One was meant to devote their life to the cause, donating every last cent of their earnings (save a $5 weekly allowance) to the church—in return they would (theoretically) never need anything—food, medical attention, camaraderie, spiritual guidance, and so on. But, as we now know, the community was far from utopian—congregants were subjected to physical, sexual, and mental abuse, deception (for instance, Jones planted his secretary in the pews so she could be "healed" before the parishioners), and brainwashing.

One of the film’s most disturbing moments comes when a former member states that the Koolaid massacre had been rehearsed back in California, when Jones served what he falsely claimed to be poisoned punch as a test of his devotees’ faith—really, more of a test of his power, which he exercised on a level that paralleled Stalin’s. Congregants were compelled to turn in their own family members if they showed the slightest inclination towards dissent, essentially slaves to the increasingly deranged Jones.

It might have been interesting to interview psychologists in an attempt to provide more insight into why people are drawn to cults (although, as one survivor eloquently points out, nobody “joins a cult”—they join a political movement, or a religious organization), and, in turn, how one man could influence people to such an irrational degree that they would put up with such cruelty and abuse, follow him across the world to Guyana, and, ultimately, pour cyanide down the throats of their own children. But then, it may be more effective to leave this for us to ponder, as a question that seems (and may be) unanswerable.

Deliver Us From Evil, Amy Berg, 2006

As if I hadn’t subjected myself to enough disturbing material for the week, I decided to watch another documentary that takes a scathing look at religious figures, only where Jonestown focuses on one strange (nut)case, this one takes on the whole Catholic institution. And just as Jonestown is about the abuse of power, this too exposes the corruption that even the Catholic Church, an institution that prides itself on its piousness, can succumb to as a result of its supreme authority and influence.

Father O’Grady, an Irish Catholic priest who relocated to Northern California in the 70s, was known by nearly all who came in contact with him as the pinnacle of godliness, someone worthy of their trust and respect—and yet, O’Grady has admitted to the sexual abuse of dozens of children (including a 9-month old) over the years. Shockingly (although not all that surprisingly when you think about it), after the first incident was reported, the Church hierarchy allowed this behavior to continue by taking every possible step to protect O’Grady and suppress the facts. Instead of de-ordaining him, or at the very least sending him off to a monastery where he would be far away from children, he was simply moved from parish to parish, more or less left to do as he pleased with the poor, unsuspecting parishioners.

The film claims that the rampant cases of pedophilia in the clergy exist largely because of the celibacy rule, which didn't always exist in Catholicism. But O'Grady is definitely another case altogether, as he admits that he's only turned on by children. His extensive onscreen interviews show him to be quite frank about his past activity, and he seems to be taking steps to contend with his unsavory predilections—or at least attempting to—but that does nothing to assuage the years of emotional devastation his many victims are still feeling today.

It’s particularly telling that the church declined to be interviewed for the film, maintaining silence on the issue just as they always have.

Hairspray, John Waters, 1988
Polyester, John Waters, 1981
Desperate Living, John Waters, 1977

More on this to come.

2007-08-16T19:43:00.000-04:00

Movies watched, week of July 22 to August 4, 2007

Last Chants For a Slow Dance, Jon Jost, 1977

Underground filmmaker Jon Jost’s second film—and the first of Jost’s films that I’ve seen—follows a thoroughly unlikable character named Tom as he aimlessly wanders the country in his pickup truck, having abandoned his family. He meets various people along the way—a hitchhiker, a man in a diner, a woman at a bar—carrying on long, banal conversations. This series of meaningless exchanges lends the film a sense of alienation; Tom is trying to make connections with people, but not succeeding. The long takes and general lack of action contribute to the slow, crawling pace and muted feeling—one extended scene shot from the window of a moving vehicle depicts the road passing beneath, accompanied by silence. Moreover, much of the action occurs off-screen, just barely hinted at. The film’s only sex scene is performed with the TV on throughout, legs moving in the corner and faint moaning sounds serving as our only clues to what’s taking place. The film culminates in an act of violence that’s just as random as the rest of the plot, yet it doesn’t seem unexpected.

Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Leone, 1984

When Sergio Leone was given the opportunity to direct The Godfather, he declined the offer, as he was already at work on an epic mob drama of his own, about Prohibitian-era Jewish gangsters. But while The Godfather is often referred to as one of the greatest films ever made, Once Upon a Time in America is far less widely renowned. Perhaps this owes to the fact that the studio significantly reduced the five-hour original cut to a more commercial running time of just over two hours (even now, the circulating DVD version has only been restored to not quite four hours)—the American public never had the chance to experience its full cinematic breadth. Or perhaps The Godfather simply has more memorable catch phrases (“I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse,” “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes,” and so on). I’d have to watch The Godfather again in order to offer my own take on which one is more deserving of praise—but then, this is kind of a silly argument to be perpetuating anyway.

One thing Leone’s film has going for it is the artistry employed in its transitions between eras; the film seamlessly moves through time (both forward and backward), from the 1920s, as adolescent Noodles, Max, and the rest of their gang form the relationships that will irrevocably forge the course of the rest of their lives, to the 1930s, to the 1960s. As an old man, Noodles peers into a peephole and sees his sepia-toned childhood; he steps through a doorway at a train station in the 30s, coming out the other side thirty years later—it’s as if there are time portals peppered throughout the world, and one has only to find one in order to visit another time in his life. (Not that Noodles experiences it this way, but it does evoke a sense of time as nonlinear for the viewer.) The film also boasts beautiful imagery—a man in a pillow factory wading through falling feathers as if in a snowstorm, and a child taunted by whipped desserts in the same way he is by the opposite sex.

The film opens and closes in a 1930s opium den. (A phone starts to ring incessantly, and continues to ring even through Noodles’ flashback, creating an unnerving sense of tension.) Many theorize that the entire film is the product of an opium-induced dream, as Noodles remembers his past and envisions his future. I can only hope this is not the case—the “it was all a dream” cop out might be one of the most disappointing resolutions to a film that I can think of. Otherwise, my only gripe is the soundtrack, which is borderline easy listening. The only appropriate forum for a string instrumental version of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” is in a dentist’s office.

Fuck, Steve Anderson, 2005

This documentary dedicated to the mother of all curse words feels more like a VH1 special than a movie made for the big screen—well, maybe an HBO special, due to the rampant use of expletives. Featuring many talking heads, including Drew Carey, Hunter S. Thompson, Janeane Garafolo, and Pat Boone, Fuck has its high points, but quickly starts to repeat itself, restating the same basic sentiments in slightly different phrasings. I was under the impression that the film chronicled the history of the word and its origins, but it’s actually more of a comment on free speech and censorship—all well and good, but perhaps not quite enough content to fill a feature-length documentary.

The film includes some commentary from advocates of squeaky-clean language, but the general consensus is overwhelmingly pro-fuck—or, I should say, anti-censorship. Moreover, the naysayers seem unable to come up with effectively persuasive arguments, other than “years ago only sailors talked like that” and “we must protect the children!” (I am so sick of hearing about “the children.”) Pat Boone suggests that people start shouting “Boone!” instead of cursing, which Ice-T makes great use of later in the film.

The highlight, for me, was the inclusion of one of the most incredible quotes uttered by an American president that I’ve ever encountered. I’ll never think of Lyndon Johnson the same way again.

This Is England, Shane Meadows, 2006

While I was never a British skinhead in the 1980s (and so I can’t really say for sure, although I did hang out with a few American ones in the late 90s), this is the most authentic cinematic portrayal of skinhead culture to date. Based largely on Meadows’ own experiences, This Is England depicts the ordeals of a troubled 12 year-old who finds a sense of camaraderie within a gang of skinheads, just as the National Front is beginning to infiltrate the culture. What begins as a harmless group of friends performing minor acts of mischief quickly darkens when an old friend, Combo, returns from prison, hard-edged and eager to recruit his peers to join the National Front political party. It’s particularly telling that those who are most easily persuaded are also the most misguided and impressionable, the ones who lack confidence in themselves. Combo also seems to have some deeper psychological issues—he’s obsessed with a girl with whom he shared a drunken one night stand three years ago, and beats the hell out of someone he’s just professed immense friendship toward (and then freaks out immediately after doing so).

The soundtrack features a decent selection of oi and reggae tracks, such as Toots & the Maytals’ “54 46 Was My Number” and the UK Subs’ “Warhead,” but I would have liked to have heard more along these lines, as opposed to the melodramatic piano/string instrumentals that dominate many scenes.

Scarface, Howard Hawks, 1932
Scarface, Brian De Palma, 1983

A small-time crook with a scar on his face rises to the top, estranged from his disapproving mother and murderously jealous of anyone his sister, who wants in on his criminal lifestyle, attempts to date—these are about the only similarities between the original Scarface and its remake. The 1930s film takes place in Prohibition-era Chicago, closely following the story of Al Capone, while the 80s version is about a Cuban drug lord who flees to the U.S. during the Mariel boatlift, when Castro emptied Cuba’s jails and sent the prisoners to Miami. The latter film has me seriously questioning Al Pacino’s acting abilities (first Scent of a Woman, and now this?)—I hope I’m not the only person who finds the fake Cuban accent to be ridiculously overacted. The gold chain-wearing, cocaine-snorting, cash flaunting, disco dancing atmosphere lends the film a cheesiness, and not in a fun, nostalgic way. You could say that it’s just reflecting its era, but that doesn’t make it any more stomachable.

I disliked both of these films, but I suppose if I had to pick one I’d go with the original. (At least it doesn’t have the godawful soundtrack of the De Palma film.) In its defense, while by today’s standards pretty tame, Hawks’s film was rather brutal for its time. I did have to laugh at some of the silly, gut-clutching, death scenes, almost expecting to hear Tony cry, “They got me!” as he staggered to his knees. It’s not the first film I’ve seen with a disclaimer at the beginning: “This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and our liberty.” Etcetera. Thankfully, there’s no longer a censor board that requires such inane statements to validate any kind of unpopular social commentary.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Werner Herzog, 1998

The basis for Herzog’s recent feature film, Rescue Dawn, this documentary tells the story of a German named Dieter Dengler, who fulfilled his lifelong dream to be a pilot by joining the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War. Shot down over enemy lines, Dieter was captured, tortured and imprisoned, weighing a mere 85 pounds when he escaped. Incredibly, Dieter recalls these harrowing events with a calm detachment, matter-of-factly describing what took place, offering no political context or opinion. Even as he somewhat perversely reenacts these events, having his hands tied and led through the jungle by Vietnamese villagers, he appears composed, although he does admit that his heart is beating a little faster. The villagers actually look more spooked, and Dieter has to remind them that it’s only a movie.

The film presents a number of parallels between Vietnam and World War II—Dieter grew up in ravaged post-war Germany, which had been “transformed into a dreamscape of the surreal.” In the same frank tone, he recalls how he would hunt among the rubble, tearing wallpaper from the remains of decimated buildings, which his mother would cook into a stew. Similarly, Herzog’s narration, concerning Dieter’s view from the plane, asserts that “even though it was all very real, everything down there seemed to be so alien and so abstract. It all looked strange, like a distant barbaric dream.” As in all of his films, Herzog provides remarkably insightful commentary regarding humanity, spirituality, and life itself.

2007-08-02T23:43:00.000-04:00

Movies watched, week of July 8 to 21, 2007

A Brief History of Time, Errol Morris, 1991
Not so much a history of time as a history of Stephen Hawking, this documentary about the noted paraplegic physicist is nonetheless engaging. While it’s not my favorite Morris film, it retains many of the hallmarks of his signature style, such as the Philip Glass soundtrack, and oft-visited themes concerning the nature and purpose of life itself. Hawking’s robotic voice—well, really the voice of a computer he must communicate through—lends the film an otherworldly atmosphere, evoking cosmic entities, a sense of disembodiment.

Halloween II, Rick Rosenthal, 1981
This picks up right where the first Halloween left off—actually, they overlap slightly, beginning as Dr. Loomis shoots Michael, only to find that he’s escaped, surviving multiple gunshot wounds and a fall from a second story window. While it’s satisfying that it directly corresponds to the first movie, the effect is awkwardly achieved. It doesn’t really feel like an opening, more like returning from a commercial break, the viewer thrust into the middle of the action with no explanation.

My disappointment doesn’t end there. I’m sure I’m not the first person to voice these complaints, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that Michael can’t be killed—how is he still alive after being shot six times? Why can he just break through a glass door (or, conversely, why is the hospital door made of breakaway glass)? How is it that he can walk away from a flame-engulfed room? (It does look as though the fire eventually killed him, though not without a fight—oh wait, he comes back in Halloween IV…) I was under the impression that Michael was a psychotic human, yet he seems to have superhuman powers of invincibility. He also comes off kind of like a zombie with his trudging, yet steady gait. I can only hope that the upcoming remake will lose some of the silliness surrounding the original films.

The Pianist, Roman Polanski, 2002
Whereas most films about the Holocaust depict life—or a lack thereof—inside the camps, this film portrays the events leading up to that point, and the hardships endured for those left behind. (In one scene, Szpilman escapes from a building that’s being razed, emerging to an eerie, post-apocalyptic landscape of rubble and skeletal remains of bombed-out buildings—it seems that eventually, everyone suffered, Jews and Gentiles alike.) It’s a hard film to watch, leveling the sense of distance between viewers and this group of people who were exterminated more than 60 years ago—we can see ourselves in their place, and the feelings of dread and shock at what was allowed to take place intensify exponentially.

Secret Honor, Robert Altman, 1984
An uncommon portrayal of Richard Nixon as he dictates a two-hour drunken monologue into a tape recorder—he doesn’t even bother to buy a blank tape, instead recording over salsa music—reflecting on his life, both personal and political. At times sputtering, cursing, and crying, Nixon addresses an imaginary judge, an aide named Roberto, or sometimes just mumbles to himself in incoherent asides.

Atypical of the rest of Altman’s oeuvre, there’s only one character, as opposed to his usual ensemble cast of thousands. It feels more like a play or a one-man show—and now that I realize that it’s based on a play, I believe it was probably more effective in that format.

My Left Foot, Jim Sheridan, 1989
While the biopic of Christy Brown, an Irish painter and writer plagued by cerebal palsy, is certainly a story of triumph over incredible odds, the film manages to avoid being overly saccharine or insipidly heartwarming. It takes the viewer into territory both dark and humorous, such as Brown’s attempt at suicide after his declarations of love for his teacher are not reciprocated—it’s difficult to tell whether he’s shaking so much because of fear or his afflictions, but he’s physically unable to cut his wrists (thankfully). David Lynch’s The Elephant Man comes to mind, in that the protagonist is an extremely intelligent person trapped inside the confines of his own malformed body, assumed to have the mind of a three year-old and treated as such by society.

Opening Night, John Cassavetes, 1977
An alcoholic stage actress is haunted by a dead fan and obsessed with her inevitable aging, which is made all the more obvious through her current onstage role. As her sanity gradually unravels, no one seems to know how to deal with it, sending her to a spiritualist, or pushing her onstage despite her barely being able to stand. The storytelling is complex, at times making it difficult to discern whether a given scene is part of the play or the actors’ reality.

2007-07-20T16:23:00.001-04:00

Can I still blame my laziness on the summer? I'm trying to catch up here, so please bear with me...

Movies watched, week of June 24-July 7, 2007

Belle de Jour, Luis Buñuel, 1967

Severine is a woman torn between two worlds, working as a prostitute from two to five and returning to her role as dutiful wife by the time her husband comes home. Buñuel seamlessly hints at the psychology behind her actions through brief flashbacks and surreal dream sequences—fleeting memories of sexual advances from an older man and refusing Communion, and daydreams of horse-drawn carriage rides ending in various forms of erotically charged acts of degradation. Severine feigns disgust at her customers’ sexual fetishes, yet she sought out the place—she must enjoy it on some level, yet isn’t willing to entirely abandon her role as prim and proper society woman.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Sam Peckinpah, 1974

When a piano player named Bennie learns of a reward placed on the head of Alfredo Garcia (whom his hooker girlfriend knows a little too well, if you catch my meaning), he tries to outrun the bounty hunters who are also after the elusive Alfredo, who we never get to know below the neck. The gradual breakdown of Bennie’s sanity is compellingly accomplished, as he begins to talk to the rotting, fly-infested head in the passenger’s seat, but I would have loved to see even more surrealism employed, the head beginning to talk back to him.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jim Jarmusch, 1999

Jarmusch’s subtle sense of humor is in full display in this tale of a mafia hit-man who communicates by homing pigeon and models himself after a samurai warrior. His best friend, a Haitian ice cream vendor named Louie, speaks only French, while Ghost Dog speaks only English—throughout the film, the two unwittingly utter the same phrases in their own language, my favorite running joke.

Hype!, Doug Pray, 1996

I watched this documentary on the "Seattle sound" only for the Dead Moon footage. As expected, there was a lot of fast-forwarding going on, through awful performances by the likes of Gas Huffer (ha) and Crackerbash (?).

The Bridge, Eric Steel, 2006

A film crew spent all of 2004 taping the Golden Gate Bridge from various angles, capturing the 24 suicides that occurred that year—that’s one every couple of weeks, which, to me, is astounding. (For those who challenge their ethics, the crew notified authorities whenever they suspected someone of planning to jump, and actually prevented a few). What’s particularly disturbing about many of these moments is the nonchalance that seems to surround them. The jumpers appear to be casually making their way across the bridge, going about their business—and then suddenly they’re climbing over the railing and leaping to their deaths. One man spent the last minutes of his life on his cell phone, even laughing at one point. Perhaps he’s saying his goodbyes, but he looks so casual, that when he hangs up and moments later is hurtling into oblivion, the unexpected turn of events is startling.

Supervixens, Russ Meyer, 1975

This gloriously raunchy, campy movie is quintessential Russ Meyer, featuring a psychotic cop, big breasted vixens (hence the title, all of their names begin with “Super”), and a ridiculously over the top electrocution scene. After he’s falsely pinned for his wife’s murder, Clint Ramsey flees town and is attacked by voluptuous, horny women the whole way—the poor schmuck’s not even interested half the time. His dead wife, Super Angel, begins to show up again, covered in blood but looking sexy as ever, usually perched on top of a mountain and laughing derisively—it’s ambiguous as to whether she’s a ghost, a hallucination, or something else entirely, but an explanation isn’t really necessary.

George Washington, David Gordon Green, 2000

Somewhat reminiscent of Killer of Sheep, particularly in its scenes of children playing, this impressive debut is alive with striking colors and images—George in his superhero costume, Buddy reciting a monologue in an alligator mask—generating an elegant, dreamlike embodiment of youth.

2007-07-16T21:35:00.000-04:00

Gates of Heaven * Errol Morris * 1980
Vernon, Florida * Errol Morris * 1982

These early documentaries by Errol Morris were two of Werner Herzog’s picks for his nonfiction series at Film Forum this past May. In addition to suitably complementing Herzog’s own oeuvre, there’s a deeper connection between the two directors. As the story goes, when Morris was a young film student, Herzog told him that if he actually made the project he had always talked about—a movie about pet cemeteries—he would eat his shoe. When Morris answered his bet with Gates of Heaven, Herzog honored his end of the bargain. The meal is documented in the short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, directed by Les Blank.

Neither film is about one thing, but rather a miscellany of rambling digressions and false starts that revolve around a unifying theme, be it pet cemeteries, or a northwestern Florida town. Gates of Heaven begins as somewhat of a battle against the evil rendering company, contemptuously described by the Foothill Pet Cemetery’s paraplegic proprietor as a kind of animal holocaust, with gas chambers and mountains of half dead “little pets.”

While it is undoubtedly an unpleasant business, the representative from the rendering company is far more amusing, as he laughs incredulously at humans’ sentimentality for animals, his attitude falling along the lines of “Get a load of this, people actually get upset over dead animals! One lady quit and she never saw or smelled anything that went on, it just bothered her mind! Can you beat that?” In this and many other scenes, Morris displays an instinctive comedic ability, with his use of timing and cutting to generate laughter out of an otherwise ordinary statement. That and he seems drawn to offbeat characters—or perhaps they’re somehow drawn to him.

The film features some genuinely touching moments from bereaved pet owners. A sequence of graves bearing epitaphs for the likes of Tippins and Caesar, accompanied with images of departed poodles and kittens and so on is heartbreaking in itself (at least if you’re a sucker for cute puppies like I am). Many of the markers display such warm pronouncements (although a bit saccharine for my tastes) as “I knew love; I knew this dog” and “Dog is God spelled backwards” (sorry, but that last one cracks me up a bit).

One woman ponders over her lost pet, “There’s your dog; your dog’s dead. But where’s the thing that made it move? It had to be something, didn’t it?”, expressing, through her own grief-stricken observations, the core of one of mankind’s greatest mysteries—the nature of the soul—an extremely complex notion pared down to its raw essence. Of course, there are also moments in the film that portray the degree of insanity that pet owners can exhibit, perhaps best represented in the woman who accompanies her Chihuahua in a high-pitched squealing duet.

A bit of controversy arises when the Foothill PetCemetery loses its lease, forcing the remains of 450 pets to be exhumed and transported to the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park in nearby Napa. The owners of these unfortunate creatures, disturbed from their apparently not final resting places, are outraged.

While interviewing an elderly woman named Florence Rasmussen about the removal of the dead pets, Morris catches a sprawling, incoherent monologue that seamlessly drifts from the topic at hand to complaints about her immobility and ill health (although she later says “people my age as a rule don’t get around like I do”), her insolent grandson who never visits her even though she bought him a car (well, actually she only gave him $400), how he won’t have kids or get married (except he was once married to that tramp and involved in a paternity suit), and so on, contradicting herself every step of the way. Instead of cutting her off as I imagine most filmmakers would do, Morris brilliantly decides to let her run with it, including the entire conversation.

Rasmussen’s speech is somewhat of a segue—a portal, if you will—between the stories of the two cemeteries. Now there is a whole new set of idiosyncratic characters, namely the Harberts’ sons, who are preparing to take over the family business—one a former insurance salesman who tries to organize his office in order “to display the maximum trophies,” the other a mustachioed hippie named Danny who plays guitar in a hammock, daydreaming of becoming a rock star (there’s a great scene where he plays electric guitar on top of a hill with the volume cranked, so that his music can be heard “all over the valley”). Danny has an air of melancholy about him, alluding to lost loves and impossible goals, but one can’t help but laugh a little at the earnestness of his philosophizing—for instance, “the pill has led to a pet explosion” and “a broken heart is something that everyone should experience.” Both sons project a feeling of defeat, as each has returned home after failing to succeed in their own aspirations, falling back on Bubbling Well as a last resort.

Vernon, Florida, released two years after Gates of Heaven, opens with a truck slowly trudging down the street, emitting a billowing cloud of smoke—a comical sight, this slow-moving entity leaving a foggy haze in its wake strikes me as an apt metaphor for the town and its inhabitants.

The film is a character study, surveying various “specialists”—the town’s foremost experts on turkey hunting (this man has the feet and gobblers—”beards,” as he calls them—of his prized kills proudly mounted above the door of his trailer home, each with a story behind it), New Mexican sand (they’re convinced that it is growing*), opposums, turtles, and other animals (“I’ve been bit by everything there is in the country. Wild game, you know. Except a rattlesnake. I was sure enough watching for him.”), and so on. Morris layers these scenes together to create a collage of oddball witticism, a lyrical portrait of a remote corner of the world. In all of his films, one can see that he’s interested in people’s obsessions, particularly if they’re fixated on eccentric or out of the ordinary subjects—like pet cemeteries, turkey hunting, or quantum mechanics (as in A Brief History of Time). Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which focuses on an elderly topiary gardener, a retired lion tamer, a man fascinated by mole rats, and a cutting-edge robotics designer, might be the best example.

From the film’s portrayal, there are, ostensibly, no kids and few women in Vernon—though, logically, this statement must not be true, it’s somehow believable. Morris has an eye and ear for odd characters—from watching his movies, you’d think that the U.S. is populated entirely by freaks. Most of the Vernon inhabitants we meet are old men who speak with heavy, hard-to-decipher accents; their seemingly rambling speech, when printed on the page, has an oddly poetic quality. One man sits on a bench, examining a jewel he has sent away for in the mail: “I don’t know what I’m looking for. What does a jeweler look for? You know, those guys, when you go into a jewelry store? If you want something examined, they look through a lens. What are they looking for?” And in the instance of the owners of the jar of New Mexican sand: “And now, you see, my jar is nearly full. It grows. It crawls. It crawls up the side of the jar, you see?”

My favorite of these characters is the preacher delivering a sermon on the word “therefore,” which Paul used 119 times in his writing—therefore it must be significant (look, even I’m using it!). Most amusing is his winding journey through the dictionary, each new entry initiating further study, another word to look up: “I found the word to be a conjunction. Now, I had long forgotten what a conjunction was…Webster’s Dictionary said that a conjunction is an indeclinable word that connects two thoughts together. And so I said, What does this word ‘indeclinable’ mean?”

As in Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida recalls the types of ethical questions I touched on in my review of Fred Wiseman’s Hospital. Is Morris ridiculing these people? Are we meant to laugh at them? In this instance, it depends on the viewer—essentially, it’s in the eye (and ear) of the beholder (please forgive the cliché). Morris certainly isn’t laughing at them—he seems to genuinely love these characters, though he doesn’t deny that they’re a strange lot. In a lecture entitled “The Anti Post-Modern Post Modernist,” Morris says of the film: “Like a lot of my projects, Vernon, Florida came out of my failure to do what I had set out to do, which was a story about insurance fraud [the community had a freakish number of “accidental” amputations] which I wanted to call Nub City…Instead, I stumbled on these amazing characters, who I remain very, very fond of.”

While these two films lack the visual sophistication and intricate soundtracks of later films like A Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, they are nonetheless representative of his distinct style and thematic propensities—unmistakeably Morris's films.

*From “Sand That Grows and Other Stories” by Liam Lacey:

Recently, says Morris, he was speaking at Brandeis University about the capacity for self-delusion in connection with a number of his films. He mentioned the couple in Vernon, Florida: “The one thing we know about sand is that it doesn’t grow.”

A man in the audience pointed out that the “sand” from that part of New Mexico was gypsum which can absorb water.

“So I started thinking: They took this sand from the desert and came back to their humid Florida town, and they open it from time to time and the humidity gets in and is absorbed by the gypsum. I realized I was the one who was deluded.”

2007-07-04T21:30:00.000-04:00

Movies watched, week of June 17-23, 2007

Halloween, John Carpenter, 1978

After seeing the trailer for Rob Zombie’s forthcoming remake of Halloween, I decided I really needed to check out the original, which I’d managed to overlook until last week. While it’s undoubtedly a great classic horror movie, it suffers the usual genre-inherent dilemma: the villain is more interesting than the victims. I found myself rooting for the creepy masked psycho, cheering as he silenced another screechy, annoying airhead with the plunge of a butcher knife—which kind of diminishes the scariness.

Whereas I’ve shunned recent remakes like The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in order to avoid seeing these movies ruined, I’m actually curious to see Zombie’s Halloween. Instead of a straight remake, it features original material that addresses many of the questions I had about Michael, spending more time exploring his character and psychosis. While that could potentially ruin the mystique, I’m interested to see what he comes up with.

Hostel, Eli Roth, 2005

I’m not a particularly big fan of modern horror movies, preferring Hitchcockian thrillers and 70s slashers, but Roth’s Thanksgiving trailer in Grindhouse roused my interest in his previous work. The premise (college students backpacking through Europe fall victim to a murder-for-profit ring in which people pay upwards of $25,000 for the privilege to kill a person in any way they like) is intriguing but poorly executed. And as described above, the fact that I couldn’t stand the frat boy types I was supposed to be identifying with detracted from the degree of terror I might have experienced. While there is a lot of fake blood employed (enough for one of the killers to slip on it and drop a chainsaw on his legs), this seemed pretty tame compared to the gruesome scenes I had braced myself for.

Factory Girl, George Hickenlooper, 2006

I’m speechless at how appalling this movie is. Having read Jean Stein’s Edie, I know that there’s definitely a compelling story behind the Sedgwicks, but for some reason the filmmakers decided to force it into a clichéd Hollywood cookie cutter, reducing Edie’s life to something along the lines of “pure, good girl with a dark past comes to the big city and is destroyed by the evil artists.” The plot concentrates on a couple of minor footnotes in Edie’s life and glosses over more significant aspects—her affair with Bob Dylan, which is represented in the film as a major milestone, takes up about two of Edie’s 430 pages, and is considerably skewed from actual events. The film barely touches on the Sedgwick family history, excepting brief mentions of Edie’s brother Minty and how her father supposedly molested her, drastically oversimplifying the complexities of her family dynamic.

The stiff, stilted dialogue (“I think Warhol’s paintings are changing the world!”) is particularly cringe-worthy, as are the low blows directed at Warhol’s work and his associates. Slate.com’s review accurately conveys the degree of disgust I experienced as this mockery unfolded before my eyes, perhaps better than I could have said it myself: “Factory Girl isn’t just a bad movie, it’s a 90-minute insult to the culture it pretends to be capturing.”

The City of Photographers, Sebastián Moreno Mardones, 2006

This documentary, featured in Lincoln Center’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, chronicles the legacy of a group of photographers working under the Pinochet regime, who courageously took to the streets to document the horrors of Chile’s military dictatorship. Their work, which is not only politically enlightening but aesthetically beautiful, aided in making the rest of the world aware of the Chilean people’s plight through the distribution of photographs to the foreign press.

In addition to heightening public awareness, the photographs put a human face to the statistics. In particular, one photographer is shown at work creating a mural comprised of family photos of the dead. Instead of 3,000 anonymous victims, we’re presented with people on vacation at the beach, enjoying a beer, smiling with loved ones—3,000 real people with their own experiences and memories that were abruptly silenced, adding a chilling, deeper layer to the horror.

Epidemic, Lars von Trier, 1987

In Lars von Trier’s second feature film, a screenwriter and director (played by Epidemic’s screenwriter and director—the postmodernism is already evident), lose their 220 page script entitled The Cop and the Whore due to a computer error that erases the document. They can’t remember enough of the plot to recreate it, so they work day and night on a new script, with only days to complete it. What they come up with is a medical thriller about a horrifying disease of epidemic proportions. The protagonist, Dr. Mesmer (also portrayed by von Trier), tries to treat the disease but inadvertently ends up spreading it. Epidemic blurs the lines of fiction and reality, as the plot of the film within the film begins to bleed into the outer frames (it seems that the script’s creators are also unintentionally spreading the disease in real life).

Epidemic is a kind of microcosm of von Trier’s work as a whole, showcasing the wide range of his aesthetics. He employs gorgeously arranged shots for the film within the film, while the framed story about the writers is shot in grainy black and white with hand-held cameras and natural lighting. Many of the themes explored in von Trier’s later works are present (hospitals, for example), as are his writing methods and style of humor.