Kill the Snark

I've Moved!

2009-10-07T15:55:00.001-07:00

For all my latest writings, including film reviews, go to my new website, jeffkuykendall.com.

2009 Wisconsin Film Festival

2009-04-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

This blog has been hibernating for the winter while I've been off finishing work on a novel. I wasn't planning on blogging about this year's Wisconsin Film Festival, but, well, it's been a tradition...so let's do it. Here's a quick rundown of what I saw this year.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (U.S., 2008) * * *
D: Sacha Gervasi

I've been wanting to see this since reading a glowing Film Comment article from last year; it's a documentary about a heavy metal band that hasn't been big since 1984. And even then, they weren't so big. Canadian rockers Steve "Lips" Kudlow and Robb Reiner (yes, his real name) have kept the Anvil brand alive, albeit with just a small group of loyal fans, while laboring at miserable day jobs, still dreaming of one day breaking through to the big time. The film follows their last-ditch effort at success through a mismanaged European tour and a big-budget studio album (their thirteenth, with money fronted by Lips' older sister) in which record labels may or may not have any interest. Much like The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, the dialogue could be straight out of a Christopher Guest comedy (or, more obviously, This is Spinal Tap), were it not all real. But the film is also unexpectedly moving, as Gervasi--who toured with the band as a teenager, and has since become a Hollywood screenwriter--makes pains to emphasize that Lips' devotion to the Anvil dream has real-world consequences to his family and Reiner's, who are waiting on the sidelines for a better life.

Live from New York...: 1950s Television from the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (U.S., 1952-1958)
D: Sidney Lumet, Hal Keither, Lou Sposa

This program assembles three half-hour live television broadcasts from the 1950's, rare copies held in the Wisconsin Film and Television Archive (and shown on DVD to preserve the prints). "Danger" was an anthology mystery/suspense program; the episode screened, "Death and the Family Jewels," is an amusing film noir with a young Cloris Leachman prominently featured; but it's of interest primarily for Lumet's innovative camerawork, which does its best to bring a certain amount of style to the live format. More entertaining was an episode of "Mr. Peepers," starring Wally Cox as a nebbishy science teacher. Much of the comedy still works marvellously, although the sitcom format had a long way to go: much of the humor seems to meander aimlessly, which gives the unintended feeling of (bad) improv. Best of all was "ESP," a failed game show hosted by Vincent Price. UW Cinematheque curator Heather Heckman unfortunately forewarned the audience this would be "boring," and so I saw at least one couple leave right as it was starting. Their loss. Poor Vincent Price struggles to make the most of an unworkable concept (none of the contestants demonstrate any psychic powers, unsurprisingly--including the prize fighter, a palooka who admits to not knowing what "ESP" meant until the producers told him he had it). The series, which premiered while the game show trials were ongoing, deserves a DVD release--all two episodes, as the plug was quickly pulled. The unintended humor value is extremely high. I can't imagine that any film at WIFF this year generated louder laughter.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 (U.S., 2008) * * * 1/2
D: Kevin Rafferty

Rundown of the legendary Harvard/Yale game of 1968 is deceptively simple, cutting between talking heads and footage from the game itself. But this is the best sports film I've ever seen. Despite the necessary distancing of the talking heads, despite the grainy quality of the 1968 film, despite the fact that the outcome of the game is in the TITLE ITSELF, the enjoyment and the palpable suspense of the game is translated perfectly, partly because of director Rafferty's clean technique, but mostly because it was a damn good game. First and only celebrity spotting of the festival: Mayor Dave attended. First "sensurround" experience of the festival: sitting next to me was a gentleman who attended the actual game, and helped provide me with additional play-by-play commentary. (Past "sensurround" festival experiences include watching Werner Herzog's Buddhism documentary Wheel of Time with exiled Tibetan monks, and the horror film "Isolation" next to a WIFF volunteer who was in hysterics and borderline catatonic collapse for the entire film.)

The Trap (Serbia/Germany/Hungary, 2007) * * 1/2
D: Srdan Golubović

When the son of a middle-class couple falls ill, only an expensive surgery can save his life. In desperation for the money, the wife places an ad in the paper despite her husband's protests and injured pride. But options are running out when the husband, Mladen, receives the only answer to the ad, from a mysterious benefactor who will provide the money on one condition: that Mladen perform a murder. While he agonizes over the decision, their son is hospitalized, and Mladen's marriage begins to fall apart when he refuses to tell his wife just what's been bothering him. Golubović does a fine job illustrating the "quiet desperation" of a man living through hard economic times (it's easy for the viewer to relate anyway), but unfortunately the film is predictable from its plot through its method: in every scene the viewer can anticipate what will follow--which on the one hand provides a sense of doomed inevitability, but on the other hand makes for a very plodding film. One good twist regarding the blackmailer, in an excellent scene at the climax, almost redeems the enterprise, but it's a long time coming, and all too fleeting. It's not bad, but this has all been done before, and in more rewarding or insightful films.

Our Beloved Month of August (Portugal, 2008) * * *
D: Miguel Gomes

As an (almost Godardian) experiment, this film is fascinating. Imagine a filmmaker who wants to tell a story called "Our Beloved Month of August," involving a teenage singer, her tentative flirtations with her handsome cousin, and her overprotective father. Then imagine that while the director prepares to shoot, in his research he becomes distracted by the Portuguese countryside and its eccentric inhabitants. Thus, he begins to film 2nd-unit footage without much interest in initiating the main story itself, much to the chagrin of his investors. Essentially this is the story of Miguel Gomes' Our Beloved Month of August, which does, ultimately, get to its story-within-a-story, but not before spending about half its 147-minute running time in leisurely distraction. We meet a young man who, once a year, jumps off a bridge; we watch local bands play; we go up and down the river and its surrounding hills, occasionally glimpsing the director, or locals who may or may not want to involve themselves in his film. The temptation is to speculate on what the film would have been as a conventional narrative, without such an expansive prologue, but truth is that it's the experiment which makes the film something which can't be dismissed. An endurance test, perhaps (there were many walkouts), but a rewarding one.

Between the Folds (U.S., 2008) * * *
D: Vanessa Gould

This documentary on the art of paper-folding transforms one's notions of what origami is, as we witness artists from different nations creating elaborate three-dimensional sculptures: figures with detailed facial expressions, flowers that blossom before your eyes, beasts which stand as tall as a person. Most surprisingly, we learn of its practical application to fields of math and science, from designing unfolding solar panels for satellites, or doing cutting-edge research on protein folding; which is why the art is of growing interest to professors who spend their spare time folding paper and elaborately diagramming their work. Great fun at a sold-out show (one of many this year), with director Gould in attendance. Accompanied by two animated short films on the origami theme.

Tulpan (Kazakhstan, 2008) * * *
D: Sergey Dvortsevoy

Dvortsevoy's portrait of a family of Kazakh farmers living within the same small dwelling on the dust-devil-swept steppes is most remarkable for capturing the rhythms of life: herding the sheep, singing to pass the time, eating dinner on the sandy floor of the hut, playing with a radio to capture the fleeting signal from a distant broadcast, and occasionally venturing out to try to get young Asa a wife. There's only one eligible girl left on their corner of the steppes, and that's Tulpan, who is never seen, though she advises her parents that Asa's ears are too big. Thus deemed unsuitable, Asa miserably returns to his homelife, and chafes at the idea of being just another shepherd, his big-city dreams fueled largely by his hyperactive friend Boni, who collects Western pornography and tapes it to the inside of his truck. Very similar to The Story of Weeping Camel--in fact, replete with a graphic animal birth--but with, naturally, a more adult edge.

Idiots and Angels (U.S., 2008) * * *
D: Bill Plympton

Plympton's fifth feature-length animated film is, once again, done almost entirely by Plympton himself, which is still a very rare and exceptional thing--and which is why it's so unusual that there are two such works in this year's festival (the other being Sita Sings the Blues, reviewed below). I haven't seen his last, Hair High, but have been following him pretty avidly otherwise, being a fan since his first film, the surreal musical The Tune (to date, his only "family" picture). Plympton's style is unique: hand-drawn, sketchy, ribald, violent, and most of all a slow-burning surrealism, where one incident leads to another with a deliberately-paced comic inevitability. Idiots and Angels is the apotheosis of his style, and one he's been building toward since The Tune and, in particular, I Married a Strange Person (previously my favorite, now usurped). Like IMASP, Idiots and Angels follows a man who inexplicably receives strange powers. Unlike IMASP, those powers--which come in the form of angel-like wings--manage to inhibit rather than enable his out-of-control Id. Our protagonist, who begins the play as a thoroughly wicked scoundrel who follows his every lustful and vengeful whim, is pummeled into an unwilling character arc by his animate wings, which blind him when he tries to spy on a nude sunbather, and send him soaring to right every wrong against his wishes. Meanwhile, two others--a surgeon and a barkeep--want the wings for their own personal gain. Plympton has been working toward dialogue-free storytelling for decades now, and he achieves it with Idiots and Angels; it's telling that even though sound problems took out the soundtrack for the first five minutes (thanks, Wisconsin Union Theater!), the audience could follow along perfectly, and were laughing at every gag. Plympton also simplifies his elements, limiting himself to the same locations and a small cast of characters, so that only the surreal comic action becomes complex and rich, as with the best Loony Toons. WIFF Sensurround moment #2: when the ending credits began to roll, a man toward the front of the theater stood up as his pants fell down, mooning the audience--a perfectly Plympton finale.

Revanche (Austria, 2008) * * * *
D: Götz Spielmann

Alex is carrying on a secret relationship with the Ukrainian prostitute Tamara, against the wishes of their mutual employer at a Viennese brothel. Tamara is offered a chance to move up to the role of a higher-class escort for the elite, at a fancy hotel, but when she refuses, her pimp hires someone to rough her up. Alex offers her a chance to escape when he concocts a bank heist plan, but when it goes horrifically awry, he's left to pick up the pieces in a country village with his sickly, accordion-playing grandfather, and the couple next door, a police officer and his wife, who are unable to conceive. I've probably given too much away already. What should be stressed is that Spielmann is uninterested in crafting a traditional thriller, and forsakes "suspense" in favor of a documentary-style realism as he tries to access the emotional lives of the characters, and untangle the very complex moral dilemma each one faces. What makes Revanche so remarkable is that it arrives at a rare and potent emotional space, one which could never be anticipated from the setup.

Mermaid (Russia, 2007) * * 1/2
D: Anna Melikyan

I want to award this film higher marks simply for existing: it's a Russian fantasy-comedy, directed by a woman, aiming for Amelie-style imagination and romance. But it never quite pulls together, and leaves one dissatisfied, even at 115 minutes. Masha Shalayeva plays Alisa (Alice, by the subtitles, perhaps to emphasize an Alice in Wonderland connection), who was born out of a waterbound tryst, and who decides to become a mute after witnessing her mother seducing a passing sailor (her father has been absent for many years, though she still waits for him). Sent to a school for special needs children, she focuses on honing her latent psychic ability, at first by causing apples to fall from trees, and later by orchestrating much larger events, usually unintentional catastrophes (to Alisa's distress, many people die in the course of this film as the results of her psychically-enhanced Id). When her mother moves the family--which includes Alisa and her grandmother--to Moscow, she adjusts to city life by taking a job as a cell phone ad (wearing an elaborate phone costume), and eventually falls in with a man who makes big money selling plots on the moon. That is, "falls in" with him literally--rescuing him from a suicide attempt as he jumps off a bridge, and seconds before she was going to off herself in the same fashion. Enamored perhaps as much by her own legend (how she was conceived) as the man himself, she devotes herself to becoming his housemaid, while he easily bats off her naive advances and continues to stumble, somnambulistically, through his life. Of course, eventually she persuades him to see the world--and her--differently, but this happens as abruptly as the contrived crisis/climax which follows almost immediately afterward. The film feels a bit like a missed opportunity.

Sita Sings the Blues (U.S., 2008) * * * *
D: Nina Paley

A dazzling first feature-length animated film by Nina Paley, Sita Sings the Blues combines legends from the Ramayana, autobiography, and the songs of 1920's jazz singer Annette Hanshaw into an extremely personal feminist statement dressed up as sweet psychedelic candy. When I first read about this film on the Cartoon Brew blog, my curiosity was piqued enough to eagerly seek out whatever information I could find. At last able to view the finished product (and on the big screen!), I'm pleased to say that the film exceeds my elevated expectations. Most impressive--apart from the fact that this entire, studio-slick film was done by one person at her home computer--is the blending of animated styles, which dialogue with one another in charming and engaging ways. The Ramayana scenes, in which we learn the legend of Sita, her abduction, rescue, and subsequent marital discord, are illustrated by found art cut-outs, animated Terry Gilliam-style, and set to the voices of three storytellers trying (sometimes vainly) to settle on the details of the legend. These are intercut with scenes of Paley's own domestic upheaval, mirroring Sita's, and animated in a "squiggly" style of animation as if bringing to life doodles sketched into the corners of Paley's diary. Then there are the Hanshaw-driven musical numbers, the highlights of the film, which are frequent and eye-popping, animated like a Betty Boop short as visited by the Yellow Submarine. All of it is woven together so persuasively that the viewer is left convinced that there was no other way of telling the story, either Sita's or Paley's. A wonder: and you can watch it for free at the film's website.

I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse

2008-11-09T12:32:00.000-08:00

I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse (France, 1973) * *
D: Fernando Arrabal

I earlier reviewed Fernando Arrabal's Viva La Muerte (1971), a film which I defined as "angry." Here is another film by anger (to borrow the byline used by Kenneth Anger). Arrabal, a founder of the Panic movement, seems determined to outdo fellow Panic artist Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970) with a raging, nightmarish film on a similar theme. Like El Topo, I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse focuses on the calamity that unfolds when a holy man from out of the desert comes face to face with corrupt civilization. In this case, the holy man is a dwarf, Marvel (Hachemi Marzouk), who is discovered by a fugitive, Aden Rey (George Shannon), wanted for the murder of his mother - as is explained in an amusing opening newsreel interpreted into sign language for those "deaf-mutes" in the audience. Our hero actually had an excruciatingly Oedipal relationship with his mother, which has left him an epileptic, as well as a basketcase tortured by grotesque daydream/reveries of his childhood. As in a Jodorowsky story, he is unable to escape the shadow of a parent, leaving him in a state of arrested development, a sharply-dressed man of society who secretly longs to dress in his mother's underwear and relive the traumas of his youth. (Those traumas, always revisited to the sound of galloping hooves, include witnessing his mother at the receiving end of a graphic cumshot during an S&M session with a lover.) Having fled the authorities into the desert, he finds Marvel eating sand and goatshit delicacies, a complete innocent who can float into the air and perform other minor miracles. Marvel also grows out one toenail, clipping it only once a year, to store it with his others in a sack. At one point, Aden sorts through the sack to count the toenails, as one might count the rings of a tree, only to find them far too numerous. (Marvel has also lost count, and suggests he might be 10,000 years old.) Determined to introduce his new best friend to civilization, he takes the dwarf and his pet goat to the city, where they rent an apartment together. Disconcerted that there is no soil indoors, Marvel has Aden assist him in transporting bags of dirt inside to construct a garden. Absurdist misadventures follow, as Aden introduces his friend to the modern world (and the authorities continue to pursue, always one step behind). He tries to bring Marvel a lover, introduces him to eating meat in restaurants (which repulses the dwarf), and takes him to church--where Marvel performs a genuine miracle of stigmata that gets him promptly kicked out. All the while themes of incest, repressed homosexuality, and social and religious satire emerge, leading to a climax about as bloody and as memorably repellant as the one which ended Viva La Muerte. Much more so than Jodorowsky, Arrabal seems hellbent on providing a cathartic transcendence through rolling about in the grand guignol.

Taboo imagery is Arrabal's cinematic language. An erect penis is lit like a candle - which is the least of the phallic violations on display. Aden and Marvel are depicted shitting (for real) in silhouette against a desert sunset. A flower's stem is stuck into a woman's ass, to emerge coated in shit and devoured (not for real). When two nude lovers in gas masks copulate, it seems almost like a refreshing reprieve - the kind of garden-variety surrealistic symbolism which Arrabal usually tries to stampede past on the way to more aggressive imagery. While the Panic movement was partly established as an anarchic response to the commercialized state of Surrealism (thanks, Dali), I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse reminds one that Surrealism was originally intended as a weapon. This film is a weapon, perhaps more than it is a work of art, but as savage as it is, the film also feels less innovative and original than what was concurrently being created by artists such as Jodorowsky, Luis Buñuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini - even the stylish exploitations of Jesus Franco. Perhaps it is because many of the shocks seem pointless. Perhaps it is because the plot feels unoriginal, an imitation of El Topo or Simon of the Desert, but given a psychosexual twist.

Yet it is still undeniably a "film by anger," an exorcism of Arrabal's private demons. It is a product of a unique decade in which extreme transgression became, if briefly, not just a valid cinematic tool but also fashionable. I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse still provokes outrage, which is certainly one of Arrabal's chief objectives. That it also provokes weariness, exhaustion, and even cynicism from this viewer is, perhaps, one of the unfortunate effects of witnessing an artist set on taking every concept to its extreme - and bloody, and scatalogical, and repulsive - ends. I liked Viva La Muerte. But perhaps I've now had my fill of this kind of exploration, and hunger for real poetry now, not just belabored gestures at symbolism from the mud and grime.

Don't Touch the Axe

2008-10-06T08:41:00.000-07:00

Don't Touch the Axe (France, 2006) * * * 1/2
D: Jacques Rivette

There was, for a little while circa 2006, a bit of a Jacques Rivette revival. Rivette has always been one of the most underrated of the French New Wave directors, perhaps because his films were always more self-consciously theatrical than overtly cinematic. A touring program helped to reestablish his presence in the consciousness of film buffs internationally, screening prints of films such as Celine and Julie Go Boating (to date, his best-known and most highly-regarded film), Duelle, Noroît, Love on the Ground, and the sprawling Out 1. (Alas, when the festival came to my local UW-Cinematheque, they did not screen this last one, at 773 minutes his most legendary.) Oddly, the revival seems to have dimmed, and I'm still waiting on an announcement of some Rivette films on Region 1 DVD (ahem, Criterion?). Still, his latest film, released in the U.S. as The Duchess of Langeais, at least was released stateside, and to favorable attention, at that.

Anyone who has taken the time to come to know Rivette through his films will eventually come to Honoré de Balzac and Rivette's great affection for the author; and so it should come as no surprise that in 2006 he adapted "The Duchess of Langeais," a novella included in Balzac's collection The History of the Thirteen. Originally, Balzac intended to call the story "Don't Touch the Axe," after a pivotal line of dialogue. Significantly, Rivette restored the title to his adaptation, although, for reasons I can't quite understand, it was changed to The Duchess of Langeais for festivals and limited release in the U.S. Don't Touch the Axe is a rather savage title, which adds a bit of teeth to what will be, by necessity, a story told mostly through dialogue--a chamber drama of unrequited love, set almost entirely in the Duchess' boudoir. Guillaume Depardieu* plays Montriveau, a decorated general of the Napoleonic wars, visiting Paris with a gruff demeanor, like a seaman who hasn't gotten his land-legs; fittingly, he plays the part with a staggering gait, to imply a war wound, though he seems to move like Frankenstien's monster, and is just as out of place.** At a ball he meets Antoinette (Jeanne Balibar), the wife of the wealthy, and perpetually absent, Duc de Langeais. Finding this fish-out-of-water entertaining, she decides to play with his affections for her own amusement. She invites him to her home, wearing only a flimsy nightgown and acting the engaged audience to his life story. As she intends, he falls intensely in love, declaring that she is the first woman who has ever stolen his heart. She is, of course, being the perfect coquette, building his expectations in perpetuity without ever intending to satisfy his desires. This echoes, ironically, the tale he tells her (in the film, stretched over several nights): of being taken through the African desert by a guide who promises him that the journey will be only a few miles more, a few miles more--until they have gone too far to go back. Montriveau is also being led on, so to speak, but when he reaches that "point of no return," he decides to turn the tables.

And here is the only departure from the novella, a minor one: in the film the implication is that Montriveau decides to have his revenge upon the duchess of his own will; in Balzac's story, it is at the instigation of his friend Ronquerolles. Ronquerolles does play a role in Rivette's adaptation, but it's a late and minor part; the result is that Montriveau becomes a more dynamic character here, and more responsible for the tragedy which unfolds. Yet this is a Rivette film, arid, sometimes clinical. We are removed from Montriveau's thoughts and feelings, so that he's somewhat more mysterious than he is the novella. Balzac presents a messy character, emotionally fragile, and given to a rage when he finds that he's been so emotionally exposed by the coquette's wiles. Guillaume Depardieu, to his credit, is effective and sympathetic, but Rivette seems to hold him back. Rivette, like Godard, has always been a little reluctant for the viewers to lose themselves completely in the story--he wants to emphasize the boundary between the viewer and the characters. In the novella, there is a distinct dividing line when the point of view switches from Montriveau to the Duchess. But since we are never entirely within Montriveau's head in Rivette's film, that narrative switch is never really applied. The dividing line of interest for Rivette is the emotional gap between the two characters. Montriveau falls in love with the Duchess, and then she falls in love with him; but they never seem to meet one another. In one of the final images of the film--a rare departure from the narrative, though a minor one--we see a cinematic illustration of this divide, although to avoid spoilers I won't describe it here. Really, this is an anti-love story, and Rivette's emotionally aloof approach seems strangely fitting, even if it was not Balzac's method.

Since this is not an experimental film by any means, or at least far less so than Rivette's early works, the result is a fascinating tension between artificiality and authenticity. The dim candles of the salons, the creaking of the floorboards, the dank corridors of the abbey and the clutter of Montriveau's apartment all lend a convincing verisimilitude. But Rivette keeps the emotions in check. He makes little effort to draw the viewer into sympathy with the characters. It is up to the audience to understand the dramatic stakes. Rivette's only cinematic trick is one he's used in the past: using interstitial title cards ("The next day--" "But, the next evening--" etc.), including some with extended quotations from Balzac's prose. He's always been among the most literary of directors; what is amusing is how Rivette, in his autumn years, seems to be pushing cinema toward the form of the novel. One could say that Out 1, which takes as long to see as a novel takes to read, was an early attempt to do just this; but an evening spent with any film of Rivette's is as intimate and as oddly comforting and involving as reading a book. That Don't Touch the Axe is a wonderful film is almost besides the point; it is another wonderful Jacques Rivette film, which is more than enough.

* Guillaume Depardieu tragically died of pneumonia just a short while after I wrote this review.
** Not entirely an artistic choice: Depardieu famously had to have his leg amputated following a motorcycle accident.

Lost in America

2008-09-13T15:57:00.000-07:00

Lost in America (U.S., 1985) * * * 1/2
D: Albert Brooks

Albert Brooks is something of a lone albatross in American comedy for the past three decades; his films are razor-sharp, almost black comedies, but with a heart (and so appear, at first, to be less cynical than they really are). He's more populist than Woody Allen, but not a recognizable commercial name. Even when, in the first year of Saturday Night Live, he produced some brilliant, sardonic short films, he was booted off the show because he didn't fit into the SNL clique (shipping his shorts to NY from LA). Still, he's managed to--every few years--produce some very fine comedies, a handful of which approach masterpieces, and so his chief following is among film critics and film buffs. Lost in America is one of those near-masterpieces, perhaps his finest hour; and since I just found it for $2.99 in the discount bin at Pick 'N' Save, I'm writing about it here.

Brooks anticipated the Big Brother-style reality TV show craze with his satire Real Life (1979), in which he played "Albert Brooks" (much as in his shorts and in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, an arrogant send-up of himself), but in 1981 made his first great film, Modern Romance, in which his character cannot find happiness because he distrusts anything resembling contentment, and thus pathologically self-sabotages his relationships; somehow, the film comes across as more brutally self-analytical than Annie Hall, as Brooks dissects his protagonist's narcissism and pities anyone who would have the misfortune to fall for him. (I should mention it's also very funny.) Lost in America could be seen as taking this self-sabotaging character, here called David, into his 40's, having finally settled into a lifestyle, with a loving wife and a lucrative advertising career for which he's invested eight years. Anticipating a promotion, he buys a new home and toys with the idea of purchasing a luxury car; but when he's offered the "Ford account" in New York, and told that a younger, less experienced employee will be taking the promotion, he has an epic meltdown before his boss (a subtle shot suddenly reveals that his boss has been gripping a stress-ball through the entire conversation):

"I used to make fun of my friends in college who went out to 'find' themselves. I took the business route. So I end up here. I can't believe it. So what do I get? I get a transfer. After all these years, I get a transfer. I can get that at a bus stop, right now, I don't need any qualifications. Oh, by the way, our hairpiece secret is off."

After getting fired, he marches directly to his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty), at work, channeling all of his frustration and crushing disappointment into a frenzy of euphoric inspiration: they're going to leave their jobs behind, sell everything, buy a motor home, and travel across America "just like 'Easy Rider.'" Never mind that this never happened in Easy Rider. Soon they're on the road in their motor home (a leather-clad man on a motorcycle pointedly flips the bird), and make a fateful stop in Vegas to get remarried. The chapel is closed, so they go to the Desert Inn and settle for the "junior honeymoon suite," which, impractically, has two small heart-shaped beds. While David sleeps--the beds pushed awkwardly together--Linda sneaks down to the casino for an all-night gambling spree. At 6 AM he stumbled into the casino in a bathrobe, only to find Linda playing roulette with the look of a strung-out heroin addict, perpetually putting chips on "twenty-two, twenty-two."

"The man says you're not on a lucky streak."
"I was down earlier, but come on, I mean--"
"And you're up now?"
"No, I'm still down, but I'm gonna hit now--"
"How down are you?"
"David, you're going to bring me bad luck, now stop it."
"But he's saying you've got bad luck..."
"Come on, come on, twenty-two, twenty-two...yes! Yes!"
"Wow! All right! I'm sorry, I'm sorry! All right! How much?"
"Thirty-five dollars."
"We're up! We're up!"
"We're still down."
"Down? How bad?"
"Down. Down. Twenty-two, down! Come on...twenty-two!"
"Down? How much have we lost?"
"Everything. Everything."
"Everything?"
"Everything...on twenty-two and make it happen for me!"

All of their life savings are gone, including the precious "nest egg." David goes to speak to the manager of the casino (Garry Marshall), who sympathetically offers to comp the room and breakfast. David has a better idea. Still wearing his bathrobe, he proceeds to make the biggest advertising pitch of his life.

"I'm going to tell you this idea now, and please, be secretive, because if another hotel hears about this, they'll take it. This is my business. As the boldest experiment in advertising history, you give us our money back... Think of the publicity. The Hilton hotel has these billboards all over Los Angeles with the winners of these slot machine jackpots; their faces are all over L.A., and I know that works. I've seen people in corners look up and say, 'Maybe I'll go to the Hilton.' Well, you give us our money back. I--I don't even know now, 'cause I'm just coming off the top of my head, but a visual where, if we have a billboard and the Desert Inn just handed us our money back. This gives the Desert Inn, really--Vegas is not associated with feeling."

The extended scene is the centerpiece of the film, and as David continues to pitch, and the manager continues to politely, but firmly, refuse him, the desperation seems to sweat out of the screen, until at last David is describing a Santa Claus/Vegas advertising campaign, and the manager replies, "We're finished talking." If ever Brooks touched greatness, this scene is probably it.

From there, events become slightly more predictible, and slightly less funny, although the performances of Brooks and Hagerty continue to shine, as they milk each moment for all its potential. The climax is a climax as only Brooks would stage it--understated and purely conceptual, and the natural endpoint of the satire: David, returning from his first day as a crossing guard, listens while Linda enthusiastically describes her day working as the assistant manager of a Wienerschnitzel, and then introduces her boss, a teenager. A more hopeful coda is then applied, but tempered by Brooks' cynicism: they return to the lives they had, having been permanently warned off the pursuit of happiness.

One imagines that if Brooks had been able to make a series with these characters, and Hollywood had that to offer in the 80's rather than Chevy Chase vehicles, the world at large might be a better place. Still, most recently he produced Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2005), surely one of that year's most underrated (and underseen) comedies, whose plot suggests that even post-9/11, societies of all persuasions can unite under a solitary cause (in the case of that film, the cause is not liking the comedy of Albert Brooks). Yet who could dislike Lost in America, or any film which features this exchange:

"Phil Shabano, the unqualified son of a bitch! Why? I'll tell you why, because life isn't fair. But you know what'll happen? It'll balance out. He'll buy that boat I've had to look at in that stupid catalog for three years and he'll crash in Catalina and die and seals will eat him."

"Oh, now--you like fish."

"So what? I'm just telling what might be. Fine, he won't die, and he won't be eaten, but he'll never find his way back to the mainland."

The Skull

2008-08-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

The Skull (U.K., 1965) * * * 1/2
D: Freddie Francis

What a curious, wonderful find this film is, now finally available in a definitive presentation from Legend Films, which has given us the recent (unfortunately) colorized restorations of Ray Harryhausen's early films, but here has nothing to colorize, and so offers up the simple, perfect pleasure of a widescreen transfer of an oft-neglected, overlooked horror classic. Though it features many stock players of Hammer horror franchises (Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Michael Gough, in particular), and is directed by Freddie Francis, veteran of many Hammer horrors, The Skull is actually a product of Hammer's chief competitor, Amicus, which is best known for producing anthology horror films like Torture Garden (1967) and Tales from the Crypt (1972). When I was in college, and watching Hammer movies voraciously--wondering why it had taken this horror fan so long to discover them--I would rent the Amicus films as a last resort (i.e. I couldn't find any Draculas or Frankensteins at the video store), and would derive modest pleasures from them. They often seemed like pale imitations of Hammer, featuring many of the players and directors, but with results that are choppy, garish, and considerably less handsome. (Although it should be noted that in Hammer's waning years, there wasn't much discernible difference between the studios.) The Skull is different. It's based on a short story by Robert Bloch, built upon the premise that the Marquis de Sade was possessed by an evil spirit, and that his skull still contains that spirit trapped within. Cushing plays a collector of occult items, who uses them in his research for books on demonology. Lee is his friendly rival. In the first proper scene in the story (after a pre-titles sequence in which we learn how the skull was first stolen from de Sade's corpse), the two Hammer superstars engage in a strangely obsessive bidding war over three Satanic statuettes, presided over by judge Michael Gough. This sequence alone should make the film a treasure for Hammer fans, and indeed is probably the best Hammer sequence never made by the studio; it also, being an auction of ancient and occult memorabilia, seems like an inspiration for an early scene in Guillermo del Toro's homage-laden Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Lee outbids his rival and wins the statues, though he's hard-pressed to explain to Cushing just why he wanted them so badly. Not a good sign. Later, Cushing is visited by Patrick Wymark (Repulsion, The Witchfinder General), who has two items which he thinks Cushing will want to buy--the first being a rare book on de Sade, the second being the man's very skull, for which he wants a thousand pounds. Of course, he can't very well prove it to be de Sade's skull, and he hopes that his own reputation will persuade Cushing; nevertheless, Cushing, though intrigued, refuses an immediate decision. Later, we learn that Wymark stole the skull from Lee, though Lee is only happy to be rid of it: he believes it was the skull which urged him to purchase the Satanic figures (for reasons unknown, but certainly sinister), and will now exert its unholy influence upon Cushing if he decides to take it. Of course, now that Cushing has been urged to stay away from the skull, his curiosity is piqued, and so begins an obsessive spiral which is one of the most peculiar and unique in the genre of British horror. Cushing, so often playing the most heroic of Hammer archetypes, here gets to sink his teeth (so to speak) into a more unsavory role. As his fascination with de Sade's skull grows, and his actions become more irrational and dangerous, he takes the viewer step-by-step through the man's unraveling--much more gradually and believably than, say, Jack Nicholson in The Shining. The film's long final stretch, almost set in real-time, is hypnotic, overpowering, almost claustrophobic, and beautifully illogical in the way nightmares are, in the way that the best Poe and Lovecraft stories are. Freddie Francis, always stylish but not always consistently good, here relishes the dreamlike quality of the story, and particularly indulges in the film's one actual dream sequence, which Tim Lucas rightly compares to Kafka's The Trial, but which also--in one drawn-out game of Russian Roulette--provides the kind of intense, sickening dread for which the horror genre is best suited. In Francis' most stylish and distinctive touch, several shots are taken from the point of view of the skull itself, as we gaze out of the skull's hollow sockets and the actors hit their marks so that they are perfectly framed--as though, somehow, the skull were arranging them like pieces on its chessboard. In several delirious moments, we are trapped in this POV as the skull actually pivots to follow them. All of this is most effective in a film in which so many of the Hammer horror clichés have been surgically removed, the plot stripped to its most archetypal players with all comic relief and other rote frivolities cast aside. The Skull gets straight to the heart of the matter, the heart of horror, but with the same stride as a sleepwalker grasping a knife in his sweaty fist.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

2008-07-26T05:38:00.001-07:00

The X-Files: I Want to Believe (U.S., 2008) * * *
D: Chris Carter

What if, in the middle of a summer of expensive, special effects-driven superhero blockbusters, they released a modest, intelligent, adult thriller based on the cult TV series The X-Files? What if it had almost no special effects, no extraterrestrials, no "government conspiracy"--and went in the exact opposite direction of its previous big-screen outing of ten years before (1998's The X-Files, aka The X-Files: Fight the Future)? What if, instead of delivering on what fans and non-fans would expect, they actually answered the criticisms leveled at the first film (and at the series' later, less-valued years)? The answer, I'm afraid, might be the death of the whole enterprise. And it's a shame, because in doing all these things they've actually delivered a very good film.

As every X-Phile knows, there are two kinds of X-Files episodes: one from the formidable "mythology" arc--involving UFOs, alien abductions, and government cover-ups--and the more common "stand-alone" hour, which might be either a "monster of the week" installment or a thriller on a variety of paranormal topics. Contrary to what an outsider might think, most fans prefer the latter, and indeed, the best episodes of the series have been stand-alone episodes with nothing to do with "black oil" or Alex Krycek or little spikes to be jabbed in the back of the alien bounty hunter's neck. Early in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, an FBI agent tips off the viewer by referencing a handful of the stronger X-Files episodes ("Beyond the Sea," "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose"), all of them having to do with psychic phenomena. And that's exactly what you're getting here: a stronger stand-alone episode, stretched out to just under two hours. Expect anything else and you'll be greatly disappointed. Many of you will be.

It's a FBI-procedural mystery first and foremost, the kind you'd expect to see in a thriller starring Morgan Freeman and/or Ashley Judd. As the movie begins, FBI agent Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) is employing a psychic, Father Joe (Billy Connolly), to help track down a missing agent. Instead he finds a severed arm buried in the snow. She then brings in former agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), late of the X-Files and now a practicing doctor, in hopes that she can contact paranormal expert Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), who has been in hiding for years (the 2002 series finale left Mulder and Scully on the run from the shadow government lurking within the FBI). Mulder is now living in exile, having grown an Al Gore beard and working out of a cramped room layered with newspaper cutouts and the familiar "I Want to Believe" UFO poster, dozens of pencils stuck in the ceiling. It's pretty much how you'd expect the obsessive, eternally driven Mulder to be getting on. Distrusting the FBI, he thinks this is just a trap to bring him into the open; nevertheless, as another agent's life is at stake, he's persuaded to meet with Agent Whitney and the psychic Father Joe, who, we quickly learn, is a convicted pedophile, now castrated, and living in squalor while nursing an addiction to cigarettes. The man's visions are beyond his control, and very often lead nowhere. Scully is disgusted by his crimes and convinced he's a fraud, although when he tells her, apropos of nothing, "Don't give up," she can't help but wonder if it's a message from God, as she's locked in an ongoing battle to save the life of a young child afflicted with a terminal illness. She wants to put the child through an experimental and grueling stem cell therapy treatment, but another priest (Adam Godley), the "good" priest to Joe's "bad" priest, counsels the parents to have the boy taken out of the hospital, where he can die in peace. It's a completely unrelated subplot that regardless brings an emotional and philosophical weight to the film. Meanwhile, Mulder puts all his faith in the increasingly discredited Father Joe, and just as the investigation seems to be drying up, a sinister conspiracy of an altogether different sort begins to reveal itself. No, aliens are not involved. Stop thinking that.

While it's jarring to see how much Anderson and Duchovny have aged over the intervening years (a familiar face makes a cameo late in the film, and he looks uncannily, almost comfortingly the same), they slip so naturally into their old and best roles that it becomes easy to accept this as the latest chapter in their continuing relationship. Viewers unfamiliar with the last two seasons of the series (and, let's face it, that's 90% of the audience) will find it jarring to see the two agents romantically involved, the sexual tension of the first film long since dissolved as they hop into bed with each other early into this sequel. The more obvious path would have been to treat the agents like ex-lovers, with a frosty reception before finally rekindling their affection for one another--an overly-familiar arc that, I think, anyone else would have taken. But writer/director/series creator Chris Carter and co-writer Frank Spotnitz have chosen a braver path with this film, more respectful of the fans who want to see Mulder & Scully grow, but also respectful of adults who want a mystery-thriller that treats them like adults. The plot goes in genuinely unexpected directions. The moral dilemma each agent faces has a severe and real-world weightiness--particularly Scully's. Father Joe is a fascinating character, alternately creepy and sympathetic, sometimes at the same moment, and a concrete symbol of the moral gray areas with which the plot concerns itself. The film's biggest flaw is that the climax feels too muted--and when Mulder wields a wrench and groggily shouts, "Does anyone here speak English?", it's easily the most embarrassing scene in the film. The movie is also slow and talky, which is poison in the middle of the popcorn season. But I will also admit that when someone complains to me that a movie was "boring" and "nothing happened," I consider that an endorsement. (Would you rather Michael Bay direct this?) What you actually have here is not a "boring" movie, but one that will, I suspect, look a lot better when viewed outside of the bigger-is-better frenzy of The Dark Knight (which is great, but an altogether different beast), Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, etc. It will seem considerably more appealing when viewed on DVD in the fall. It will also age well, as it doesn't tie itself up in knots trying to connect itself to the series' convoluted plotline.

But in making all these risky choices, Carter and Spotnitz may very well have killed off the franchise. Good grief, I thought as I left the theater: who knew that they would make such a modest movie? And release it in July? What were they thinking? But if you sit through the credits you'll get a clue that they knew the risk they were taking, in a cute, unexpected farewell shot of Mulder and Scully which might be--they know very well--the last time we glimpse the two characters. It's a sweet, whimsical wave goodbye. I would rather hope that they get to make at least one more.

The Best of the X-Files

2008-07-14T16:42:00.000-07:00

On July 25th we will finally have a second X-Files feature film (the first was released ten years ago). The original FOX Network series ran from 1993-2002, and most X-Philes would agree that it went on a bit too long, leaving many fans feeling a bit disillusioned with the series. But it is without a doubt one of the most popular science fiction series of all time, and Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, FBI investigators of the paranormal, have became iconic figures on a level few TV characters achieve. We should be reminded that there was a time, around the third season, when the show went from being a cult hit to a mainstream smash, and Mulder & Scully made the cover of Rolling Stone (naked and in bed together, of course), and a soundtrack was released featuring R.E.M., William S. Burroughs, Nick Cave, and the Foo Fighters. The X-Files, for a while, was hip. Long before Alias, Lost, or Heroes, viewers obsessed over the details of the tangled "mythology" plotline, trying to guess which secondary character would get killed next. The feature film marked both the height of the series' popularity as well as its demise; like those viewers who hoped to find out who killed Laura Palmer at the end of the first season of Twin Peaks, those expecting to get "all the answers" in the X-Files: Fight the Future walked away disappointed (though the reviews weren't bad). The seasons that followed were greeted with increasing indifference from the public; the ratings were enough to justify Fox's insistence that it stay on the schedule, but the phenomenon was over. Eventually David Duchovny was replaced by Robert Patrick (Agent John Doggett), and Gillian Anderson was slowly edged out of the series by Annabeth Gish (Agent Monica Reyes). Fans weren't enthusiastic about the changes, and while the ninth season began as a relaunch, halfway through the creators changed focus and began to wrap up the storylines, sometimes hastily.

I became a fan of the series from the first episode (attractively entitled "Pilot"), watching it only because it debuted right after The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., the show which Fox was really putting its money and marketing behind. Brisco disappeared quickly, but the X-Files got rave reviews and slowly attracted a rabid cult following, who took possession of this new thing called the "internet" to use as their own virtual water cooler to discuss the show. Having been there from the beginning, I felt a certain ownership of the show; while I was never a part of the fan communities, I made it a point to learn who all the writers and directors were, so I could figure out who was behind the best episodes and the worst. I bought the trading cards and the fan magazines. I was first in line when the movie opened, and obsessively taped the show off television, in those days before "complete season" box sets. But around the sixth season I began to lose interest, and I was dismayed enough by the Doggett/Reyes thing that I tuned out of the ninth season entirely. (Although this was just as much because The Sopranos was airing in the same time slot--a show whose quality I was more excited about.) A while back I took advantage of a sale at a certain brick & mortar store and picked up the first few seasons of the series, to revisit the show that I hadn't watched in years. I figured that even if I disliked what the show became, it was such a part of my life between about 1993 and 1999 that it deserved some special space on my shelf. Watching the episodes, the "comfort food" factor kicked in, and I quickly became a fan again. While the worst episodes are still the worst, the best of the series has stood the test of time. And taking a break of a few months between Netflixing the seventh and eighth seasons, I could even gain a newfound appreciation for the Doggett/Reyes years, as I gained a much greater respect for Robert Patrick's nuanced performance. (Let's face it, he can emote with more skill than Duchovny.) Now, following another sale at that brick & mortar store, I've got all the seasons but the ninth. It's just a matter of time before I break down and buy that one too.

In anticipation of the new X-Files film, which will either revive or permanently bury the franchise, here's a guide to the best of the X-Files. If you want to revisit the series with a bit more caution that I, these are the episodes worth watching.

Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) inside an abandoned truck in E.B.E.

Season One (1993-1994)

While Duchovny and Anderson are still getting a handle on their characters in Pilot (1x79), creator Chris Carter fully understands them, and the classic formula is already in place: Mulder and Scully uncovering a conspiracy--here involving alien abductions--in a small town and in the deep woods, poking around with flashlights while Scully rolls her eyes at Mulder's every theory. Deep Throat (1x01) is even better, making plain the show's All the President's Men inspiration (exploited to its full in the feature film), and with a plot the "conspiracy" episodes would mimic countless times: Mulder attempts to infiltrate a military base to learn the truth about the government's involvement in UFO activity. (A young Seth Green seems to be working out his persona as Dr. Evil's son in the Austin Powers movie that was just a few years away.) Squeeze (1x02) is the first "stand-alone" episode, and one of the most fondly remembered: Eugene Tooms (Doug Hutchison) is a serial killer who can contort his body to fit into very small spaces; he also hibernates without aging, and eats human livers. It's written by Glen Morgan & James Wong, who were to become the first celebrities of the series' writing staff; they became known for writing crackerjack goosebump thrillers, before using their success on the series to launch a movie career (to this day, they're best known for creating the Final Destination franchise). Ice (1x07) is heavily derivative of "Who Goes There?", the classic John W. Campbell science fiction story remade--twice--as The Thing. Once again characters are trapped in an arctic environment, paranoid about who they can trust and who has been infected by a monster; in this case, it's a parasite which makes people hyper-aggressive. Despite its lack of inspiration, the episode is so tense and effective that it justifiably became a fan favorite of the early seasons. Yet Eve (1x10) has aged more gracefully. Possibly the most exquisitely crafted episode of the first season, this begins as a supernatural thriller (doppelgangers? ghosts?) before becoming a human cloning horror story featuring two murderous little girls and a climax worthy of Hitchcock. It would have been nice to have seen this story thread tied into the wider conspiracy plotline that later developed, and in retrospect it seems curious that it wasn't. Beyond the Sea (1x12) is another winner, this time taking Silence of the Lambs as an inspiration (Chris Carter was inspired by Jodie Foster's performance in that film to create Dana Scully). Brad Dourif, best known as Grima Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and as the sickly town doctor of Deadwood, here gives another unbearably intense performance as death-row inmate Luther Lee Boggs, who claims to have psychic insights into a killer pursued by the FBI. Mulder this time becomes the skeptic, while Scully is disturbed by Boggs' seeming ability to communicate with her recently-deceased father. This is probably Morgan & Wong's finest script, and the director, David Nutter, would become known as the go-to suspense director for the series, earned in part by the skills on display here. But the episode also packs an emotional punch rare for the show's first season. E.B.E. (1x16 - pictured above) is a great romp, as Mulder and Scully chase a UFO cross-country; along the way we meet The Lone Gunmen, publishers of a conspiracy-theory newspaper, and a backhanded homage to the growing X-Phile community. The killer from Squeeze returns in Tooms (1x20), which has the unusual distinction of bringing back a popular character within the same season (though story continuity necessitates it). Morgan & Wong here begin to establish the black humor which be one of the series' strongest traits. In the season finale, The Erlenmeyer Flask (1x23), the "mythology" finally gets going, as Scully sees her first "evidence" of alien life, and a cold-blooded assassination occurs when the two agents get a little too close to the truth.

Peering at the Flukeman with fascination and disgust in The Host.

Season Two (1994-1995)

A bigger budget and the glow of good reviews led to a more confident and stylish second season. This is also the season that made the show famous, with a richly-developing conspiracy plotline and stand-alone episodes that made for perfect Friday night chills. (The show would later move to Sunday nights in search of higher ratings, to the disapproval of many fans.) Little Green Men (2x01) shows off the bigger budget as Mulder heads to the jungles of Puerto Rico for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, on a tip from the sympathetic Senator Matheson (named after Twilight Zone writer Richard Matheson). In the Chris Carter-scripted The Host (2x02 - pictured), AKA the notorious "Flukeman" episode, a monster in New Jersey's sewage system is growing at an alarming rate, and killing in alarming ways. The Flukeman was played by Glen Morgan's brother Darin, who would later become the series' most acclaimed writer. Duane Barry/Ascension (2x05/06) is a two-parter prompted by Anderson's real-life pregnancy; working around her maternity leave, the writers concocted a plotline which would have ramifications for the rest of the series: Scully's kidnapping by a deranged UFO abductee (Steve Railsback), who hands her over for sinister experiments by forces which are either alien or--worse?--part of a shadow government. Later in the season is Die Hand Die Verletzt (2x14), a witty black satire and a Morgan & Wong tour de force, with the agents facing off against the Satan-worshiping faculty of a high school (the pre-title sequence, featuring a typical faculty meeting, is one of the greatest in the series' history). Colony/End Game (2x16/17) ties the biggest life-altering event in Mulder's past--the abduction of his sister when he was an adolescent--and ties it into the mythology, with surprising results. Humbug (2x20) is Darin Morgan's first script, and possesses his distinctive stamp: irreverent humor that pokes fun at the X-Files clichés (already well established, although at the time it seemed that only Morgan had noticed). Sideshow performers are being murdered by a tiny, crawling mutant--but every aberration of nature has someone who loves him. F. Emasculata (2x22) is the X-Files take on the virus/outbreak thrillers that were then popular in bestsellers and in film, and works better than most of them. Our Town (2x24), written by Frank Spotnitz, effectively demonstrates that even cannibalism can bring a community closer together. But don't watch it while eating KFC.

Peter Boyle guest stars in the series' high watermark, Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose.

Season Three (1995-1996)

Here is the show at its zenith, when the creative staff was firing at all cylinders (Darin Morgan in particular), and the ratings began to reciprocate as the show became a genuine phenomenon. The opening two-parter, The Blessing Way/Paper Clip (3x01/02) is riveting stuff, even if it also marks the first overuse of a technique that would quickly become tiresome: the pre-credits extended, pretentious monologe spoken in voice-over to accompany a montage. It was first used in Little Green Men, and apparently deemed successful enough to warrant its overextension for the rest of the series. Here, one can tolerate the voice-overs to get to the really good stuff, namely Mulder & Scully discovering miles of mysterious filing cabinets in an underground facility, where there also lurks an alien spacecraft. Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose (3x04) is, however, utterly flawless, and arguably the best hour the series ever produced. A showcase for the talents of writer Darin Morgan and guest actor Peter Boyle, it concerns an insurance salesman whose psychic gift is also a curse--he can only see how people will die. (He suggests that Mulder will die of autoerotic asphyxiation.) It's about fate and destiny, and whether life is a gift or a long, weary, miserable crawl toward death; but it's also existentialism by way of Woody Allen (the name "Clyde Bruckman" is taken from the famous director of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd silent comedies). The ending is both tragic and moving. His War of the Coprophages (3x12) is less emotionally serious--the plot is about killer cockroaches, after all--but just as serious philosophically. While the parody is even more outrageous than in his effort for Season Two, Humbug, the intelligent sensibility is quite present. His final script for the series, Jose Chung's From Outer Space (3x20), pushed these seemingly conflicting impulses--the silly and the thoughtful--to extremes. An instant fan favorite, it shrinks not from goofy cameos (Jesse Ventura, Alex Trebek), or girly screams (from Agent Mulder), yet when it's all over, ask yourself: why does the episode feel so bittersweet? How did he do that? Apart from writing beautiful scripts, Morgan was also establishing wider parameters for the series to explore. Now the X-Files could be touching and funny. And when it was funny, it could also be delirious and bizarre. Some X-Files scribes would imitate him poorly, and others would pick up the baton for some really inspiring work--namely Vince Gilligan. Gilligan, who most recently co-wrote this summer's Hancock, produced efficient, lean scripts that also made room for whimsical ideas. His second outing, Pusher (3x17), is actually one of his few "straight" episodes, proving that he could create the ideal X-Files mystery thriller, that was the show's bread and butter. Of that mode, the episode is one of the series' best. Mulder and Scully are put up against one of their most formidable villains in Robert Modell (Robert Wisden), a man who can psychically "push" other people into doing his will, or seeing what he wants them to see. As with all of Gilligan's scripts, the premise is fully and satisfyingly explored, with a memorable stand-off in the climax, Mulder's will pitted against Modell's. Quagmire (3x22), written by Kim Newton, is marked most heavily by Morgan (it even acts as a sequel to two of them, since Clyde Bruckman's dog, Queequeg, plays a central role here, and the stoners from War of the Coprophages make an appearance). Mulder and Scully investigate murders attributed to a lake monster, but their investigation hits one snag after another, and their culprit is not what they expect. The season's mythology arc, meanwhile, gets more interesting--and more tangled--with Piper Maru/Apocrypha (3x15/16), which introduces the "black oil" alien that can hop from one body to another, the payoff ultimately reserved for the feature film.

A member of the inbred Peacock family guards his territory in the savage Home.

Season Four (1996-1997)

A strategic move to Sunday nights was accompanied by the slick, satisfying season premiere Herrenvolk (4x01). But it was the second aired episode, Home (4x03), which gained the most attention--or notoriety. Preceded by a parental advisory, the Morgan & Wong-scripted hour proved, if nothing else, that the X-Files could still be scary on a Sunday night. Some have called it the scariest hour ever produced for television. It's actually wittily done, with Mulder's spoken nostalgia for small-town America undermined thoroughly as we're introduced to the Peacock family, inbred mutants who, in the pre-titles sequence, bury a squealing infant in the yard minutes after it's been born. The agents' investigation into infant murders leads to a final, violent battle for the Peacock home. This was the comeback for Morgan & Wong, who had left the show for a season; it would also be their last season with the series before they left for good. Home is their standout script of the season, and a calling card for Kim Manners, who, from here on out, replaced David Nutter as the show's unsurpassed "thriller" director. Vince Gilligan's Unruhe (4x02) is one of many episodes in which Scully is taken hostage, but one of the most unnerving, with a killer who can take psychic photographs, and uses them as justification to perform amateur lobotomies on his unwilling patients. Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man (4x07) concentrates on the central villain of the mythology arc, filling in his history generously (tying him to the assassinations of JFK and MLK), with the qualifier that none of this might actually be true. It's a mythology episode that pokes fun at the idea of government conspiracies, but humanizes the CSM regardless. Leonard Betts (4x14) and Memento Mori (4x15), on the other hand, take the X-Files mythology completely seriously, and go to a greater extent to humanize those effected by the government conspiracy. Leonard Betts in particular benefits by sneaking in a key mythology plot element into what seems like a stand-alone episode, leading to a shocker of a denouement. The season's lightest note is struck by an extended Darin Morgan homage, Gilligan's Small Potatoes (4x20), which even casts Morgan himself as the main character, a schlub with the remarkable ability to take anyone's face--even Luke Skywalker's--which may explain why there have been a number of spontaneous pregnancies in town.

The Lone Gunmen meet a real cyberpunk in William Gibson & Tom Maddox's Kill Switch.

Season Five (1997-1998)

With the X-Files: Fight the Future in production, Season Five became a build-up to the main event, which would open about a month after the season finale aired. So while the mythology episodes lay the groundwork for the film (with an eye, it seems, toward the possibility that this might be the last season of the show), it's the stand-alone episodes which really shine, introducing the idea of the guest star writer, as Stephen King and science fiction writers William Gibson and Tom Maddox each take a crack at adapting their distinctive styles to suit the show. To that end, King's Chinga (5x10, co-written by Chris Carter), about a demonic doll, is most interesting as a meeting of the two fictional universes, as Scully seems to wander into King's New England hell. It is, however, not as effective as Gibson & Maddox's script for Kill Switch (5x11), which smoothly incorporates Mulder and Scully (and, naturally, the Lone Gunmen) into the cyberpunk genre that Gibson helped invent. A novel's worth of action and twists are packed neatly into the show's forty-five minutes. A crossover of a different kind occurs in Vince Gilligan's Unusual Suspects (5x01), which brings in Richard Belzer's Detective Munsch from NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street, investigating an incident involving the Lone Gunmen. With Duchovny and Anderson off filming the movie, this episode acts as a placeholder until they returned, though it doesn't feel like filler, thanks to Gilligan's extremely entertaining script--good enough, in fact, to inspire a short-lived spin-off series called The Lone Gunmen not long after. Frank Spotnitz's Detour (5x04) sees the agents return to battle chameleon-like monsters in the Everglades; despite a far-fetched explanation (even by X-Files standards), the episode features one of the season's most memorable scenes, as, stranded in the forest in the middle of the night, Scully sings Three Dog Night to a sleeping Mulder. The Post-Modern Prometheus (5x06), though it borrows from the plot to last season's Small Potatoes, is nevertheless one of the oddest episodes in the series' history. Written and directed by Chris Carter, it's an extended, black-and-white Frankenstein homage which also involves possible sexual assaults and plenty of Cher music. It works, somehow. Bad Blood (5x12) is Gilligan's best-known episode, and most popular; a Rashomon-style tale (the same approach taken by Darin Morgan with Jose Chung's From Outer Space) that sends up vampire lore. It's the series' second shot at vampires, after the second season's unsuccessful, Gothy "3." Travelers (5x15), written by John Shiban & Frank Spotnitz, finally brings X-Files inspiration Kolchak the Night Stalker into the series--Darren McGavin, here playing Agent Arthur Dales, who recounts an X-File from decades prior. Tim Minear's Mind's Eye (5x16) showcases the acting chops of guest star Lili Taylor, playing a blind woman who can only see out the eyes of a killer. Finally, the season's penultimate episode, Folie a Deux (5x19), has a call center employee driven mad by visions of his boss as a man-eating insect, a madness which is passed on to Mulder.

Scully, marked for death in Tithonus.

Season Six (1998-1999)

It's unusual for a TV show to continue in the wake of its big screen spinoff; usually feature film adaptations come only after the show has left the air, such as this summer's Sex and the City. But The X-Files returned, and many fans would say that it was the show's mistake, or the moment when it "jumped the shark" (a notion parodied in the Ninth Season episode of the same name). Certainly the mythology episodes began to repeat themselves and grow a bit tedious (with some exceptions), and the series began to rely a bit too heavily on comic relief episodes, at least in this season and the next. But Vince Gilligan's scripts continued to provide bright spots, and Chris Carter wrote and directed the satisfying and ambitious stylistic experiment Triangle (6x03), which sees Mulder wandering into the Bermuda Triangle and onto a 1939 luxury liner taken hostage by Nazi spies. Here he encounters doppelgängers of Scully and the Cigarette-Smoking Man, while the real Scully tries to finagle his rescue within the bureaucracy of the FBI. Every scene is an extended tracking shot, with minimal edits, a la Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. Drive (6x02) , by Gilligan, is a premise inspired by Speed with elements of Vanishing Point: a man is infected with something that will make him explode unless he drives as fast as he can westward. It's a good opportunity to show off the series' recent relocation from Vancouver to Los Angeles, utilizing striking desert locales that are in contrast to the series' familiar dark, damp forests and overcast suburbs. Gilligan's script to Tithonus (6x09) ranks among his best work. A world-weary newspaper photographer takes photos of people just before they die; his secret, and what he's attempting to accomplish, take Scully by surprise. His script to Monday (6x15), co-written with John Shiban, does the Groundhog Day thing--one woman keeps reliving the same day over and over--but with urgency as well as palpable despair. She's part of a bank heist that ends tragically, and must somehow find a way to convince Mulder and Scully that the best way to stop the heist is to not interfere; or, more impossibly, convince them that they've lived through this again and again. Arcadia (6x13), smartly conceived by writer Daniel Arkin, sends Mulder and Scully undercover into a gated community, investigating a murder while posing as the perfect married couple. They quickly bump up against the strict community guidelines, which inspires Mulder to become something of a suburban terrorist, sticking pink flamingos in his front lawn and a basketball hoop on his driveway. In The Unnatural (6x20), written and directed by Duchovny, we again return to the archives of the X-Files courtesy Agent Arthur Dales--or, rather, his brother (when McGavin bowed out)--in a tale of a shapeshifting alien who infiltrates the Negro baseball leagues, just because he wants to play baseball. During the series Duchovny would return a couple more times to the director's chair, but this is his best effort by far. Field Trip (6x21) involves some strange phenomena occurring after the discovery by Scully and Mulder of two skeletons buried in a tunnel in the woods. To give away the ending would be a crime, but suffice it to say that the key revelation is a lot of fun. As for the mythology episodes, the series from here on out seemed to want to answer the criticism that the conspiracy plotline was too complicated to follow, so the elements were simplified and the plot was frequently spelled out and underlined by the dialogue. What you finally get is something of a satisfying payoff in the two-parter Two Fathers/One Son (6x11/6x12), which brings the saga of the "Syndicate"--the Mafia-like shadow government--to a resolution that feels like a series finale (although it comes in the middle of the season). Yes, for once something actually happens.

In Brand X, Assistant Director Skinner discovers just how evil the tobacco industry can be.

Season Seven (1999-2000)

The last full season with David Duchovny, Season Seven had its share of highlights, but a certain weariness seemed to be setting in, in particular infecting the mythology episodes--with a key exception. Sein Und Zeit and Closure (7x10/7x11) wraps up the subplot involving Mulder's abducted sister in a manner both unexpected and incredibly moving. It's also the most subdued two-parter of the mythology storyline, more in line with the Season One episode "Conduit" (which also explored the effect of Samantha Mulder's abduction upon Fox) which was a wise decision. As for the stand-alones, The Goldberg Variation (7x02), written by Jeffrey Bell, is a lot of fun; Goldberg is for Rube Goldberg, whose ghost seems to haunt this episode--the story of a man with unusually good luck, who's marked for murder by an increasingly frustrated Mafia. The Amazing Maleeni (7x08) stars David Mamet's favorite magician, Ricky Jay, who in the opening sequence appears to be murdered by a rival magician. The fact that Ricky Jay is in the episode at all should give you a clue that nothing is going to be what it seems. X-Cops (7x12) presents an X-File as an episode of the long-running FOX series Cops, as Mulder and Scully are chased through Los Angeles by a camera crew, while working with the LAPD to catch a monster that can take on the form of whatever its victim most fears. In En Ami (7x15), the Cigarette-Smoking Man promises Scully a cure to her cancer if she travels with him to an unknown destination. Written by Cancer Man himself, William B. Davis, it's an interesting presentation of how the actor perceives his most famous character. Brand X (7x19) has exactly the sort of premise that would have made it a classic if it had aired a few years earlier, when the show was making a name for itself: smoking a new, experimental brand of cigarette leads to a grisly demise. The explanation has the quality of a convincing urban legend, and surely must have convinced at least a few viewers to quit smoking. It's admirably straight-faced too; a relief in a season with too much over-the-top comedy. Though I admired the humor in Je Souhaite (7x21), a thoroughly unnecessary X-Files take on the djinni legend (and "three wishes") that is nonetheless hilariously perceptive: one man asks to become invisible, and is immediately struck by a car.

Agent Doggett is annoyed by number-one X-Files fan Leyla Harrison in Alone.

Season Eight (2000-2001)

Season Eight finds the series in transition between the Mulder & Scully years and what Chris Carter apparently hoped to be a long-running stretch with Agents John Doggett (Robert Patrick) and Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish). To ease the pain for fans, Anderson is still present, though Duchovny, on his way out, appears in only a handful of episodes late in the season. I despised this season when it first aired, and gave up on the show; revisiting it this last year, I was surprised to see that it had many pluses: it shunned the jokey/parodic episodes to return to a more serious tone in line with the show's first season; Doggett is well-developed and sympathetic, and superbly played by Patrick; and there's a sense of excitement when Mulder does, belatedly, return, leading to a two-part season finale that delivers--and should have been, alas, the very final episode. So let's count the positives: there's Roadrunners (8x05), about a strange cult in the deserts of Utah who want Scully to host an alien creature whom they worship; I also liked Invocation (8x06), by David Amann, with a simple but involving mystery plot--a boy returns years after his disappearance, having not aged a day--that also humanizes Doggett (whose own son was kidnapped and murdered). Redrum (8x03), written by Steven Maeda, is one of the season's very best, and only tangentially involves Doggett and Scully: a lawyer (Joe Morton) finds himself on death row for the murder of his wife--and then finds himself slipping backward in time, inexorably moving toward that critical event. After Mulder's return (involving a literal rebirth), the almost nostalgic Three Words (8x18) sees him again infiltrating a top-secret installation with the aid of the Lone Gunmen. (The three words, by the way? "Fight the Future," unfortunately.) Vienen (8x16) is another old-school romp, this time with Mulder and Doggett aboard an oil rig that's become infected with the alien black oil (it also, once more, has shades of The Thing). Frank Spotnitz's Alone (8x19) teams Doggett with FBI agent Leyla Harrison (Jolie Jenkins), a real X-Phile who has memorized all the past cases, much to Doggett's annoyance. (When she finds a mysterious slimy substance, she immediately assumes it to be bile, referencing a moment in "Squeeze.") The villain actually seems to be the Lizard from the Spider-Man comics, though no one seems to catch that (unintentional) reference. Finally, the season draws to a satisfying close with Essence/Existence (8x20/21), with exciting action scenes, the death of a major character, and a long-awaited emotional resolution for two others. Unfortunately, there was one more season still left.

Scully performs a kitchen autopsy on a cat in the late-series standout Scary Monsters.

Season Nine (2001-2002)

What turned out to be the final season of The X-Files was clearly intended to be the first of The X-Files 2.0. For the first time, the opening title sequence was completely revamped (not just subtly altered, as it had been in past seasons). It was flashier, more up-to-date, and even included Mitch Pileggi's name and face--deservedly so. But it also misguidedly assumed that Doggett and Reyes would be an adequate substitute for Mulder and Scully, who were always the heart of the series. While Robert Patrick was engaging as Doggett, Annabeth Gish never quite comes to own the role of Agent Reyes; it doesn't help that her character is so weakly conceived (she's New Agey, and she's trying to quit smoking). Luckily Anderson stuck around in Duchovny's absence, but it's quite clear that she wasn't going to stick around long. Late in the season, there's a dramatic shift in approach, and rather than launching new story threads (as begun unimpressively in the two-part season premiere), the writers begin to wrap them up; clearly, Chris Carter had decided that this was it. In the meantime, you had few stellar episodes. But Lord of the Flies (9x06) has a clever idea even though it doesn't quite come together the way it ought to: an awkward adolescent, addicted to the music of outcast icon (and schizophrenic) Syd Barrett, finds himself undergoing biological changes when his hormones begin raging--he begins to transform into an insect. Which makes it difficult when he wants to impress a girl. Improbable (9x14), written and directed by Chris Carter, is even more eccentric and bizarre than Season Five's "The Post-Modern Prometheus." Burt Reynolds guest stars as a man with some kind of connection to a serial killer who, in turn, commits murders that adhere to a strict numerology which only Agent Reyes notices. Imagine Darren Aronofsky's Pi reimagined as a jolly Italian musical, and you might approach what is happening here. Scary Monsters (9x12), written by Thomas Schnauz, is easily the best episodes of the season, and is the real discovery of the neglected "Doggett years." It also has one of the best openings of the entire series: a little boy, terrified of monsters under the bed, cries out for his father. The father looks under the bed and sees something scurrying in the darkness, and deliberately ignores it; then he closes the door and holds it shut while his son screams helplessly, besieged by the monsters of his nightmares. While Scully stays behind to autopsy a cat on her kitchen table, Doggett, Reyes, and Leyla Harrison (from last season's "Alone") travel to the secluded home to find out if the boy's allegations about his father are correct. Just about as perfect as an X-Files episode gets; or, at least, one without Mulder. But now the loose ends were beginning to get tied up. Jump the Shark (9x15) is an affectionate goodbye to the Lone Gunmen, also providing closure for their prematurely canceled spinoff series. Release (9x16) ties up the mystery regarding Agent Doggett's son--rather devastatingly. It's an excellent script by David Amann and John Shiban. Finally, Sunshine Days (9x18), a Vince Gilligan script, involves the Brady Bunch, bodies launching through rooftops, and telekenesis, and yet it's ultimately sweet-natured and smart. As for the series finale, well: it's there. "The Truth" is two hours that feel like a marathon runner crawling with anguish across the finish line. The first hour is a laborious summary of the mythology arc, attempting to draw the threads together; the second hour is all over-the-top action. One wishes the two halves had been better coordinated. Still, when all is said and done, the X-Files legacy was preserved, however tattered around the edges. The episodes highlighted above rank as some of the finest hours network television has ever produced, and certainly are in the pinnacle of science fiction TV, right there next to classics from The Twilight Zone. The series has become iconic, and the next feature film has an intimidating legacy to live up to. Though I truly wonder if the series was ever meant for the big screen. My fondest memories of watching the shows: when it aired on Friday nights, with none of the fanfare (and little of the budget), just the excitement that this week there was a new episode from one of television's best-kept secrets. One of the great things about DVD is that the X-Files can become a Friday-night spook-show staple once again.

Morvern Callar

2008-06-22T18:51:00.000-07:00

Morvern Callar (U.K., 2002) * * * 1/2
D: Lynne Ramsay

Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar is, above all else, valuable for being an experiential film, a film of sensations. The plot is quite beside the point--which will be trying for some. But it seeks to place you in the shoes of its title protagonist (the always-great Samantha Morton), who witnesses the world through headphones--drowning out the world around her--and even when she removes them, she seems to still be listening, waiting for the world to transform into something other than ordinary.

As the film opens, to a strobe effect which will be echoed several times in the film--here created by flickering Christmas tree lights in a dark room--we see a half-naked man sprawled upon the floor, and then Morvern, stroking his arm, and stroking the blood at his wrist. This is how she's found her boyfriend, but he's left her presents, including a mixtape (shades of Radio On) and a novel he's just completed, which he asks to be sent to a publisher. The man sounds insufferable, but luckily for us it is not his movie. Morvern does not call the cops, but lets the body sit for days while she contemplates what to do; she hits the town with her best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) in what is, for them, a typically decadent night, dancing, tripping, making out. They're Scottish; they work in a supermarket; their idea of ambition is to travel to Spain to hang out at a hotel for spring break debauchery, picking up guys and taking shots. But an idea has struck Morvern, and she decides to take her dead boyfriend's suicide letter literally--he has written "For Morvern"--so she changes the byline to her own name before submitting it to a publisher. To her surprise, the publisher shows interest, and now she has to meet up with them so they can make their offer. In Spain, she wanders the hotel, at one point hooking up for anonymous sex, but for her own reasons: to comfort a grieving man. (The parallel scene occurs near the beginning of the film, when she picks up a ringing payphone at the train station and offers open comfort to the distraught somebody on the other end.) She urges Lanna away from the parties of the pool resort to see the real Spain, which goes better for Morvern than it does for Lanna.

Morvern remains fascinating throughout, because while she is not the artist that her boyfriend was--and therefore has a difficult time fooling the overeager publishers--she yearns to express herself in some fashion, if only she had the means. Woody Allen once nailed the idea in his Bergmanesque drama Interiors: "What happens to those of us who can't create?" All poor Morvern can do is wander with her headphones, feeling something in the mixtape that makes her yearn for more than she has. But her inspirations are morbid: taking credit for the manuscript, disposing of her boyfriend's body (she buries the pieces on a hill using a garden spade), ditching her friend in the Spanish wilderness. You don't exactly root for Morvern; you wonder at her. She carries the movie with her unpredictability. And yet she is not the typical, boring surrogate for the sensitive screenwriter: she is a party girl, prone to fits of giggling at inappropriate moments, restlessly immature, and really unable to understand that pull she feels toward expanding her life into something other than working by day and partying by night. What is most refreshing about Morvern Callar is that I'm not sure I've seen this character in a film before.

It's based on a novel by Alan Warner, but the film is directed by Ramsey, a woman (who also made another cult film, Ratcatcher), and written by Ramsey and Liana Dognini. It has a woman's eye, a woman's gaze; the female nudity (abundant) is not eroticized but feels raw and natural. It is voyeuristic only in the sense that one feels, as one does throughout the film, a sense of discomfort, of prying into someone else's life. The film seems remarkably real, in much the way of another recent (and raw) Scottish film, Red Road. But it also has a lightness, matched by the disorienting soundtrack selections (often at a sharp angle from what is happening on-screen); a dreamlike quality, and a sense that anything can happen because the standard rules don't seem to be applying.

Frequently the soundtrack songs drop out, essentially moving from what Morvern hears (enveloping beats and melodies that push out all ambient sounds) to what someone else would hear--tinny, muted noises. It's the most critical contrast Ramsey provides for the world that Morvern sees and a starkly different "reality." But when you're caught in that misguided swoon of Morvern's, the film is strangely transporting, like jumping off a building--the thrill of feeling the wind against your skin just before the inevitable crash.

The Desert of the Tartars

2008-06-16T14:54:00.003-07:00

The Desert of the Tartars (Italy, 1976) * * *
D: Valerio Zurlini

The young, handsome Drogo (Jacques Perrin), having just enlisted in the military, is assigned as a lieutenant at the distant outpost of Bastiani, which lies between a vast, empty desert and high, snow-capped mountains. This ancient fort's purpose is to mark a territorial border, but the enemy, the "North Kingdom," is almost forgotten, so quiet has this war become. As time passes and he gains stature within the ranks of the garrison, he learns of the subtle frictions between the officers, as well as the suicidal despair of the soldiers who serve under them, waiting constantly for a conflict that never happens. Yet there does seem to be something brewing out upon the desert horizon: Captain Hortiz (Max Von Sydow) claims to have once seen figures riding white horses--Tartar horses--though he is reluctant to speak of it now; soon Drogo and his companions sight a white, riderless horse trotting just beyond the border, and heated discussion arises as to whether or not they should go over the border (forbidden) to seize the horse, and whether or not it actually belongs to the enemy at all. If that enemy even exists.

Time passes, Drogo grows older, and his discreet attempts to find another station somewhere else are denied. The bureaucracy of the garrison leads to stupid, sometimes disastrous decisions: when one soldier doesn't know the password to gain re-admittance to the fort, he is shot down--as though he might be the enemy even though they can easily recognize that he isn't. Rumors of a possible Tartar invasion increase, as evidence mounts that the enemy is on the move; yet, somehow, it is justified to reduce the population of the fort and weaken it. The absurdities might sound like something out of Catch-22, but Valerio Zurlini's The Desert of the Tartars, based on the novel by Dino Buzzati (published in English as The Tartar Steppe), is more somber, with a premise, bordering on the allegorical, that calls to mind Kafka. As in Kafka's stories and novels, all actions lead to futility and frustration, with utter catastrophe constantly on the horizon.

Zurlini's film--his last--is beautifully photographed, with fine (if deliberately muted) acting, and an austere, slightly removed quality that calls to mind Visconti (in particular The Leopard and Senso) and Bertolucci (in particular The Conformist). It is austere, however, to a fault. While Zurlini might be serving the novel with the greatest respect, and certainly gets across the erosion of time (the film is 140 minutes) as well as the unidentifiable dread of the story's premise, the film could only be helped by a little auteurist kick in the pants. Imagine what Bunuel could have done with the material (never find the fetishes he would have imposed). Or Herzog (who probably would have hypnotized his cast). The problem with the film is that it hasn't the guts to push the film into the territory of real greatness--to lull the audience into the trance that the story requires and then really show them something, take them someplace. A little humor wouldn't hurt, either.

Yet the journey is worthwhile, and there are a few moments within the film that are stunningly imagined. When Drogo first arrives at Bastiani, riding alone on horseback, the camera pans slowly across the deserted, ancient fortress, which appears to be abandoned. He finds bayonets stuck into the ground, but no soldiers, all while the tower of the fortress looks magnificently, ominously down upon him from the background. Much is made of what can be seen from the tower through binoculars--the strange evidence of the unseen enemy--and Zurlini effectively puts across the idea that to look through them is to confront one's fears and paranoias. When Drogo, late in the film, collapses in a faint when he attempts to look through his pair, it is perhaps the most strange and shocking moment in the picture.

If the film were a bit more strange, a bit more shocking, it may have been better remembered, these three decades later. As it is, The Desert of the Tartars is an interesting, literary, and occasionally fascinating film; it has a peerless, professional sheen. Perhaps a little smudge here and there could have made it a masterpiece. Sometimes a director needs to get his hands dirty.

The White Hell of Pitz Palu

2008-06-10T16:57:00.000-07:00

The White Hell of Pitz Palu (Germany, 1929) * * *
D: Arnold Fanck and G.W. Pabst

Long before she directed Triumph of the Will and became the most notorious propagandist director of all time, Leni Riefenstahl was an athletic, daredevil actress, who starred in a string of "mountain" pictures which took advantage of the natural beauty of remote alpine locations, as well as Leni's own statuesque glamor. Many of these were directed by Arnold Fanck (G.W. Pabst, director of Pandora's Box, co-directs), who had an eye for the spectacular, almost alien landscapes of high climes. He also knew his way around an action scene. Early in The White Hell of Pitz Palu, Dr. Krafft (Gustav Diessl, also in Fritz Lang's wondrous Testament of Dr. Mabuse) is accompanying his wife and their friend on a trek across the cliffs of the sinister Piz Palü glacier; his wife, alas, plummets down a dark crevasse, too deep for a rescue. Now she is frozen for eternity within its hellish depths, as Dr. Krafft later forlornly tells engaged couple Maria (Riefenstahl) and Hans (Ernst Petersen), who are vacationing off the glacier. Time for another trek, of course, which leads to another, greater catastrophe: a group of young students are swept by an avalanche en masse down steep cliffs and into hidden crevasses and caves, and Krafft, Maria, and Hans become stranded, exposed to the elements, unable to scale their way to safety. The plot--of disasters, search parties, and rescue attempts--is nothing more than an excuse for Fanck's delirious stunt sequences and powerful editing. The action scenes are almost abstract, carefully plotted and edited swiftly, just like Psycho's shower scene. I highly recommend renting Kino's DVD and keeping your finger on the pause button, deconstructing frame by frame how Fanck constructs each shot (i.e. man's coat is splashed with snow, shocked heads with wide mouths whirl as the camera spins upside-down, a dummy is shoved over a ravine, etc.), and then play it back at standard speed to see how the images become almost impressionistic, forming the idea of the event rather than a coherent depiction of what has just happened. For 1929, it's astonishingly innovative, and one can almost imagine that Fanck has laid the groundwork for later blockbuster action films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, with their carefully storyboarded action setpieces. Fanck also deserves applause for simply having the gall to film on the locations he's chosen; in a 20's silent film, particularly one of German vintage, one might expect lots of expressionistic sets and makeup. Fanck is the antidote to that approach: he strives for realism, filming on location and in deep ice caverns with cascading layers of cannot-be-faked stalactites, perching his actors (and actress) on the edges of the slopes with mountain vistas behind them. This is not to say that some sets are used, and plenty of special effects applied, but a veracity is achieved--what Werner Herzog calls the "voodoo of location"--which transports the viewer inside the cinematic space. Yet these secret mountain caverns can look just as otherworldly as anything in a film by Murnau or Lang, and Fanck knows it. In the most memorable scene, when dozens of members of a rescue team penetrate a labyrinthine ice cave, each holding a flare with an eerie glow, all scattered throughout the frame to fill it completely, the fires illuminating the many frozen bodies of the dead students, Fanck indulges in superimposing a title-card: "Inferno!" It's the one moment when Fanck is willing to cop to the visual poetry he's achieved.

Red Desert

2008-06-08T08:35:00.000-07:00

Red Desert (Italy, 1965) * * * *
D: Michelangelo Antonioni

If there is fault to be found in Antonioni's 1965 Red Desert, it is not within the borders of the film's frames: Antonioni is, at this stage of his career, such an impeccable artist that there is not a single moment of the film which could not provoke a healthy paper from a thoughtful film student. Red Desert is a magnificent meditation on human alienation, thoroughly schematized, yet open to enigmatic possibilities as Antonioni lets his camera wander across these bizarre industrial landscapes (visually, it is almost a science fiction film). The only fair criticism might be that Antonioni had already done this many times before, and that the reason he's so good at it by 1965 is that he's just very well practiced on the subject matter. And yet, you wouldn't criticize Hitchcock for making a "wrong man" film--you'd pop one in the DVD player when you're in the mood to watch the best of wrong man films. If you're hankering for a slowly-paced, gorgeously-shot, meditative film about upper-class existential angst, may I recommend L'Eclisse, La Notte, L'Avventura, or Il Deserto Rosso, all representing the cream of the crop, and all by Antonioni?

Monica Vitti again stars, here cast as the wife to the manager of a factory, whose plant is suffering under the impact of a worker's strike. She has just been involved in a terrible car accident, and although she's physically recovered, she is, as her husband complains, not quite right. In fact, she's crippled by neuroses, almost schizophrenic, as she literally cringes and recoils at the oppressive, rusting, decayed, and polluted world around her, which Antonioni frames so that it visually presses in on her from all sides. In his films, empty space carries as much weight as heavy concrete. She ponders opening a ceramics shop, and explains to an only slightly less disaffected engineer (Richard Harris) that she must choose just the right color for the shop--something "neutral," she says, as she shows him the paint samples she's splashed on the wall. Of course, her world is filled with neutral colors--browns and grays, primarily--and so whenever Antonioni introduces a splash of bright red, or a delirious purple, a flag should be raised in the viewer's mind. But the reddest room, low-ceilinged, hidden in the back of a shack sitting on a foggy pier, is gaudy and almost shameful, and it's where Vitti, her husband, and their friends gather for a debauched party that sits temptingly on the verge of an all-out orgy. This kind of debauchery has been chronicled in Italian 60's cinema before, most notably in Fellini's La Dolce Vita, but the way Antonioni treats it is telling. The couples find the encounter rife with sexy possibilities, but Antonioni doesn't: he's noticing how gaudily the paint is splashed on these rotting old planks, how Vitti and Harris have a slightly distant, haunted look about them, how the biggest lech in the room is almost reptilian in his movements, and that the cold, bottomless ocean is only just below them; most of all he points out how truly awkward and desperate they seem. When another couple arrives to peer down into the room, the partygoers--either middle-aged or approaching middle-age, and lying on their sides and backs like children in a cramped playroom--seem briefly self-aware, before they try to lure that visiting couple into their lustful self-delusion.

It's delusion in which Antonioni is most interested: his central characters, often played by Vitti, seem to have broken that spell, suddenly facing a universe which is cruel and meaningless, and which no one else can see. That--and the fact that we're all in it alone. The most powerful, almost supernatural image in the film is a vision Vitti has while standing in the foggy harbor with her friends, all of them having just fled the proximity of an arriving ship that's being quarantined: Vitti sees each of her companions slowly absorbed by the mist, one at a time, while they stand, frozen, staring at her. It's one of many iconic images in Antonioni's filmography, but perhaps the closest he comes to actually visualizing that nothingness which is assaulting his characters. But the cruelty can also come from other people. She tries to explain it to Harris: "If you pinch me, only I suffer..." Even her son can be cruel, though indirectly, when he leads his mother to believing, for a day, that he's become paralyzed by polio. When she discovers him standing, perfectly healthy, on top of his bed, she's relieved, overwhelmed with gratitude; and then struck by horror--not just that a trick was played on her, but that her own child could so carelessly thrust her into such an awful alternate reality. It's just another one of her epiphanies, as the film chronicles Vitti's deterioration on the path to a grim "enlightenment."

Antonioni would subsequently challenge himself by taking his approach to different cultures: first to swinging London with Blow-Up, then to American campus radicalism with Zabriskie Point. Red Desert feels like the last film in a series, mastering his themes, or, perhaps, just finally expressing something he'd been trying to get at for the past several films. You might prefer any of those other films (me, I'll take La Notte), but one thing that strikes me about Red Desert is the feeling that the director has finally scratched that itch. He's gotten out what he's been wanting to say, and now he can move on--if only a little bit.

Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?

2008-06-07T20:03:00.001-07:00

Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (France, 1966) * * *
D: William Klein

The ninth box set from the Criterion Collection's Eclipse imprint collects three rare films from the little-known, American-born satirist William Klein: Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), Mr. Freedom (1969), and The Model Couple (1977). A renowned New York fashion photographer who became an expatriate, Klein's first feature-length film is French, and wholly absorbs swinging 60's Paris; it's a biting but playful critique of the fashion industry and pop culture in general. I couldn't help but be reminded of Richard Lester's imaginative satires, including Help! and How I Won the War. And, like those films, it's impossible to imagine it being produced in any decade but the 60's.

Polly Maggoo (Dorothy MacGowan) is a Parisian cover girl adored worldwide. She is also something of a blank slate, upon which the various characters of the film--including a TV documentarian, a wealthy prince, bumbling secret agents, and haughty fashion designers--project all their ideals, lusts, and fantasies. On top of this threadbare plot (which can be summarized as: "Polly is pursued"), Klein layers witty dialogue, pointed satire, surreal dreams, endless digressions, TV commercials, sloganeering, even cut-out animation, all to demonstrate how Polly the person disappears beneath Polly the idol, a papier-mâché construct whom all the peripheral characters have built in their private fantasies.

At 101 minutes, it's all a little too much, and becomes slightly exhausting after a while. But the film picks up in its final stretch--even as the narrative becomes even more disjointed--with an odd and unexpected finale, followed by one of the funniest ending credit sequences I've seen (with drawings by famed cartoonist Roland Topor). What's most impressive about the film is that it demonstrates Klein to be an instant natural as a filmmaker. With restlessly creative techniques--super-fast editing, crowded and dizzying compositions--he reinvents his film every few minutes. The effect is like reading a glossy pop-art magazine: a little Vogue, a little Mad Magazine, a little New Yorker, with plenty of eye-popping ads.

Most of all, as a freewheeling, madcap 60's satire, Polly Maggoo is endearing for actually being clever and fun--something many of its larger-budgeted rivals (What's New, Pussycat?, Casino Royale) only dreamed of being. But this would make a brilliant double-feature with Godard's equally stylish Masculin-Féminin, a yé-yé girl critique of a (slightly) more serious tone. Have at it.

Love on the Ground

2008-06-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

Love on the Ground (France, 1983) * * * *
D: Jacques Rivette

Unable to wait any longer for Criterion or Criterion's Eclipse line to release a Jacques Rivette box set, I went on an import DVD-buying binge recently and ordered from overseas Noroit, Duelle (both 1976), Love on the Ground (1983), and Don't Touch the Axe [aka The Duchess of Langeais] (2007), all films from one of the French New Wave's most underappreciated directors. Rivette is best known for two films, the little-seen but notorious 773-minute film Out 1 (1971), and the elliptical fantasy Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). Love on the Ground acts as a pseudo-sequel to Celine and Julie, again pairing two female friends, who behave like twins, and thrusting them into a mystery and a haunted house. Only this time those latter elements seem less critical, stylistic dressing that only adds to the playfulness of the tangled narrative.

See if you can follow: Charlotte (Geraldine Chaplin) and Emily (Jane Birkin) are actresses partaking in an experimental theater which takes place in an apartment; the audience becomes voyeurs walking from one room to the next as they follow the action. One of the guests to the performance is a writer, Clement (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), who recognizes that the play is a bastardization of his own work (the man who stole the play, Silvano, is also one of the actors). Rather than taking offense, or suing them, Clement invites the three actors to his secluded estate to act in his own new play, which he would like to produce in a similarly interactive fashion, with his entire mansion becoming the theater. The only other occupants of the home are his servant, Virgil (Laszlo Szabo), who in his spare time is "translating Hamlet into Finnish," and the stage magician Paul (Andre Dussollier). Charlotte, Emily, and Silvano are assigned roles: Silvano is the tempestuous playwright, Emily is "Pierre," and Charlotte is the hotly-desired woman over whom they duel, Barbara. Yet soon it becomes apparent that another artistic theft has taken place. The play is actually closely based on recent events in the life of the magician, Paul, whose ex-lover Beatrice was also pursued by Clement. To complicate matters even further, when Paul takes a lover, that woman has visions which subsequently come true. Emily takes up with Paul, and sees a vision of herself, apparently dead, lying on the floor with blood upon her brow, an unfamiliar woman in a red dress leaning over her. It doesn't help matters that the estate is apparently haunted, or at least has strange properties: a secret, locked room emits strange sounds (jungle wildlife, or waves washing upon a beach), and glimpsing down a dark corridor might suddenly reveal strange sights.

The languidly-paced film (almost all of Rivette's films are paced to mimic the realistic rhythms of everyday life) takes place over the course of a week, as the unlikely troupe rehearses, rewrites, and prepares for the big performance--all while Clement refuses to write the final act, waiting for inspiration to strike. Love affairs begin and end, taking different shapes and interweaving in complicated patterns. Mysteries are launched--(What is Virgil writing? What is in the locked room? What happened to Beatrice? etc.)--and many of them go unanswered. Late in the film, Charlotte says to Emily, "It seems like we've been here forever," and indeed that's the feeling Rivette intends to invoke. He creates a continuum into which the viewer is thrust, and sets cycles spinning kaleidoscopically, so that events seem to recur in different colors, though not exactly in a linear progression. Unlike his more famous contemporaries, Godard and Truffaut, Rivette is not the most stylish or cinematic of directors. There is no score on the soundtrack, and he doesn't want to distract with camera tricks or flashy compositions or editing (although his languorous camera tracking always manages to find the perfect way to frame his cast of characters, theatrically embracing as many bodies in the mise-en-scène as he can). His method, as far as filmmaking goes, is to strip the film down to its barest essentials, while drawing the viewer's attention to the artifice of the production. Perhaps the key visual moments in Love on the Ground are those at the beginning and end of the film, when spectators frame the action at the edges of the screen, leaning around corners and into doorways to watch the players. Rivette is more interested in thematic resonances of a literary level; indeed, his films might be more suited to novel-readers--or to devotees of avant-garde theater--than to film buffs. You need to be able to appreciate that not only are we watching spectators watching a play--but that those characters are in turn based on other characters, who are, in turn, watching themselves represented in the play. It's as though two mirrors have been turned to face each other, forming a reflection that repeats infinitely onward. (Early in the film, someone even comments that Clement's house is like a mirror, shortly before Charlotte sees an alternate-reality version of herself reflected down a hallway.)

Love on the Ground is currently available on a PAL Region 2 DVD from Bluebell Films, with English subtitles. It is advertised as the "newly restored and remastered director's cut." It did seem to feature scenes that I didn't recall from a Rivette revival at the University of Wisconsin's Cinematheque a couple years ago, although the IMDB implies that the "cut" version is 125 minutes, and I'm pretty sure that the print I watched was closer to 2 1/2 hours. At any rate, the DVD is the full 169-minute version. There are no extras--not even a chapter menu--and the picture quality is adequate, though much better than the pink-hued old print I'd watched. I recommend it highly as one of Rivette's most elaborately-constructed, intellectually entertaining puzzle-boxes.

The Fall

2008-05-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

The Fall (U.S./U.K./etc., 2006) * * * *
D: Tarsem

I don't get it.

Oh, I get Tarsem's ravishing new motion picture, The Fall. That I get. And love. What I don't get is why the film played once in 2006, at the Toronto Film Festival, a handful of festivals in 2007, and is only finally getting a U.S. art house run the summer of 2008. I also don't get how any film critic in the world could dismiss a film of such originality, wit, and intelligence--all that and it's a film that celebrates filmmaking, to boot. I would posit that any critic who dislikes The Fall should hand in their credentials at the front desk on their way out.

Griping aside, I am still awash in the glow of this film I saw tonight, which accomplishes a rare feat: it is a production of enormous spectacle which also has a rich emotional depth. It is the reason cinema was invented. I don't mean this in the most hyperbolic sense. I don't mean that The Fall is the apex of the art, or that it stands among the greatest films ever made. (It is easily the best film I've seen so far in 2008.) I mean that because it is the sort of story which could only be told cinematically, and because its strengths are almost impossible to describe without directing the reader to go and see for himself, the film seems to represent the most elusive, magical element of the cinema-going experience. And it's a full-course meal.

The story is paper-thin as it reads in a review. After a near-fatal accident (the titular "fall") filming a stunt scene for a silent-movie comedy, the Buster Keaton-like actor Roy Walker (Lee Pace) becomes bedridden in a hospital; his heart has been broken by a girl, and he's trying to end it all. Key to his suicidal plan is tricking a five-year child, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), into stealing some morphine so that he can overdose. He begins telling her a story about her father, which she visualizes (for us) in a manner that calls to mind The Little Prince, or tales from the Arabian Nights, or anecdotes from The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, or something out of Rudyard Kipling.

If I can just pause to point out: this is a movie made in 2008, and it's referencing the literature I cited above. This is significant to me because, in 2008, to be successfully marketed to Americans a movie must either be a mainstream Hollywood special effects blockbuster (preferably about a superhero, or based on a toy or TV show, or a sequel to something), or it must be sold to the art houses as a serious-minded award contender. The Fall is neither. The Fall is for people who wouldn't mind, before they go to bed tonight, reading a chapter from an H. Rider Haggard novel or an article in the latest National Geographic, or maybe watching an old movie like Fritz Lang's The Indian Tomb or The Thief of Bagdad (either one). If my name-dropping is putting images in your head, I want you to take those images and ideas and dunk them into an aquarium filled with fluorescent-blue water, with wondrous little toy props resting among the bright-green pebbles, so that everything seems transformed into pop art with a surrealist's touch. Indeed, Tarsem invokes Dali at least once in the film, as a man's face transforms into a desert landscape that somehow, through a play of shadows and rocks, retains his image--free of special effects, as most of the film is. He also invokes M.C. Escher (with a labyrinthine palace of staircases which is, also, very real). For filmmakers, his influences range from Alejandro Jodorowsky (when one fictional character dies, birds escape from his mouth) to the Brothers Quay (quite out of nowhere and late in the film comes a snappy little stop-motion sequence). Yet it's telling that to compare his style to anyone else, you have to name those at the extreme edges of the list (Herzog is another); that's because Tarsem is uncompromising, and delivers, with every shot, not just a polished mise-en-scene but an original idea over which he obviously labored. When I go to the movies, just as when I read novels, I crave imagination. Tarsem has it in abundance.

I'll admit I was not completely bowled over by Tarsem's first film, The Cell (2000), which was also visually impeccable but a bit too self-serious and stifling. But The Fall, for all its serious themes (suicide, depression), is rescued by young Untaro's convincing, endearingly funny performance, and by a razor-sharp wit in the extended fantasy sequences. (One of the bandit heroes of Roy Walker's story is Charles Darwin, who has a pet monkey that helps him catch butterflies, and who at one point nobly proclaims to his assailants, "Shoot, you animals! They'll pay you well for Darwin's hide!" The "fictional" thread to the story is, of course, why you're paying to see this on the big screen, and now I'm compelled to mention that every location in this film, no matter how fantastic it appears, really exists. You could not build sets this large, nor make CG this tactile. Tarsem, carting a camera and a small crew to the far corners of the Earth, has made a travelogue for an alien planet that just hasn't been filmed very much before. How fitting that I saw this on the same day that the news was running photos from a lost tribe in Brazil, never having contacted "civilization," bodies painted red, aiming their bows up at the aircraft snapping their photo. Well, I bet they've met Tarsem.

It's not just that The Fall is a wonderful and one-of-a-kind film, which it is. For everything Tarsem went through to get this movie made, he should be hailed just as Peter Jackson was a few years back: he financed the film out-of-pocket, shot it in scattered locations across the globe, and wrangled a performance from Untaru that is one of the rare child performances wholly deserving of an Oscar, a performance which roots all of the spectacle and fantasia onto a human and emotional plane. What is happening?

What is happening is that audiences will respond as the press hasn't. See this film on the big screen now, before it quickly vanishes; in a few years, when The Fall is a revered cult film, you'll be able to brag to your friends that you saw it how it was meant to be seen. Plus, unlike everything else playing in the cinemas this weekend, you have never seen this film before.

Alternate Metropolises

2008-05-02T20:17:00.000-07:00

Metropolis (Japan, 2001) * * * 1/2
D: Rintaro

"This comes of trifling with robots."

-Tima, Metropolis (2001)

When Metropolis was released in 2001, anticipation and expectation among anime fans could not be higher. It was a dream collaboration among three of the brightest and most imaginative minds of Japanese animation and manga: the director was Rintaro (Galaxy Express 999), the screenwriter was Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), and the work he was adapting was a seminal manga by Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy). It might be understandable, then, that reaction was positive but a bit muted; other than hyperbolic praise from director James Cameron, it seemed that most critics found it to be not much more than attractive eye candy, and many anime fans only allowed themselves the epiphany that they had been won over from the Otomo school to the Miyazaki academy a long time ago. Indeed, Metropolis was released the same year as Miyazaki's Spirited Away, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Film, and won. The charms Metropolis had to offer--spectacle, sci-fi noir, existential questioning--seemed old school, no matter how well it presented them.

Indeed, that was kind of the point. Metropolis, for all its futurism, had its gaze set firmly toward bygone eras. The classic Tezuka book upon which it was based was published in 1949, and apart from retaining the outdated look of Tezuka's characters, Rintaro and Otomo see fit to include many 40's film noir stylistic touches, even playing up the private detective angle inherent in the original book. Ray Charles singing "I Can't Stop Loving You," from 1962, features prominently (and ironically) during the climax. The sleek, retro design of the city and its robots is rooted firmly in 30's serials and science fiction films such as Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Things to Come. And of course the 1927 cinematic milestone Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, influences the look as well as the story, and its theme of humanity vs. the mechanical. (A silent movie influence is also evident in the film's iris-in transitions, and 1920's-style jazz music permeates the score.) So with at least four decades referenced in the style of Metropolis, all incorporated into a far-future environment, you'd be excused if your head spins at the anachronisms. Yet the blender approach creates a deeply nostalgic resonance to the film, as though all of the detritus of the 20th century is piling up underneath these towering, high-tech skyscrapers and awesome, sun-altering rayguns. What's generated is a deep longing for the past, even while we're shown the spectacular panorama of the future, so that when the city finally does topple to the ground, it's a happy ending. A return to simpler things: transistor radios, grungy dives, Ray Charles records, etc.

It's also a return to human emotion, represented in the relationship between Kenichi and the female robot Tima, as well as, to a lesser extent, the sympathetic robots Pero (dressed in a trenchcoat and fedora) and Fifi (a simple-minded but brave maintenance robot). These latter robots are design to serve, but develop connections to the human world that seem to make them human by extension. Tima was designed to conquer the Earth, but she is rescued from her own destruction by young Kenichi, who introduces her to the human world as well as the notion of identity. That fragile idea is shattered when she learns of her own artificiality, and she embraces her destructive abilities as programmed by the corrupt politician Duke Red--secretly the leader of the militant Malduk Party that despises mankind's reliance upon robots. By manipulating sunspots and seating ultra-robot Tima upon his "Throne of Power," he plots to topple Metropolis, as well as all other modern civilizations upon the planet.

The robots are also despised by members of the working-class (one complains that robots take all the jobs), though they're defended by some left-wing rebels who live in hiding, and who shelter Kenichi, Tima, and Kenichi's uncle, the detective Shunsaku. Meanwhile, Rock, the adopted son of Duke Red, hunts down Tima and tries to destroy her. He seems even more committed to Duke Red's theories than Duke Red is--all robots must be destroyed--but he's actually motivated by jealousy that she'll take his place in his father's affections (she's designed to resemble Duke Red's deceased daughter). Rock is the real villain of the piece, at every turn pulling out a revolver and shooting someone in cold blood. Yet because of his motivations, he's a tragic character: an orphan who can never be truly accepted by his adopted father, and so has to destroy the man he loves. More moving, more tragic, is Tima, who is just on the cusp of learning what it means to be human when she's forced to confront her true identity and true purpose.

The ideas behind Metropolis are hardly new. Certainly Blade Runner (and, by extension, Philip K. Dick) is a big influence here, just as it's been on Ghost in the Shell and other major anime films, although any story dealing with the limits of artificial intelligence and feeling must also be compared with 2001: A Space Odyssey and the works of Isaac Asimov. These themes are part of a long, rich tradition in science fiction. At this stage, a genre fan hardly expects revelations, just a pleasurable beating upon the same old drums. At that, Metropolis excels, as Rintaro and Otomo mine the characters and situations for an effective emotional resonance. They also keep the viewer delighted by the dense cinematic compositions, often cluttering the screen with events and movement, as Otomo does in his own films (Akira, Steamboy); and the viewer is kept bombarded with the cognitive dissonance of a jazz soundtrack, unrealistic, Disney-styled cel-animated characters, and slick CG sequences. These CG scenes, seven years later, are the only elements of Metropolis that have dated a little, ironically enough. Revisiting the film in 2008, I was struck by how refreshing the cel animation of Metropolis is; these days, it's a rare art form. More than that, Metropolis features truly accomplished character animation by the best animators in Japan (well, those that weren't working on a Studio Ghibli film, anyway).

What prompted revisiting Metropolis was finally acquiring a copy of the original manga, published in English (and, alas, mirror-image, left-right artwork to "conform to English-language standards") by Dark Horse Comics in 2003. Metropolis, along with other early Osamu Tezuka works, helped create the prototypical manga character design: large-eyed, expressive, exaggeratedly cartoonish. Yet I instantly recognized it as conforming to the style of the Walt Disney comics of the same period, and it took me back to my childhood, when I voraciously read reprints of those comics by talented artists such as Carl Barks. With that in mind, it's amusing (and a little strange) to see Tezuka poke fun at Disney by depicting giant killer mice--resembling Mickey Mouse--attacking the populace of Metropolis. No, that's not much like the Rintaro film; it bears more in common with the punk pop art of another anime, the defiantly bizarre Tamala 2010 (2003). Tezuka's Metropolis is its own, unadaptable beast. The plot wanders unforgivingly, making plain its serialized origins. There are many unnecessary characters and sideplots. Its conclusion is a bit lecturing, and not even fully supported by the story that's unfolded. These caveats aside, it's a fascinating read, if for no other reason than to see manga in its key formative moments, figuring out what it can borrow from the West and what can remain uniquely Japanese. It is also, like the film, unique enough from the style of modern manga to feel all the more refreshing.

Tezuka is fond of populating his panels with dozens of characters, each of them shouting disparate pieces of dialogue, which calls to mind early-20th century newspaper comics, especially those of Winsor McCay ("Little Nemo in Slumberland"). Some of the pages read like storyboards for a cartoon short, such as when one character runs directly toward the viewer, approaching panel by panel until we are swallowed by his mouth. But mostly Tezuka's Metropolis is whimsical, nonsensical. Few characters survive the transition to film intact. The big-nosed Duke Red, an iconic Tezuka creation, is an antagonist in both, manipulates sunspots in both, and orders the creation of a robot in both, although in the book he is an outlaw, not a politician. The robot, Michi, is actually asexual, with a button inside the throat that allows he/she to switch genders. As in the film, the robot does not know what it is, but when it finds out, it runs riot, attempting to destroy the human race (in the film, the robot--Tima--cannot be blamed, since she has been programmed to do this). Michi also looks quite a bit like Astro Boy. Kenichi has a much smaller role in the book, although his look is very close to his design in Rintaro's film. The creator of the robot, Dr. Laughton, is in both works; the uncle detective is in both. (Yet only Tezuka's has the nerve to include Sherlock Holmes as a central character.)

Tezuka hadn't seen Metropolis when he wrote and drew the book; he was only inspired by a still of the famous robot-creation moment from Fritz Lang's film. The result is a book that has nothing to do with the movie, other than the fact that it has a robot in it. When assigned to adapt this somewhat ludicrous (though oddly entertaining) manga, Otomo clearly decided to wed Tezuka's book more strongly to its inspiration. He incorporated the vertical social stratification of the 1927 Metropolis into the 2001 version; once again, the lower-class are literally lower than the upper-class, and once again, there is a subterranean, industrial, almost uninhabitable world beneath the glamour of the upper levels. The working class vs. the bourgeoisie conflict is carried over, as are the riots and rebellions. The Tower of Babel sequence from Lang's is here established by giving Duke Red a tower called the "Ziggurat"--and if you didn't get the reference, Otomo has one of his characters define the word as a Babylonian tower, "like the Tower of Babel." It helps to underline one of Otomo's chief concerns, ever present in his work: the apocalyptic ends of civilization when it grows to its utmost extremes--and the cyclical nature of society, as it picks up and rebuilds, reborn. Perhaps most obviously, Otomo settles the robot's gender as female and blonde, like Brigitte Helm's Maria, transformed into a machine in the original.

So is 2001's Metropolis an homage, and if so, to what? It seems to exist as part mirror, part prism, reflecting and refracting light, or common pop cultural strains in both science fiction cinema and Japanese manga. It's something to visit for pleasure, not intellectual enlightenment. It's a film about science fiction, about animation, for fans of both. Indulgent? As animation seems to retreat further into the darkness, the only torches held by Pixar and Studio Ghibli, Metropolis seems like one of the brighter flames that is now set to recede, recede, recede, until we look at it with a nostalgia similar to its creators' nostalgia for lost worlds of the past.

Stanwyck X 2

2008-04-20T06:04:00.000-07:00

Forbidden (U.S., 1932) * * *
D: Frank Capra

Shopworn (U.S., 1932) * *
D: Nicholas Grinde

As part of a series of recent Columbia Pictures restorations, the UW Cinematheque last night screened two pre-Code melodramas starring Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck (1907 - 1990) is my favorite actress of the 30's, straddling the line between button-cute and drop-dead-sexy, and when given the right writers and directors, could make dialogue crackle, zing, or smolder, as appropriate. Perhaps best suited to screwball comedies (as in Preston Stuges' superior The Lady Eve, or Peter Godfrey's Christmas in Connecticut), she could also make lasting impressions in film noir (Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity) and sensationalistic pre-Code soap operas (the notorious Baby Face), where a low-cut blouse, a significant look, and a fade to black would also be accompanied by a suggestive double-entendre not possible a few years later. The two films screened, Forbidden and Shopworn, were both produced in 1932, two years after the Code was established, but two years before it began to be effectively enforced. Within that four-year span, the Talkies pushed the envelope as far as they possibly could, most famously with the nude skinny dipping of Tarzan and His Mate (1934). Stanwyck's career flourished in this period, although her truly great work wouldn't come until later; audiences were struck by her combination of beauty and natural, casual wit and intelligence. Watching these films over seventy years later, what's most intriguing is how modern Stanwyck's performances seem, like an '08 gal trapped in 30's clothes. It helps explain why she always seemed to prance over the heads of her co-stars.

Forbidden is an early film written and directed by Frank Capra, still two years away from It Happened One Night (1934) and four years from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). "Capraesque" calls to mind an idealized vision of small-town America, populated with lovable, quirky characters nonetheless espousing all-American values in the face of corruption; Forbidden actually begins with the most Capraesque scene, in that sense, as a bespectacled, schoolmarmish Lulu (Stanwyck) arrives to work with a lost, dreamy look in her eyes, and we see glimpses of a town that might as well be out of You Can't Take it With You or It's a Wonderful Life. But then Lulu decides to discover her inner lithe spirit, ditches the glasses, buys a sexy dress, and runs off to Cuba. (And here the pacing of the film switches from awkward and uncertain to rat-a-tat screwball.) There she meets an older man (Adolphe Munjou), and carries on an affair, unaware that he's district attorney Bob Grover, an important public figure with an invalid wife. For convenience of plot, turns out they also live really close to one another, and that her friend Al Holland (Ralph Bellamy), the editor of the local newspaper, is eager to catch the man in a scandal. A scandal is in the works: Lulu is pregnant--something she discovers right after discovering that Grover is married--and so she goes into hiding for about 9 months or so to avoid the societal shame of being a single mother. When Holland does discover Lulu with her toddler in a park--just as Grover shows up, and the toddler runs over to him yelling "Daddy!" (again they all live within about a block of each other)--a fiction is hastily arranged by Lulu that she's acting as governess for Grover, who just adopted this child. Which then means that Grover has a new child to take home to his surprised and delighted wife. It gets more tangled from there. The plot is breathlessly absurd, but its central purpose is to set up Lulu as the self-sacrificing woman, who gives up her life for Grover with little to no reward. The philandering husband is actually meant to generate sympathy in moments, which doesn't work, particularly for a modern, post-feminism audience. And yet the film has much to recommend it, thanks to Stanwyck and Capra. Stanwyck is a wonder to behold, although she has to endure the last stretch of the film in middle-age makeup that dims her flame a little. Most memorable is her introduction to Grover, dead-drunk in her cabin suite, having mistaken her room #99 for #66 (he explains that it's not the first time he's been upside-down)--but is sobered up by her beauty; Stanwyck, for her part, plays her confusion-turned-to-delight as note-perfect as one can imagine. Capra's screenplay, though convoluted, shines where you'd expect it to: with the clever dialogue and the character details, notably with Bellamy's dogged newspaper editor, Lulu's eventual boss, given some of the best lines in the film. Of course, the whole subject matter--unwanted pregnancy, premarital sex--could not be tackled once the Hays Code began enforcement. Funny, then, that for all its sensationalism, it remains old-fashioned to the core, setting up Stanwyck as the paragon of the martyred female, willing to do anything for her man--as Lulu suggests to the readers of her advice column. Capra seems to suggest that Lulu has found her perfect job at the paper offering romantic advice anonymously; of course, one might now think she's the worst possible candidate. According to the excellent program notes by the Cinematheque's Tom Yoshikami, Forbidden became Columbia's top-grossing film of 1932; it's easy to see why, with its satisfyingly-played potboiler elements.

But the second half of the double-feature is definitely the "B"-movie of the bill, the lesser melodrama Shopworn, directed by Nicholas Grinde, who, indeed, grinded this one out. Stanwyck is fine, but is given less range to play as a small-town girl whose father dies in an accident involving dynamite and being buried by about 4,000 tons of rock; still, he lives long enough to tell her to keep her chin up and always keep fighting, because it's a hard world, and he wishes he could have given her a better life, she deserves more, go out there and etc. etc. (He's also played by an actor who looks like he's about two years older than Stanwyck.) She finds herself working as a waitress in a college town, regularly turning down the attentions of the frat boys, and naturally intrigued by the one student who doesn't hit on her--the studious mama's boy Dave (Regis Toomey). Turns out his parents are members of Society, and don't want their boy marrying a waitress, probably the first girl he's fallen for; they set up a trap which gets Stanwyck locked away at an institution for morally-regressed women (or something like that), where she does hard labor for six years before being released again into the world. Almost instantly she finds overwhelming success as a dancer on Broadway, which, of course, lets her turn the tables on those who done her wrong. (Ah, but she's really got a heart of gold, you'll see!) This was the second film of the evening in which, to offer a manufactured climax, someone pulls out a gun. In Forbidden, it pays off with delirious gusto; here, it's a sign that the screenwriter is running out of ideas, and appropriately enough, the gun is quickly pocketed with shame, as though the person wielding it is sorry that the screenwriter made her to resort to such a cliché. In a more interesting parallel, both Forbidden and Shopworn feature a shot in which Stanwyck's eyes are all that are visible amidst a cluttered array of bodies and props. One can only surmise that audiences of the 30's found Stanwyck's eyes to be her most alluring feature, and so the directors were trying to showcase them; nevertheless, the result is a pair of truly odd compositions. Shopworn is severely disadvantaged by heavy cuts suggested by the Code--proof, apparently, that they could exert influence even in 1932--and the cuts are quite noticeable in what might otherwise be seen as shoddy editing. Most jarringly, in the middle of one scene the dialogue is suddenly replaced by dubbing provided by different actors. According to Yoshikami's notes, suggestions of prostitution and abortion were removed altogether at the Code's insistence. What's left is a film in which nothing very interesting ever happens, and in which the male lead is completely overwhelmed by Stanwyck--he's a milquetoast, and we know that she really needs someone who can keep pace with her, a Cary Grant or a Clark Gable. Okay, so the film is lousy, but with a live audience--one that's just sat through the over-the-top madness of Forbidden--the campy melodrama is a hoot. For what that's worth.

It's great to see these films restored--and with an audience--but one can't help but wish that the uncut version of Shopworn could somehow surface. As such, the latter film is not really an entry-point into Pre-Code sensationalism, but for that purpose Forbidden serves really well. I'd also suggest Turner Classic Movies' two box sets, Forbidden Hollywood 1 and 2, the first volume of which contains the uncut Baby Face, the Stanwyck wonder in which she literally sleeps her way to the top of a company (in one extended montage). It would be a few decades before Hollywood got this dangerous again.

What Has Become of the Baron

2008-04-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (U.K./Italy, 1988) * * * *
D: Terry Gilliam

"What will become of the Baron? Surely this time there is no escape."
-Poorly-choreographed mermaids, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

I first saw Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen when I was twelve years old. I was reading the Milwaukee Journal (the funny pages and the Movies section were all I read) and came across a review for the film. The review described flying heads on the moon, a winged Grim Reaper, a hot air balloon made of women's underwear, a three-headed gryphon, a fish that swallowed ships, and so forth. I had never before begged my parents to take me to a movie as I begged them to take me to Baron Munchausen. Smart move, in retrospect, since it was an exclusive engagement at the Oriental Theatre downtown, and one of the few theaters in the country that was showing the film; as Gilliam explains in a documentary in the new Blu-ray special edition of the movie, Baron Munchausen didn't even receive the standard arthouse release. I was one of the lucky few to see it on the big screen. My Dad took me, and it was the first time I'd ever been to the Oriental Theatre; it was (and is) an old movie house dating back to 1927, ornately built, with a giant main theater with heavy red curtains, looking just a bit like the decrepit but grand proscenium upon which Baron Munchausen relates his tall tales. I was the right age for this film, the perfect age. The only other Gilliam film I'd seen was Time Bandits--around when that came out, too--and although I'd found that movie to be quite frightening (oddly, the part that scared me the most was when the face of the Supreme Being chased the Time Bandits down a hallway; Gilliam made God terrifying), I was also enthralled by its fantasy, in particular the iconic image of the giant emerging from the sea wearing a galleon as a hat. Still, it's not that I went into Baron Munchausen thinking, "Oh good, it's the latest film from the director of Time Bandits." I had never heard of Monty Python. All that Gilliam/Python obsession came later, and so his view of the world--absurdist, fantastic, surrealistic, vulgar--was a wonder to me. At the ticket counter, my father said, "Two for...Baron Von Munchausen?" And, like Sally correcting her father in the film, I had to insist, "It's the Adventures of Baron Munchausen!" As the film began, right away I knew I was seeing a different kind of filmmaking--it seems less innovative now, but the mere notion that the title of the film was displayed only as the banner of a crooked flier for a play, pasted to the base of a decapitated statue, seemed really mind-blowing to me at the time. This was not going to be your standard escapist fantasy. When I saw the obese harem girls twenty minutes into the film, wading through the sultan's pool, being led by eunuchs amidst two dozen narrow columns and a menagerie of animals--I was warped forevermore. Sex, to my twelve-year-old brain, was a subject of great curiosity, but it was also very mysterious. So it is in the film. Whatever the sultan was doing with all those obese women, I dared not imagine (nor do I still); when the body-less Queen of the Moon began making exotic moans, complaining that her body was in bed with the King, I knew that sex was involved and was panicked that the movie might visit the subject so straightforwardly (I was with my Dad, you see); instead, the Baron nervously explains to young Sally that the King is just "tickling her feet," which then proves to be the case, luckily for me. Violence, too, seemed over-the-top yet innocent, storybook; decapitations occur bloodlessly, and one severed head still manages to wink at a harem girl when he lands in her lap. Could this film be on my wavelength? No, it had trumped me: it was presenting a reality even stranger than the stories and comics I was writing in my spare time. It was opening up my imagination into a wider universe.

I could not understand why the film, for the next several years, was referred to as a "disaster." I understood that it went over-budget, but I didn't see why that should affect one's opinion of the completed film. What I'd seen was not a disaster, but, in my limited experience, one of the Greatest Films of All Time. I didn't know this phenomenon of judging a film by its accounting books was already firmly established; I had never heard of Heaven's Gate. The truth is that, when this phenomenon occurs, most people don't see the finished product and indeed give it a wide berth, having already heard, from people reciting people reciting people reciting stories from Variety, that the film is a "disaster." When it came out on video, only two copies appeared in my local video store, and they proved tremendously popular. I had to stake out the place before I finally could rent Baron Munchausen, copy it using the old VCR-to-VCR method, and study it in more detail. I watched that old pan-and-scan copy endlessly. I tracked down the soundtrack of the film, one of (the late) Michael Kamen's best scores. I read the book Losing the Light, by Andrew Yule, which chronicled the making of the film warts-and-all, and at last understood the troubled production history. (I still recommend the book, the best ever written on the subject of Gilliam.) I won't go into the voluminous details of those troubles, as the three-part documentary on the new disc offers a good summary. But after reading the book, I could objectively conclude that some of the problems were caused by my new hero, Gilliam, though the great majority were not. I came away with the notion that Gilliam was a bit cursed (I was beginning to familiarize myself with the history of Brazil, as well), an idea that has spread and become another popular fiction as more and more of his films have hit near-legendary snags during the production phase, most famously with his aborted project, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. That his star, Heath Ledger, died in the middle of Gilliam's latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, has further given fuel to this myth, which is unjust not only to Gilliam but to the memory of Heath Ledger.

The new, long-awaited special edition release of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen on disc gives a chance for critics to reappraise the film, and for that it's most welcome. It helps that Gilliam has a bigger following in 2008 than in 1988, and it helps Munchausen's reputation that Gilliam drastically retreated from big-budget spectacles after the film's financial failure: he made the acclaimed, low-budgeted drama The Fisher King next (which, contrary to Munchausen, insists on the importance of reality over fantasy), then the efficient science fiction thriller 12 Monkeys, and the cult classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was a small enough production that it could afford to be a theatrical flop. Because of these retreats from Munchausen's scope and scale, the former film looks all the more rare and beautiful. It is Gilliam at his most unrestrained, letting his fancy take him where he pleases. Well, almost: the moon sequence was drastically altered at the insistence of the studio and the creditors, reduced in scale so that a city of 2,000 became 2 (Valentina Cortese and an uncredited Robin Williams); and the passage from the novel that made Gilliam want to make the film in the first place had to be eliminated entirely: the Baron's horse, bisected by a portcullis but oblivious to the fact, drinking from a fountain and letting the consumed water spill onto the ground behind it. Regardless, what made it onto the screen is so visually stunning that it doesn't miss those scenes, which, admittedly, would have slowed down the story anyway. You still have a vast army of Turks, with elephants and siege towers, storming the city; you still have the Baron (an excellent John Neville) riding a cannonball through the air; you still have Eric Idle racing to Spain to fetch a bottle of wine, one feet that spin like the Road Runner's; you still have winged, skeletal Death stalking the Baron throughout; you still have the inside of a great fish with its vast, half-eaten shipwrecks; you still have the Baron's arrival on the Moon, one of the most serenely beautiful ever to be committed to celluloid; you still have the Baron waltzing with Venus (Uma Thurman) through the air, surrounded by waterfalls, as stop-motion cherubs drape them in a ribbon for God's sake. It's time to fess up: it's one of the great, iconic fantasy films, right up there with Ray Harryhausen's best and both Thieves of Bagdad. I'd even go further and say that it improves upon Raspe's original book, which was a collection of charming tall tales that acted like individually separated jokes with tidy punchlines. Gilliam's film, co-written with Charles McKeown (who also plays Adolphus), is actually about something. It has some fairly profound things to say about aging, impetuousness, responsibility, and one's need for fantasy. It was something of a manifesto for Gilliam, and although it is often grouped with Time Bandits and Brazil as the third part of a trilogy (this, at Gilliam's own insistence), I think it works best when compared to nothing but itself, for it's a completely one-of-a-kind spectacle.

For years Gilliam treated Baron Munchausen as the bastard child of his filmography. Perhaps the traumatic experience of making the film haunted him for a long while afterward, or perhaps he began to believe the critics who dismissed it as pretty but flawed. It's a relief, then, to hear him embrace the film on the new audio commentary, recorded with McKeown. He's come to grips with what he's made, and has begun to appreciate that he may never make a film like it again. Most of what he imagined somehow made it onto the screen. If that about 75% of Gilliam's intentions, well, at least that's pound-for-pound more imagination, wit, and grace than most films possess.

Day 4 & Wrap-Up: The 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival

2008-04-06T16:33:00.000-07:00

En La Ciudad de Sylvia (Spain/France, 2007) * * *
D: José Luis Guerín

Today we saw two lightweight films with almost no narrative, but lingering, loving views of France, both filmed by outsiders to the country, clearly smitten. The first, from Spain, was this film, which actually owes a great deal to Jacques Tati's Playtime (probably one of the ten greatest films ever made). Dialogue-free for long, long stretches, José Luis Guerín's film follows the gaze of a young artist (Xavier Lafitte, looking like he just rode in from Peter Jackson's Rivendell) who sits at a French café watching the passers-by--mostly the many beautiful women, and drawing their profiles and the backs of their necks in his sketchbook with a charcoal pencil. A waitress gets her orders confused and spills a drink; a couple sit in icy silence for an eternity until one answers, "No, probably not. But I'll think about it." Young women gossip and flirt. Eventually our artist gets up and follows one of the women, pursuing her through labyrinthine streets, bumping up against street vendors, commuters, and street musicians, always in pursuit of the elusive woman, whom he thinks he recognizes from somewhere else. It's a languorous, sensual film in which almost nothing happens, but it nonetheless contains enough to recommend it, from the playful, Tati-esque running jokes in the background, to the complicated layering of faces, bodies, and moving trains reflected in windows like a palimpsest--the ideal woman glimpsed like a ghost somewhere beneath it all. Such a perfect simulation of a lazy Sunday morning spent lounging at a café that it should be sold as thus on DVD, like how they sell video fireplaces.

Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge) (France, 2007)
* * *
D: Hou Hsiao Hsien

This much-acclaimed feature from France by a Chinese director (of 2003's Café Lumière) drew a large Sunday afternoon crowd to the Orpheum, though the murmurs heard on the way out were just as sharply divided as those from En La Ciudad de Sylvia--either the film was a great work of art, or punishingly slow with nothing to say. I enjoyed the film, as I enjoyed the former, although I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, and to watch the two films almost back-to-back is a strange experience. One begins to feel adrift. In France. Like a red balloon. The film is inspired, of course, by the famous children's film The Red Balloon (1956), which I remember watching in elementary school. As with the original, an animate red balloon drifts above the head of a young child, but in this case it leaves the story for long stretches as we follow the boy, Simon (Simon Iteanu), and his new nanny, a filmmaker student named Song (Fang Song); we also meet his mother (Juliette Binoche), who works for a puppeteers' ensemble. The "plot" in this one is that she is trying to find a way to evict the man who's renting the room downstairs--he hasn't paid his rent in months, and she needs the money. Meanwhile, Hou Hsiao Hsien doesn't so much adapt the original film as he deconstructs it; Song is making a short based on the film, using Simon, and she helpfully explains how she's going to use special effects to pull off the stunt. By pulling back and watching Song film his Red Balloon movie for him, he pulls off a bit of framed theater that calls to mind Jacques Rivette. Flight of the Red Balloon, despite its brief moments of fantasy (when the red balloon materializes outside the context of Song's film, to visit an unknowing Simon), is set to the rhythms of life, with Binoche, as the single mother struggling to find moments of beauty in her harried life, giving a passionate, vital performance. Yet this film's chief trait is its very intangibility; it is as light as a balloon.

Fermat's Room (La Habitación de Fermat) (Spain, 2008) * * * 1/2
D: Luis Piedrahita & Rodrigo Sopeña

The closing night film of WIFF was Fermat's Room, in what can't be described as its North American premiere (because Tribeca wants to claim that title later this month), but a "special screening" that just happens to be before anyone else in North America gets to see it. One could make the argument, if Fermat's Room, this festival's Timecrimes, and the recent The Orphanage are any indication, that it is a golden age for Spanish thrillers. The premise is irresistible: four strangers, all of them brilliant mathematicians, are invited to meet at a secluded location to match their wits in an evening of puzzle-solving. All are to wear nametags bearing the name of a famous historical mathematician (i.e. "Pascal"), preserving their anonymity, although, as we'll find out, they already have pivotal personal connections. They meet in a rusting old building, but inside is a decorated parlor--with a dinner table, shelves of books on mathematical theory, and a chalkboard. Their host, the enigmatic Fermat, abandons them suddenly when he receives a call stating that his daughter has slipped into a coma; after he leaves--"accidentally" leaving a PDA behind--the door locks, and the PDA suddenly delivers a message: they have one minute to solve a puzzle. When they fail to transmit the answer via the PDA before the deadline, the room begins to shrink: they're trapped on all sides by hydraulic presses hidden behind the walls. And so the evening proceeds: a puzzle is given, they struggle to answer it, and only when they find the answer are they granted a few minutes' reprieve from the presses. But it's also a drawing room mystery, and thus while they solve the PDA's puzzles they also work to find out why they're being murdered, and what connection the four of them really have. Most of the movie's puzzles went over my head; they explain each answer, but (understandably) very rapidly; as one character explains in the first line of dialogue, "If you don't know what a prime number is, you should leave now." But that's not really true: while math permeates the film, it grandly succeeds as a taut thriller, something Hitchcock would have loved; he would have especially relished the bit of business about death-by-seatbelt, and you'll see what I mean when you see the film. A very fun movie, and a fitting crowd-pleaser for the closing night of the festival.

Wrap-Up: A very successful year for the festival - very big crowds, and some big coups on films. One major problem, in my experiences and reading about others' online, is that the volunteers showing the films don't often check to see how the films are being projected and sound once they get the film going. At least half of the films I saw were slightly out of focus, or kept slipping out of focus, which is much more noticeable on a subtitled film. (Unless my contacts are battery-powered, and the batteries were running low.) But otherwise WIFF was a blast. Here's my ranking of the twelve films I was able to see, best to least-best--as my reviews indicate, I would recommend all by Bon Cop, Bad Cop, but even that proved to be a very popular film at the fest:

1) Timecrimes
2) Chop Shop
3) My Winnipeg
4) Mongol
5) Fermat's Room
6) Flight of the Red Balloon
7) En La Ciudad de Sylvia
8) The Substitute
9) Yella
10) Stuck
11) The Wonderful World of Sid Laverents
12) Bon Cop, Bad Cop

Day 3, Part 2: The 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival

2008-04-06T06:41:00.000-07:00

The Wonderful World of Sid Laverents (U.S., 1963-1980)
D: Sid Lavarents

Multiple SIDosis (1970)
It Sudses and Sudses and Sudses (1963)
One Man Band (1964)
Stop Cloning Around (1980)

This brief program (45 minutes) featured four short films from the eccentric but multi-talented amateur filmmaker Sid Laverents, a retired engineer who, over decades, has amassed hundreds of home movies demonstrated his unique, slightly insane sensibilities. He recently turned 100, and some of his shorts have been preserved and restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, from which these choice selections were taken, introduced by a UW grad who interviewed Laverents and assembled the program. To call the films bizarre would be an understatement, but they're also charming and friendly, as though Laverents has invited you into his home and chosen to provide the entertainment for the evening. These entertainments include demonstrating, visually, how multi-track audio recording works (the brilliant "Multiple SIDosis," easily the jewel of the program, and depicted in the still above); attempting a zero-budget, live action recreation of cartoon mayhem when Laverents is forced out of his apartment by an exploding mass of bubbly suds; playing a couple of tunes as an extremely elaborate one-man band; and exploring in-camera trickery with the musical clone comedy "Stop Cloning Around." Loads of fun.

Mongol (Russia/Kazakhstan/Mongolia, 2007) * * * 1/2
D: Sergei Bodrov

Imagine Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible: Part One, as reimagined for the post-Conan the Barbarian, post-Lord of the Rings, post-Matrix crowd, and you have Mongol, an epic action film which isn't highbrow enough for the Eisenstein fans, but is, as my wife put it, "really, really cool." It tells of the rise of Genghis Khan, in his youth called Temudgin, robbed of his royalty and sent into exile after his Khan father is poisoned by a rival tribal leader. The story--told in flashback, but mostly in a linear fashion--is redundant as hell, basically depicting Temudgin getting captured and recaptured again, while constantly in pursuit of his bride, whom he chose himself when he was nine (a decision which is at the root of all his troubles, since his bride was from the wrong Mongol tribe). It's rescued from tedium by, oh, just about everything: the extraordinarily gorgeous cinematography, the excellent and nuanced performances, the folktale weight of the story, and the exciting and bloody action scenes, edited by UW grad and Oscar-winner Zach Staenberg (who was scheduled to attend, but cancelled because he was busy editing the Wachowski Brothers' Speed Racer adaptation). Staenberg must be singled out for praise here, as his exhilarating and harrowing editing slows down and speeds up the action, sometimes in a single shot, to make sure that the audience can follow what exactly is happening amidst all the dust, blood, and swinging swords. Nevertheless, director Bodrov (Prisoner of the Mountains) largely refrains from style-for-style's sake, apart from a few flashy touches--like an arrow that is launched across a vast plain, to land at the feet of the enemy leader as a declaration of war--that call to mind the mythic/storybook proportions of one of Zhang Yimou's recent action epics.

Stuck (U.S./Canada, 2007) * * *
D: Stuart Gordon

Stuart Gordon has produced a body of work more consistent in quality than most of the modern-day "masters of horror"; in fact, any greatest hits collection of the recent Showtime anthology of the same name would have to include his two standout films, "Dreams in the Witch-House" and "The Black Cat." His movies, almost all of them in the horror genre apart from the recent Mamet adaptation Edmund, reflect the work of a first-rate storyteller, provocateur, and grand guignol enthusiast. (He's also, hands-down, the best cinematic translator of H.P. Lovecraft, a well he will revisit again with his next feature.) Stuck is both typical and atypical of his output: atypical, because it begins as a straightforward drama, parallel portraits of a young nurse (American Beauty's Mena Suvari), on her way to a promotion, who spends her nights partying recklessly, and--unconnected--a middle-aged man in desperate straits, having just lost his job and his apartment (The Crying Game's Stephen Rea). Then their lives collide literally: she strikes him with her car late one night, and his body becomes lodged in the broken windshield. She panics, but unable to make this a hit-and-run, drives him home and hides the vehicle--bloody body and all--in her garage. But he isn't dead. What then unfolds is a razor-sharp satire (the selfish Suvari asks Rea, "Why are you doing this to me?"), as well as a hilariously miserable battle of wits between the two, as Rea agonizingly struggles to get out of the windshield, and Suvari tries to find some plan to dispose of this little problem, which threatens to derail her career path. With Stuck, Gordon played the Orpheum audience like a violin, and it was almost entertaining enough to just listen to the peals of laughter and disgust (usually at once) which rippled through the crowd at Saturday's late-night screening. After the film, Gordon conducted a short Q&A; the shy, witty (and, some say, squeamish) director related the real-life incident which inspired the film, commented upon his Hitchcockian cameo, and revealed that he couldn't get into the UW's single film class when he was a student in the 60's.

Day 3, Part 1: The 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival

2008-04-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

The Substitute (Vikaren) (Denmark, 2007) * * *
D: Ole Bornedal

I didn't know what to expect from The Substitute--running into the theater so quickly, after getting caught in traffic, I didn't even have time to look up what country it was from, but I vaguely recalled that it had something to do with an alien disguised as a substitute teacher. I expected some modest laughs, hoping it wouldn't be too terrible. What a delight to find that it was an effectively mounted, ingenuity-stuffed throwback to the dark and satirical Joe Dante fantasies of the 1980's, like Gremlins and Explorers. Indeed, the substitute teacher for this Danish elementary school is an alien from outer space--from a breed that's replaced love with war--and she's intent on kidnapping a few specimens (all right, the entire classroom) to teach her race the unique traits of Earthlings. In the meantime, she demonstrates all sorts of wicked powers, like shrinking humans so that she can eat them, gobbling down chickens in a gory mess, summoning a doppelgänger of the Minister of Education from a hovering metal sphere that follows her wherever she goes, and even (worst of all) calling the kids out on their secret longings and inner weaknesses. She's bizarre and unpredictable, and keeps the proceedings off-kilter, even when you think you know the beats this kind of story should take. Ultimately, the story proves to be less than it seemed, but there's plenty to entertain along the way, and the child actors, who are very good, are given fully-realized characters to portray.

Chop Shop (U.S., 2007) * * * 1/2
D: Ramin Bahrani

Ramin Bahrani's first feature was Man Push Cart, a stripped-down homage to Neorealism (think Bicycle Thieves), filmed on a shoestring budget, that received deserved acclaim. Still, I half-suspected that maybe the acclaim was a little too rabid, that the comparisons to Robert Bresson were a bit premature. Now comes Chop Shop, an excellent follow-up that is superior to the earlier film, demonstrating a talent for realistic storytelling that is growing more compelling. Ale (Alejandro Polanco) is a young adolescent so streetwise that he could almost be mistaken for an adult, if it weren't for his height. He certainly seems to be in complete command of his situation, despite the fact that he has no parents, and he's living out of a garage. When his older sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), arrives in the city, he happily gives her a home, while both plot to save up enough money to purchase a vending truck (shades of Man Push Cart) from which they can run their own business. In the meantime, Ale does auto body work and steals fenders and hubcaps to sell to the shop, storing his savings in a jar hidden in a dirty hole in his home, beneath a simple wooden board. Isamar is making money too, by turning tricks, and how Ale finds out--and how he copes, setting his makeshift maturity against the last embers of his innocence--fills out the narrative with real emotional depth. The story is efficient and simple, but Bahrani's documentary-style approach is so absorbing that I began to lose all track of my own reality, trading it in for the grungy world of Chop Shop's. When the lights finally came up--after a suitably minor-key, but deeply satisfying ending--I barely knew where I was. That's tribute enough to Bahrani's skills as a filmmaker, and the utterly convincing performances he elicits from his young leads and their co-stars.

Day 2: The 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival

2008-04-05T05:04:00.000-07:00

Yella (Germany, 2007) * * *
D: Christian Petzold

At every screening at WIFF, you're handed a ballot at the door, and on the way out you're asked to mark the little slip of paper and drop it off, grading a film on a five-point scale. It doesn't help that my mind can't really think in five-point grading scales, not even after a couple years of Netflix (perhaps it was those adolescent years spent checking out Roger Ebert video guides from the library). But it's even worse to try to judge a film on the spot, before you leave the theater. After the Friday afternoon screening of Yella at the Wisconsin Union Theater, I didn't know what to think. And after a half-hour-long argument with my wife about the film at Chin's Asia Fresh afterwards, I still didn't feel I could properly judge the merits of the film. Here's the problem. Yella is, by all appearances, a direct remake of Herk Harvey's 1962's horror classic Carnival of Souls, yet it doesn't announce its inspiration, leaving one who has seen the original film to keep wondering if this is a remake (until the ending, when it becomes clear that it is), and simply compare and contrast the two versions without an objective view of Yella's own effectiveness. (Incidentally, if Carnival of Souls were made today instead of forty-six years ago, it would most certainly be playing the Wisconsin Film Festival. It's a true classic of independent, zero-budget filmmaking, and worth seeking out - my review of that film is here.) The set-up is almost identical in both films. As in the original, the main character is caught in a car as it goes hurling off the edge of a bridge, and she crawls out of the water dazed and not quite herself. Yet she goes about her life, pursuing her dodgy career, and it's here that the details change dramatically enough to make Yella its own unique story. In the original, the protagonist, looking for a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City, is haunted by images of a walking corpse. In the 2007 version, Yella (Nina Hoss) is taking a job as an accountant, but her boss just got fired from the company, and her only prospect for employment is a young businessman who wants to take her on as his personal assistant for some shady, high-stakes business deals. At the same time, she is pursued by a specter--not of a ghoul, but of her psychotic ex-husband, the one who drove her off the bridge, and who apparently survived the crash. Most of the action takes place around a hotel, the kind you'd find near an airport in a nondescript part of town riddled by business parks and car rental lots. For some reason or another, hotel room doors are frequently left open, and the characters wander in and out of each other's rooms like lost souls, seeking companionship or violent, emotional confrontations. The arc Yella follows over the course of the film is curiously conflicted: on the one hand, she's developing a warm personal bond with her new boss, and seems to finally be finding happiness; on the other, she's becoming an increasingly impersonal and amoral dealmaker with little regard for the person at the other end of the table. Your feminist side wants to applaud her journey toward self-actualization, but it becomes increasingly obvious, as seemingly supernatural events keep intruding upon the narrative, that Yella is avoiding a harsh truth about herself, leading to a final revelation that you may or may not see coming a mile away. Since I'd seen Carnival of Souls, I knew the twist from the beginning of the film, and waited for its reveal; I admit that I have no idea how obvious it is to those unfamiliar with the original film--I'm also curious how effective the ending from that perspective. I feel like I can't judge the thing properly. But I am positive that it's a well-acted, beautifully edited thriller whose pace one might call "deliberate"--which of course means "slow"--though I found that refreshing: Yella has the patience to generate a slowly-building sense of dread. While refraining from overtly disturbing imagery, the film is almost psychically disturbing. I'm not sure that Yella adds up to very much in terms of meaning, but it's the rare genre film that largely avoids genre shortcuts to be effective.

Bon Cop, Bad Cop (Canada, 2006) * * 1/2
D: Erik Canuel

The setup of Bon Cop, Bad Cop is best illustrated in this photo. A dead body has been found on the border between Ontario and Québec--precisely on the border, suspended on the sign, and therefore overlapping the police jurisdictions of both territories (I didn't realize that highway signs marked borders so precisely, but perhaps the cops were too lazy to consult surveyor's maps.). A cop from each is assigned to the case: Toronto's tough-but-straightlaced cop Martin Ward (Colm Feore--read, Danny Glover), and tougher, loose cannon David Bouchard (Patrick Huard--read, Mel Gibson). Both are bilingual, but nonetheless Bouchard uses his French as a barrier to keeping Ward at bay, mumbling smartass comments in his native tongue. Both have a child and a woman tending the house--for divorcee Ward, it's his younger sister, who keeps a close eye on his teenage son, and for Bouchard, it's an ex-wife with whom he's still very close, and their young daughter, a ballerina. The murder is somehow tied to a conspiracy involving hockey teams--yes, this is the second film of the festival featuring Canada, hockey, and a ballerina, although, surprisingly for a buddy cop movie, there is less overtly homoerotic content than in Guy Maddin's film. Bon Cop, Bad Cop, really the first film to exploit the Canadian Film Board's government-sponsored resources to make a crowd-pleasing action film instead of an austere arthouse product, was a smash hit in its native country--which of course means that the country with which it shares a vast border has never heard of it. It's filled with Canadian humor, most obviously in its culture clashes between the Canadians and the Québécois, but also in little details, many of which, I'm sure, went over my head. But it does play to American audiences as a winking satire of Canadian culture, and is certainly worthy of a wider release down here. The problem is that it is really just a retread of the Lethal Weapon series, right down to the daughter-in-jeopardy climax; the humor, which is welcome, is unfortunately nowhere near as sophisticated, or as funny, as that found in last year's buddy-cop parody Hot Fuzz, and it suffers greatly by comparison. Still, the film was clearly a hit with Friday's night's capacity crowd at the Orpheum, who responded to the broad jokes and gross-out gags with tidal waves of laughter. I'm skeptical the film would work as well in a different setting, without such a pleasingly game audience.

Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes) (Spain, 2007) * * * *
D: Nacho Vigalando

I loved this movie. Both brilliant and dizzyingly absurd, Timecrimes begins as a semi-surrealist horror film, permeated with terror of the unknown, before--as that "unknown" is gradually revealed, and every room of a spooky old house is explored from various angles, making its residents known--transitioning into a grandly tragic comedy. It opens with Hector, a middle-aged, paunchy man given to voyeurism, his binoculars permanently hanging from his neck, unexpectedly discovering, from afar, a beautiful woman stripping in the woods. When he subsequently spies her lying inert, he ventures into the woods out of fateful curiosity--and is stabbed in the arm with a pair of scissors by a man with bloodied bandages about his face. He flees, climbing a fence and breaking into a neighboring building, which appears to be abandoned, though it has a sinister laboratory in the basement. And what happens then...well, let's say this much: it's a film about time travel, primarily, and if you plan on seeing it, you'd best stop reading there. It's almost impossible to describe Timecrimes without robbing the film of its chief weapon--surprise and fear (as Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition would put it)--and the less you know going in, the more effective and wonderful the film becomes. Then again, I eagerly await a second viewing, since the various twists can only muddy the film's narrative even more. If you've seen any time travel film made after the Back to the Future trilogy, or even The Terminator films, you will accept the rules this film puts forth unquestioningly. The beauty of Timecrimes is that it knows you'll follow its frenetic premise, which then allows writer-director Nacho Vigalando to take you upon the wildest of Möbius-strip rides, making you wonder why you'd accept the bizarre rules of time travel stories in the first place. Timecrimes makes not a lick of sense, ultimately, and yet it is logical and precise, building upon each established premise and raising the stakes each time Hector is plunged backward in time. What Hector does--and why he does it--makes this film a mini-masterpiece of black satire. The bandaged man, the girl in the woods, the man in the lab, the terrorized wife--all of these elements are arranged and rearranged like some complicated mathematical equation. Or a very good joke which Kurt Vonnegut might have told. (Incidentally, to give you a sense of how difficult it is to instantly judge a film with those ballots-at-the-door, I gave this film a 4 out of 5 when I left the theater last night, suspecting--though I loved what I'd seen--that Timecrimes might not have held up by the morning. Instead, I wake up to find myself even more enthralled and intrigued. Dammit.)

Day 1: The 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival

2008-04-03T17:11:00.000-07:00

My Winnipeg (Canada, 2007) * * * 1/2
D: Guy Maddin

It's the tenth anniversary of the Wisconsin Film Festival, held every year here in Madison, and for many locals it's traditionally a frenzied four days of squeezing as many films into their schedules as possible. As I do every year, I'll be blogging the fest right here, although this weekend I'm not sure I'll find much time to do so, since I'm seeing so many. The first day is kind of slow--just one film for me--but it started the festival with a bang. I'm no stranger to Canadian dream-savant Guy Maddin (see this essay), but I'm still amazed at the pace at which he issues his films, as though spewing them continuously from some grungy backroom meat grinder somewhere in Manitoba. Well, Winnipeg to be precise, the coldest city on Earth as Maddin hyperbolically puts it in his hyperbole-strewn autobiography, My Winnipeg. It's an autobiography-via-municipal history, with Maddin portrayed recurringly as the passenger of a drifting train, struggling to stay awake as outside the window we glimpse snowy images of the frozen city (from every angle). His films have always been autobiographical (his father died when he was young, and reincarnated fathers play a role in his first short, "The Dead Father," as well as last year's Brand Upon the Brain!), but My Winnipeg goes further than most, as Maddin directly addresses the audience, providing his own narration. I've listened to his audio commentaries and so I'm familiar with the sound of his voice, but to hear his narration, set to his own subjective montages of stock footage, I was struck at how much he reminded me of Michael Moore, in particular the early sections of Roger & Me. Winnipeg might as well be Flint, Michigan--nostalgically remembered, but desolate and nightmarish at the same time. Of course, this is still a Maddin film, and so the vaseline-smeared lens plummets through a series of eroticized tall tales from Winnipeg's history and Maddin's personal memories, all enacted using techniques that call to mind Eisenstein, Cocteau, Bunuel, and Bergman. He even adds a new trick: animation, albeit pleasingly Soviet-styled cutout animation like the 1920's animated feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed. (I'd like to see a lot more of this in the future, please.) And it's filled with bawdy humor, camp, and Maddin's peculiarly poetic writing, which marries dreamy surrealism to deadpan hilarity. The height must be the feverish séance scene, set in a Masonic temple, in which a ballerina leads the proceedings (shades of Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary) and coaxes, um, ectoplasm out of one of the young male volunteers. I thought this would be a toss-off, truncated Maddin film, but he delivers: it's another low-budget epic, stunning to look at, and extremely entertaining. It seemed to win over the medium-sized audience at the 5:15 screening at MMoCA, including, I'm sure, many being introduced to his bizarre filmmaking for the first time.

The Castle

2008-03-16T08:19:00.000-07:00

The Castle (Germany, 1997) * * * 1/2
D: Michael Haneke

To be a devotee of Franz Kafka is an almost sadomasochistic act of frustration, since his two masterworks, The Trial and The Castle, are books which are incomplete--missing many chapters, in the case of the former, and missing an ending, in the case of the latter. But then, this is my life, and I'm a frustrated individual. In high school I first discovered his writings--gravitating more toward The Trial and his short story "In the Penal Colony" than his more famous "The Metamorphosis," and obsessing over Orson Welles' 1962 adaptation of The Trial, which, with its horrendous sound quality and contrasty, beaten-up public domain prints, always looked like some mysterious relic from another dimension, and thus mesmerized me. (It was also, along with Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai and High and Low, my introduction to "art films.") I haven't read The Castle in eight or nine years, but upon watching Michael Haneke's 1997 adaptation (populated by familiar faces from the same year's Funny Games), I can say this matches my recollection exactly. This must be one of the most scrupulous literary adaptations ever made; it is faithful to a fault. But if you're a Kafka fan like myself, that fault will also be its strength. The Trial at least had a sketchy ending to draw from, and Welles used the fragmentary nature of the book as a stylistic device, embracing the dream-logic and paranoiac incoherency which builds and builds as the reader pushes through; the downbeat ending becomes appropriately apocalyptic in Welles' hands. But like the book he was adapting, Welles' work is broken and stamped-upon; like his films Mr. Arkadin and Othello, it was a low-budget movie scrapped together after years of effort, and demonstrates every injury. Appropriate, then, that Haneke's film also reflects its source, although it is considerably more polished and watchable. The protagonist of The Castle, known only as "K.," is a land surveyor who presses himself upon a small village ruled over by the mysterious "Castle," which we never arrive at, and its "Count," whom we never see. K. claims to have been summoned by the Castle, and yes, there was in fact a request for a land surveyor many years ago, although no one can agree upon whether or not he's still needed. Indeed, K. is continually congratulated upon the work he's been doing, even though, upon arriving at the village, all he can do is make inquiries to visit the Castle--ever denied--and attempt to infiltrate the upper echelons of the entangled bureaucracy. He seduces Frieda, the mistress of Kramm, one of the Castle's officials, and makes meetings with under-officials who have little interest in him. He is appointed two sycophantic assistants, whose help proves to be disastrous, and who never leave his side, even when he attempts to throw them out. Frieda, too, becomes worshipfully attached to him; she's an emotional wreck looking for any signs of admiration or approval. The way K. takes possession of her is surprisingly callous and self-serving; this is not the Joseph K. of The Trial, who has committed a crime he can't identify, but a man with identifiably monstrous traits. Although the Castle is callous and impenetrable, K.'s efforts to penetrate the castle gates are far from noble. His actions are often motivated by lust, cowardice, or greed for power. In a difficult book with little plot momentum, the fact that the hero is often unlikeable only makes matters worse; the fact that this aspect survived an adaptation to film is simply remarkable. But Haneke goes even further by emphasizing the random turns that all the characters take in Kafka's work: the inexplicable likes or dislikes the characters hold for K., and vice-versa. Kafka's cynical view is that all the world is impenetrable, forbidding, and ruthless; and we are criminals justly punished for attempt to infiltrate it. Haneke intermittently uses a narrator to read Kafka's prose, as K. stumbles through the snowy village from one futile task to another, and cleverly uses the fragmentary nature of the novel to accentuate the book's humor--cutting suddenly to black for a few seconds before the next scene only places emphasis on the absurd ends at which the last scene had arrived. I awaited with great curiosity what kind of ending Haneke would give this endless work, but instead of attempting to draw conclusions where none can be drawn, Haneke presents the ending as Kafka wrote it: an abandoned sentence, as Kafka gave in to fatigue and left the manuscript as it was. While the film threatens to fatigue the viewer, those attuned to its perverse satire will appreciate just how unique The Castle is. A piece of broken literature can become one-of-a-kind cinema.

The Burglar

2008-03-08T05:18:00.000-08:00

The Burglar (U.S., 1957) * * *
D: Paul Wendkos

The UW Cinematheque is screening recent Columbia Pictures restorations throughout the spring semester, and the series launched last night with an overlooked late film noir from the director of Gidget, of all people. While the screening had some sound issues in the last half of the film, the picture itself was gorgeous: just about the only clue that the opening newsreel was not real but a part of the film itself was the fact that it looked so crisp and clean. It's a wry opening, with factoids about "belles lifting barbells" "every hour to keep that hourglass shape," eventually settling on an occult spiritualist and her obscene wealth--a great mansion, a big pool, and an emerald necklace which--as the camera pans back out of the newsreel into the theater--catches the eye of Nathaniel (character actor Dan Duryea), a professional burglar. As he exits the theater, and lets his gravelly face tower above the camera, we're treated to the kind of jazzy opening credits sequence that was the hallmark of a lot of great noirs. If the opening reminds one of Orson Welles (the use of newsreel harkens back to Citizen Kane), so does The Burglar's punchy editing, overheated character acting, and inventive camera angles (one humorous shot depicts the discovery of the missing loot from the point of view of the open safe); even the climax pays homage to The Lady from Shanghai, although that might have been a rote requirement for the genre at this point. The plot is almost unusually untangled, barring one effective twist halfway through. Nat decides to steal the emerald necklace, so he enlists girlfriend Gladden (Jayne Mansfield, surprisingly good) to befriend the lonely woman and scope the joint out. She discovers where the safe is located--it's never explained how, thanks to an effective, forward-jumping cut which takes us from the Gladden the old woman perceived (down-on-her-luck, humble) to the Gladden Nat knows (a cynical, sultry thief). We're also introduced to his other partners: a nervous wreck intent on getting to Central America, and a thug who can't respect Gladden's personal space. During the robbery itself, the police discover the burglars' car parked near the mansion; Nat seemingly talks his way out of their suspicions, but after the robbery, this encounter gives the police a sketch artist's profile of the prime suspect. The tension builds as Nat tries to convince his partners to stay holed-up, to contact no one, and to hold onto the necklace for just a little while longer until the heat dies down--but meanwhile, he's forced to get Gladden out of the picture, which begins a chain reaction that leads to double-crosses and violence.

Like most noirs, The Burglar is downbeat and pessimistic, with a protagonist whose struggle to juggle oncoming crises ultimately leads to catastrophe and murder. Duryea is excellent at invoking the audience's sympathy while events spin out of his control; good enough, in fact, that the screenplay (by acclaimed noir writer David Goodis, adapting his own novel) should not have needed to laboriously explain his backstory, which involves being trained, as a child, by a professional burglar who steals to put food on the table, and whose death might be Nat's fault. (This flashback is literally fog-enshrouded, to the point of cliché, though for genre aficionados that's part of the fun.) Mansfield, who only has one scene in a swimsuit (and it's a yowza!), is impressively understated, serving this gloomy picture well, and off-setting the delirious presentations of her on-screen colleagues. It's a satisfying little picture, doing nothing extraordinary but everything just right. There's a brutality to the ending which noirs of the 40's couldn't have gotten away with--I'm thinking specifically of the number of gunshots seen and heard--and its leanness anticipates the best French noirs. One expects an excellent DVD release in the near future.

Southland Tales

2008-03-01T06:09:00.000-08:00

Southland Tales (U.S., 2007) *
D: Richard Kelly

The cliché is that it takes great talent to make a truly terrible movie. Lots of notable directors have overambitious, hubristic disasters in their resumés. Otto Preminger's Skidoo. Barry Levinson's Toys. David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees. Hell, even John Huston contributed to 1967's leadenly unfunny James Bond parody Casino Royale. But as this blog has past attested, I am a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan, and those films have nothing on the works of Coleman Francis and Ed Wood. Sometimes bad is just bad. The big tragedy of Southland Tales, the sophomore film of Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, is that it's so bad that it makes you wonder if it's in the Preminger category or the Francis one. I liked Donnie Darko. After Southland Tales, I'm so disappointed that I'm not sure I want to hear anything more Kelly has to say.

The convoluted, multi-threaded storyline has an Altmanesque ensemble of celebrities and quasi-celebrities cast as various eccentrics. Dwayne Johnson, aka "The Rock," plays Boxer Santaros, a Schwarzenegger-like movie star with political ties; at the outset of the movie, he has been found wandering the desert with little memory of his past. He falls in with Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a pornstar attempting to build a media empire around her name; she is secretly in league with a group of revolutionary Marxists who have a complex extortionist scheme involving both Santaros and Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), who has a mysterious double. There's also corrupt Senator Bobby Frost (Holmes Obsorne); his wife, Nana Mae (Miranda Richardson), who runs a government system (provided for by the Patriot Act) that monitors all citizens - even when they use the toilet; their daughter - and Santaros' wife - Madeline (Mandy Moore); Baron Von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), the mastermind behind an alternative energy source which uses tidal energy to manipulate objects from afar; and a soldier (Justin Timberlake), narrating the film, watching the action from a gun turrett high on a building overlooking the Pacific Ocean, himself addicted to a drug made from the same substance that powers the Baron's energy source. There's also a metaphysical mystery, a la Donnie Darko's, centering around a dead body found in the desert - a man Santaros may have killed - and of course Taverner's strange doppelgänger and three mysterious women who may be - no, are - harbingers of the Apocalypse. The story is hard to follow not because it's overly complex, but because we don't care about any of the characters, therefore we have no emotional investment in the plot. A lot of things happen in this movie, but it's not until the very last stretch, when the metaphysical cord of the mystery begins to unravel, that we muster a vestige of interest. Or not, because we left the theater two hours ago.

It might just be that I have little patience for writing that's both terrible and self-satisfied, and Southland Tales is full of it. The characters all speak in non-sequiturs, as though Kelly is certain that his film will be such a cult classic that these pieces of dialogue will one day adorn tee-shirts and coffee mugs. But the "satirical" dialogue is almost never funny, because Kelly does not, apparently, know how to write comedy, let alone direct it. Casting familiar faces from Saturday Night Live (Nora Dunn, Amy Poehler, Cheri Oteri) does not automatically mean that the stilted lines they're given to deliver will be hilarious. The extended scenes in the secret Marxist compound are truly gruelling, as these comediennes - who can be very funny, given the right material - scream their dialogue and belabor ill-conceived gags, while taking the viewer along subplots that don't mean much to the bigger picture. Kelly wants to make an all-encompassing satire about American society. He wants to attack the Bush administration, the war on terror, the war in Iraq. He wants to show how we've all become "pimps" as our culture degenerates into the oversexed and overcrass. He namechecks the Pixies ("Wave of Mutiliation" is sung, and also becomes the title of the last "chapter" of the film) and a Philip K. Dick novel (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which I recommend reading instead of seeing this film). Like Terry Gilliam's Brazil, he layers this alternate reality with slogans, posters, and traces of backstory that suggest a fictional world that extends beyond the boundaries of the film, but to no effect, because the mythology of Southland Tales isn't particularly intriguing. (A comic book written by Kelly preceded the release of the film, and provides the opening chapters to this story which begins in media res.) That's at least partly an issue of timing: his political jibes seem obvious today, and would have seemed more relevant and daring four years ago.

To Kelly's credit, his film first opened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, with a running time closer to three hours. Reviews were disastrous, although Film Comment was kind, favorably comparing his film to David Lynch's Inland Empire. Hoping to gain wider distribution, Kelly spent almost two years re-editing and reshaping his film, as well as adding more special effects, as he did for the director's cut of Donnie Darko. I can only guess that much of the narration and exposition in this final cut of Southland Tales was added over those two years, and although it helpfully fills out the backstory and fills in the more incoherent aspects of the plot, it also overcompensates by providing too much explanation. The effect is like reading an ambitious science fiction novella written by a creative writing student while he simultaneously shouts his themes and intentions into your ear. You can also feel that the film is missing whole chunks of its story, in particular much of Timberlake's character and the subplot involving drug addiction; Kelly seems to be going somewhere with the idea of the Baron's alternative fuel source being used to control the minds of drug-abusing soldiers, but then drops that plot in the rush to the climax. I also glimpsed Janeane Garofalo dancing with Timberlake at the end of the film: IMDB confirms her presence as "General Teena MacArthur," so presumably the rest of her material is on the cutting room floor. Do we have to wait for another "director's cut"? I'd rather not.

This film was released in U.S. theaters, after that long delay, in November of 2007. It finally appeared in Madison this weekend - February 29, 2008 (Kelly might appreciate his film's opening on a day that only occurs once every four years). If it seems unusual that Southland Tales materializes in my local theater only a few weeks before its scheduled DVD release date (March 18), chalk that up to the desperate straits that the theater, Westgate Cinemas, has found itself. It was once the premier art house theater serving Madison, but since Robert Redford opened his better-in-every-way Sundance Cinemas just down the road, Westgate has been scrambling to retain its audiences. For about a month or so they scheduled touring stand-up comics, and they began serving alcohol. Now Westgate shows older films like Goodfellas in addition to some of the less-popular art house films (i.e., those Sundance lets them have). My wife and I hadn't been to Westgate in a long while, and were shocked to find it deserted on a Friday night. She bought a beer from the concession stand, and was given a wristband to wear: "You can take it off when you're done with your beer." To approach the theater showing Southland Tales--the main auditorium--we had to pass beneath a ceiling leaking water. As soon as we sat down, even though we were ten minutes early, the projectionist immediately dimmed the lights and started the film. Although this was opening night, his instinct was correct; no one else showed up. The odd result is that I felt that I was "bearing witness" to Southland Tales. I had to be there to prove that it happened. That we had gone at all was my wife's idea; she wanted to be able to tell people that we saw it on the big screen. I'm not sure that I'll be bragging about that anytime soon. I was hoping Southland Tales would be a forgotten classic, the sort of film that critics dismiss now but is revived in reputation years down the road. Instead this is something more akin to the misfires directed by Robert Altman: the chaotic Brewster McCloud, the turgid Quintet. If Kelly goes on to better things (he has another film, The Box, opening later this year), then Southland Tales will get periodically re-evaluated. I would suggest, with heavy heart, that it's not worth the effort. The film is excruciating. You've been warned.

Transformers Cause Head to Hurt

2008-02-28T18:43:00.000-08:00

Transformers (U.S., 2007) * 1/2
D: Michael Bay

What caused me to rent Michael Bay's Transformers? Was it nostalgia for my childhood toys and cartoons? Was it the exposure to too many Oscar films at once during this Oscar season, that I needed a lowbrow, big budget chaser to clear the palate? Was it just the sheer number of boxes on the shelf at the video store, that seemed to insist that my only real choices were either this or 30 Days of Night? Was it a morbid curiosity to see if Michael Bay is really as bad as all his detractors claim, since I've seen none of his films? The film does not start promisingly. The opening image is of a cube standing still in some distant galaxy, a narrator explaining that this object, called, imaginatively, "The Cube," is at the center of an alien war. At this point I am given to wonder if Uwe Boll has been handed a budget, and these are the results. What follows is one scene after another, each compressed so tightly that it might almost form a diamond, or a mushroom cloud, although the actual result is just a lot of frenetic camera-whippings and Shia LaBeouf, not entirely unappealing, reduced to sweating a lot and desperately delivering his lines before Bay cuts to the next scene. Sometimes he manages to get all the words out. Sometimes Bay is forced to interrupt him to cut to an unrelated comedy bit by Bernie Mac or John Turturro, or to leer at the hopelessly tanned Megan Fox, or to show a helicopter or tank or truck turning into a giant robot and smashing the bejeezus out of things. It is not enough that the robots stand around and look mighty. They must also behave like wacky Jim Henson Muppets, as a stealthy Decepticon spy does, or like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as most of the "heroic" Autobots do. I place "heroic" in quotation marks because I'll be damned if I can isolate a single scene in which one of the Autobots does anything remotely admirable. True, "Bumblebee" does try to help LaBeouf score with Fox, but my memory of this scene is almost entirely erased by the moment in which the adorable Transformer pisses on Turturro's head. While the score by Steve Jablonsky ("Desperate Housewives") shamelessly steals from The Terminator, we watch the Autobots slowly form an allegiance with the two teens in an effort to battle the Decepticons for control of the Cube. Can you think of a nobler cause? Meanwhile, in War Games (1983) as well as this film, another group of attractive young hackers match wits with the military-industrial complex, leading eventually for all these story threads to sort of collapse into the shape a cat makes with a ball of yarn after an hour of effort. Like climbing a mountain, this film exists because it's there.

But I'm worried. What if Bay has made his film so impatient, so childish, so tightly-edited, so Ritalin-deprived, that it will, if watched too often, actually open up a black hole in the fabric of the universe, sucking into it all that we hold dear (reality)? What if it is creating some kind of cosmic imbalance that must be dealt with as though it were equivalent to the global warming crisis, only more urgent? I see only one solution. Michael Bay is 43. We must find a 43-year old director the equal of a Michelangelo Antonioni. This director, who may or may not exist, must immediately set to work on a feature film adaptation of Gobots. However, unlike Transformers, this Gobots film will be set to the pace of a L'Avventura, a L'Eclisse, or a Blow-Up. The takes will be extended, and the camera will glide slowly. For God's sake, we must not be in a hurry. The plot will revolve around the mysterious disappearance of Cy-Kill, the villainous motorcycle. Fitor, the jet-robot, tries to discover if he was murdered, kidnapped, or simply wandered off in a fit of existential ennui. Although it is equally important that the viewer must work to discover that this is even the plot, and no resolution must ever be found. Despite the fact that almost all the characters will have wheels on their backs or windshields on their chests, none of them ever transforms into anything, reflecting the state of psychological and emotional stagnancy in which they are trapped. If we can get this film in production quickly, equal the budget of Bay's film and get it into the theaters before the end of this summer, we might be able to prevent cosmic collapse. Get to work.

2007 Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films

2008-02-20T19:40:00.000-08:00

This year the Oscar category for Best Animated Feature Film is unusually strong, with two extraordinary animated films, one CG and aimed at families (Pixar/Disney's Ratatouille), the other 2-D, and a personal film intended for adults (Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis). I'd be pleased to see either win. But let's not forget the animated short films, and it's worth noting that if you live near a major city, there's a good chance that you can catch Shorts International's program of the 2007 Academy Award Nominated Short Films. In Madison, both of the Shorts International programs (for live action and animation) are playing at the Sundance 608 Theater through tomorrow night. Unfortunately, the animated films I watched this evening were screened via DVD instead of film (and it was a bit contrasty and blurry), but you take what you can get. The selection of nominees this year is definitely a step up from last year's, since the 2006 crop featured only one excellent film ("The Danish Poet," which thankfully won), and this year's features two. "Only two?" Well, I'm also consoled by the fact that only one of the five shorts is generic 3-D CG, the others using digital animation only to augment more traditional techniques. Canada's "Madame Tutli-Putli," by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, is a semi-parodic tale of pulpy horror, as the title character--a puppet with what appears to be live-action eyes, overlarge and filled with terror--boards a train and witnesses bizarre, otherworldy events. The technique is interesting, but apart from a few, scattered clever ideas, the piece is aimless and disappointing. "I Met the Walrus" (Canada) is better, if slight; it's a 1970's audio interview conducted with John Lennon by a 14-year-old boy, with Lennon's twisting language (about peaceful protests and the Beatles) artfully illustrated in black-and-white collage. The clunker of the program is "Even Pigeons Go to Heaven" (France), with dreadful CG animation and a story (a huckster pitches a machine that can transport you to Heaven) that is under-developed, with a cheap, unfunny punchline. Nevertheless, your attendance will be rewarded by the two longest films in the program, which are mini-masterpieces. Russia's "My Love," directed by Alexander Petrov, utilizes gorgeous animation which looks like living, swirling oil paintings. A rarity for animation, the story lives up to the technique, telling an unexpectedly mature tale of a 15-year-old Russian poet wrestling with his first loves--for an earthy, impetuous servant girl, and a mysterious, bespectacled older woman--and struggling to maintain a "pure" love despite all that might compromise it. It's the first animated film I've ever seen that aspires to something akin to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it mines emotionally and intellectually rich material. It's deserving of the Academy's recognition, yet I would be also pleased to see Suzie Templeton's "Peter & the Wolf" win. This UK/Polish production uses charmingly simple stop-motion animation, but with a wit and humanity that elevates the approach, even while poking fun at the familiarity of the Prokofiev source material. I guarantee that when the familiar theme music finally, belatedly kicks in, the film will hold you captive. Too often animated films look like resume-builders; talented or proficient artists with nothing to say and workmanlike results. "My Love" and "Peter & the Wolf," like "The Danish Poet," are the work of artists expressing themselves by any means necessary. They're beautiful works of animation, but they're also vital pieces of art.

Two by Haneke

2008-02-17T06:25:00.000-08:00

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (Austria/Germany, 1994) * * *
Benny's Video (Austria/Switzerland, 1992) * * *
D: Michael Haneke

The Madison Cinematheque on Saturday night continued its Michael Haneke series, A Cinema of Provokation, with two films from the director's "Glaciation Trilogy," oddly enough shown backwards. (The first film from the trilogy, The Seventh Continent, will be screened on March 8.) All three films are connected thematically, and it would be premature for me to comment on exactly what those themes are since I've yet to see The Seventh Continent - but judging from the second and third films, most evident is Haneke's preoccupation with how families negotiate and respond to violence in contemporary culture, and how television and video package it. Even more than David Cronenberg, Haneke's "thrillers" function primarily on an intellectual level; he is not interested in manipulating the audience per se, but in making the audience aware of the manipulations of cinema (and, by extension, the media). His films are self-reflexive, at times postmodern (as with Funny Games), but they nevertheless seek to restore the impact and trauma of violence, with visceral results. Perhaps the loudest and strongest reactions I've ever witnessed from a theater audience were during two Haneke films, Cache and Funny Games. For the former, it was in horror at a sudden act of violence - the audience had been lulled into a passive state by the carefully-paced film before it was jolted by Haneke's hand, and one woman screamed. In the latter, the reaction was a cheer for a long-awaited vengeance against the film's villains - a gesture swiftly revoked and negated by Haneke (which brought about another loud cry from a few viewers). Haneke's manipulation is more subtle than one at first realizes; although he makes you aware of the manipulation, it nonetheless is functional. His films are absorbing. Yet in many cases they are as absorbing as studying a surveillance monitor. There is an untraceable moment when boredom switches over to hypnosis, before he slaps you into a sharp sense of awareness.

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance is the final film in the Glaciation Trilogy, and it begins with an announcement of its ending: that on Christmas Eve, 1993, a 19-year-old student will go on a shooting spree in a bank before putting a bullet in his head. Haneke then cuts to the evening news, which we watch for several minutes, and which will recur throughout the film: massacres in Kosovo, organized protests against United States policies, the immigration problem in Austria, the child abuse case against Michael Jackson. The 71 scenes cut between the news footage vary dramatically in length, and follow seemingly disconnected characters: a homeless child eating from the trash and stealing from train station vendors, an unhappily married couple, a couple looking to adopt a child, a grandfather scorned and isolated by his family, and a pair of students working on a puzzle for a computer programming class and handling a stolen weapon. The moments seem to be selected at random, but we become slowly aware of the rhyme and reason: all of these characters are ultimately headed toward the fateful encounter in the bank - though Haneke refrains from commenting. We focus our attention where we like, although some characters prove more compelling than others. Most naturally one will be looking for "warning signs" in the student who will become the killer, although we're given scant clues; he holds up a cheery veneer to friends and family, although we know he's stressed by his training to be a table tennis champion (there is an exhaustive four-minute, uninterrupted sequence of the young man robotically smacking at the ping pong balls launched by a ball machine, and later his coach forces him to watch repeated video playback of his loss in a game). When the act of violence finally comes, at the very end of the film, we are unsurprised but nevertheless feel unprepared. The shooting now seems senseless because we see that it didn't have to happen; there is no real motive. We may be conscious, in the 90 minutes leading to it, that Haneke wants us to see that it's pure chance that these characters would be victims - that they would arrive at the bank at just the wrong moment. But once we have seen it unfold, we realize it was chance that the shooting happened at all. Nevertheless, those 71 scenes depict a contemporary culture that effects an intense psychological strain against its populace. One gets the feeling that random acts of violence are inevitable when society creates barriers to leave every person in a state of emotional isolation. The film's trump card is its final scene, when we see the bank shooting as processed (like a McDonald's hamburger) into a brief thirty-second snippet on the evening news.

Haneke's earlier film, Benny's Video, has a more linear narrative, as well as a structure like a Hitchcock film, although it is more disorienting and disturbing than 71 Fragments. The title character is a spoiled middle-class adolescent who spends night and day watching rented videos and maintaining a surveillance of the outside street through a video monitor. (The central ironic metaphor of the film is that Benny watches a video of the outside rather than simply looking out the window; it is somehow more important that reality get processed into pixels.) He is obsessed with video he took on his parents' farm of a pig getting executed. It's this footage, played once at regular speed, then rewound and played in slow motion, which opens the film, initiating a series of re-viewings which are threaded through the film. When Benny's parents leave him alone for the weekend, he invites a teenage girl over to his place to watch movies. With a strange fascination he shows her the pig video, and then the gun used to shoot the pig, which he keeps in a drawer. He dares her to pull the trigger. She won't, so he does, shooting her multiple times in an extended, agonizing sequence whose brutality is expressed from the point of view of the video monitor, where we can only get brief flashes of movement while the sounds of the girl's screams and pleas burn into our ears. It's a violent scene, but the paradox is that although Haneke places it within a doubled frame - within the video monitor, within the film we are watching - it is somehow even more disturbing than if he had just shown everything to us directly. True, the best suspense directors know that sometimes it's more effecting to not show, but to imply. But Haneke is not after suspense. He is after "nausea," to use one of the key words spoken in the film. And somehow to watch this scene as filtered by the imperfect eye of the video monitor is to render the action more real. It becomes a documentary.

Haneke is not interested in "torture porn," a trend that wouldn't emerge for another decade, and what's most surprising about Benny's Video is that there's so much left once the murder has been committed. Benny cleans up after the body (but not until he's videotaped the corpse, to complete his snuff film), then attempts to resume his normal life. He almost tells a friend, when he sleeps over at his house that night, but resists; he goes to his sister, and we're not certain if he would have told her if she'd been in that day. He defiantly shaves off all his hair. He gets into an altercation with his friend at school. If his rebellion seems like a cry for help, it's blunted when he actually sits his mother down and shows her the video of the murder. Her reaction--and his father's, when he enters the room--is the film's centerpiece. She is watching with horror and fascination. Her expression suggests that she is watching it as one might watch a thriller--as a passive viewer held in suspense; she is struggling to grasp that what is on-screen has actually come to pass. She doesn't switch off the video and call the police. She and her husband watch it to the end. And in the interest of double-framing everything, Haneke has us watch the footage for the second time, but the conditions upon which this video is being viewed seem to transform what we are seeing and how we react to it. We are watching the film through the parents' eyes, and we are also watching the film through Benny's eyes, watching his parents watching the video. This might all seem hopelessly intellectualized if it weren't for the visceral reaction the scene provokes. It's as though Haneke isn't just interested in indicting the viewer's voyeurism; he wants to study the texture of it.

There's more to Benny's Video, which I won't spoil, except to say that it may sacrifice believability for the sake of making a point about the fractured values of the contemporary family. Ultimately, what the film might present most successfully is a portrait of an emotionally disconnected youth (the parents are less convincing). It certainly has a lot more plot than 71 Fragments, although both films are more interested in theoretical explorations than storytelling. As cinematic sticks of dynamite, they're noteworthy: angry, shocking polemics which avoid the sensationalism of directors like Todd Solondz and Lars von Trier, substituting instead pungent doses of reality. Or Reality TV.

In Bruges

2008-02-13T19:20:00.000-08:00

In Bruges (U.K., 2008) * * * *
D: Martin McDonagh

There are a number of points upon which In Bruges places great emphasis. A bottle is a deadly weapon. Bare hands can be deadly weapons, too. Many famous dwarfs have committed suicide. You cannot be held responsible for what you say or do under the influence of cocaine, but neither can those actions be easily forgotten. But most of all, it is stressed that Bruges is in Belgium. If you didn't know that, you could take (small) comfort that neither did Ray (Colin Farrell), a novice, Irish hitman who's been sent there with his partner Ken (Brendan Gleeson) for reasons unknown to either one of them. They suspect they're on a job, but they won't know until their short-tempered boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), calls them at their hotel. In the meantime, Ken is intent on showing Ray the local medieval architecture, although Ray thinks Bruges is "a shithole." While they wait for that fateful call, and sightsee, we see Bruges from Ray's point of view: as a dull tourist-magnet whose most promising attributes are (a) a film production in progress "with midgets," and (b) the drug-dealer servicing the Belgium film crew, attractive and, inexplicably, romantically interested in him. While Ray becomes entangled with the locals, Ken is alone when he receives the call from Harry--which will change everything.

As In Bruges is a black comedy about hitmen, you might suspect you've walked down this path already. Grosse Point Blank (1997), for example, or Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). What's refreshing and remarkable about In Bruges is that, despite its basic plot structure, the individual scenes are unpredictable, playing to the rhythms of the characters--characters you have not seen in films before. In Bruges is a black comedy aimed at intelligent adults; it expects you to keep pace with its imagination, while understanding when it's appropriate to laugh and when it is not--and why some key scenes play to both ends. It's written and directed by playwright Martin McDonagh, and the script sharply uses the characters to drive the action. So diverting are its characters that although you know guns will eventually be brandished, and bullets will fly, you'd rather they didn't; you like these people too much to see them go down in a bloody battle. Thus, murder carries a weight rare in black comedies of this vein, although violence of other sort is dished out with abandon. After all, if someone comes at you with a bottle, however you react is just self-defense.

The cast is perfect, Farrell in particular a revelation as Ray, whose childlike qualities are pivotal to the film's major theme (never kill a child). Ray has all the depth of a thinly-sliced piece of sandwich cheese; when he struggles to come up with a clever scheme to convince Ken to let him leave the hotel room, you can see the thoughts working across his face as though pulled by slave labor. The real wonder is why Farrell, with talent like this, keeps getting typecast in films like Alexander (2004) and Miami Vice (2006). He seems more at ease playing the fool, and here he's a fool so instantly iconic that you could slap him on a Tarot card. Gleeson has been granted a more versatile career as a character actor, best known lately as "Mad-Eye" Moody in the Harry Potter films (there's a nod to the Potter films here that may make you weep with laughter). Like Farrell, he's exceptionally funny, and has a pair of scenes with Fiennes late in the film which are so good that you can rest assured he will not be recognized come Oscar time 2009. Fiennes essays a low-class crook chafing at the high class his money has bought him; he's quick to offense, with an impeccable since of honor and pride. It's the sort of role Bob Hoskins used to play, but since it's Fiennes--a man who could have had a career like Farrell's, but has instead played fat Nazis, disfigured sorcerors, and shy gardeners--the result feels like something completely new. It may be that Harry feels like a unique human being, even though his character--in this kind of film, in this genre--doesn't have to be. That's what's brilliant about In Bruges. It didn't have to be, but it's a deeply soulful and human satire. Plus it has the range to make dwarf jokes and Bosch references, sometimes in the same breath.

The Best Films of 2007 (Hers)

2008-02-01T13:31:00.000-08:00

Because she is married to a film buff, my wife is a film buff by proxy. This is her list of the best films of 2007 (mine, previously posted, is here).

1. Paprika (Satoshi Kon)
This is a film made for me. A female scientist creates an alternate personality to interact with patients in their dreams. The imagination in the dream worlds results in really beautiful scenes, and the philosophy that allows dreams, the internet, and movies to intertwine is fascinating.

2. Once (John Carney)
A musical for the indie crowd. A street musician meets up with a struggling mother with a good voice. I loved the music and the bittersweet tone of the film.

3. The Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin)
The second film in Guy Maddin’s "Me" trilogy. We saw this in Chicago performed live by Crispin Glover, a castrato, and orchestra, and several foley artists. We saw it again in the recorded version with Isabella Rosellini, but unfortunately it wasn’t quite as good that way. I love the silent-film-era effects and the confused sexual expression.

4. No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen)
I agree with the critics on this film, as it is very good. A film about a man who finds some money and becomes hunted, but it's really about how the characters in the film deal with life, death, their ideals, and their responsibilities.

5. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Sidney Lumet)
This is one of those films about a perfect crime gone horribly wrong. It’s also about dealing with life and death, but from the coward’s perspective.

6. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson)
A Wes Anderson movie. Three brothers go on a pilgrimage to India to speak to their mother. The film has wonderful comic moments and is held together by the belief that the brothers really do love each other and depend on each other no matter what their actions might show.

7. Zodiac (David Fincher)
A crime movie without a solution. I loved the inside look on how these brutal murders, with so much evidence, could go unsolved. The film has gone out of its way to be accurate down to what the characters are wearing and even where the trees are located, and while several theories are presented, the audience is left to figure it out for themselves. I’m working on my own theory about the killings (I think there was more than one Zodiac).

8. Across the Universe (Julie Taymor)
Another of those films that is made for me. This musical uses Beatles songs as a base, then re-imagines and re-records the songs adding beautiful, often fanciful imagery. The songs turn out wonderfully (and this is from a person who hates most Beatles covers). The story is done well, but the film could have fleshed out the minor characters more.

9. Juno (Jason Reitman)
This is a comedy about teen pregnancy. The pregnancy is actually treated rather seriously as it deserves, but allows humor to mask some of the pain and fear that comes with being pregnant so young.

10. King of Kong (Seth Gordon)
This movie made me care about who has the high score in Donkey Kong. That is a major accomplishment. The documentary proves that real life can be funnier and more outrageous than fiction (although for some reason, probably involving a lot of money, they are remaking this as a fiction film).

Next 5: Sunshine (beautiful, but serial killer plotline is uninspired), No End in Sight (very informative look at exactly how close we came to getting the Iraq war right, and how much better everything could have been), Ratatouille (a story about being yourself no matter how impractical it may be), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (legend vs. reality of two very complicated men), Eastern Promises (such a great fight scene)

Note: I have yet to see Michael Clayton, Persepolis, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, or Atonement. And I'm not sure I will see all of those.

***

Okay, enough of letting my wife write on my blog. Back to my reviews...

Funny Games

2008-01-27T05:57:00.000-08:00

Funny Games (Austria, 1997) * * *
D: Michael Haneke

A bourgeois couple, Georg (Ulrich Mühe) and Anna (Susanne Lothar), with their young son Georgie and their dog, are staying in a lakeside home, with all the luxuries that entails, including a dock for their boat and an impenetrable fence. But Georg opens that fence for two unfamiliar faces, nondescript, white-gloved fellows who claim to be staying with the neighbors. Calling themselves Peter (Frank Giering) and Paul (Arno Frisch)--and, later, Tom & Jerry and Beavis & Butthead--they proceed to ingratiate themselves into the home, which they refuse to leave. This quickly escalates into violence: when Georg tries to throw them out, he gets a leg broken by a golf club. Their dog is killed, and the family is held hostage for an evening of sadistic "games," the principal one being a bet that they won't survive the next twelve hours.

Since this film was released in 1997, Haneke has gained an international reputation as an art cinema provocateur, a Hitchcockian master of suspense as self-reflexive as Jean-Luc Godard. Indeed, both directors would love the film: Hitchcock for its open manipulation of the audience's fears and expectations, Godard for its playful violations of cinematic convention: "Peter" looks directly into the camera, winking at the audience, sometimes addressing us or, at one point, admitting to his hostages that they have to keep on with the games to pad this out to "feature length." At one point he even seizes a TV remote control to rewind time when one of the hostages gains the upper hand. The biggest tension of Funny Games is between these bursts of cartoonish irreality and the extended harrowing and grueling scenes of torture and grief that constitute the bulk of the film--the faker-than-fake and the realer-than-real.

We have seen home invasion and hostage films before. We anticipate the family gaining the upper hand on their tormentors at some point. When young Georgie escapes from the house, fleeing to the neighbors' to look for help, we're gripped with suspense, in fear for the boy's life, just as we expect that all of this will come to something fruitful; even if he's recaptured, we think, he'll leave some clue behind that will eventually lead to his family's deliverance. That's how these movies work. Certainly Haneke wouldn't have this whole setpiece be for naught. Similarly, when Anna escapes late in the film, after the captors have seemingly left for good, we're convinced their torment isn't over yet, simply because the film is still happening. And there has to be a point to all this, right? The bad guys have to get their comeuppance, a la The Virgin Spring or its grindhouse equivalent, The Last House on the Left. Perhaps Anna will find the villains at a disadvantage, and wreak a horrible revenge?

But as soon as we see that Peter & Paul can even reverse time to reconfigure reality to their advantage, Haneke might as well step into the frame to gloat over how he's stacked the deck. At this point, near the end of the film, all suspense is drained and we're left with either (a) blackest amusement, or (b) bottomless dread that Haneke can now subject us to anything. Actually, of course, there isn't really anywhere else to go, and the film settles with a rather obvious circular conclusion. But although you're struck by the style, you're left wondering what it was all about.

It's about movie violence vs. real violence, movie catharsis vs. real catharsis, movie characters vs. real human beings. Tom & Jerry and Beavis & Butthead are violent cartoon characters (famously, one five-year-old who watched those MTV arsonists Beavis & Butthead burned down his family's mobile home; whatever the real connection, his mother sued the network). Funny Games is an angry attack on the media's trivialization of violence. It restores the weight and tragedy of violence while contrasting it with the phony expectations of the thriller genre. The hostages in Funny Games are "real" people; when they grieve at the loss of a life, in one astonishing extended take that seems to last for ages, it's heartbreaking and also convincing. But the two antagonists are "movie" characters. Their motives are nonexistent, and the plot manipulates itself to their advantage. (Also notice that when one of them stalks little Georgie through the neighbors' house, he seems to be everywhere at once; that's because he is, probably watching the film just as you are.) At one point, they even address the difference between fictional characters and reality--Peter insists there's no difference, since what you see on the movie screen is as real to your eyes as anything else. At that moment, it's the last thing you want to hear, since events have become so sickening that you want to believe it's just a movie.

For all its effort, Funny Games is a film which pushes you away from it just as strongly as the deliberately artificial suspense pulls your emotions and sympathies back in. As a cinematic thesis, it's clever, if a bit too smug (and honestly, someone like Jacques Rivette would have gone even further in exploring the meta-fiction and the ideas beneath). As a film, it's almost unbearably suspenseful, but all of this is ultimately undercut. Haneke is a hell of a filmmaker, and the filmmaking on display is master-class. I'm not quite convinced that this anti-thriller thriller avoids collapsing beneath its own paradox, but on the other hand I admire what's on the screen. I recommend it by saying that if you've read this far, you know if you'd like it. It's essential viewing for film buffs with a strong stomach.

[As a footnote, I should mention that Haneke has just remade this film as an American production with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth in the lead roles. Due for release shortly, by all accounts it is a faithful adaptation of the original film.]

Funny Games is the first film in the series, "Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Provocation." Subsequent Haneke films will be screened for free at the University of Wisconsin's Cinematheque through the rest of the spring semester. Check their website for details.

Cobra Verde

2008-01-15T19:25:00.000-08:00

Cobra Verde (West Germany/Ghana, 1987) * * * *
D: Werner Herzog

Herzog's last film with Klaus Kinski is a forgotten epic, a rewarding spectacle that's often misunderstood by those who've only viewed it once. A notorious bandit, "Cobra Verde" (Kinski), after impregnating the three daughters of a plantation owner in Brazil, is sent away on a suicide mission to re-establish the slave trade with a kingdom situated in Ghana, West Africa, around the fort of Elmina. The King has been deemed insane, and is said to kill any white man who sets foot on his land. Cobra Verde accepts the title of viceroy and sails across the ocean. At first he seems to meet with success; although the only white man he meets is a corrupt bishop tolerated by the locals (the slave-trading fort of Elmina has been sieged and abandoned), the fast-firing rifles he offers are highly valued by the local government, at war with a neighboring tribe. But his business venture is only briefly successful. The King orders Cobra Verde seized and brought to him, then orders his face painted black, since it's still considered forbidden to decapitate a white man. That night, Cobra Verde is rescued by men in service to the prince, who, it seems, is twice as insane as his father. His eyes always wild, he speaks in nonsense declarations, although we might be wary that when a leopard is heard roaring, he calls it "My father!"--for the royal family associates themselves with leopards. Soon after, he proves more wily than he seemed, double-crossing the bandit just before the slave trade itself is banned in Brazil. Cobra Verde, marked for death and finally abandoned by all, flees toward a hopeless fate.

Although the film has earned its place in cinema history as the last collaboration between the infamous savages Herzog and Kinski (for more on their troubled relationship, cut to the chase and rent Herzog's documentary My Best Fiend), Cobra Verde is also somewhat of the bastard child of that output, ranked below the more admired Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Nosferatu (1979), and Fitzcarraldo (1982). Though it is probably remembered more vividly than their Fassbinder-esque meltdown melodrama Woyzeck (1979), Cobra Verde is a difficult film: somehow both ambiguous and direct, morally complex but with a simple, straightforward narrative. The main dilemma is Cobra Verde himself, who is in almost every scene of the film but hesitates to reveal himself to the viewer. At the outset, in South America, he seems to be a Man with No Name from a Sergio Leone Western--a scowling rascal whom no one can defeat single-handed (although, this being a Herzog film, there are no duels, just lingering shots of desolate towns occupied by vermin and hogs). He is an outlaw, but he has no compunction about cornering a slave and ordering him back to the whipping-post. The narrative sets him with such an impossible task--not pulling a boat over a mountain, perhaps, but just as futile in nature--that he automatically is lent sympathetic qualities. He doesn't earn them, but he has them to a certain degree, because this is how the story is structured and he is, after all, our protagonist. When we're quickly reminded as to why he's there, and we see the almost taboo image of Africans bound together by chains at the neck, we're repulsed. Yet Kinski still marches through, overseeing it all, scowling, and Herzog's camera follows him in fascination. We want to think there's more to this man because Herzog believes there is, and we indulge. At one point Kinski plunges amidst the slaves to help them bear the weight of a giant trunk through Elmina's gates, and he shoves one of the slaves aside so that he can take the lead. It's like a parody of Jesus' march toward crucifixion, except that he doesn't relieve the burden out of empathy, but rather because he thinks he can do better. Like all Herzog heroes, Cobra Verde has his wild eyes fixed upon an insurmountable goal, and sets himself resolutely against all the forces arrayed against him in a manner that isn't noble but unnerving, frightening.

A simpler story might have had Cobra Verde find redemption once he leads his Amazon warriors to overthrow the King--the man would repent his crimes, and work to overthrow the slave trade. But he only works to build the slave trade up again; this, after a spectacular setpiece in which he trains the warrior women by hurtling himself into their midst, picking up a spear alongside them howling, and then, perhaps the most memorable scene in the film, he leads his female army to storm the walls of the King's court at Abomey, at one point hurling a venomous snake out of his path with bare hands in his frothing stampede. Cobra Verde's evolution, his character arc, is less obvious, and on the initial viewing it might be invisible. He's a cutthroat admirable only for his determination. On the other hand, a second viewing makes his progression more clear. The first major scene in the film is a long discussion between Kinski and a dwarf about the snow high in the mountains; the dwarf describes it as a wintry heaven, where the snowflakes fall like feathers and the ice glistens. Kinski listens expressionlessly, but for once he lacks his scowl. That's a clue. Later, while awaiting execution in the King's camp, lying in the dirt and with no one around to hear, he cries out in longing for that mystical snow. And amidst the quiet, lyrical scenes following the battle, he provides only one full glimpse into his psyche, in an aborted attempt at a diary or a letter (if the latter, presumably to his lover, a slave on the plantation in Brazil):

I cannot begin to describe this cretinous existence of mine, nor how lonely it is to be without family or friends, the only white man in this country, perhaps the whole continent. Meanwhile I have become the father of sixty-two children, but this gives me no satisfaction. Perhaps next year I shall come back and marry. I would live in the lands of ice and snow, anywhere to be away from here. The heat here is mean and inescapable. It courses through the bodies of the people like a fever, and yet my heart grows colder and colder.

Cobra Verde is damned, and he knows it. He is a prisoner and a slave to the existence he is pitted against, and although he fights against the odds as soon as he arrives in Ghana, to succeed in his almost insurmountable task strips him of his soul. After all, should Sisyphus finally push his boulder (or riverboat) over the hill after countless attempts, how much humanity would he have left, and would he be able to appreciate his accomplishment? Our bandit has been handed an evil task, and though he dutifully follows it, inspecting the teeth of his slaves, rounding them up for the slave ships--when he asks to ventilate their holding cells, it's only because he wants to cut down on the casualty rate--ultimately, near his end, hunted by the English and facing a life in in the shadows, he becomes sharply aware of his condition.

It was no misunderstanding. It was a crime. Slavery is an element of the human heart. [Toasting] To our ruin!

In Herzog's typically cynical fashion, he implicates everyone in the slave trade, including the viewer. We buy and sell each other. (Cobra Verde has been, after all, slave to the company that he sent him here, slave to the King of Abomey, and now he has been sold to the English.) But if that final exchange is atypically spelled-out, the final images of the film summarize the point more poetically. Cobra Verde has fled to the beach, approaching a canoe that he hopes will bear him across the ocean. When he sees one of Elmina's cripples following him, his stride quickens, and he seems panicked. He arrives at the craft and tries to push it into the water. It doesn't budge. Desperately, he grabs a mooring-rope and pulls with all his might, yet it still doesn't budge. Eventually, exhausted, he collapses into the sea, rolling with the surf until all of his movements finally cease, and the water rolls over his head, burying him into the sand. This might be considered Herzog's most existential moment. I see it as so pure and straightforward that it is almost devoid of philosophy. Here is our end; but here also is this man's specific end, as all his efforts have come to nothing. Why is it that although the viewer cannot fully empathize with him, and though he remains a deep mystery, this ending--in which he really becomes a pathetic wretch--remains devastating? We are in the realm of Shakespearean tragedy, the realm of Macbeth, but transformed and given a slightly different resonance. Herzog has once again touched an invisible realm, that ecstatic cinema he's always sought, and Cobra Verde deserves to finally be recognized as one of his best films.

Cinematic Titanic

2008-01-13T05:51:00.001-08:00

As a follow-up to my story on Mystery Science Theater 3000, I wanted to offer some thoughts on the latest venture from the original creator of that show, Joel Hodgson (aka Joel Robinson). Hodgson, in the 80's, was the thinking man's prop comic, who could have moved to Los Angeles to work in television but instead launched a homegrown public access comedy show in Minneapolis. MST3K ran a year before The Comedy Channel picked it up, and from there the program, with its "movie riffing" from Joel and his robots in silhouette from the bottom of the screen, became a cult classic. Well, after a few seasons Joel did leave the show for Los Angeles, and most recently was working on the Jimmy Kimmel show as a staff writer; J. Elvis Weinstein, the original Tom Servo, had already left for L.A. to pursue a comedy career, and eventually Trace Beaulieu (Crow T. Robot) and Frank Conniff (TV's Frank) followed suit. After Joel's departure, the show nevertheless continued for five seasons with head writer Michael J. Nelson taking over hosting duties. It's been seemingly ages since MST3K breathed its last, cancelled by the Sci-Fi Channel, and Nelson has written a novel, Death Rat, and brought his movie riffing to audio commentaries and the podcast-commentary series Rifftrax, with its money-saving notion of providing only the riffing--the listener has to rent the film on his own. Nelson, with Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo #2) and Bill Corbett (Crow T. Robot #2), also started The Film Crew, a movie-riffing group who have issued a handful of DVDs in which they tackle such films as The Wild Women of Wongo. This latest project was the closest approximation to the MST3K of old, but has met with mixed reviews, as some fans have lamented that it just wasn't the same.

Enter Cinematic Titanic, which finally sees Hodgson returning to the format which made him famous. His movie-riffing team also includes Weinstein, Conniff, Beaulieu, and Mary Jo Pehl (MST3K's Pearl Forrester). Cinematic Titanic debuted as a live show performed for members of Lucasfilm on the Skywalker Ranch, a warm-up to their first episode now released on DVD exclusively through the CT website. What you get when you order the DVD is just a disc in a small, square carboard sleeve, with little protection - luckily, mine arrived unscratched. The mastering of the DVD includes the most basic of menus with, head-smackingly, only an image of the DVD you were just holding in your hand a second ago. There are no pretty dressings, perhaps because the website wants to ultimately set up a pay-to-download service so that fans can burn each episode on their own; this is not yet available. The play's the thing, and in this case it's Al Adamson's atrocious 1972 film Brain of Blood, here retitled The Oozing Skull as part of an agreement to allow CT to distribute the film. There are no "hosting segments" such as MST3K had, and copyright infringement with MST3K owners Best Brains prevents Hodgson from using the familiar theater seat silhouettes at the bottom of the screen; instead, through the entire length of the film we remain in the theater with scaffolding at the right and left sides, all 5 members of CT standing or sitting upon it while they address the film. No introduction to the premise: you just plunge straight into the sheer awfulness of the film. And it is a really excruciating work. Adamson, direct of Dracula Vs. Frankenstein (1971) and little else you'd remember, made a string of Z-budget horror films through the late 60's and 70's, all of which were directed with maximum incompetence. Brain of Blood--er, The Oozing Skull--has an utterly stupid plot about the leader of an imaginary Middle Eastern nation becoming critically injured, and rushed to a mad scientist who plans to move his brain into another body. But the mad scientist, being mad and all, has plans of his own: he moves the brain into the body of a disfigured simpleton. Why? Because he can! There are lots of footchases and one car chase, and one footchase which ends with the pursued leaping into a car and turning the keys, whereupon the car blows up and a nearby dwarf laughs. Brilliant.

One of the things about MST3K is that half the time you're laughing at the film itself, not just the jokes in the foreground. CT has the same pleasing effect. Ultimately, you're just enjoying watching a bad exploitation movie from the 70's. But the riffing is quite good, if a bit stiff at times, as the team hasn't yet developed the intangible chemistry which comes with doing a dozen of these things together. If anything, it feels a little too rehearsed (which of course it is); it needs more of an improv feel. But it's still Joel, Josh, Trace, Frank, and Mary Jo. It is good to have them back together again, even if they were never together quite like this. And Weinstein's CT theme song, hot jazz in the style of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.," is terrific. This is by far the most promising product of the post-MST3K projects that have been offered to fans, a highly entertaining hour-and-a-half if you're willing to spring for the DVD sight unseen (it's $15.94). I'm not sure how often these episodes will be issued, but if there's a Cinematic Titanic-of-the-month club, sign me up.

The Best Films of 2007

2008-01-07T14:14:00.001-08:00

1. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson)

It seems absurd to call Wes Anderson underrated, since his films have been routinely flagged for release by the Criterion Collection, and his fan following (particularly strong for people in their 20's) has extended to a viral Team Zissou MySpace account. And certainly Anderson doesn't seem to feel any pressure to make changes to his distinctive style: austere uses of the widescreen mise-en-scene, thematic color coding, familiar themes of dysfunctional families, a recurring company of players. Nevertheless, critics seem baffled by Anderson's films upon the first viewing, and only those critics who revisit his earlier films find them more rewarding. This is key: Anderson and his co-writers place a great deal of character detail in compact scenes, so that if you're not paying attention, or tracking certain clues dropped in each scene, the final payoff may not have the emotional impact intended. Attentive and receptive viewers have a different experience. The Darjeeling Limited is blessed with a gifted and game cast--Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman on a misguided and hysterical journey for enlightenment on a train travelling through India--but the real wonder of the film is the screenplay, which is bitingly satirical and subtly moving at the same time. If Preston Sturges were alive, this is the kind of film he'd be making.

2. Zodiac (David Fincher)

I was never a David Fincher acolyte, but the famously stylistic director showed such restraint in his crime epic, Zodiac, that I was instantly won over. The trick he pulls off is formidable: despite the fact that the murders take place early in the film, and much of its three-hour running time is given over to talking and thinking--questioning of suspects, digging through boxes of paperwork, and other believably mundane procedures--the viewer is nonetheless gripped with suspense and growing fascination for its entire length. Perhaps Fincher's biggest challenge of all was constructing a true crime mystery in which no answer can be provided. Going into this film, the only thing I knew about the Zodiac killer was that he was never caught. That doesn't ruin anything. The film's real subject is not crime but obsession, and the lengths to which a person will go searching for answers that may be impossible to acquire. Although there is a prime suspect, the fact that there remains as much convincing evidence in favor of his guilt as well as his innocence turns the film into a philosophical puzzle worthy of Borges.

3. No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen)

When reviews from the Toronto Film Festival began pouring in for No Country for Old Men, it was frequently observed that this was a Coen Brothers film like no other--a reserved, spare, cold-blooded, straightforward and devastating piece. Perhaps because my perception was colored by these early reviews, when I saw the film I was struck by all of its trademarks from the Coen canon: there's Stephen Root's "Man Who Hires Wells," a grinning, perversely bizarre businessman, and the beaming Wells himself (Woody Harrelson), cocksure, thinking himself smarter than the audience knows he is. There's the fact that the Coen Brothers have always been accused of being a little cold-blooded. And there are the elaborately conceived setpieces, focused on the details: how the assassin Chigurh (Javier Bardem) uses his pressurized air-gun to blast open the locks of doors; Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) watching his car on the horizon sink a few inches, realizing that the tires have been shot out and that he has no escape; the trail of blood left by a wounded dog in the desert; the desperate attempt to convince a teenager to surrender his jacket so Moss can cover his bloody shirt. In fact, one of the things that makes No Country for Old Men so wondrous is that every single scene would be suited to a Coen Brothers career highlight reel. But ultimately, like Zodiac, it's the sting of its no-resolution ending; life moves on, while evil remains on the loose.

4. Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino)

The proper way to experience Death Proof and Planet Terror was in the theater, preferably a packed one on the Friday night it opened. With a scratched, beaten-up print (a sign posted next to the theater entrance warned moviegoers that the film was supposed to look this way), custom-made exploitation movie trailers directed by the likes of Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, and Edgar Wright, a restaurant ad, and missing reels, it managed to both recreate a night at a sleazy Bronx grindhouse circa 1972 and a raucous night at one of Quentin Tarantino's movie festivals in Austin. Much of the audience used the "intermission"--when the fake trailers were showing--to run to the bathroom or the snack bar, which only added to the simulation. But honestly, few grindhouse movies managed to be as funny and entertaining as Robert Rodriguez's sustained John Carpenter parody and Tarantino's genre-twisting, Cannes-pleasing slasher film. This was easily the most fun I had in a theater in 2007.

5. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton)

A grand, old-fashioned musical, adapted from Stephen Sondheim's grand guignol hit from decades ago; it just so happens that it's also one of the goriest films of the year. (Should I recommend it to my mother? The jury's still out on that one.) But Johnny Depp is spectacular as the title "demon barber," avenging the wrong done him years back by a corrupt judge (Alan Rickman, naturally)--when he can't mete out his justice, he takes out a misanthropic rage against the populace of London, assisted by Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who offers to bake the bodies into her infamous meat pies. The songs are memorable and strikingly beautiful, the violence is alternately comic and frighteningly savage (and often both at once), and it's all a tour de force for Tim Burton, in his finest form since 1994's Ed Wood. So much fun.

6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)

Andrew Dominik's spellbinding Western reverie calls to mind the work of Terrence Malick, as well as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and the best moments of Heaven's Gate. It's an exploration of the gap between legend and reality, the tall tale and the human, as Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) infiltrates the gang of Jesse James (Brad Pitt)--not to kill him, but to worship him, imitate him. The homoerotic undertone almost seems beside the point; it's present almost out of obligation, but it's the least interesting aspect of the story. What seems more important is the extended, tranquil moments that precede violence, the sacred space before a life meets its end. And so Dominik lingers on the ghostly light of a train passing through the woods, casting its beam across the faces of the hooded men about to rob it; or one outlaw's fateful ride on horseback with James at his back; or that last self-scrutiny in a mirror, as James catches the reflection of someone coming up behind him. The film also dwells critically on what follows violence, whether it be Ford's embracing of his own legend as re-enacted on a stage before a paying audience, or a hole in the ice, opened by James' gunshot, revealing fish swimming obliviously in a frozen lake.

7. Ratatouille (Brad Bird)

Next to Hayao Miyazaki, Brad Bird is the best of the modern animation directors, although being an American, he's been forced into abandoning cel animation and embracing CG. Not against his will, mind you, but out of necessity. Disney shut down their traditional animation studios, as former CEO Michael Eisner decided that CG was the wave of the future--in the most short-sighted of predictions. But Eisner's now gone, and Pixar, which once threatened to break their partnership with Disney, is now practically running the show. Their two star directors are John Lasseter (Toy Story, Toy Story 2) and Bird, former director of the short "Family Dog" as well as various episodes of The Simpsons, and whose first film was the critically lauded--and beautifully cel-animated--The Iron Giant (1999). When he made The Incredibles in 2004, it was obvious that he had found a way to work his charming designs into the CG format, while exploiting CG's potential for eye-popping effects. Better still, his storytelling was as precise--and as full of heart--as ever. Ratatouille is at least the equal of the former film, although it is notably scaled down. Remy the Rat (Patton Oswalt) pursues one goal--to become a great chef, despite his species--and to accomplish this, he befriends a human co-conspirator, Linguini (Lou Romano). That the great majority of the film takes place in a single location, the kitchen, almost passes one's notice. It is within this kitchen that great adventure and romance unfold, with the manic energy of a Chuck Jones short tempered by Brad's signature emotional sincerity. When I was a kid, the Disney offerings were The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. These days children don't know how lucky they are.

8. The Host (Joon-Ho Bong)

This South Korean horror film is the best monster movie to come along in years. Chemical pollution causes a giant amphibian to grow beneath Seoul's Han River, arising one day to stampede through a public park, swallowing any men, women, or children who get in his path. Strikingly, this happens within the first minutes of the film, revealing the whole horrifying creature at once as it begins to gobble up people who are just as stunned and stock-still as you are; the sight is both horrifying and comically absurd. With the big reveal given right at the outset, you might wonder what's left for a monster film to do. Joon-Ho Bong's answer is to focus on hapless father Gang-Du as he and his family try to find his daughter, stolen by the monster; they battle the South Korean Army's bureaucracy and eventually the creature itself, hidden deep in the labyrinthine sewers of a quarantined zone. It's astonishing to find a monster film that is incapable of cliché, and there is not a moment of The Host which meets your expectations. It surpasses them.

9. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon)

The most important documentary of the year might be No End in Sight, which details all the wrong-headed decisions which led to the disaster in Iraq. That's the most important documentary. But I'm not ashamed to say that my heart belongs to The King of Kong, chronicling the attempt of Steve Wiebe to break the Donkey Kong record held by arcade champion Billy Mitchell. While it's clear that director Gordon was hoping for a quirky take on "nerd sports" docs like Spellbound (2002) and Wordplay (2006), the subjects took his film in completely unexpected directions, with conspiracies, petty rivalries, cowardly decisions, brave decisions, and modest victories and failures. Better still, the players in the world of competitive arcade playing prove to be worthy of a Christopher Guest mockumentary--only truth proves to be more funny than fiction. That said, I love Wiebe, and he proves to be the perfect sympathetic underdog as he steps into this curious, bizarre world of middle-aged men who keep the 80's alive. See the original before the upcoming remake (directed by Gordon) has a chance to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

10. Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright)

British director Wright is quickly becoming a master of contemporary comedy, cutting his teeth on the wonderful sitcom Spaced before helming 2004's cult hit Shaun of the Dead. I loved Shaun, but Hot Fuzz is twice as good, as Wright has learned a thing or two about sustaining a 90-minute comedy. While Shaun spent its biggest laughs in its first half, Hot Fuzz builds slowly until it reaches a breathlessly funny fever pitch, and one of the most hysterical climaxes since the Coens raised Arizona. Hot Fuzz has a simple premise, a parody of Hollywood buddy-cop films which transplants a tough-as-nails officer (Simon Pegg) into a sleepy little town, where he uncovers a murder spree. At a certain point, running gags break into a sprint. Endlessly quotable and re-watchable, this might be the best British comedy since Life of Brian.

Other great enjoyments to be had in 2007:
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson) - like all of PTA's movies, a thunderous work of intense passion, and another treatise on his favorite subject, the troubled relationship between fathers and sons
Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg) - better than A History of Violence, David Cronenberg's follow-up delivers more believably human characters and a less aloof and theoretical approach, but with a permeating, gripping unease
Once (John Carney) - a charming, anti-romance, anti-musical romantic musical
Juno (Jason Reitman) - great performances by Ellen Page and J.K. Simmons highlight the best pro-unexpected-pregnancy movie of the year
Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog) - Herzog at his most mainstream is still unique and compelling
Paprika (Satoshi Kon) - mature, intelligent science fiction from an acclaimed anime director
Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin) - a delirious cinematic poem to repressed sexuality, and a spirited revival of silent cinema
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Sidney Lumet) - pitch-black neo-noir with a memorably cruel performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman
Red Road (Andrea Arnold) - a mysterious thriller in which the protagonist hides secrets from you, so that you're never quite sure what's at stake until very, very late...nevertheless, you're gripped by suspense
Son of Man (Mark Donford-May) - vivid and vital filmmaking retells the Christ story in a contemporary South African city
Tideland (Terry Gilliam) - misunderstood, morbidly comic fairy tale that keeps its heroine innocent amidst the most corrupt decay
Sunshine (Danny Boyle) - slightly marred science fiction epic with at least an hour of brilliant material, from the always-fascinating director of Trainspotting and Millions

A Gallery of Picture Players: The Women

2008-01-06T13:46:00.000-08:00

My wife's grandparents gave me an interesting Christmas gift this year: a book from 1914 (or earlier - there's no copyright page, only a pencilled inscription) called Gallery of Picture Players. It consists entirely of portraits, male and female, across hundreds of pages. They are stars of stage and screen, but almost all of them are forgotten today, apart from Charles Chaplin, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Lillian Gish, and a few others. Below I've created a gallery of some of the women. Essentially these are among the earliest Hollywood glamor photos, and while standards of beauty and fashion may have changed--and the idea of a bona fide "movie star" hadn't yet come to full fruition--within each picture you can see aspirations, ambition, and self-idealization written in the eyes. All the facts below were taken from the IMDB, so any inaccuracies can likewise be attributed to them.

Alice Joyce.
1890-1955

Starred in at least 199 films, by the IMDB's tally, beginning in 1910 and ending in 1930. She married three times, once to the director Clarence Brown (Flesh and the Devil, Anna Christie). There are numerous portraits of Ms. Joyce in the book, and she is quite ravishing.

A lengthy bio can be found here.

Dorothy Bernard.
1890-1955
Starred in numerous films from 1918 to 1921.

Ethel Grandin.
1894-1988
Starred in films from 1911 to 1922.

Fan Bourke.
1886-1959

Her career ran steadily from 1914 to 1920, with an additional appearance in Lummox in 1930.

Irene Boyle.
No info on her date of birth or death, but the IMDB credits her in films falling between 1913 and 1923. I love this photo. She must have been very proud of her bearskin rug.

Leah Baird.
1883-1971

Appeared on the stage with Douglas Fairbanks (who also appears in this book), and had a short moment in the limelight of cinema.

Lillian Gish.
1893-1993

Easily one of the biggest stars of her era, and one of the first bona fide Hollywood celebrities. She appeared in Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Broken Blossoms for D.W. Griffith, and in later years was in Portrait of Jennie and The Night of the Hunter.

Louise Huff.
1895-1973

Her film career ran from 1913 to 1922.

Margaret Gibson,
aka Patricia Palmer, Marguerite Gibson.
1894-1964

Now we're in Kenneth Anger/Hollywood Babylon territory. Gibson was arrested for blackmail and extortion in 1923 (charges were later dropped), ran away to Singapore in the 30's, and on her deathbed confessed to the murder of actor/director William Desmond Taylor. There's a good bio at Wikipedia.

Marguerite Courtot.
1897-1986

Star of comedies, action films, and serials between 1913 and 1924.

Mildred Harris.
1901-1944

Charlie Chaplin's first wife - he married her when she was 17 and he was 29. A child star who grew up to appear in numerous films.

Rosetta Brice,
aka Betty Brice.
1892-1935

Valeska Suratt,
aka "The Vampire Woman."
1882-1962

Starred in The Immigrant and the original 1917 adaptation of H. Rider Haggard's She, as the title character. Seen here adhered to a vase.

Vivian Martin.
1893-1987

Appeared in "The Little Dutch Girl," "Jane Goes A-Wooing," "An Innocent Adventuress," and "Pardon My French." And look out boys, she cooks too!

Eight Arms to Hold You

2008-01-05T07:56:00.000-08:00

Help! (U.K., 1965) * * * 1/2
D: Richard Lester

Help! is a very, very odd film, but one-of-a-kind in the best of ways. It is the Beatles' second, and the last big production with their full involvement. American Richard Lester had directed their prior hit, A Hard Day's Night, and had made that film a quasi-documentary about their life in and out of hotel rooms, clubs, trains, cars, and concert halls (with one liberating moment in the open daylight, set to "Can't Buy Me Love"). When he was asked to do a follow-up, every bit the quickie as the former film--since the Beatles might be just a temporary fad--his own artistic restlessness led him to make not a carbon copy but a completely opposite work. A Hard Day's Night is cinéma-vérité, loose, rough around the edges, realistic with a satirical sensibility, with a script that sounded improvised, and cinematography in stark black-and-white. Help! is in bright, beautiful, color, rigorously scripted and structured, resolutely absurdist, a piece of pop art. It is set almost entirely outdoors, whether outside Stonehenge, in the Alps, or in the Bahamas.

If A Hard Day's Night is smothered in cigarette smoke, Help! has the cannabis aroma of the Beatles' new drug of choice, recently introduced to them by Bob Dylan. The Dylan influence is even evident in "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," John Lennon's Dylan homage, and veiled ode to closeted manager Brian Epstein. While John strums that song in the band's London flat, which looks like something out of Yellow Submarine (1968), Paul leans against a bookcase with a secret panel that only reveals more books (some of them copies of In His Own Write by John Lennon), Ringo hits a tambourine from inside a pit in the floor, where sits his sunken bed, and George lounges on the couch next to Eleanor Bron, purse in her lap, ever dignified while George makes cartoonish bedroom eyes at her. Leo McKern peeks out from under a manhole, still hunting the Beatles down. It's really one of the first music videos, although that line's a blurry one as rock musicals overtook Cole Porter and Rogers & Hammerstein; in the supplements to the film's latest DVD release, Lester says that in the 80's he was sent a "scroll" pronouncing that he was the father of MTV--and he sent it back to the network demanding a blood test. But it's hard to argue that Lester wasn't brilliant at shooting the Beatles in performance. Each song in Help! sits comfortably on a velvet cushion; the plot is secondary and the music's the thing. The title song is performed by the band in traditional Ed Sullivan Show-stance, in a white room with Ringo at the famous logo-adorned drum kit, but the black-and-white is interrupted by red darts flung at the screen by the crazed cult led by McKern; sublimely, we briefly see their female human sacrifice pining on the altar like any teenage Beatles fan. (I almost wish that the brief prologue had been excised so that this would be our introduction to the color of Help!, presenting a neat transition from AHDN's B&W.) Shortly thereafter, the band steps into a mock-up of their Abbey Road studio to perform "You're Going to Lose That Girl"; the lights are dimmed, and the band sings through rapturously filmed lens flares and spotlights, singing into the mic in extreme close-up. Rather than pulling back to see the full band and the entire studio, Lester concentrates on fractioning the performance into these close-ups, as he slips in and out of focus. It's one of the most intoxicating and inspired pieces of musical filmmaking you'll ever see. But "Ticket to Ride" is the most famous sequence, a hit single performed while the Beatles literally tackle the slopes on skis. The band had never been on skis before, and Lester filmed them while they were learning--going sideways down the bunny slopes and tripping forward into the snow. The props are limited to a piano set up in the snow, which the Beatles climb into and around, but the most innovative moment comes when musical notes are projected onto telephone wires that frame the top of the screen.

There is a plot, it should be mentioned, which takes this long to describe: a cult and a duo of mad scientists are after Ringo's ring. It's an excuse for obvious gags--Rube Goldbergian plots by the cult to sever Ringo's finger, hand, or arm--and James Bond parodies and pastiches, the trend of the day. The gags, in particular the final one in which the film is dedicated to the Singer sewing machine, anticipate Monty Python's Flying Circus, although there was already a rich tradition of dry, surrealist humor in British stage, radio, and television. From the tradition comes Bron, who plays Ahme, one of the cultists who infiltrates the Beatles' inner circle; she's a gifted comic actress, but is tasked with playing it straight against the non-sequitur-spouting Fab Four, who are a bit too bizarre to be the Marx Brothers surrogates that contemporary critics envisioned. Is Ringo, as so many have asserted, the best actor of the group? Perhaps, although he's given a "type" to play in both films--the hapless schlub who doesn't understand why everything bad has to happen to him. (Worse, even his fellow Beatles try to pursuade him that he doesn't really use that ring finger very often, and could stand to miss it!) Every time I watch a Beatles film I'm impressed by John, who doesn't so much "act" as confidently deliver his sarcastic one-liners. It's the confidence that impresses me; he has none of the awkwardness of Paul and George, and convinces that this is who he really is. Which must be acting. To their credit, George allows his shirt to be ripped right off in one scene, and later Paul is shrunk straight out of his clothes, taking a nude bath in an ashtray. Teenage girls, take note.

The only real flaw in Help! is that there isn't more of their music: a whole side B is missing from the film, which includes "I've Just Seen a Face" (belatedly receiving its cinematic bow in Julie Taymor's Across the Universe), "Act Naturally," and "Yesterday." Not that "Yesterday" could really work in a film stuffed with sight gags, car chases, and bad puns. The real wonder of Help! is in the joy the film exudes. There's one moment, during a performance of "The Night Before," when Ringo shivers from the cold and then smiles widely at someone off-camera. That these couple of seconds remain in the film is no coincidence; this is what Lester was after. During the musical sequences he wanted to show the band's charisma, their real personalities, their real joy in performance, how good these songs are, and just why we love the Beatles so much. As a result, Help! and its companion film are the best possible document of the band, however fictionalized and glued to paper-thin plots. Here you can see them performing for each other, not for an auditorium filled with screaming girls who drown out their music. Shortly after this, the band would begin to tire of each other, and jealousies and bitter feelings would begin to intrude and drive them apart. Later, John would say that the song "Help!" was meant to have a slower tempo, a more serious tone; it was a song about a nervous breakdown. Instead, it's a marvelous pop song, a pinnacle of the art. Whatever the reality, the fiction of Help!--Richard Lester's Help!--is a snapshot of the band as we'd like to remember them.

The Best Movie Posters of 2007

2007-12-30T07:50:00.001-08:00

I am currently suffering the usual post-Christmas depression - by which I mean that there are far too many great films in theaters, all of them being released at once in anticipation of Oscar campaigns, and all I read in the papers and blogs are Top 10 lists populated with films I haven't seen because they haven't hit Madison, Wisconsin yet. So while I make frequent trips to the movie theater to catch up, here's an easier list to compile, because you don't need to see the film to make a judgment.

A list of the best movie posters of the year is not equivalent to a list of the best films of the year, as is proven by the attractive designs at left and right. But browsing through the IMDB's (approximately) 9,000 films released or produced in 2007, and then clicking on the links to the small percentage that I had actually heard of, I was pleasantly surprised by some really beautiful designs. The following images are antidotes to the Photoshop-nightmare posters that plague most major Hollywood releases, where the only criteria is to cram as many recognizable celebrity faces into the image as possible. (It's also unfortunate that we live in a decade in which poster artists are discouraged from painting original images, instead being prodded toward the less time-consuming task of scanning the actor's faces into a computer.) My preference here was toward simplicity and imagination.

1. Grindhouse

The original Grindhouse poster--before it was divided in two for the individual "Death Proof" and "Planet Terror" DVD releases--was the perfect distillation of a drive-in exploitation double feature bill. It also pits the films against each other like opponents in a prize fight. To the left: Robert Rodriguez's extended John Carpenter homage, placing its key attraction, go-go dancer Rose McGowan with a machine-gun leg, front and center. (Just like in any exploitation art, the most sensationalist element--even if it's a major "spoiler"--must be prominent.) For Quentin Tarantino's slasher film, Stuntman Mike's lethal weapon, his "death proof" stunt car, heads for the viewer at high speed while the eight female leads pose in silhouette against a setting sun. "These 8 women are about to meet 1 diabolical man!" In a typical grindhouse poster, the art would promise more than the actual film delivered. But this double feature actually aimed to live up to its promises--yes, McGowan really does have a machine-gun leg (albeit only in the final act), and she even hurtles through the air while firing rockets from it. Indeed, "two great movies for the price of one!"

2. Vacancy

From Nimród Antal, the director of the cult hit Kontroll (2003), comes this extended homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. OK, I haven't seen it. But this poster makes me want to: a gorgeous painted image of the prototypical sleazy roadside motel, with the title worked into the only neon which is lit. The stars and credits are worked very naturally into the design, but the eyes are drawn to the gray sky and the ominous-looking letters "M-O-T-E-L." This teaser poster is a much more effective advertisement than the release poster, which simply shows Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale peering around the edge of a latched door--a bland image indistinguishable from any other thriller.

3. Zodiac

David Fincher's critically acclaimed mystery--and genuinely one of the best films of the year, whether or not it's granted an Oscar campaign--has a poster design which, like Vacancy's, prefers to focus on signature architecture instead of attractive actors. As with the eerie motel of Vacancy, this fog-enshrouded Golden Gate Bridge suggests the film's theme: in this case, mystery and obfuscation. As Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey, Jr., pursue the Zodiac killer, they descend into obsession as the truth seems ever out of reach; they're virtually driving into the dense fog which dominates the center of this image. Of course, the stylized logo also calls to mind the one for Fincher's "Se7en" (although it's decidedly less annoying), almost subliminally letting fans of the earlier film know that this is something they'd like.

4. Michael Clayton

This poster actually looks like the cover of a contemporary novel called "The Truth Can Be Adjusted" written by one Michael Clayton, which tells you a couple things: (1) novels these days have first-rate design, and (2) the poster means to sell the film as a classy piece of literature. I like that they've got the confidence to trust that we'll recognize George Clooney's features, even out of focus and hidden behind a giant tagline. I like that the slogan is bigger than the title. I like that the tagline is so Orwellian. I like the strong reds against the indistinct, washed-out background colors. The poster actually tells you very little about what the film's about, but you understand that it's a political thriller starring Clooney, and that sells itself.

5. Youth Without Youth
The rose-themed poster for Love in the Time of the Cholera almost made this cut, but I ultimately found it a little too boring. Then I saw this poster for Francis Ford Coppola's new film, which tops Cholera's in typical Coppola fashion: by piling on more. More roses! More luscious red offset by deep blacks! It's a beautiful design, with the lovers almost like ghosts--appropriate enough for a story about immortality--and the upside-down, mirror-image letters suggesting Cyrillic writing, subconsciously evoking the story's Eastern European setting. I even love that the credits are at an angle in the upper-right corner, somehow complementing the image instead of distracting from it. It's like a Soviet propaganda poster for puppy love.

6. The Hottest State

I love this poster so much that I have it hanging in my basement. It's a good movie, but the poster is better. Here the actors seem lost at the bottom of the image, with the credits and logo pressing them down from above. The emphasis, then, is on the ruddy-red wall, suggesting a cheap apartment or hotel room baking in the heat. While Mark Webber still hasn't gotten dressed, and lounges with a beer (or some stronger drink) and a newspaper, Catalina Sandino Moreno gazes out an unseen window, guitar in hand, either daydreaming, writing a song, or focusing on her goals and dreams. As with the characters in the film, Webber is virtually oblivious to the desires of the woman sitting beside him; although a more representative image might have had him standing outside her window, gazing up with flowers in his hand while she ignores him, this poster is more evocative and interesting.

7. Ocean's Thirteen

Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's" films have always been style over substance, which is precisely the point. They have the best cast, the best trailers, and the best posters in the business--who cares about the films themselves? Here's another ultra-stylish poster, this one cleverly finding a way to squeeze twelve--not thirteen--of its cast members into the picture by taking a bird's-eye-view. All are grinning up at you, ready to deal cards like the perfect con artists they are. The length of the table even gives the designer a chance to fit in the most prominent names in the film's cast, and the remainder of the credits are (almost illegibly) moved to the edges, framing the image. That just leaves the topper: adding a logo of the fictional 13 of spades, turning the entire image into a playing card.

8. Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Critics dismissed it has high camp, but the poster to Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth (1998) sequel has an effective simplicity. It's also a sharp turn away from the poster to that film, which emphasized grandeur and sinister red hues; this is just the radiant Cate Blanchett, the only hint of royalty being the slight tuft of a white lace collar peeking out from under her shimmering armor. The only background is a tattered flag, suggesting a giant, ravaged battlefield. Doing a lot with very little: apparently not representative of the actual film.

9. The Hills Have Eyes 2

Whatever you might think of the so-called "torture porn" movement in modern horror, they have consistently inspired some of the most striking and original movie posters of the last couple of years. This reviled B-movie--as the sequel to a remake, it's many steps removed from the 1970's Wes Craven classic--may have pluses that only a gorehound can love, but the poster deserves a closer look. The image shows one of the backwater cannibals dragging his prey--tied up in a sack--through the desert. Grid-like lines suggest a much-used map that's been unfolded and spread across a table; or, perhaps, a well-travelled 70's grindhouse movie poster. The center of interest is the battered, naked feet of that poor fellow in the bag, as well as the path left in the sand. Lovely grime, this.

10. I'm Not There

Cate Blanchett dominates another great poster, only this time you wouldn't know it, because in silhouette, with sunglasses and a cigarette, she's a dead ringer for Bob Dylan. And in the middle of that silhouette is the gimmick of the film: a run-down of the eclectic cast with the winking tagline: "...are all Bob Dylan." The only colors are white, gray, and a platinum color which suggests the legend's record sales. Incidentally, since smoking is now enough of a taboo to make it onto MPAA warnings ("rated PG-13 for a scene of smoking," etc.), is this poster suitable for all audiences?

11. Redacted

Brian DePalma's drama is taken from all sorts of media--soldier's home videos, cable news reports--so it's fitting that the poster is a palimpsest with the various media images hidden underneath a text document. That document is a censored report, the title and director of Redacted highlighted in yellow, and the blacked-out letters becoming the background images, suggesting that the pictures are pieces of what the government doesn't want you to see. There's even another layer, in the foreground: the silhouettes of barbed wire and a gun turret. The design might be a little busy, but the effect is almost psychedelic, particularly with the mix of colors. Beneath it all is a less-effective tagline, "Truth is the First Casualty of War," which ham-handedly refers the viewer to De Palma's other film about wartime rape. But it will take a while before your eyes even reach those words.

12. Brand Upon the Brain!

The latest Guy Maddin fever dream evokes a silent film, and indeed played in select cities as one, accompanied by a live orchestra, sound effects, and narration. The official release poster--with the young "Guy Maddin" character hiding in shame behind a door while his sultry sister lounges in lingerie--is very good, but its main purpose is to cram as many critical raves as possible into the image. The promotional art at left, however--printed as a postcard for theaters to give away--may or may not have appeared in full-sized "poster" form, but does a more thorough job of suggesting the hysteria, sexual repression, and humor of the film, as well as its style and methods. It's also more in line with the sensationalist poster art of an earlier era (long before grindhouses). Who in their right mind would turn down a film promising these: "Guy Trysts with Phantom Wendy!", "Strange Holes...in the Orphans' Heads!", "Dead or Alive, It's Back to Work!", and "What's a Suicide Attempt Without a Wedding?!"

13. Across the Universe

It would seem that when creating a promotional image for Julie Taymor's Beatles musical, the temptation would be to cram as many Beatles references and in-jokes into the poster as possible. This designer got it down to three: the "All You Need is Love" tagline, the image of its two lovers contained within a giant strawberry, and the cosmic background which illustrates the title song, Across the Universe. Wisely, the emphasis here is on the love story, and given the film's reported rising popularity among young college females, that's one effective way to get the film to its audience.

Oh, and the font in the title is the Beatles' official font. There's a reference too...

14. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Given a lengthy title like that, I would think the temptation here would be to present it as a newspaper headline, or at least a wanted poster. Instead, the font of the title evokes a 19th-century newspaper, but emphasis is placed on a giant blue sky--just a little dark, with stormclouds on the border. While Brad Pitt's Jesse James looks out at the horizon, his future assassin stands behind him, brooding in a tall black hat that makes him look just a wee bit mysterious. The colors are slightly bleached, but still seem to shimmer and glow. It would be a crime if the poster didn't advertise this film's breathtaking landscapes, and it does, but with dollops of menace.

15. King Corn

A classy 1950's silkscreened print that just happens to be a custom-made movie poster. To sell this documentary on the corn industry, naturally a critical rave is given prominence, plus a catchy tagline, but I dig that all the art is hand-drawn, and that the stalk of corn in the background looms like some atom-age monster about to crush those poor bastards on the truck. Also a good use of fluorescent green, a color that doesn't appear in advertising very much, perhaps because it evokes nuclear fallout. This designer embraces all of its toxic connotations.

16. Hostel: Part II

Whether you love or hate Eli Roth, the satirical-minded horror director often credited for launching the new "torture porn" movement, his poster for the first Hostel--the single image of an inexplicable claw-like tool intended for the use of God-knows-what--quickly became iconographic. There were a few posters created for his follow-up, but the one at left is the best: a ponytailed girl suspended naked and upside-down, with--water? snot?--about to drop from her nose. Sure, by now he's just flaunting those accusations of misogyny, but those accusations matter little to the teenage girls and guys who love these films. This poster is a coded message to that audience: your parents will hate this, and you will love it.

17. Margot at the Wedding

Noah Baumbach's latest domestic satire has a poster which is almost bleached white with its bright sky and diffuse colors, but Margot (Nicole Kidman) proudly proclaims that she's the title character by wearing a striking pink hat, color-coded to match her name several inches above. She's also looking determinedly in the opposite direction of everyone else, asserting her individuality. Again: simple, elegant design.

18. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

A smart evoking of some logo-driven posters of the 50's and 60's, including Anatomy of a Murder and The Man with the Golden Arm. Of course, the film could be about anything--a sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, perhaps, or a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick--but it's so confident and cool that you'll be drawn into the theater anyway.

19. The Golden Compass

For a big-budget franchise picture like The Golden Compass, you can imagine that plenty of promotional art and posters were created and used. This is the best of them, which manages to depict the spectacular while keeping the image uncluttered and easy on the eyes. What I find appealing is not necessarily that there's a big armored polar bear growling at something outside the frame, but that his bulk and ferocity are contrasted with the young girl, virtually nestled in his paw, who is calmly looking upward (just slightly awe-struck) while holding the glowing compass in her hand. Everything that a fantasy movie poster should be.

20. My Kid Could Paint That

The poster reads, "She's four years old. Her paintings sell for $25,000." The girl holds the paint brush as though it were a broom, looking at the camera with perfect innocence--despite the fact that the line below the title is: "American dream or art world scheme?" The conundrum of the documentary is functionally stated, but the design is still very attractive, with the girl's painting as the bulk of the poster, and she standing before it, essentially becoming part and parcel of the subject--an abstract made into a portrait.

Catching Up on Blizzard Days

2007-12-06T18:57:00.001-08:00

When you get snowed in every couple of days, and you live across the street from a video store, you end up watching lots of movies. Here are some I'm "late" reviewing.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (U.S., 2007) * *
D: Matt Maiellaro & Dave Willis

Before you fans attack me for the two-star review, let it be known that I am one of the original fans of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, although I haven't watched it in a few years. I used to look forward to the block of late-night Cartoon Network programming called Adult Swim, which, amidst reruns of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, would feature Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, Sealab 2021, The Brak Show, and the Aqua Teens, all of which fused supremely poor animation with non sequitur, quasi-hallucinogenic comedy. Adult Swim continues, expanded and more popular than ever, but for me watching the inevitable feature-length film based on ATHF was an act of nostalgia. (I always preferred the early days of Adult Swim, with lots of recycled Hanna-Barbera animation, and, God, those brilliant early episodes of Harvey Birdman, and the Captain Murphy era of Sealab...but anyway.) For about half an hour, I was enjoying the hell out of the Aqua Teen movie. There's a great parody of "Let's Go Out to the Lobby" which opens the film, and typically bizarre humor involving ancient Egypt, Abraham Lincoln, and a legendary exercise machine. It might take the non-initiated quite a while to figure out that the humor isn't supposed to make sense; the more dizzying the momentum, the more irrelevant the digressions, the better. But the movie drags on to 80 minutes, and it's important to remember that the Adult Swim version lasted no longer than 12 minutes. Those shorts were euphoric bursts of mayhem, followed by commercials, followed by another inexplicable program. To drag out this brand of comedy to feature length is fatal. And I'm surprised by that. I found myself thinking of the Mr. Show feature film spin-off Run Ronnie Run, in which David Cross and Bob Odenkirk took Ronnie Dobbs, just one of the hundreds of characters on their brilliant HBO sketch show, and developed his personality over a straight-faced plotline with very few irreverent digressions. Their approach had its logic: it's difficult to write a sketch-comedy movie that can sustain interest for 90 minutes, and even the Pythons hammered out plotlines for Holy Grail and Life of Brian. But with Run Ronnie Run you felt that they were taking their plot too seriously. The audience couldn't care that deeply for a one-joke character. They needed more digressions, like the profane, Jack Black-led Mary Poppins parody which is that film's high point. On the other hand, the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie proves that if you have no plotline (well, a very insubstantial one), you can fall off the other edge of the cliff. The film's just a chore. But I suspect that if you chop it up into 12-minute segments, and watch it one day at a time, it will be restored to full hilarity. This may take some surgery, but I think we can save the patient.

Knocked Up (U.S., 2007) * * *
D: Judd Apatow

Much was made by the press that the summer of 2007 would be the season--if not the year--of Judd Apatow, who already had a major hit in 2005 with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and was now releasing Knocked Up, which he directed, and Superbad, which he produced with Knocked Up's star, Seth Rogen, co-writing. It was, I suppose--as much as these things matter (which they don't; I don't think audiences were screaming, "It's the summer of Apatow!" while leaving the theater). Both films--smart, crude, sarcastic, and funny--were hits. I don't even know why I'm going through all this with you. You already know everything you need to know about Judd Apatow, and you've seen Knocked Up, most assuredly before I did, and you've come to your opinion. Still, let me tell you the plot: unemployed stoner Ben (Rogen), on an extraordinarily good night, flirts successfully with entertainment news host Alison (Katherine Heigl), and sleeps with her. Because of some bedroom confusion, he didn't wear a condom, and several weeks later she learns she's pregnant; unexpectedly, she decides to get to know Ben better rather than ditching him entirely, which leads to dating, love, etc. If the plot is conventional, the execution is not. Apatow is a master of populating his comedies with convincingly human characters. Ben seems real, perhaps because he's modeled so closely upon Rogen himself. Certainly Alison's sister, Debbie (Apatow's wife, Leslie Mann), convinces--I have a friend exactly like her--as well as her husband, Pete (Paul Rudd, behaving like Paul Rudd). All of these actors are excellent, including Heigl, although it is very difficult to believe that she'd fall in love with Ben so quickly. In fact, it almost seems like a crucial scene is missing: a moment when Ben sacrifices something for her, so that she can see his commitment, and thus see him for more than he'd presented. That scene, actually, comes at the very end of the film, but long before then she's confessed her love, and they've pursued an active sexual relationship. (This leads to a wonderful little scene in which Ben, deathly afraid of harming the unborn baby, tries to find the safest sexual position.) Anyway, it's an obvious flaw that somehow doesn't seem that important, since the film is so consistently funny, the characters so likable. You want to hang out with Apatow's friends, in Apatow's universe. Yes, if only it were always the summer of Apatow.

Tekkonkinkreet (Japan, 2006) * * 1/2
D: Michael Arias

Regular readers of this blog know that I'm a rabid fan of original, boundary-stretching animation. What I like most about Michael Arias' Tekkonkinkreet (original name Tekon kinkurîto, which I presume is pronounced "Tom Tancredo") is that it does not resemble any other Japanese anime ever made. The characters don't have the oversized, expressive features typical of anime and manga, but diminutive eyes placed just a little too far apart; though admittedly, their mouths stretch as wide as any Sailor Moon, and the central characters, "Black" and "White"--two kids who preposterously are the ganglords ruling over a Japanese district called "Treasure Town"--sail through the air and land from great heights with little apparent damage. They are our escorts through this bizarre metropolis, a landscape of lavishly detailed painted backgrounds. There's an elevated train, a clocktower with an animatronic Ganesh, and countless blocks of seedy movie theaters. Pursuing the two boys--the younger of whom is nearly autistic--is a new gang-boss, who controls superhuman warriors who may or may not be extraterrestrial. Just when this disproportionate gang battle begins to heat up, little White is severely injured and taken out of Black's custody and into a home where he begins to furiously sketch out crayon visions, most curiously of some evil entity he calls the Minotaur. Whatever the film means in concrete terms escapes me completely--and this is coming from someone who claims to understand Akira. Obviously the film is ultimately about loyalty and friendship, and on a basic level it works--and the action scenes are exciting. But the climax is a bit of a puzzle, and there's a long lull leading up to it which is genuinely morose (and curious). American FX wizard Arias' first film is successful as an experiment in style, not storytelling. I'm anxious to see what he does next.

Letters to the Editor: Is MST3K Cynical? Am I Cynical?

2007-12-06T16:35:00.000-08:00

I don't get emails regarding Kill the Snark that often, but when I do (when someone does stumble across this corner of the blog-iverse, and wants to say something about it), they're usually pretty interesting. Here are two emails about snarkiness and cynicism--one thoughtful and complimentary, the other not-so-complimentary and from a filmmaker whose work I reviewed in probably the most mean-spirited piece I've ever written.

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Hello Jeff,

I was directed to your recent piece on Mystery Science Theater 3000 by MST3KINFO.com. I really liked the article, to the point of taking notes on it as I made my way through, preparing myself for a good, thoughtful comment on your blog. Then, to my surprise, there was no comments section to be found. (A blogger who doesn't crave praise and attention? What?) So, still wanting to get these thoughts off of my chest, I'm writing you this email instead.

I really liked the article. I often find that people look at me funny when I insist to them that MST3K warrants this amount of thought. But what's really funny was how absolutely opposite my views of the show were from yours. I had actually held the show up as my shining example of how great UNcynical and UNironic humor can be. My views on humor seem very much in line with yours- I find that most people use humor in a negative way, for reasons I don't even care to get into. But I had always seen Mystery Science Theater as the antithesis of this. Just look at the sketches. Have you ever seen a group of guys (Midwestern to the core) more genuine and unassuming in your life? I love how unapologetically goofy they are. They're happy and love life. And, unlike most people, aren't afraid to show it.

BUT- There was always that nagging feeling in my the back of my mind... Isn't what these guys are doing, making fun of other people's art, kind of mean, cruel and... ironic by it's very nature? I came closest to actually realizing this concept when I read about how Joe Don Baker said he would punch the cast if he ever saw them, after hearing what they said about him during their episode featuring the film "Mitchell". (Why does it always seem to be the case that MST3K's most deplorable moments are also their funniest?)

Now that your article has clearly laid this out for me (Thank you so much), I find myself trying to reconcile this idea in my head. And I think I've come up with something fairly significant, or worth exploring anyway. MST3K should have also assaulted good movies. They should have given the same treatment to work they actually enjoyed. You can't tell me that you wouldn't sit through the entire three hours of Joel and the 'bots ripping through Seven Samurai. (Ignore the fact that they could never have gotten the rights to do this- we're waxing philosophically here.) I don't think it would be any more difficult for them to write, and I think the results could be just as funny. This type of indiscriminate assault on their part would have eliminated the "mean" aspect of that they were doing. It would have changed where they were coming from completely. In fact, just thinking about how well it would have worked almost makes me feel better about the reality of what they did.

That's what I have to say about your lovely article. You can take it as praise, or let me know what you think.

Thanks again.
Colin

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I stumbled upon your old take on my Q&A at Ebert's '06 festival, and my film "Duane Hopwood" and was struck by how... cynical it was. And how dismissive, of the film, the performances, and me. I'm also an actor and I'm used to criticism, but I wonder, just what your qualifications are to arrive at these conclusions. Are you a professional critic? Are you a a trained writer? A published writer? A professional in the arts? If you'd been at the Q&A with Ebert the day before, you'd have heard him call Schwimmer's performance "Academy Award caliber." He also went on to list the film as one of the "best of 2005." This from the most influential and (arguably) most respected film critic in the world, as opposed to...you.

Happy Holidays
Matt Mulhern

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Thoughts of your own - on cynicism, cynical criticism, or my own measly, unqualified ideas? (Hey, I've got a Masters in Writing - does that make my opinion worth more or less, and if so, by how much, percentage-wise?) Write me here, and I may post them in a future Letters to the Editor column.

She Who Must Be Obeyed

2007-11-25T11:51:00.000-08:00

She (U.S., 1935) * * *
D: Lansing C. Holden & Irving Pichel

At certain points during She--the 1935 Merian C. Cooper adaptation of the novel by H. Rider Haggard--I wanted to shout at the TV, "Where have you been all my life?" At other times, I cringed in embarrassment. This is pure pulp extravagance, with a big budget bringing Depression-era audiences savage savages, femme fatales, spectacular sets, a square-jawed hero and improbable fantasy. In the mountains of the frozen Arctic, adventurer Leo (Randolph Scott), his girl Tanya (Helen Mack), and scientific researcher Horace (Nigel Bruce, best known as the most famous screen incarnation of Dr. Watson) search for a legendary flame which can bestow eternal life upon those who bathe in its fires. Instead, they encounter the aforementioned savages, as well as a secret kingdom ruled by an immortal queen (Helen Gahagan). "She" believes that Leo is the reincarnation of her lover from 500 years before--whom she murdered out of jealousy, mind you, though she wants to make it up to him. Horace urges Leo to find out the secret of the magical flame, and the queen tries to convince Leo that he's her one and only--while privately attempting to put Tanya to death. This appealing boy's adventure goes down easy, and with a budget flush from King Kong profits (Cooper's 1933 success), you get some really stunning visuals, including a battle at the edge of a cliff, a wall of smoke through which the queen commands her minions, the shimmering lights of the immortal flame in a narrow, hidden cave, and the Art Deco sets themselves, immense, set against detailed and realistic matte paintings, but permeated with touches of Caligari-esque Expressionism. The vast gates that lead into the palace are meant to recall King Kong, but make no logical sense within the story, except to suggest that all which follows is the product of a Kong-sized imagination. Alas that more illogic pops up here and there (if this is the Arctic, why are all the natives half-naked?), and the characters are often given stupid dialogue, particularly the doltish hero, who understands things about ten minutes after the audience has. It's still a must-see for anyone with a weakness for these cliches. It's also fun to spot the moments which influenced later films: "She" dons a crown and garb which makes her strongly resemble the evil Queen of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937); the high priest, conducting a human sacrifice, dons a shaggy horned helmet like Mola Ram's in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, in the same scene where an extra swings from the center of the temple to an outcropping, and back, a la Indiana Jones in that film. Of course it all resembles the entertainments of Ray Harryhausen, too, even though there aren't any monsters; Harryhausen, a big fan, provides a commentary track on the new DVD from Kino and Legend Films. Harryhausen struck a deal with Legend to colorize his film 20 Million Miles to Earth, and She is colorized also, although you can watch it in black and white if you're some kind of, you know, purist or something. While one can theoretically defend Harryhausen's decision to colorize 20 Million Miles to Earth--it's really his film, and he claims it would have been in color if the budget had allowed for that--there's no point in colorizing She except to make it more garish and absurd.

And really, why would you want to? The original's black-and-white cinematography is beautiful, and appears to be drawn in broad charcoal-pencilstrokes. It actually resembles the preproduction drawings of Harryhausen himself, if you've seen his recent art books. Now that we live in an age where films like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow are made--deliberately meant to invoke this kind of retro-pulp world, and shot with the colors drained out by computer--you have to wonder why Legend Films thinks there's an audience for a colorized film. Let's face it, thanks to DVD, film buffs are a dime a dozen (same goes for blogs like this one). There's a big enough audience for the untouched She.

The Apple (U.S., 1980) *
D: Menahem Golan

Speaking of spectacles, I can't recommend The Apple too strongly. Is it terrible? Oh yes. Oh God yes. But it is a time capsule--not of 1994, the year in which it takes place, but of 1980, just before the 70's had completely expired, but certainly when disco was on its way out. Nobody told director Menahem Golan (later to produce, with partner Yoram Globus, many of the cheesiest films of that decade), whose film imagines that disco will live on and on, to eventually topple the government until all of our lives are controlled by a music producer named Mr. Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal), who is most certainly the Devil Incarnate. Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Alphie (George Gilmour) are country bumpkins (although apparently he's Scottish and she's not) and a singing folk duo, innocent and pure, and when Alphie refuses to sign Mr. Boogalow's contract, he helplessly watches as Bibi does--and becomes an international, soulless superstar. Alphie tries to win her back. He does. They live in a hippie commune for a year, before Mr. Boogalow and his stormtroopers find them, and there's a deus ex machina which actually involves God. The spectacularly crappy songs are by one Coby Recht, who has done--uh, let me look at at IMDB--nothing else. His lyrics are so consistently obvious and stupid as to make one wonder if it's not some brilliant bit of subversive parody; alas, the film's satire is much too obvious for that. But the film is undeniably entertaining and consistently hysterical. If you're having a group of friends over on a Saturday night, show them The Apple. But serve drinks. You'll need them.

Beowulf

2007-11-17T16:39:00.000-08:00

Beowulf (U.S., 2007) * * 1/2
D: Robert Zemeckis

Remember when Robert Zemeckis was the gifted director of breezy fantasy comedies, such as Romancing the Stone, the Back to the Future trilogy, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? He has morphed, CG-style, into the strangely clinical director of motion-capture computer-animated films, beginning with The Polar Express (2004), and now extending to Beowulf, an adaptation of the ancient Anglo-Saxon poem. I miss the old Zemeckis. I think a lot of us do. Just prior to the release of The Polar Express, Newsweek published a massive story on the film, apparently convinced that it would not only be the hit of the season (it wasn't), but also the harbinger of a new era of digital animation. Zemeckis enthused about the possibilities provided by motion-capture. By sticking ping-pong balls on his actors, he could direct their performances in a studio and their body movements could be mapped onto a computer. Really, it's just a fancy form of rotoscoping, the old technique in which actors are painted over by animators; it was used in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and most prominently--and to great criticism--by Ralph Bakshi in his later films. Rotoscoping was used to great artistic effect in Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001), proving that the form could still be a form of creative expression, rather than laziness--the most common criticism. No one seemed to think motion-capture was lazy when Zemeckis used it, or when Peter Jackson used it to map Andy Serkis' physical acting as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and as the title character of King Kong (2005). That's because the goal of most Hollywood digital animation has become realism and versimilitude, not artistic expression. So, these days, on occasion you have the computer being used to create visually imaginative films such as A Scanner Darkly (2006) and The Incredibles (2004), but too much of the time studios are pushing their animated films to recreate the dimensionality, contours, and texture of reality. Mickey Mouse could flex his body like a rubber band, and when he whistled in "Steamboat Willie," his mouth virtually popped out of his head. Great expressiveness, but he didn't look much like a mouse, did he? In Brad Bird's Ratatouille (2007), Remy the rat can stand up and talk, and when he gets on all fours and scurries, he looks just like a real rat. Critics gave rave reviews to Ratatouille, and the film deserved them, but they also took care to note how realistic the rat fur looked. As though that had much to do with the excellent storytelling.

I went into Beowulf with a bleeding heart for 2-D and a deep cynicism toward Zemeckis' grand project to make a CG animated film as convincing as live action. If I was going to experience all that Beowulf had to offer, I figured I'd better see it in Dolby Digital 3-D, in our local Sundance Cinema, with the polarized 3-D glasses. So this was literal 3-D animation, with the spears and severed limbs popping right out of the screen. The 3-D was spectacular, but the animation itself maddeningly uneven. Let me be more clear: this is a far better film than The Polar Express in every respect, and especially on the level of technical craftsmanship, but the technology has come so close to recreating the illusion of realism that the final gap to be bridged--making a CG human character completely convincing--seems all the wider. We ain't there yet. Some of the characters--all of whose faces are modeled directly upon their actors'--are astonishingly realistic, in particular King Hrothgar, played by Anthony Hopkins, and, in her sexed-up grand entrance, Grendel's mother, played by Angelina Jolie. Others, such as Queen Wealthow (Robin Wright-Penn) and Unferth (John Malkovich), look plasticine and just plain creepy, which was the effect I got from all the passengers of The Polar Express. Although characters show a little more emotional expression than before, their faces remain stiff. These mannequins lack soul. But I'll give Zemeckis credit, because while watching Beowulf I found myself wondering, for the first time, about where this is headed. All this time I've been patiently waiting for cel animation to make its inevitable comeback (you can't replace the specific charm and expressions made available by line drawing and paint), but Beowulf has finally made me realize that the day is coming when a computer-generated simulacrum is indistinguishable from a human being. Sure, it might not have a soul, but a finer form of motion capture could conceivably pick up on all the actor's nuances. Zemeckis may be on a fool's errand, but the technology is beginning to catch up with his ambition, and ultimately it will improve to the point where animation can be invisible--already occurring for special-effects shots in live action films, but something of a technological holy grail if a CG creation can convincingly replicate a live actor for 90 minutes. Imagine the money you'd save on catering.

Zemeckis is aiming for the fences with Beowulf. The Polar Express, for all its realism, sought the look of the illustrations of Chris van Allsburg (realistic, but "storybook" nonetheless). Beowulf, by contrast, is improbably steeped in earthiness and overt eroticism. This isn't just a fantasy action film. It requires that the sweat-dampened skin seem tactile, that you can see the dirt under the fingernails and the slight blemishes on the cheek. Fur garments are dropped. Golden water streams across Angelina Jolie's voluptuous body. Tendons and flesh are lovingly slashed, with red viscera splattering across the screen (and at you, if you've got the glasses). You get the feeling Zemeckis wanted to graduate early, so he skipped a few classes and went straight to his thesis. When Beowulf strides through a dark cave lit only by the dim light of a magically-illuminated horn, the shadows hide the CG's limitations, and he is strikingly human. But when the feast/orgy is held in the film's opening sequence, you can pick out characters in the background who look like rubber dolls. You wouldn't be this picky if Zemeckis weren't asking you to be. Give him credit for making his thesis an R-rated film that, ironically, gets a PG-13 from the MPAA for the likely reason that it's animated--you know, just like Toy Story, except that Beowulf strips naked to fight Grendel. (But thank God that's not really Anthony Hopkins' naked behind sagging into the frame.)

Not only is the film gory and erotic, by turns, but the entire theme is aimed at adults. It's a story about disappointment, about not living up to the image that you present. It's a story about aging, and about taking responsibility for the children we've neglected. Credit the maturity of the screenplay to author Neil Gaiman and Pulp Fiction's co-writer, Roger Avary, who have collaborated on a script that faithfully recreates the context of the story's historical origins (this takes place in 10th-century Denmark) as well as its broad outline. But it also deepens and subverts the plot. Beowulf, the text, is the legend; Gaiman and Avary purport to be telling the real story. Yes, Beowulf severs Grendel's arm, but did he really slay him by cutting off his head? In this version, it's actually Grendel's mother who decapitates her already-dead son--now reduced, pathetically, to a disfigured, dried-up fetus--while hastily seducing Beowulf. Beowulf succumbs to her charms as well as her promises of wealth and power, a mistake already made by the king (who fathered Grendel). The king eventually commits suicide, but first declares Beowulf the heir, because he knows the warrior will be the new slave of Grendel's mother, and that the crown will be heavy indeed. But what has Beowulf now fathered? This is a very fine screenplay, and Gaiman and Avary can acquit themselves. It cleverly subverts the heroic myth, and risks losing the audience by portraying a Beowulf who's a braggart, a narcissist, and a bit of an oaf. Naturally, Grendel has siphoned some sympathetic qualities; while he does chew up the heads of his enemies, he's also reacting only because of his very sensitive ear, which pains him whenever the noise of the castle reaches his mountain cave. He's dispatched early, which is kind of a shame, because as the Frankenstein monster of the narrative, he's also potentially the story's heart. (The second son, Beowulf's--revealed later on--is not granted as much humanity, in the haste to deliver an exciting climax.) I find it fascinating that Grendel literally shrinks in size when he's wounded by Beowulf, as though these blows force a monstrous legend to be reduced to reality--and a humanity. The notion reinforces Gaiman and Avary's chief concern, which is uncovering the flawed being that lurks behind a legend. The exploration of this theme gives this adaptation an intelligently postmodern spin.

But how perverse that their screenplay requires so much sensuality. This should have been a live-action film, obviously. It probably would've been much cheaper to produce if it were--after all, there's only two sets to build, a castle and a cave. And this is probably not the film to resuscitate Bakshi-style adult animation, dripping with sex and violence, even if that were the intention of the collaborators. Beowulf is a film made in the awkward years of an evolving medium. Like a lot of CG animation, it will not age well. (The early Pixars already look very primitive by comparison to the newer ones.) Ultimately, this will be a footnote in the history of cinema, cited alongside The Polar Express as an example of animation's first steps to mimic reality, whether or not that direction proves misguided. That's a shame, because there's a decent movie buried somewhere underneath all these photorealistic ones and zeros.

Tale of a Test Screening

2007-11-15T07:28:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that there have been more advance screenings of late in Madison, or maybe I'm just hearing about them more, but last night was the first time that I'd been aware of a test screening in my city. The difference between a sneak preview and a test screening is that the latter is done by a studio or a filmmaker to get feedback from an audience which might affect the final cut of the film. All right, I'm still not absolutely positive that last night's free showing of Stop Loss, the latest film by Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Peirce, was a "test screening," but since it is not scheduled for release until March 28, 2008, I think it's safe to assume Paramount Studios--reps from whom, with Pierce, were in attendance--were looking to gauge the audience's reaction. Passes were distributed via a mailing list for the Wisconsin Film Festival; you were asked to RSVP, although my wife and I did not (actually, we were waiting until the last minute to see if we could get into a sneak preview of Beowulf, which didn't happen)--we were still able to get in with no difficulty. It was held at the small but cozy theater at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and as you stepped through the gallery you were confronted by security guards ensuring that you had no cameras or video equipment. This frequently happens at sneak previews, too, although the security looked a little more professional, and there was also a table at which you could sign up for a Stop Loss mailing list and pick up stickers and posters for the movie. I strongly suspect the mailing list was actually another method to get feedback from the audience and to follow up with them. I did grab a sticker, which contains a link for a website containing a streaming video interviewing real soldiers grappling with the army's "stop-loss policy." (The page is owned by Paramount and linked to the official movie's promo site.) The stop-loss policy, of course, is the method by which U.S. soldiers have their service in Iraq extended beyond their initial contract and against their will, and is also the main concern of Pierce's (narrative fiction) film. The screening began fifteen minutes late, and for approximately an hour before it began, a looping slideshow played on the screen, set to loud music and depicting photographs taken by soldiers in Iraq. After a brief introduction by a UW film professor, Pierce took the stage, explaining that the film was inspired by her younger brother's service in Iraq. Up to this point, my wife and I were convinced that the film was going to be a documentary (she seemed to introduce it as such), but in fact it's a very conventional story of a soldier (Ryan Philippe) going AWOL when he learns that he'll be sent back to Iraq through the stop-loss policy, and he travels from Texas to New York in hopes of meeting with a senator who will help his case. I won't comment too much on the film, since it may not be the final cut, but we disliked it to the point of not even staying for the Q&A with Pierce (most of the audience also left). The Q&A was going to videotaped, either to be included on the film's website or on a future DVD, I'd guess. On the way back to the parking garage, we discussed our disappointment with the film--maybe a little loudly, I'm not sure. I said that it addressed my criticisms of In the Valley of Elah by presenting the soldiers as humans instead of machines, but that it felt like an afterschool special, and the script was didactic and obvious. Actually, I believe I said, "Why did it have to SUCK?!" In the stairwell of the garage I noticed that we were being closely followed by a man with a notepad whom I recognized from the screening. I stopped talking. Midway between the third and fourth floor, this man, without looking up to see where he was, suddenly turned around and headed back down. Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but now I'm wondering if Why did it have to SUCK?! was scribbled down on that pad, and is now making its way back to the execs in Hollywood. Oopsie.

Making Fun: Mystery Science Theater 3000

2007-11-11T06:13:00.001-08:00

In 1990, I was unreasonably (and inexplicably) excited about a new cable channel that was finally coming to our Waukesha county cable provider: The Comedy Channel, alongside its rival the Ha! Network, had been heavily hyped--at least in my issues of TV Guide--and I actually remember turning to the channel where this "comedy" was supposed to be appearing, checking in on that placeholder screen and waiting for the network to be switched on. At last The Comedy Channel materialized, and I was initiated into the scrappy beginnings of what would later become the hugely successful Comedy Central. Mostly it was clips of stand-up comedy--Rob Schneider, Adam Sandler, Larry Miller, Paula Poundstone, Dana Gould--packaged with Monty Python and Kids in the Hall clips in a program called Short Attention Span Theater, hosted by a nobody called John Stewart. There was a lot of original programming, but all of it exceptionally low-budget: Rich Hall's Onion World, The Higgins Boys and Gruber, and Late Night with Allan Havey. I actually become devoted to these shows long before finally catching an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which I'd seen advertised; I believe I was babysitting the neighbor kid when I caught episode 203, Jungle Goddess, a 1948 programmer with plenty of stock footage, cheap sets, and the racist chestnut of a white woman being revered as a goddess by African savages. At the bottom of the screen, in silhouette, series creator Joel Hodgson, with two handmade puppets named Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo, mercilessly skewered the film.

I would have watched the show even if the jokes weren't funny. As a macabre kid whose parents never let him watch R-rated horror movies, I became well-versed in old Universal horror and fantasy pictures, as well as B-movies of the 1950's: the MST3K specialty. It was a two-hour program, and the main feature, sometimes preceded by a short, played from shortly after the opening credits to the end. It was just the sort of entertainment I usually sought out on Saturday nights; and in fact I had already seen, on my local TV station late at night, many of the movies which the show chose or would choose to "riff," such as The Mole People, City Limits, and Laserblast. But the jokes were funny, even if many of the references went right over my head, and I quickly came to love Joel and the 'Bots, who interrupted the movie for short, low-rent comedy sketches, as well as the mad scientists who forced them to watch these bad movies--Dr. Forrester (Trace Beaulieu, also the voice of Crow) and TV's Frank (Frank Conniff).

The show became The Comedy Channel's first success, and when Onion World and the Higgins Boys dropped from sight, MST3K received a cushy contract to produce expanded seasons. Each Thanksgiving was "Turkey Day," and the network would show a full day's worth of MST3K episodes. The cult following became large, they won a Peabody Award, and the show was met with generous critical acclaim, most vocally from TIME's film critic Richard Corliss. Although Joel left the series midway through the fifth season, he was replaced by head writer Michael J. Nelson; despite some allegedly intense Joel vs. Mike fights on the "internet" (an entity of which I was barely aware at the time), the show's success continued to build with barely a hiccup. Conventions were spawned, and the cast and crew began to riff on movies live to an enthusiastic response. A feature-length film was financed, to be distributed by Universal, and featuring a slightly shortened version of their film This Island Earth. In the Bantam tie-in book published around this period, there's only the slightest hint that things were about to go sour--a few ominous paragraphs by writer/performer Mary Jo Pehl: "Since January of this year, Jim Mallon, producer, has said at least three times a week, 'The channel deal for Season Seven should be coming through in a couple of weeks.' It has yet to happen. Frankly, I'm losing hope and I have to face the fact that I don't even have a cat." Comedy Central (which it was now called, having since merged with the Ha! Network and having been sued by Canadian television for their brief use of the moniker "CTV") had grown sour on the show, whose ratings were good, solid--but also reached a plateau. The show also ate 120 minutes of air time, a good thing in the early days of the Comedy Channel, but now, not so much. The show was canned, only to be revived the next year, following a fierce campaign from the fans, by a different fledgling network: The Sci-Fi Channel. Sci-Fi had already gone through its growing pains, and had cut much of its original programming in favor of cheaper reruns like The Six Million Dollar Man, Dark Shadows, and The Incredible Hulk. It was looking to invest in a few select, cheap-to-produce nuggets of original programming, and MST3K, with its built-in audience, seemed like an attractive bargain.

As it happened, the show ran for three more seasons on the Sci-Fi Channel. I watched it as periodically as ever, a fan who didn't have much time to watch two-hour episodes of a TV show, and usually just caught it in bits and pieces. By the time Sci-Fi cancelled the show, when I was already in grad school, I tuned in to watch the last episode (#1013, Diabolik) and got a little nostalgic in the end, as Mike and the Bots finally returned to Earth. I hadn't watched the show in a year or two, but it was still bittersweet: the show had run for ten years, and I'd grown up with it. Yet, in many ways, the show hasn't really died. Rhino Home Video had begun releasing episodes on VHS a few years before the end, and has persistently cultivated the MST3K fan community by continuing to release DVD box sets of the show, at least two a year. Although there are only four episodes in a set, this is no small gesture, as Rhino negotiates the rights to each individual "experiment" (feature film) in that episode, barring the public domain ones of course. Sometimes the rights lapse, and episodes go out of print. Sometimes a mistake is made, most notably with Godzilla vs. Megalon (#212), which Rhino released without securing Toho Studio's permission--and that whole box set is now an eBay collector's item (a shame, as it was the best set released, and a good "starter package" for new fans). Because of the labyrinthine rights entanglements for so many episodes, it looks like MST3K full-season sets will never be released; but the show was designed with little continuity anyway, so not much is lost by the random order these sets contain. Most volumes now are split evenly between the Joel and Mike years, and Comedy Channel/Central and Sci-Fi. It's easy to get into, and an addictive show to collect.

Still, while MST3K is easily one of my favorite shows and "comfort foods," I always feel a strange ambivalence toward its cultural impact, as well as its philosophy as a whole. The reason I entitled this blog "Kill the Snark" was because I was tired of the kind of cynicism which pervades so much online critiquing--the mentality in which (1) the critic steps on one film in order to elevate another, but crudely, without properly appraising the merits/demerits of the former film; (2) the critic dismisses a film entirely without providing real criticism; (3) the critic makes the piece more about his/her own writing style, hangups, or whims rather than the actual qualities of the film, in a kind of minor form of gonzo journalism in which the writer is the star of the piece; (4) the critic succumbs to snarkiness, in particular with films that require a greater patience or openness to originality. I sometimes wonder just how influential MST3K has been upon this lower level of critical discourse. Naturally "snarkiness" and dismissive criticism has been around since the dawn of the newspaper, but MST3K makes it an art, just as it gives a bit of respectability to the risible act of talking loudly in the theater. Naturally the writing, directing, and editing of an "experiment" are ruthlessly torn to pieces, but there can be a mean-spirited angle: actors are often bashed for their appearance, and certainly for their talents (and lack thereof). With hundreds, if not thousands, of jokes crammed into a tightly-written 92-minute episode, the skilled writers and former stand-ups of MST3K have produced an astonishing comic machine, but also a behemoth of take-no-prisoners criticism that essentially leaves nothing in its wake intact. When directed toward a completely incompetent piece like The Creeping Terror, Manos: The Hands of Fate, and Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders, it's exhilarating to behold. So exhilarating that it's difficult, if not impossible, to then immediately watch a respectable film without the urge to tear it to pieces. For a little while, Everything Sucks. And indeed, there's hardly a film that can't get a severe hole or two punched in it somewhere, when watched with that slant. It should also be noted that I've heard many complaints, in online forums and elsewhere, from movie buffs dismayed at inappropriate laughter from members of the audience during revival screenings of classic films. I've witnessed this many times, most depressingly during a should-have-been-great screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some now avoid revival screenings--and the theatrical experience in general--preferring to watch their serious films at home, where they don't need to worry about wannabe Tom Servos.

Some of the creators of the original films handle the MST3K treatment better than others. Sandy Frank, who redubbed and distributed many of the Japanese films from the show's third season, was so angered by the personal ridicule he received on the show that he refused to renew the show's license to air his films. Subsequently, the Gamera movies, among the series' best episodes, remain unreleased on DVD. With Time Chasers (#821), a 1980's low-budget sci-fi film, the creators of the film were actually fans of MST3K and excited to find out that their obscure little movie was going to be featured on the show. Writer Paul Chaplin, in his "Reflections" on this episode written for the Sci-Fi Channel's MST3K website, recalled positive feelings for the film: "We...got a definite sense that the whole project was undertaken by a group of well-adjusted people. That is certainly not true of most of our movies, and they're to be commended. And truth be told--and remember, I'm only saying this in order to be polite--this really isn't a horrible film." Mike Nelson has a more painfully honest account, in his DVD introduction to the episode: "When the show premiered, [the makers of Time Chasers] had a party, and we talked to all the people beforehand, especially one of the characters--the little guy with the mustache, I don't remember his name...and they showed the movie, and we talked to the guy after that and things weren't so good anymore. Apparently they didn't think we would actually savage the film. Maybe they thought we would say, 'Wow, this is a great film.' It didn't happen that way, and apparently the party was kind of a downer, so to all of those people involved in Time Chasers: I'm sorry." On the other hand, Don Sullivan, one of the stars of The Rebel Set (#419), has found a somewhat strange, if philosphical appreciation for the treatment his film received by the show. On an interview included in the recently-released Volume 12 box set, he says, "I've always liked [MST3K] for reasons that most people don't understand... The first time I saw it was The Giant Gila Monster [#402], and the little robots added humor to it. It was a nice film...however, the Science Fiction 3000 [sic] robots added luster to that. And the same thing with The Rebel Set. Here's a good movie, with a lot of interesting interplay of three losers, which, if you really look into it, has a lot of psychological interplay. They added humor to it in a beautiful way, the robots, that takes it...from a 'B' movie to an 'A' movie and that makes it very nice for the actors that are in it. So I love it." Now, perhaps Sullivan, like Chaplin, is just being polite, but his argument seems to be that MST3K improves its films in its efforts to tear them apart. Many fans would agree. On the other hand, he defends the qualities which he believes inherently exist in the original version of The Rebel Set. I admit I can't see much of any "psychological interplay" among the characters of the film--certainly nothing of any depth--but Sullivan clearly invested himself in the picture and continues to feel a natural protectiveness toward it. It's just that he's also managed to reconcile it with the MST3K version in what is either reflexive doublethink or an appreciative serenity which comes with time and distance.

At fan conventions and other MST3K-related events, it's not unusual to see cast and crew from the original films showing up to express their love for the show. Although I've never attended an MST3K convention, on two occasions in Madison I was able to see, up-close, how these subjects of so much "riffing" have reconciled their feelings toward it. The first was very positive, the second very weird. At the 2003 Wisconsin Film Festival, Kevin Murphy (the voice of Tom Servo) introduced a screening of Giant Spider Invasion [#810] with one of its stars, Paul Bentzen, who was very appreciative of the crowd and enthusiastic right alongside them, despite the fact that the film, though presented "un-riffed," was greeted to a roar of laughter that barely abated for its entire length. That's what you call a good sport. The director, Wisconsin-based auteur Bill Rebane, was scheduled to appear, but didn't because he was "snowed in," as Murphy told me skeptically before the show began. A couple years later, Rebane did show, this time for a festival celebrating his films hosted by Murphy and Mike Nelson. My wife and I planned to stay for as long as we could, but after the excruciatingly awful, two-hour-long documentary on Rebane's life as a director, edited incompetently by his wife, we bailed. The real reason we left is that it was just too awkward to be watching a recap of this director's life while every clip is mocked mercilessly by the audience. It was like an episode of "This is Your Life" hosted by Satan. The clips from his films--the "highlights," supposedly--were so awful that at a certain point, despite all my efforts to resist, I couldn't help but join in the laughter. We both did, and I think we felt a little dirty after that.

So I'm not saying that the films chosen for MST3K are not worthy of mockery. It's particularly cathartic when applied to the backward and even sexist values imposed by the older films, like the short subjects, many of them meant to be screened in classrooms, instructing young women to take home economics classes while the boys take Shop. (In one short, women are given a very limited array of careers from which to choose, should they--gasp!--actually want one; the most ambitious is being a stewardess.) Hey, snark has its place, and can provide a useful satirical function in undermining the status quo. On the other hand, some of the show's episodes have received vehement objections when the films being savaged are fondly remembered. Kevin Murphy recounts, in the MST3K Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, of encountering a hostile Dennis Miller when the crew was invited to his show: "Dennis mumbled something about us slipping because we had done Marooned on our show and it was a pretty good movie and maybe we'd lost our touch. In a word, he slammed us. Then he just sat there, sweating, staring at us blankly, and we smiled and stared back, then it was time to go." Marooned starred Gene Hackman and Gregory Peck and won an Oscar, so it was an odd choice for MST3K, but it was also the premiere of the fourth season, with the show at a creative peak, and it served as kind of an announcement by the show that they were hitting the big time, getting bigger films, and yes, some of those big-budget blockbusters were pretty bad, too. The objections were much stronger when they chose This Island Earth for use in Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. I remember being surprised at the choice because my recollection was that the movie was kind of good. Certainly it was a cult classic, thanks to its bright primary-color cinematography, elaborate sets and plotting, and a memorable monster as iconic, in some circles, as Robby the Robot and the Creature from the Black Lagoon (they'd riff a Black Lagoon sequel later). What I--and a lot of other people--had forgotten was just how silly This Island Earth was. It's not a bad movie, it's a silly one, profoundly so: the aliens disguised as humans have suspiciously elongated foreheads, the captain's chair of their spacecraft looks like a toilet, and, well, it's got the Professor from Gilligan's Island in it. If you're in the right mood, you can laugh at the movie while still enjoying it. And while this was the most controversial experiment choice the crew of MST3K ever made, for me, conversely, it is the very justification for why I love this show. In the best episodes, the movies are a lot of fun to watch. They remind me of when I was a kid, watching beaten-up prints of B-movies on tape and on TV, waiting anxiously for the next monster they put up on the screen, just to see if it's going to look good or if it's going to be another lizard in a dinosaur costume. I love how goofy many of these movies are, and I love the movies. That's not doublethink.

In a recent interview with Joel Hodgson on Starwars.com, he explains: "As time went on I began to have affection for all these weird movies we were working with. I don't have the attitude like, 'bad movies suck and I'm going to put my eyes out with a pen because I curse you, bad movie!' I like all movies, good and bad. The good ones I call great, and the bad ones I call horribly great." In the end I think that's the best way to view MST3K. It isn't a savaging, but a salvaging: a way to recycle these ephemeral B-pictures into something entertaining again. Approached in the right spirit, MST3K is a justification for loving movies. After all, the sketches and the framing segments are just a small portion of each episode; the bulk is taken up by the actual film itself, and you're right there, with Mike, Joel, and the Bots, watching them. You wouldn't do that if you didn't have some kind of affection for the genres and the trappings of the drive-in or direct-to-video picture. These are still fun movies. So when you settle down with the latest box set, a bag of microwave popcorn and a beer, go ahead and laugh guiltlessly, but also remember why you're laughing: because deep down you love movies.

[Although the show has been cancelled since 1999, the creators of MST3K have eventually gravitated back toward movie-riffing. Mike Nelson produces a steady stream of podcast movie commentary on his Rifftrax site. (He does the commentary, but you have to go and rent the film.) Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett (the voice of Crow during the Sci-Fi years) have also formed The Film Crew, and started a line of DVDs in which they riff on various bad films from yesteryear. Finally, Joel Hodgson has just reunited with J. Elvis Weinstein (the original Tom Servo), Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, and Mary Jo Pehl for Cinematic Titanic, another movie-riffing project which promises to release DVDs in the near future.]

The Best of the Rhino Releases
Although a few of the episodes have slipped out of print over the years, Rhino has released enough "experiments" to make for a healthy MST3K schooling. Here are the first you should seek out on Netflix or at your local video store.

1. 424 Manos - the Hands of Fate
Appallingly slow-paced horror film from the imagination of a manure salesman, though Joel and the Bots make it hysterically entertaining. Generally considered one of the worst films ever made.
2. 303 Pod People
The ideal combination of Alien and E.T., this is the story of a boy who befriends a "cute," snout-faced, furry little alien, who proceeds to slaughter all of his friends. The best bits involve a band led by a guy who looks like Greg Brady, and sings incomprehensible songs (which Joel expertly parodies).
3. 1003 Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders
Less a film than a tax write-off, this ill-advised "children's film" patches together two grisly horror movies, noticeably produced in different decades, and both coincidentally featuring a household pet being set ablaze. Also, a man dressed in a wizard's costume walks through a park asking people, "Have you seen my monkey?"
4. 506 Eegah!
Richard Kiel (Jaws from The Spy Who Loved Me) plays a caveman discovered living in the hills of a California desert. Listen sharply for the weird, looped line "Watch out for snakes!" which has become something of a catchphrase. Arch Hall, Jr., sings.
5. 212 Godzilla Vs. Megalon
This episode went out of print quickly, but it's signature MST3K, with lots of rubber-suited monsters and one of the best host sketches ever: "Rex Dart, Eskimo Spy."
5. 321 Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
A very special Christmas episode with this notorious children's film in which Santa Claus is abducted by Martians, and, in one disturbing sequence, almost blown out of an airlock by the murderous yet wacky aliens.
6. 820 Space Mutiny
Eighties direct-to-video SF movie features the moving story of a bodybuilder romancing a middle-aged tramp and battling a mutiny with gun-battles on golf carts. A minor character is killed in one scene, and then reappears in the background of the very next scene.
7. 404 Teenagers from Outer Space
The title says it all, except that there's also, inexplicably, a giant lobster on the loose. Edited so incompetently that it approaches avant-garde art.
8. 207 Wild Rebels
Rhino has released about all of the 60's biker and Hell's Angels movies featured on MST3K, and this is the best of them, with a priceless "Wild Rebels Cereal" sketch.
9. 908 The Touch of Satan
This low-key 70's horror film is far from the worst film MST3K ever did, but at one point, while a beautiful young witch shows a hunky drifter a small lake in a field, she points to it and says: "This is where the fish lives." I have spent years ruminating on that line, trying to decipher what exactly the screenwriter meant and how in God's name it ever made it into a motion picture. I don't recommend you do the same: that way lies great agony.
10. 518 The Atomic Brain
Women with poorly-realized foreign accents are abducted by a mad scientist, who is practicing body-switching experiments in the basement of his Gothic manor. These foreign accents are a beautiful thing, fluidly changing in the middle of single syllables. The plot is straight out of a Gilligan's Island episode: another reason I love it.

Do not start here:

1009 Hamlet: The MST3K writers wanted to prove that even Shakespeare could write a horrible film, but the result is excruciatingly boring.
515 The Wild World of Batwoman: This film is so incompetent that it's hilarious for the first few minutes, but then the "deep hurting" sets in. I find myself physically unable to sit through this movie.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

2007-11-10T18:58:00.000-08:00

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (U.S., 2007)
* * * 1/2
D: Andrew Dominik

Jesse James (Brad Pitt) is nearing the end. He stages one last train robbery, then his older brother (Sam Shepard) splits, and it's up to Jesse to put the gang on their separate ways. In these last days, with the law hot on their trail and the pressure bearing down hard, Jesse's men start to get anxious and more than a little paranoid. Each thinks James is gunning for him, and he just might decide that's a good idea, when he sees the guilty look in their eyes. This includes the brothers Ford, Charley (Sam Rockwell) and his kid brother Bob (Casey Affleck), both of whom have a severe loyalty to their leader, although Bob's is a fealty born of youthful idolization. He keeps Jesse James novellas and portraits stored in a box under his bed, and he's bitterly ashamed and defensive when Charley and the other bandits tease him about it--although he's just as willing to heap praise upon James to his face, with earnest eyes and a stupid smile that creeps up his face despite his best attempts to bat it down.

Chopper director Andrew Dominik's sophomore film, in its quiet, frontier lyricism, bears more than a passing resemblance to the work of Terrence Malick (Badlands in particular); but he contributes a unique flavor with a modern, moody score, courtesy rock musician Nick Cave (who also wrote and scored The Proposition), and interludes shot as if through smoked glass, narrated by Hugh Ross, who provides historical footnotes as well as beautiful snapshots of the characters' well-hidden emotional lives. These passages are presumably taken from the novel by Ron Hansen, and they certainly lend a literary texture to the film, which unfolds at a gradual pace, with each moment of suspense or action drawn out and dissected before being folded back into its package. Most notably this can be seen in the train robbery, which begins as an almost spiritual ritual, as the train's spotlight floods the woods like the coming of Titania, casting eerie white light upon each of the shoddily-hooded faces of the James gang, who gaze at it, enraptured; Jesse merely waits with his lantern in the middle of the tracks, waiting for the train to stop. Never mind that it shouldn't be able to so quickly--the sequence is in slow-motion, and by film logic, the train has an eternity to come to rest. This gorgeous scene soon transitions into the nature of the heist itself, with thundering guns, startled passengers, and one fellow guarding the safe, visibly summoning all the courage he can to stand up to Jesse James. He'd be a minor character in any other film, but by Dominik's method, every face has a story worth telling. That extends to the curious assignation between Dick Liddil (Paul Schneider) and the young wife (Kailin See) of the father of his friend Wood Hite; the two make preposterous passes, hers a bit more clever than his, until they finally meet in an outhouse. The sequence does bear some import upon the plot, but it plays as its own isolated sketch, and it's just about as perfect as anything you'll see in a modern Western.

But the focus, of course, is on the story of Bob Ford's fascination with Jesse James. At the start of the film he's just a tagalong desperate to be a sidekick in the gang. Soon James begins to treat him like a little brother, to the relief of Charley Ford, and the resentment of everyone else, including Jesse's wife. What makes their relationship interesting is that it isn't static: Bob picks fights with Jesse where others wouldn't have the courage, in his confused efforts to deal with his own devotion to this sometimes undeserving bully, sadist, and killer. Jesse, in turn, threatens Bob's life, then apologizes to him the next day by presenting him with a nickel-plated pistol. Since you know the outcome of the story, the telling depends upon building interest in this relationship and its import; it almost succeeds. I found Casey Affleck's Bob Ford to be a bit too slow, a bit too sweaty-palmed and simpering, to sustain my interest for every moment he's on the screen, although I can't say the same for Pitt. It's telling, if predictable, that reviews of this film bypass Pitt in their recognition and praise for Affleck. That's because this is Affleck's first major performance; quite the opposite of his role in Gus van Sant's understated Gerry, here the camera focuses on his face and studies every tic and twitch and bead of sweat. It's a good performance, but a tiring one in this 160-minute film. Pitt, on the other hand, is the best that he has ever been. When he catches the camera's stare, it's a pure pleasure to see him studying Bob and the other members of his gang, judging their loyalty, finding it lacking, and then, with an almost sublimated despair, forging ahead regardless. He does shoot a man in the back, beat an adolescent boy senseless, and implicitly threaten everyone else, all while nursing a paranoia that grows wider by the day--but you still have a magnetic attraction to the man. All that works beautifully, thanks to a moving performance by Pitt. Sam Rockwell is good, too, although a bit overplayed; this is the kind of Western where there are no stalwarts, only nervous wrecks, and Rockwell is here the most toady of sidekicks, eager to please James lest it cost him his life.

There's one drunken barroom scene, with Nick Cave making a (strangely anachronistic) cameo, that is so unnecessary and familiar that it seems to belong to any other Western--or every other Western. And the film does, finally, drag on just a little bit too much. But it is so absorbing, so perfectly paced, that these slightest missteps seem glaring. This is a patient, observant, and valuable film, and there should be more like it.

Day Watch

2007-11-08T15:55:00.001-08:00

Day Watch (Russia, 2006) * * 1/2
D: Timur Bekmambetov

This two-and-a-half-hour sequel to the Russian fantasy blockbuster Night Watch boasts an impressive budget, almost nonstop action, and a script so packed with characters, digressions, and subplots that it's visibly burst at the seams. It is, in many ways, the Russian version of The Matrix Reloaded. The first film was of almost historical importance in its home country; Russia (and the Soviet Union) has had a heritage of films that are either high art propaganda (Battleship Potemkin, Aelita Queen of Mars, Man with a Movie Camera) or simply high art (The Mirror, The Return, Russian Ark), but Night Watch was escapist fun for the masses. Granted, it was extremely ambitious escapist fun, with a plot that many critics found impossible to follow, but others likened it to The Lord of the Rings (whether or not they could follow that plot). The film, based on the international bestseller by Sergei Lukyanenko, explained quickly that two supernatural forces are holding an uneasy truce in the modern-day world: one side, the good guys, have formed the "Night Watch" to keep an eye on the bad guys, and vice versa for the "Day Watch." It's basically a cops versus gangsters story, but populated with witches, wizards, shapeshifters, and vampires. When one side transgresses against the other, the other side muses on how to react. (This chess game is really no different than what goes on in The Sopranos.) In Night Watch, we were introduced to Anton, a low-level wizard who learns that his son can become a powerful agent of darkness; despite his attempts to keep him, the boy is recruited, at the end of that film, to the other side. As Day Watch opens, Anton has initiated his friend Svetlana as an agent of the Night Watch, and while on duty they both encounter Anton's boy, and get a sense of how powerful and evil the adolescent has become. Anton grows obsessed with being reunited with his boy, and spends his spare time tracking down the Chalk of Fate, an ancient, magical piece of chalk which can alter the past, and a plot device better suited for a Harry Potter novel. That pesky chalk also provides one of the most absurd deux ex machinas in all of modern cinema. But that's not until you've reached the end of this epic, which features so many fistfights, car chases, and mystical twists that I certainly don't have the time to recount them all here. The most notable and entertaining of these involves Anton going undercover by switching bodies with a female Night Watch agent, which leads to gender-bending complications when he and Svetlana confess their love for each other. It's a great idea in a movie that has a lot of them--I also liked Alisa the witch's golden ring, which allows her lover to feel her emotions and immediately identify if she's cheating on him--but this breathless film has a strange tendency to show off its budget while pursuing blind alleys. Like when Sventlana first mentions that she loves Anton (his car dives off the road and he makes a spectacular crash in a snowbank); or when Alisa drives up the side of a hotel, shattering through windows and driving down hallways, just because she's anxious to see her boss; or when Anton goes to great effort to board a plane to Samarcand, only to turn around when he realizes that's not where he really wants to go. Day Watch is worrisomely obsessed with providing one spectacle after another, each bigger than the last, until you arrive at an absurd, apocalyptic climax replete with tango dancing, a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a yo-yo, a little spider with a baby-doll's head, multiple drunken speeches into a microphone, another car chase--this one with a car crashing straight through a truck lengthwise and surviving intact--a completely irrelevant whodunit unmasking of a murderer, and a ferris wheel crashing down a city street. They might as well have called upon the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. It's a shame, because the exhausting and pointless finale undoes a lot of goodwill the film had built before then. Bekmambetov, although he relies too heavily on fast-cutting and heavy metal music, shares with Jean-Pierre Jeunet an intensely visual storytelling style which requires the audience to pay attention to the smallest details, which inevitably become important later on. This provides for some delightful little gags as well as bigger payoffs. Kudos also to the costume design and makeup, which outfits Alisa with red leather, a spiked dog-collar, and a haircut that points upward into little devil horns. The look of this film is richly detailed in its decadence. The decaying slums in which the Night Watch lives and works is in dramatic contrast to the elegance of the forces of darkness, who drink their blood out of fine wineglasses while wearing the sexiest gowns. But, like The Matrix Reloaded, it's much ado about nothing much. Anton is torn--in one scene, almost literally--between his love for his son and his love for Svetlana, but it's never convincing that either one should love him. He's a chain-smoking, drunken, usually bloody wreck. Yet upon these relationships turn the plot--and apparently the fate of the world. I appreciate that all the large-scale action and mayhem pivot on a personal story about love and devotion, but it just doesn't work. All that's left is to lean back and watch the eye candy, and marvel without being charmed.

Wristcutters: A Love Story

2007-11-06T19:00:00.000-08:00

Wristcutters: A Love Story (U.S., 2006) * * *
D: Goran Dukic

The irresistible idea behind Wristcutters: A Love Story--derived from the short story "Kneller's Happy Campers," by Etgar Keret--is that if you commit suicide, you're delivered into a world exactly like the one you just left, except slightly worse. It's a gray-skied, rubbish heap of a world, where no colors are too bright, most things are broken, and no one can smile. I mean, literally: no one has the ability to smile. In the film's prologue--one of the sharpest sequences--Zia (Patrick Fugit) cleans up his apartment rigorously in preparation to slitting his wrists but, as he lies on the floor in a pool of blood, losing consciousness, he notices one giant dust bunny in the corner. Then he dies. Now stranded in this afterlife, he works in a dismal pizzeria serving fellow suicides while Joy Division plays on the radio, and he continues to pine after his girlfriend, Desiree (Leslie Bibb). He finally meets a couple of pretty girls, but another customer, with a 70's-style mustache and cap, plus a guttural Eastern European accent, frightens them away; nevertheless, Eugene (an excellent Shea Wigham) quickly becomes Zia's friend-in-misery, and the two plot a road trip across the desert in Eugene's car, which has a black hole at the foot of the passenger seat. A real black hole: a tear in the cosmos. But that's less important to Eugene than the fact that the headlights won't work. Shortly they pick up a hitchhiker, Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), who thinks she's here by mistake, and wants to find a way to contact the authorities. Only no one knows who the authorities are, or who runs the place. That's one of the mysteries--there are white-suited cops who write tickets and arrest people for misdemeanors. Another is why, at a little camp run by a man named Kneller (Tom Waits), minor miracles happen, such as levitating matches and fish-color-changing. Another is what would happen if you tried to commit suicide again.

But none of these mysteries carry very much weight: when you occupy this purgatory, it seems your natural curiosity is blunted along with your enthusiasm for anything else. Our droll, unsmiling heroes make observations, look for Zia's girl, stumble into strange characters, and sing along to the tapes made by Eugene's old band. This is a road movie in the vein of early Wim Wenders, although the straight-faced bursts of whimsy seem more inspired by his later work. It is intermittently a very funny film, but for the most part it settles for being pleasant, comfortable--like a neglected, moth-eaten sweater retrieved from the back of the closet. It does get bogged down in "plot" when Will Arnett (of "Arrested Development") turns up late in the game as a cult leader, and I'm not exactly sure just what John Hawkes (You and Me and Everyone We Know) is doing in this film--nor does he, apparently--but these flaws are not serious. I like the bit about Eugene's family, all of whom have committed suicide, in a bizarre chain of events. Patrick Fugit is an appealing lead, as he was in Almost Famous, although it's perverse to cast him in a film where he can't rely upon his broad, innocent smile. I like the rhythm, and the simple, low-key gags. And since this is not a "quirky new fantasy-comedy-drama from ABC/HBO/Showtime," no formula is settled upon, and it's allowed a neat, nice ending. The film is completely improbable, with astounding coincidences and miraculous twists, but the story embraces them, and follows its own flickering match, last seen spinning weightless into the night sky.