Your Humble Viewer

Hello, I Must Be Going

2012-01-16T08:31:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how you got here--I may be to blame--but welcome to my second blog--the first was "The Home Viewer," which is lost somewhere; I may have shut it down myself. In any case, I want to thank you for visiting while pointing out that this site is all but abandoned. I'm devoting my energies to The Constant Viewer, an attempt to make my way through film history without writing history; and Netflix Instant Play Picks of the Moment, which explains itself.

Writing the pieces on this site was a great opportunity for me--and a real education--as well as a lot of fun. Poke around all you like, leave a comment if you will. Some day I may revive this site--or me; in the meantime, Happy Wandering.

2011 Halloween Roundup: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck

2011-10-24T22:01:00.000-07:00

This year’s Roundup settles firmly into that most dependable little room in all of Halloweentown: the vampire’s coffin, that plush satin button-tufted Mystery Box with the same surprise, every time: the Vrykolakas, Wampir, Vampire—the Invited Guest, the Undead, the Right One (for all the wrong reasons). And while we’re certain we’ve left out your favorite, here’s the lineup for our annual Dark Ride (with cheap pizza at dusk). Drop on by Sunday, October 30, bring your favorite treat (optional—but we’ll take garlic, hawthorn or holy water), stake your claim (heh-heh-heh), pull up a casket and sharpen your teeth, kiddies, because it’s Roundup time.

WARNING: These are all R-rated films.

The Roundup won't let children under 17 attend
unless accompanied by parent or adult guardian. 'Nuff said.

1:00 PM Mr. Vampire/Geung si sin sang (1985)

And old Hong Kong favorite at the Roundup, this is as close as a vampire-only lineup can get to a kiddie matinee—although it may not be for actual kiddies. Martial arts, broad slapstick, and indistinct mythology blend with obscure methodologies for dispatching hopping vampires—yes, like fanged pogo sticks—in a Jackie Chan-ish world of stunts and general foolishness.

3:00 PM Fright Night (1985)

Sorry, gang, but the original 3:00 show, Dracula (1993), is unavailable. But we had this one in our pocket, the original Mom-let-the-wrong-one-in movie. Roddy McDowell has fun playing Vincent Price, and Chris Sarandon is '80s hunky--but Stephen Geoffreys has the most fun of all as Evil Ed. Dinner's in the oven!

5:30 PM Shadow of the Vampire

Speaking of X-treme acting, here’s a movie that imagines the making of Murnau’s Nosferatu with John Malkovich as the famed director and Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, his vampire. I could tell you that in this version Schreck is a little too good at playing the rat-toothed Count, but the casting should be enough to scare you. An overlooked Gem of the Genre.

7:15 PM Let the Right One In (2008)

We’re not snobs just because we know that the average moviegoer is more afraid of subtitles than of vampires. The only unfortunate side-effect of that fear is Absolutely Unnecessary American Remake Syndrome, an ailment that even the directors of the original can suffer from (see—or don’t—the remakes of The Vanishing and Funny Games). Fortunately, there’s a cure for AUARS: Let the Right One In, a pale and frosty Norwegian original that reminds us how bad it is to be a vampire, even if you like it. Along with Near Dark (1987), The Addiction (1995), and Nadja (1994)—with Peter Fonda as both Dracula and Van Helsing—Let the Right One In remolds the vampire movie in unexpected ways. (Oh, and speaking of Norwegian horror films, do yourself a favor and watch Trollhunter (2010), a funny-clever-scary Blair Cloverfield Project—with the added bonus of the most stunning landscapes since Bilbo went a-wanderin. You’ll be pining for the fjords before you know it.)

9:15 PM 30 Days of Night (2007)

Another chilly movie, we’re happy to end the Roundup with a David Slade picture, the man who gave us the terminally squirmy Hard Candy (2006). But for 30 Days of Night he calms down, more or less, to give us a good-ol’-fashion CGI-fest—with generous slabs of thrill-ride satisfaction. And you thought that almost-vice-president lady who looks like Tina Fey was the only scary thing to come out of Alaska.

Ebertfest: Day One

2010-04-21T22:25:00.000-07:00

First day of Ebert's festival: Pink Floyd The Wall and You, the Living. First one is aggressively depressing and confused. The second is Swedish and deadpan hilarious--and, in a compassionately depressing way, a persistent reminder of the need to--I'll just write the word, and be derided--love. There's going to be a panel discussion about whether film students need to know much about film history. How could one make, let alone understand, You, the Living without Buster Keaton?

Tomorrow: meet n greet for Ebert Club members. Dare I bug the Poobah and ask him to sign my copy of The Great Movies?

"Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye": Happy Birthday, Tom Waits

2009-12-07T06:19:00.000-08:00

I walked into the little joint--more like a shed, something out back of a farmhouse, ramshackle leaning, door half-off in a half-smile--and someone was playing an old-timey phonograph--Victrola scratching her soft nails along my back, making me grin and shiver--but no, it was a real person singing--OK, not so much "real" as really imagined, a sight for sore eyes, skinny guy slouched at the piano, little hat on his head, something golden glinting in a glass always nearby--and I've stayed there for decades, and I can't tell you how often that fellow has made my throat catch and my eyes well up--and then he steps right up and I'm happy at last, knowing a little rain never hurt no one--"and the rain it raineth every day"--and he knows it, so he keeps singing, with that big smile and those sad eyes, pursing his lips at the naughty world, but ready to forgive it, down there by the train, blood money in our pockets--but we're innocent when we dream, he insists, and lets us off the hook--just long enough for us to slip out the back, Ruby still asleep, and take the long way home, all the way around the world.

Thanksgiving: Lou Jacobi, 1913-2009

2009-11-05T11:07:00.000-08:00

I just read on Roger Ebert's website that Lou Jacobi died. Ebert reminds us of two of Jacobi's great roles: the cross-dresser in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and the outraged Uncle Gabriel in Avalon--and for me that is the lasting image, the uncle standing there, railing at everyone for carving the turkey without him, the big shots out in the suburbs leaving everything behind--everything, not just him. It is a painful scene for me to watch, familiar from my own childhood--my grandparents in South Philadelphia, the Sicilian block with the water ice stand on the corner, little pieces of lemon rind in the sweet snow, sneakers hanging on the wires, the alley behind, the wine cellar below. But the older I grew, the less frequent the visits, until it was all suburbs, and no more Mifflin St.

Still, even after I was an adult and married, my wife and I would occasionally visit my grandmother, who slowly receded, tinier every month. The row house was the same, sweet-smelling in an old-wine kind of way. I remember going to the little glass-paned doors of her china cabinet, and opening it, just to catch the whiff of some long-gone brandy in the little cut-glass decanter, with a few abandoned Jordan almonds behind the nick-knacks and set of aperitif glasses, dusty pale pink and yellow and white.

So when Lou stands shouting in the suburban lane, tearing his garment over the effrontery of the thing, I hate him for ruining Thanksgiving for everyone--and ruefully thank him for showing us what it's like to fade away. Jacobi does it in style, not gently but with his eyes up, asking God if He can believe such a thing could happen to a family, whether it comes from Minsk or Pinsk or Enna.

Halloween Roundup 2009

2009-10-26T06:22:00.000-07:00

[Note: I found the above version of "It's Halloween"--by those ever-lovin' Shaggs--on YouTube. Perhaps a few too many cats-in-costumes, but it has a REALLY scary ending; you've been warned, kiddies. Heh-heh-heh!]

Welcome, you little demons, to our third annual Halloween Roundup, an all-day (and into the wee hours of the night) marathon of cinematic scares. We start at noon with something for the kids, then Monster Mash our way to a hometown-tribute Midnight Special. So bring a Treat or pull a Trick, and join us this Saturday for a movie or two or three or four or ...

12:00 noon
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

You might want to bring a cracking good piece of Stilton to this (G-rated) Halloween entry in the stop-action animation film series that single-handedly redeems the expression "cheesy movie."

2:00 pm
Cloverfield (2008)

A movie whose home-video conceit and shaky-cam sensibilities work better on the small screen than in theaters. The plot: Young people just a little too nice for Real World: Brooklyn find themselves in a Godzilla movie.

4:00 pm
Suspiria (1977)

Is this Dario Argento's masterpiece? The epitome of Italian giallo murder-movies? A Technicolor excess-travaganza? Hitchcock for the delirious? Who cares? It looks great, and Jessica Harper is at her stupefying-'70s best.

6:00 pm
Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Every year we show one we haven't seen--not even the trailer. But I hear it's Sam Raimi doing a PG-13 impression of himself, Evil-Dead-style. Don't forget your Necronomicon; there will be a pop quiz--in which something might actually pop.

8:00 pm
Stir of Echoes (1999)

Kevin Bacon gets hypnotized at a party, then starts seeing Things. Nice mid-budget ghost-machine. Besides, afterwards you can go from Pam Grier or John Cleese--or from Peter Boyle or Burt Young--to Kevin with only one degree of separation. "Thank you sir may I have another!"

10:00 pm
Candyman (1992)

It's sexual politics are a bit icky, it's villain maybe verging on the racist, it's taste questionable. In other words, welcome to 1992, when '80s uncertainty met '90s desperation. Besides, it's Virginia Madsen's moment in the sun, and as good a version of a Clive Barker story you could want--sans Pinhead. Call it "A Poison Tree Grows in Cabrini-Green."

12:00 midnight
Strange Behavior (1981)

The companion piece to Strange Invaders, Michael Laughlin's two-movie homage to '50s SF-horror, sort of. Both pictures feature a combination of earnest appreciation and near-spoof--without falling too clumsily into either. And hey, this is the one about the psychological researcher doing terrible things to local college kids in a small town in Illinois called--oh, you guessed it: Galesburg. OK, so it was filmed in New Zealand(!). But it's heart--as well as various other organs--is in the right place: just a little to the left of the Hawthorne Center, and a hoot-n-holler away from Old Main. Midnight Madness, Knox College style.

Costumed Cut-Ups, Atlantic City:

"Hallowe'en" (1896)
Joel Benton

Pixie, kobold, elf, and sprite
All are on their rounds to-night,--
In the wan moon's silver ray
Thrives their helter-skelter play.

Fond of cellar, barn, or stack
True unto the almanac,
They present to credulous eyes
Strange hobgoblin mysteries.

Cabbage-stumps--straws wet with dew--
Apple-skins, and chestnuts too,
And a mirror for some lass
Show what wonders come to pass.

Doors they move, and gates they hide
Mischiefs that on moonbeams ride
Are their deeds,--and, by their spells,
Love records its oracles.

Don't we all, of long ago
By the ruddy fireplace glow,
In the kitchen and the hall,
Those queer, coof-like pranks recall?

Eery shadows were they then--
But to-night they come again;
Were we once more but sixteen
Precious would be Hallowe'en.

Rating Game Redux 47: "Foos-ball? Buncha overgrown monsters man-handlin' each other..." --Mama Boucher

2009-02-03T14:18:00.000-08:00

I've been away a long time--trying to get the heck out of the 1920s on my other blog--the darn movie diary book. But I decided to get back into the "Rating Game" in our local paper with "Best Football Movies." And while Sunday is behind us, and it is no longer Bosstime, I figured I'd toss a Hail Mary and see who nabs it.

“Three Little Pigskins” (1934)
Pan-handling Three Stooges are mistaken for the “three horsemen of Boulder Dam” and promptly dismantle college football beyond all recognition. Academic highlight: Larry woos Lucille Ball in Pig Latin.

Bend It Like Beckham (2002)
Football, British-style, as a young Sikh defies her parents to play on a women’s soccer team. Maybe too easy in its mixture of feel-good sports comeback, grrl-power assertion, cross-cultural bonding, and love-won-and-lost subplot, but it’s an enjoyable hodgepodge, with more action in any five-minute stretch than twenty soccer matches.

Friday Night Lights (2004)
With Billy Bob Thornton in complete control of his character, and country star Tim McGraw as a father who peaked not when his son was born but when he received that high school championship ring, this is the Hoosiers of football movies—and that’s saying a lot. As much about the punishing pressure to win as it is about the nobility of playing, Friday Night Lights gives us a coach and team whose “heart is full.”

Looking Backward: Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009

2009-01-16T08:06:00.000-08:00

Robert Hughes points out that Wyeth's Christina's World is as ubiquitous a piece of Modern American art as Grant Wood's American Gothic--although the latter leans more toward the ironic, and I prefer the profound sentimentality of Wyeth's painting. I have a print of it in my dining room: I had given it away to someone dear, who framed it beautifully, and then dearly re-gifted it. We have not seen Karen for about twenty-five years, but her painting reminds me of her every day--and Christina models Karen a bit--and vice versa, the two of them taking turns in the field.

Christina's World resonates on the screen, as well. Two years ago I noted its influence on Terry Gilliam's Tideland--and every so often we can elsewhere see Christina sliding gently into view:

Ponette (1996)
The little girl's mother has died, and her tears blur her vision, until she finds herself wandering in a dream of grief and longing.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Harold Crick hears the far-off sound of his own unreality, and stares into the middle distance, giving us the look that must have been on Christina's face.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968)
Deaf and mute, John reaches out, and touches, but the returning hand brushes his cheek too softly for him to feel he can remain.

The Thin Red Line (1998)
Even Guadalcanal in 1943 provides Christina an opportunity to appear--and it isn't just the wind-swept fields, but Terrence Malick's lowering camera, finding small flowers, insects, the secret world thrumming on, almost inaudible, but thriving.

With Edward Hopper and William DeBernardi, Wyeth is among my most dependable visualizers of American spaces. Only one of them remains--still hale and hearty, Bill, knock wood three times--but so do the pictures, plain and deep and helping me see.

The Horror, the Horror

2008-12-02T06:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I began teaching a three-week December Break course here at Knox College, "The Gothic in Film." We started by considering Gothic (and Gothic-influenced) lit--The Castle of Otranto, Jane Eyre, Poe, Hawthorne, "The Yellow Wallpaper," Stoker--and will explore a number of topics as they arise in various films--paying special attention to the visual/aural elements that help define the Gothic movie.

Here's the schedule of topics/films; play along at home.

WEEK 1 (December 1-5)

Introduction to Course: Nosferatu (1922)
Expressionism: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Batman Returns (1992)
The Oneiric: Eraserhead (1977)
The Outsider: Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Freaks (1932)
The Doppelgänger: The Shining (1980)

WEEK 2 (December 8-12)

The Body: The Fly (1986)
Ghosts: Ju-On (2003)
The Other: The Exorcist (1973)
Fate and Inevitability: Angel Heart (1987)
Revenge of Nature: Them! (1954)

WEEK 3 (December 15-19)

The Noir Sensibility: Citizen Kane (1941), Touch of Evil (1958)
The Freudian Sensibility: Psycho (1960)
Grand Guignol: Mad Love (1935), Day of the Dead (1985)
Moral Tales: The Dead Zone (1983)

As you can tell, I'm not so much dedicated to advancing a single argument as giving the students as many options as possible to approach the Gothic. I'm also interested in non-horror films' Gothic sensibilities, especially film noir.

As we go along, I'm compiling a filmography for each topic, and welcome your suggestions.

Rating Game Redux 46: "Determined to Prove a Villain"

2008-11-10T06:52:00.000-08:00

Our local paper asked us to call into the abyss, and some boss villains called back.

The first villains are encountered in childhood. Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) is the Big Bad Wolf in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), his fingers famously tattooed with “love” and “hate,” Mitchum’s sleepy grin relentless as he pursues the children through a black-and-white troubled dream.

Given the current global economic state, Haghi (Rudolph Kleine-Rogge), the evil banker in Fritz Lang’s Spione/Spies (1928), comes easily to mind. Sitting wheelchair-bound (unnecessarily, his disability a ruse—how’s that for a metaphor?) in his office, wired to a worldwide network of saboteurs and assorted minions, his staring eyes and goatee pointing at us like a weapon, Haghi threatens monetary chaos while his own coffers fill to bursting. Fortunately, in Lang’s version, no bailout is offered.

OK, I can’t resist another financier: Henry F. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Also in a wheelchair, Potter cannot bear the thought of regular folk owning their own homes—or George Bailey’s growing conviction that, eventually, everyone should have a conscience.

The Home Viewer (12): Dead of Night

2008-11-03T14:29:00.000-08:00

Yes, yes, Halloween is over. But terror--not to mention my ego--knows no bounds, so here's the latest column I wrote for our local paper. Boo.

The best Halloween films are midnight movies, weird creatures that hide during the day, slithering and lumbering out only when the sun has set and it’s a long way until dawn. As Macbeth, among the finest citizens of Halloweentown, says, “Let not light see my black and deep desires.” So save your revered classics and perennial favorites for a happy matinee: It’s time for Midnight Madness, where (as long as I’m quoting) “something wicked this way comes.”
......................................
Les yeux sans visage/Eyes without a Face (1960)

Also known as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus (the English dubbed version, which I’m sure I saw in the mid-‘60s on some UHF channel), this is the least unhinged of our Creepy Cavalcade. Still, surrealist Georges Franju sent them running out of the theater with his tale of a surgeon who attempts to restore his daughter’s beauty (maimed when her father crashes the car) by kidnapping young women and removing their faces, which he then grafts onto his poor daughter, who wanders the mansion-clinic wearing a featureless mask, a ghost before her time, while her father and his dedicated nurse cruise the shadowed streets, searching for victims. The gruesome is always more so in black and white, the details of the surgical procedures soaked in darkness, the daughter’s melancholy mask pale as a bone in moonlight. (For a campy take on this situation, see 1959’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.)

Freaks (1932)

“We accept her--one of us--gooble, gobble--we accept her--one of us--gooble, gobble.” Or “gabba gabba” if you’re a Ramones fan. Tod Browning loved the circus, and the fact that night must fall. So every chance he got, he put the two together, in whichever way he could, from The Unknown and the lost London After Midnight (both 1927) to Dracula (1931). But Freaks has its own strange trajectory, veering toward exploitation (his cast famously includes actual circus sideshow performers)--well, plummeting over the edge, perhaps. But in Browning’s world the congenitally disabled and the purposely contorted are the norm, while the “normal” viewer is the deviant, the voyeur. If you feel uncomfortable watching the Human Torso, Koo-Koo the Bird Girl, Johnny Eck the legless man, or the encephalitic Zip and Pip, it’s your problem, not theirs. But woe to anyone who crosses “one of us.”

Day of the Dead (1985)

After the original, this is the most outlandish (and my favorite) outing for George Romero’s forty-year zombie spree. The humans are nervous wrecks, the zombies are literally storming the gates, while undead Bub grooves to his Walkman. Gory without regrets, cluttered with endlessly bickering characters--the best of them as pleasant as spoiled milk--and punctuated by social commentary delivered with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, Day of the Dead should be viewed only at midnight, when your regular self is too tired to stop watching.

A Bucket of Blood (1959)

I would have to resign my post if I didn’t mention a Roger Corman movie--preferably one with Dick Miller. But what can I add to the basic premise of A Bucket of Blood? A wanna-be beatnik artist (Miller as Walter Paisley; what a Clyde, daddio) kills things—eventually people, natch--encases them in clay, and becomes the darling of the finger-snapping set. Only Dick Miller could play camp straight; lesser performers would have tripped over their own sandals. More desperate than The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), with a creepy-giggling sense of its own cheap appeal, this one deserves a tip of the beret.

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

In deference to this column’s appearance in a family-friendly publication, let me simply state that if you’re going to watch only one ‘70s eurotrash lesbian vampire film at midnight this Halloween …

The Brood (1979)

David Cronenberg’s horror films are bearable only if you’re willing to watch what appears to be occupational therapy. Here, it’s divorce Cronenberg-style, as Samantha Eggar turns to psycho-babble psychiatrist Oliver Reed to help her work out some marriage/motherhood problems. The result is a Gothic parable of anxieties externalized and rage embodied. Always one to rub our noses in our selves, Cronenberg turns the mad doctor scenario into an indictment of pop psychology--with truly nauseating and delirious results. And you thought Norman Bates had issues.

Suspiria (1977)

Dario Argento’s triumph of style over substance, its suspense set-pieces textbook lessons in editing and pacing worthy of Hitchcock or DePalma. It’s basically an “old dark house” plot, with strange goings-on and multiple murders. But Argento brings a painter’s eye--and a devilish glee--to the proceedings to prove that a midnight movie can also be a class act.

Eraserhead (1977)

The ultimate student film, five years in the making, David Lynch’s first feature, “a dream of dark and troubling things,” set the tone for most of his later work. It is, for me, the ultimate dead-of-night movie, devoid of all camp sensibilities, deliberate as a virus, a dimly lit trudge toward adulthood depicted as a surreal withdrawal--not back toward childhood, but inside the resisting self, sickened by the prospect of growing up. For most viewers, Eraserhead is something to be endured, like an unwelcome guest, and so I’ll warn you more than recommend it to you. But if you must, watch it at midnight--better yet, after the midnight movie, in the “dark night,” as St. John of the Cross put it, when you’re ready for it because you’re all alone.

Have a Happy Halloween, kiddies.

Halloween Roundup 2008

2008-10-29T07:09:00.000-07:00

Let's not lose our heads, kiddies: The Halloween Roundup is back! And as your faithful Mausoleum Master, I wracked my brains--and when that didn't work, I wracked the brains of a drifter I lured into my unmarked van--and out popped this year's Roundup, a salute to the post-Vietnam, pre-digital, big-haired '80s, with all kinds of stuff trickling down. Everything was awesome and the New Wave gagged everyone with a spoon--and at the movies, nothing was sacred--unless you were making a big-time Hollywood picture, with Ark-Raiders, Star-Warriors, or a pack of John Hughes brats.

But down there in the basement, the horror film hissed like a 'gator, the outer limits of bad behavior meeting the boundless audacity of Special Makeup Effects. So square those big shoulders, mousse up and bug out, because it's Halloween all day, and the '80s all the way (after a kinder, gentler kid matinee).

11:00 am: Monsters, Inc. (2001)

Proud to have successfully digitized hair, Pixar luxuriates in a free-flowing, bouncing romp through that most basic of childhood fears: the Thing in the dark. Except this time it's John Goodman in Gentle-Giant mode, with Billy Crystal talking out of the corner of his mouth--and Mary Gibbs as Boo, the voice-talent highlight of this candy-colored clown of a movie.

1:00 pm: Mr. Vampire (1985)

A goofy Hong Kong hodgepodge of ghosts, follow-the-bouncing-vampires, wire-fu action and slapstick comedy, sprinkled with obscure (for most of us) references to various folk-myths and practices. A movie that all but demands you watch it dubbed, if only to add one more layer of foolishness. An early-afternoon oddity you won't soon forget.

3:00 pm: The Changeling (1980)

Along with Uzumaki (2000), a Japanese exercise in gothic-surrealism, The Changeling is a Roundup perennial, a solid ghost story that features George C. Scott tortured by guilt (not a stretch for the Big Man) and drawn into his new home's past sins. Worth it just for the rubber-ball scene.

5:00 pm Near Dark (1987)

Well, the '80s really begin with this one, Kathryn Bigelow's almost-comic gore-fest that asks the question, "Are there vampires in 'Real America'?" You may not want to know the answer, but you'll get one from Lance Henricksen, Bill Paxton, and the rest of their a-hootin'-and-a-bloodsuckin' clan.

7:00 Eating Raoul (1982)

I'll admit I haven't seen this one since the actual '80s, so its satire may not travel as well as I'm hoping, especially as it enters John Waters territory: '50s camp sensibility paired with '80s alternate sexuality. Hmm. We shall see.

9:00 pm Dead and Buried (1981)

With James Farentino and Jack Albertson starring, one might fear we're in TV-movie territory. But if you remember the heyday of TV movies, you should fear not--and just enjoy being afraid of this small-town-with-a-secret. Although Dead and Buried is another one I haven't seen in years, it promises a twist or two as the body-count rises.

11:00 pm The Fly (1986)

Along with Les yeux sans visage (1960), one of the true masterpieces of "medical horror." Serving as a metaphor for AIDS, cancer, genetics as an industry, abortion rights, what-have-you, David Cronenberg's movie forces us to watch the changes any of these can force upon the body and soul. Audacious, funny, heart-breaking, sickening, The Fly takes us past midnight with a buzz no one wants.

Fall-back options (in case of damaged discs):

From Beyond (1986): Stuart Gordon's follow-up to 1985's Re-Animator.

The Shining (1980): Stanley Kubrick's Gothic meditation on the disintegration of the nuclear family, with a fire-ax.

Angel Heart (1987): Alan Parker drifts along the bayou with Mickey Rourke, joined by a decidedly de-Cosby-fied Lisa Bonet and Robert DeNiro eating a hard-boiled egg. Things, I don't have to tell you, get weird.

And I may have a few copies of last year's Roundup CD, free to our valued patrons and crammed like a doomed goose with spooky tunes to keep you doing the boneyard watusi all night long. See you Saturday, boos and ghouls! (Heh-heh-heh!)

Rating Game Redux 45: Are We Scared Yet?

2008-10-28T14:26:00.000-07:00

Our local paper continues to love Halloween, calling for "Scariest Movie Moments." (I have excluded the obvious: Michael Bay, Wild Hogs, Mike Myers' accents)

Them! (1954)

In the opening sequence, a little girl in a bathrobe, clutching a doll, wanders trance-like through the desert. The giant ants that follow are pretty cool, but that image of the little girl conveys real dread, deeper in your head than any ‘50s creature-feature could actually deliver.

The Fly (1986)

Just about the longest man-to-monster transformation in the movies culminates with Seth Brundle’s doomed, surreal consideration of his slipping into fly-dom: “Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects don't have politics. They're very brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first insect politician. You see, I'd like to, but I'm afraid.” Always the jazz performer, Jeff Goldblum plays the scene like sci-fi Shakespeare, scatting his way into the genetic abyss.

Psycho (1960)

While Milton Arbogast’s (Martin Balsam) slow ascent to his doom is Hitchcock working the scare-machine full tilt, it’s Anthony Perkins at his ease that scares me the most, with his boyish grin and stammer, watching Vivien Leigh eat “like a bird,” his attention, as always, maternal.

Rating Game Redux 44: We All Scream

2008-10-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Our local paper edges us closer to the October Country by calling--loudly, piercingly--for "Best Horror Movie Screams." As usual, too many remain unheard when three is all I'm allowed to mention--but we can still hearken to Mary Philbin, opening her mouth--and covering it, lady to the last--her eyes wide enough to take in every putty-and-wire rotted crease of Lon Chaney's Phantom--her scream silent, as if in a dog's-only upper register. And Janet Leigh, vying with Bernard Herrmann's violins as Anthony Perkins smiles, shy guy that he is, and helps Mother. And even John Goodman and Willliam Forsythe, the Snoats brothers, letting loose with lusty roars as they suddenly realize the shocking burdens of raising (as far as anyone can tell) little Nathan Arizona.

But these three--OK, four--will do for now, their din the first herald of Good Ol' Halloween, just around the dark corner.

In the original King Kong (1933), Fay Wray’s scream becomes more important than any actual words in the script (excluding the famous last line). Sometimes recorded as a tiny thing—to match her size relative to Kong’s—sometimes filling the soundtrack, her screams are as memorable as the animated ape himself.

A tie, same movie: When Helen Delambre (Patricia Owens) finally sees what her husband (David Hedison) has become in The Fly (1958), she screams—and the camera cuts to her fly-husband’s perspective, her face reproduced in every facet of his fly-eyes, her scream suddenly a distorted warble. And then the human-headed fly at the end, caught in the spider’s web, screaming, “Help me! Help me!” in a high-pitched falsetto at once ridiculous and pitiful—until Vincent Price smashes it with a rock.

In Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Marilyn Burns as Sally Hardesty spends an interminable final sequence screaming, moaning, begging for mercy. It is unnerving and almost impossible to watch /listen to, the cruelest ten minutes in movie history.

The Home Viewer (11): Lincolnesque

2008-10-08T06:03:00.000-07:00

I recently submitted a Lincoln-themed piece to our local paper--but I can't find it online, and I don't get the paper, so I'm not sure if it ran. (I really should work on my ego.) Anyway, here in Illinois we're generally pretty Abe-happy--although I'm used to that kind of thing: Growing up in NJ near Philadelphia, it was Ben Franklin this and Ben Franklin that. History. Sheesh. Anyway (again), we're gearing up for his bicentennial--and the college where I work was the site of the 4th Lincoln-Douglas debate, during which, we are always proud to point out, Lincoln "first condemned slavery on moral grounds."

And so it is in high moral dudgeon mode that I present The Roundabout Lincoln Movie Tribute. As the Honest One once said, "There's nothing I'd rather do than go to the theater." You have been warned.

As the Lincoln-Douglas Debate Weekend arrives, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the debates, Galesburg and Knox College are doing their best to honor the old Rail Splitter and his legacy. But as far as the Home Viewer is concerned, no celebration is complete without a random collection of movies. In my diligent laziness, I wandered around a Lincoln quotations website, and have allowed some choice passages to help me select the films that follow. Honest, Abe.

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

There’s nothing like opening strong. These words, from his first inaugural address, are justly famous, beautifully constructed without being too fussy, self-assured in their flourishes—the balanced, parallel structures, the long phrase separating subject and verb, trusting the reader to follow, to carry on to the end—with a judicious balance of sentimentality and profundity. But where, cinematically speaking, does this take us? I’m reminded of films where passion strains the “bonds of affection”:

In John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards all but surrenders his love to hatred, a hard man whom everyone shuns—until he is forced to break his own will and be touched by those “better angels,” and stay his murderous hand.

Akira Kurosawa’s Akahige/Red Beard (1965) is the tale of young, ambitious Doctor Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama), who feels trapped in a charity clinic run by Toshiro Mifune’s Dr. Niide (whose nickname gives us the movie’s title), a man whose great humility and good will—and humor—is tainted by neither false pride nor false humility. While Yasumoto complains, Niide persists, and the younger man’s ego melts under the heat of Red Beard’s implacable dedication. And the remarkable thing is that Kurosawa, like Lincoln in his speech, avoids sheer sentimentality, and instead asserts compassion as the “mystic chord” necessary to accomplish any worthwhile task, pride abandoned, enemies reconciled.

Touchez pas au grisbi/Don't Touch the Loot (1954), directed by Jacques Becker, feels like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon in its brutally frank attention to failure, while ironically praising the virtues of friendship and loyalty. Jean Gabin's Max, a ready-to-retire criminal, is forced to risk everything to save his longtime friend/partner in crime. A casually hip movie in which thugs call each other “Daddy-o” and friendship is more valuable than loot. As Sam Spade says, "Don't be too sure I'm as crooked as I'm supposed to be." Fifteen years later—and an ocean away—Max tenders the same warning, and woe to any mug who gives it the drift.

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

Can we still affirm these words from Lincoln's first annual message to Congress? After a $700,000,000,000 bailout, it appears that, while we are told the American laborer/fundamentals/foundation is sound, Capital still rakes in better fringe benefits. Even at the movies.

Wall Street (1987) trickled down a little secret: “Greed is good.” Michael Douglas with his slicked-back mane and lizard eyes today may seem quaint, an ‘80s Simon LeGree, but is it a coincidence that his character’s name is Gordon Gekko? In its boundless truthiness, Wikipedia tells us that, when threatened, many species of geckos will “expel a foul-smelling material and feces.” Thus endeth the lesson.

But if you really want to see an angry populist at work, suffer through George Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005). The capitalists hide in a luxury hotel while the workers forage amid the living dead—which in the end become the not-so-meek inheritors of the Earth-as-buffet, taking what they like, and eating what they take.

Still, some movies give credit where it’s due. Norma Rae (1979) and Bread and Roses (2000) extol the virtues of unionization—although Ken Loach’s movie is not as optimistic as Norman Ritt’s, whose Norma Rae (Sally Field in her first Oscar-winning performance) rises above the cotton-dust to lead her fellow textile workers to victory. And while the anti-(crooked) union undertones of On the Waterfront (1954) shift the film’s politics, Brando’s Terry Malloy rounds his shoulders and sneaks in the class-hero side door, the worker-as-boxer, bloodied but unbowed.

“I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].”

In this 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, a Southerner and slave-owner, Lincoln addresses, among other things, his opposition to the American Party, or “Know-Nothings,” “Nativists” who advocated restricting immigration of Catholics, particularly from Ireland. Despite his repeated statements that he did not consider a person of African descent to be his “equal in many respects,” as he put it in his first debate with Stephen Douglas, he maintained a strong conviction that “in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.” In the Know-Nothings he saw a damaging extension of the degradations of inequality.

Listen carefully to Daniel Day-Lewis’ Bill “The Butcher” Cutting in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), and you’ll hear plainly the “progress in degeneracy.” He is always on the lookout for the Irish minions of “their king with the pointy hat what sits on his throne in Rome” and boasts, “You know how I stayed alive this long? All these years? Fear. The spectacle of fearsome acts. Somebody steals from me, I cut off his hands. He offends me, I cut out his tongue. He rises against me, I cut off his head, stick it on a pike, raise it high up so all on the streets can see. That's what preserves the order of things. Fear.” And in the end, it is fear that motivates even the fearsome.

My favorite part of the above quoted Lincoln passage is his assertion that, if the Know-Nothings gain control, he “should prefer emigrating to [Russia] where they make no pretence of loving liberty … where despotism can be taken pure.” But when John Reed went to Russia in 1917 and witnessed “ten days that shook the world,” he was hoping for a nation where no one craved “the spectacle of fearsome acts.” And for a brief time, the electric charge of freedom lit him up—as Warren Beatty chronicles in Reds (1981), where Reed moves from fellow traveler to true believer to disillusioned idealist to accidental martyr. In the end, Reed stays behind, buried in the Kremlin, finally equal to everyone, while the “pretence of loving liberty” is still kept up, although more than a little strained.

Well, I’d like to thank Lincoln for easy words to build on, evocative and brimming with ideas. Seems a shame that this is all I’ve squeezed out of them; but as another Master Rhetorician, George Orwell, reminds us, everything is political, even the decision not to be political—and that might include a movie now and then.

Coming Soon: The annual Halloween Roundup. I was thinking of doing an all-'70s version. Any suggestions--or alternate themes?

"Sometimes nothing can be a pretty cool hand": Paul Newman, 1925-2008

2008-09-27T10:11:00.000-07:00

Two, maybe three kind favors from Paul Newman--maybe four: Hitting that pool ball, learning a lesson from the Fat Man. Fifty eggs in an hour--of course, of course--his grin as phony and as real as every single year that beats or blesses it out of him. And winking at everybody, especially himself, throughout the '70s, a fight where a hockey game breaks out, dispensing frontier justice, playing cowboy--but somehow, most of all following Robert Altman all the way up to Montreal, icing down Expo '67 and playing a little Quintet.

Why that last one sticks most with me, I don't know. But I remember being surprised to see him there, like John Wayne with the wind knocked out of him, wandering around the Last Days. And so now Mussburger meets the Old Man--the One he prayed to in Cool Hand Luke, a couple of hard cases with a sly-sad sense of humor. But maybe He'll forgive and forget, the tangy tastes of Newman's Own fresh on His tongue like kind words, both of them deep down charitable, with matching blue eyes.

Rating Game Redux 43: This Is the End

2008-09-26T05:56:00.000-07:00

Our local paper's Rating Game called for Best Movie Endings--very nice category, but phenomenally difficult to do well. So I just did three Kubrick endings. Better than nothing, but of course I abandoned Kane's Rosebud; Antoine Doinel's walk on the beach--not to mention Charlton Heston's, accompanied by the Statue of Liberty; the telling piece of information that it's Chinatown, Jake; the Blair Witch wall-huddle; the standoff in the snow to see who's a Thing and who isn't; Marcello abandoning his film to dance in the circus-line; Rocky caring less who won the fight--and Joe E. Brown caring even less that Jack Lemmon's a man; Peter Sellers walking on the water; Michael closing the door on Kay; and Rick at the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And so on. (Feel free to add your own--c'mon, dear geeks, show me up and tell me what I've missed.)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Some sneer at its pretentiousness, others scratch their heads, puzzled. But it remains one of the movies’ great mysteries, a beautiful reminder that, before it was a story, cinema was an image.

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.” You can say that again. Funniest apocalypse ever.

Paths of Glory (1957)

Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas) wanders from the despairing mess of a war run by opportunists, and hears the German girl sing, his men joining her, their hearts breaking, the front waiting to tear them to pieces. The perfect counterpoint to yet another Best Movie Ending, Casablanca’s.

Aint YouTube grand?

Rating Game Redux 42: "What's So Special About Them?"

2008-09-04T06:06:00.000-07:00

I usually don't go for the snarkier Rating Game categories for our local paper, but I eventually succumbed to "Worst Movie Special Effects." And while I promised myself not to kick a movie when it's down--that is, no low-budget picks--I couldn't resist just one.

The Polar Express (2004)

The mask-like faces of the motion-captured actors convey a sense of menace, rather than the almost-solemn dream that was the attraction of Chris Van Allsburg’s book. You know you’re in trouble when Tom Hanks (as the Hobo) looks more like Tom Waits.

Spider-Man (2002)

Yes, Spider-Man is strong--like the man says, “Listen, Bud, he’s got radioactive blood”--but the CGI Spidey seems made of rubber as he bounces from one skyscraper to the next, his trajectory as convincing as Wile E. Coyote’s--while only unintentionally funny.

Robot Monster (1953)

I’m being unfair: Good special effects are hard to come by when you have no budget. But when the interplanetary threat is the one and only Ro-Man--a guy in a gorilla suit sporting a dual-antennae space helmet who communicates with his home world via bubble machine--one must conclude that the lack of funds was exceeded only by a lack of imagination. As Ro-Man remarks, “Your deaths will be indescribable.”

The Home Viewer 10: August Personages

2008-08-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

My monthly column for our local paper ran last week, just as the weather turned heavy with wet heat, dog days for sure. So for once my fortnight doodlings make some sense.

Sirius, the dog star, swims up there in the late-summer sky, innocent and unconcerned—but brings the dog days, hot and still, all kinds of bad mischief right below boiling point—or lazy, washed out, finished with all temper and fervor. Or one more: Can you hear Nat “King” Cole cheerfully sprinting through those lazy hazy crazy days of summer (“those days of soda and pretzels and beer”), the brutal heat forgiven in happy cornball song? So, before autumn slips in to steal away August, it’s doom or gloom or one last hurrah—and movies for each.

Doom
There’s an old Ray Bradbury story—“Touched by Fire”—that offers a theory: at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit, people become homicidal. Almost forty years later, Spike Lee watches that same mercury rise in Do the Right Thing (1990). Everything in the movie is hot, from the colors to the characters, all of them impossible to touch without getting burned.

In Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), the sun is dying—but he brings us close, and it pulses off the screen, too bright to look at, so big we can’t see the curve of its rim. And the closer you get, the more beautiful and dangerous it becomes, a fatally ecstatic summer whose end no one wants to see.

Speaking of locales with an endless summer, the list of desert movies can stretch from The Female of the Species (1912; a “A Psychological Tragedy” set amid the “purple sage”) and Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1925; its desert arriving in the finale, where the titular sin turns deadly in—where else?—Death Valley) to Sahara (1943), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and the bizarre The King Is Alive (2000), in which stranded bus passengers decide to pass what time they have left by staging King Lear; talk about your blasted heaths. But when I was nine years old, The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)—until it reached its feel-that-cool-breeze climax—knocked the breath out of me with its parched desperation, reducing life to some sand and wreckage, with a few sparks of hope not nearly as bright as the uncaring sun.

Gloom
Despite the preceding, for most of us the phrase “dog days” is mainly about laying low, allowing August to blow its hot air while we half-slumber in the shade, too tired to do much, including complain. There is a kind of grandeur in laziness, as appreciated by “The Stranger” (Sam Elliott—and I’ll never get tired of his voice) in The Big Lebowski (1998), who acknowledges that “The Dude,” Jeffrey Lebowski (another perfectly sloppy Jeff Bridges performance), is not only a lazy man but “quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide.” Caught in a hardboiled thriller, The Dude shuffles along in his quest to restore his rug—because, man, “it really tied the room together”—and to bowl his way into the semifinals. The Dude abides.

The Big Lebowski is set in the early ‘90s, and if that half-decade taught Americans anything, it was how to slack off. And at the movies, the owner’s manual for slacking is, of course, Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991), which meanders from one twentysomething to another as they amble and talk, semi-work and almost-think, content to let Austin’s heat beat down unnoticed, as they run into one another—although “run” is definitely too strong a term—and let everything slump to a halt. As one of them observes, “Who's ever written a great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?”

Last Hurrahs
Before September changes everything, the dog days offer one more chance to live it up. In his original review of The Endless Summer (1966), Roger Ebert calls it “91 minutes of wish fulfillment.” Filmmaker Bruce Brown and his two surfers (Mike Hynson and Robert August—I kid you not) decide one month is not enough, and bum around the world, looking for—and finding—the “perfect wave,” all the while passing through sublime landscapes with a gee-whiz jokiness that manages to catch like a wave the laid-back heart of surfing.

Of course, one really shouts a last hurrah when it seems there’s little time left. Last Holiday (2006; the 1950 Ealing Studios version with Alec Guinness is not available on DVD) offers the irresistible Queen Latifah setting off for the Grand Hotel Pupp near Prague to doll herself up, cook like a Food Network diva, and generally brighten everyone’s day. She brings enough honesty to the role that you barely notice that the movie’s a lightweight, and simply root for the Queen.

Well, I can’t leave the dog days without mentioning an actual dog—and my favorite is My Dog Skip (2000), an earnest evocation of the Good Old Days whose plot contrivances and aw-shucks dialogue are redeemed by the performances—Diane Lane and Kevin Bacon as the parents, Frankie Muniz as the lonely boy saved by his dog (with Luke Wilson as the feet-of-clay hometown hero), and of course Skip himself (played by numerous dogs, among them Moose, who was also Eddie on the TV series Frasier), a Jack Russell to the bone, eternally aware and eager. The affection he gives and receives is as fitting an end to August as we could ask, finite but lasting, socked away for next summer.

Rating Game Redux 41: Sometimes, Once Is Enough

2008-08-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

Pretty straightforward Rating Game category this Thursday for our local paper: Three Best One-Hit Wonders. As usual, three is not enough--but with these artists, I'll make exceptions.

"They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Ha" (Napoleon XIV)

Not a great song, but, given the controversy surrounding Ben Stiller’s “Simple Jack” character in Tropic Thunder, I thought I’d remind everyone of a similar storm back in the mid-‘60s over this tune, which features a scorned lover who suffers a mental breakdown after his girl (“that mangy mutt”) leaves him, and he is carted off to the “happy home.” The tune was banned after its initial release. (The 45 itself was interesting: The B-side was the A-side in reverse, from the label to the song itself.)

"96 Tears" (? and the Mysterians)

Simple rocking rave-up, the quintessential one-hit wonder by the best-named band ever.

"Spirit in the Sky" (Norman Greenbaum)

A perfect hybrid: psychedelic blues in the service of a gospel tune with fuzz and feedback.

Rating Game Redux 40: Out of the Inkwell

2008-07-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

Our local paper called for the top three comic book characters in film--and, while Superman deserves always to appear on such a list, I decided to make room for smaller fry--but worthy entrants, as ironic-satiric as they may be.

Harvey Pekar

The author of the autobiographical comic American Splendor, Pekar was played by Paul Giamatti (and himself) in a 2003 film that re-defines the term “comic book hero.” Dour, frustrated, suspicious that Something is catching up to him (and he’s always right), able to outrage David Letterman and inspire Robert Crumb, Pekar emerges as the nerd-world Superman (not that Superman himself doesn’t already hold that title), able to leap postmodern angst with a single, ragged sigh.

Batman

From cliffhanger serial to High Camp TV to Tim Burton’s/ChristopherNolan’s take on the Dark Knight, Batman has endured all manner of violence—more to his character than his body—but manages to soldier on. Burton and Nolan, in particular (with help from Michael Keaton and Christian Bale), have done the most to deepen/broaden the Bat-myth.

Mystery Men

The 1999 film, based on Bob Burden’s comic, not only spoofs the superhero genre but contributes to it, with a welcome eagerness to allow anybody to enter the pantheon, as long as you can stay in character. As The Shoveller (William H. Macy) put it, “We struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering.” Now, isn’t that super?

Rating Game Redux 39: Giving You Space

2008-07-23T07:16:00.000-07:00

Yet another little list for our local paper--and oh, the easy irony of it: a little list for a big category: Best Movies About Space. I decided not to choose films that are simply set in outer space, but which use space as a central element. This excludes good movies--Outland, Red Planet, even The Right Stuff--with key sequences set in space. But three is three, so here we go.

(By the way, I took the category to mean "outer space." My wife, however, suggested down-to-Earth movies like Lawrence of Arabia and Gerry and Cast Away that depend on open spaces to tell their stories. What a relief that someone else is clever; I'm happy just plodding along. Thanks, Jill.)

Solaris (1972, 2002)

In both Andrei Tarkovsky’s original film and Steven Soderbergh’s remake, the boundary between earth and space dissolves, leaving human memory to rebuild whatever might remain.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Stanley Kubrick jump-cuts us to a future in which humanity is wrought by space into infinite shapes, as stately as a waltz, as cold as evolution, an “ultimate trip” that leaves us wide-eyed and expectant.

Sunshine (2007)

The sun is dying, and Danny Boyle plunges us head-first into all that heat and light where space waits–either like a lover or a spider, depending on whom you ask.

The Home Viewer 9: Just Another Word

2008-07-14T07:56:00.000-07:00

Oops; forgot to post the following column I wrote for our local paper back on July 3. My editor asked for movies about "freedom and independence," and all I had was a re-imagined memory: nine years old and setting off firecrackers, nervous and eager, doing exactly as I pleased.

When I was a kid in New Jersey, my Fourth of July fireworks connection was Tim--actually, his older brother Ed, a genuine early-1960s hood, scary and impressive. Ed got us the good stuff: long double-row strands of Black Cat firecrackers; cherry bombs that looked like miniature versions of those hand-held explosives favored by cartoon villains; and the legendary M-80, which sounded like Doom clearing its throat and could punch sudden holes in most anything we’d cram it into. And of course the showering rockets and Roman candles, propelled above the suburban rooftops or spreading like fiery peacock feathers in the gloom of my backyard. No sparklers or fizzing bottle rockets for us; Ed brought only concussive oriental danger, Adult Supervision Required--but seldom obtained.

And so, if this Home Viewer is about movies of freedom and independence, it starts there, in the peril and joy of sulfuric freedom, the reckless independence that made me both grin and flinch.

Nothing Left to Lose
A guilty pleasure: movie heroes who couldn’t care less. Things are going so well--or so terribly--that nothing can touch their upward trajectory or downward spiral.

First, joy. Watch Richard Dreyfuss clench his teeth like a roller-coaster enthusiast in Let It Ride (1989), a gambling movie that captures the full-tilt thrill of a winning streak, as Dreyfuss’ compulsive gambler--who repeatedly promises his wife (Teri Garr) he’s coming home--keeps playing the ponies, while every other loser at the track rides with him, for once picking nothing but winners.

But also despair. Watch Nicolas Cage contort that happy-puppy face of his into manic, hopeless-but-unstoppable yearning in Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Like Dreyfuss, Cage’s insomniac ambulance driver is surrounded by like-minded madmen (Tom Sizemore, Ving Rhames, John Goodman); but here they fuel Cage’s guilt-ridden quest to drive anywhere for redemption. Trapped by regret, he frees himself to ride the nightmare wherever it wants to take him.

The Burden of Freedom

I’m thinking of the Kris Kristofferson song, in which at first he prays that God forgives those who don’t understand him--but then, as he considers he has “wounded / The last one who loved [him],” he prays she will forgive him. From the egoism of the self-righteous to the humility of the self-aware; there’s your burden for you. And nothing captures this better than movie incarnations of the Hemingway-esque “code hero,” who lives by a personal morality in a dark world, and whose failures are of no concern, as long as the code is followed. If these heroes are humbled, it’s by the code itself, which treats its faithful followers with indifference.

Despite its problems, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) confronts the burden of freedom, interrogating John Wayne’s code hero, Ethan Edwards, with a strange combination of sympathy and fear, even disgust. Ethan is the outsider, entering the homestead uninvited, his seemingly unbreakable resolve both respected and loathed. It’s as if Ford realized he had invented “John Wayne,” and was using Ethan to discover if he’d done the right thing. True, Ethan is the only man for dire circumstances--but he brings trouble with him, and is forced to cast off his pride to save the innocent (Natalie Wood) as well as himself.

The weight of the code can be felt in many films, from the hard-boiled detectives of The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Murder, My Sweet (1944) to the hard-boiled crooks of Touchez Pas au Grisbi/Don't Touch the Loot (1960) and Shoot the Piano Player (1962). Just a word on two particularly startling examples: Detective Story (1951) and This Gun for Hire (1942), starring actors--Kirk Douglas and Alan Ladd, respectively--who couldn’t be less alike, but who manage to take their characters (Douglas a police detective, Ladd a hit man) all the way to the pitch-thick bottom of the code. Pride and despair drive them, expose them, finish them off. Among the darkest noirs to ask where personal freedom ends and personal responsibility begins.

Yankee Dandies
All right, I haven’t forgotten the Fourth of July. But if we’re going to get freedom and independence, we have to earn it. And if the Fourth means Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), then so be it. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Jimmy Cagney’s George M. Cohan may be as grand an old guy as the flag he wrote songs about--but after all, it’s still Cagney. Seeing him draw himself up to hoof it like a flaming pinwheel, his face steady, his eyes staring into the camera, I can’t help but think of The Public Enemy eleven years earlier or Cody Jarrett seven years to come in White Heat--the three of them cocky and infinitely pleased with themselves--and relentless in their self-assertions.

Only Mickey Rooney could summon more energy than Cagney (if you don’t count Kate Hepburn in screwball-comedy mode), but you’d be hard-pressed to find an actor happier to be a sociopath in one movie and a barnstorming vaudevillian in another. So maybe this is the perfect Fourth of July movie: like fireworks, high jinks and mayhem combined, with a big explosive finish. Top of the world, Ma.

The Home Viewer 8: Here Come Some Brides

2008-06-17T10:09:00.001-07:00

For June, I promised our local paper a column on "June Brides." And immediately regretted cornering myself into yet another clichéd theme--which I weaseled into the following, culminating in a petulant snit as I bring up The Shining, of all things. Feh. I think.

“Up, up, fair bride,” the poet John Donne calls, his voice typically imperative. And so he should be, as he entreats the “phoenix” bride to “come forth … To an inseparable union.” Ah, what a fond dream it is, one that the movies conjure all the time—and stir up, shake and shatter. Let’s turn to face the bride during this most stereotypical month for (here come famous last words) “what no one may put asunder.”

Princess Brides

Some brides stand in patience, certain and self-assured, not in the back waiting to process, but already at the altar, to be approached. Arwen in The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)—as dewy-eyed as Liv Tyler may play her—not merely courts but claims her husband, withstanding the dangers of the Ring-quest and the loss of her immortality, leaving her father and asserting her place. The film gives her more Grrl Power than Tolkein’s book, although in the end she remains a blushing bride.

Rosalind Russell, though, blushes not at all as she dangles an almost-ex-husband (Cary Grant) and an eager-to-please almost-to-be-one (Ralph Bellamy) in His Girl Friday (1940)—and don’t let the title fool you: Hildy Johnson is her own girl, an ace reporter whose Tommy-gun delivery and cyclone wit toss both men every which way she pleases, until she gets the man she wants—and probably a Pulitzer in the bargain.

There is one bride of solemn wisdom, both princess and companion, away in an ideal tower—but thankfully real when you finally reach her: Audrey Hepburn in Robin and Marian (1976). Not a great film, but what better bride to still the bluster of an aging Robin Hood, played by Sean Connery with his usual knowing wink? True to form, Hepburn underplays, inviting us to pay special attention, until she becomes the center of things—no mean treat, with James Bond unsuccessfully straining to save the day every ten minutes.

Runaway Brides

Like greatness, some women have bride-ness thrust upon them. In both Picture Bride (1994) and Sweet Land (2005), mail-order brides struggle to reconcile with strangers in strange lands. Picture Bride’s Riyo (Youki Kudoh) flees her troubles in early-twentieth-century Japan and goes to Hawaii as a mail order/”picture” bride. Isolated and unsure, she slowly finds, if not happiness, at least herself, amid the island’s beauty and hardships. (By the way, look for Toshiro Mifune as a benshi, a performer who accompanied Japanese silent films, providing narration and dialogue. His spirited cameo out in the sugar-cane field, brandishing his wooden samurai sword, is one of the great movie-within-a-movie moments.)

On the mainland, the mail-order tribulations continue in the rural Minnesota of Sweet Land, with the added burden of post-Word-War-I anti-German sentiment. Structured as a family memory, the film looks through Inge’s (Elizabeth Reaser) eyes at those who reject her, while managing to ask us in the present to reconsider our own attitudes—in which, for instance, “official language” acquisition becomes more important than the quality of the “outsider’s” character. Beyond that, though, the film remains a personal story of all-but-despair and the blind persistence of love, beautifully filmed—like Picture Bride—so that Nature broods over these melancholy stories, trying Her best to provide moments of sun and shade as needed.

Brides of the Monster

You’d be surprised—or maybe not; but who am I to judge your view of marriage—how many horror films have “bride” in the title, or feature marriage as both pit and pendulum. The most interesting ones involve the notion that marriage “changes” a person—as in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), in which Tom Tryon (who wrote The Other) is body-snatched, giving bride Gloria Talbott one Atom-Age Gothic honeymoon. It’s a well-worn SF theme (with variations featured in, for instance, the old Outer Limits series, with William Shatner—which itself was more or less remade as The Astronaut’s Wife (1999)—and I’ll let you decide if you’d rather see Bill S. or Johnny Depp as the alien spouse); and for the non-SF variant there’s always The Return of Martin Guerre (1982)—remade as Sommersby (1993).

For me, though, the Wicked Queen of the conjugal switcheroo is The Shining (1980), Stanley Kubrick’s trapped-in-a-marriage allegory, with fire-ax. Wendy’s (Shelly Duvall) husband (Jack at his most eyebrow-arching) stares, glares, and pitches homicidal fits as he lurches like Frankenstein’s creature to “correct” his wife and son. On that note, allow me to convey best wishes to all you June Brides out there. May your marriage last “for ever, and ever, and ever.”

Rating Game Redux 38: Meet Some Beatles

2008-06-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

More impossibilities for our local paper's Rating Game: "Best Beatles Songs." I made the mistake–after picking the first without hesitation–of going to a Beatles website that listed everything they recorded. It is, if you love pop music, overwhelming. So, perhaps more than any other Rating Game Gang of Three, the following is essentially random–again, except for the first, which is all I need.

“All You Need Is Love”

Just when their pop status reached what seemed an unattainable height, the Beatles invited us all up for a sing-along—anyone remember the world-wide satellite linkup broadcast?

“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”

They were good at bitter love—and okay, sad love too, as with “Yesterday”—but when John ruefully invites “all you clowns” to “gather round,” misery couldn’t be better.

(And thanks, Stephe, for all those impromptu acoustic hootenannies in grad school. Every time I think of this tune--and a good dozen or so others we'd rough up like big happy dogs--I can see us in your dorm room or on Foley Beach, yawping with Tom, another lifetime ago.)

“Revolution”

All the rocking of early Beatles with all the exasperation of—well, John, early or late.

"That's HEDLY": Harvey Korman, 1927-2008

2008-05-30T07:26:00.000-07:00

I suppose I shouldn't be too worried that Harvey Korman is gone: Something or other is bound to make me laugh in the same way: overwhelmed by schtick, almost-sniggering asides, eyeball-rolling indulgence--all with a wit as keen as his timing, and a mad love for dopey laughs. What a cliché it is to state the importance of laughter--but I've never let the descent into the facile and the trite stop me before, and I certainly won't now, as I attempt to wave goodbye like a starstruck kid to Harvey Korman--a man whose very name verges on funny--that "K," that perfect "Harvey"--I'm smiling already.

I couldn't wait to see him on Carol Burnett's show. He gave me permission to laugh, even though I was a punk teen in the '70s, and adults--and by extension anything that would make them go haw-haw-haw--were supposed to be square hypocrites--and of course we are--OK, I am. But Harvey entered laughing--at least in his eyes, at the corners of his mouth--especially if he were approaching Tim Conway (oh, man: another genius for another day). And I didn't have to be hip; thanks to his sly generosity, I could laugh at stuff that--well, whaddaya know?--was straight out of Your Show of Shows, down to the on-air crack-ups. A long laugh-line stretching like an ample Borscht Belt all the way to Harvey.

I could blather on, but who needs it? What matters is that permission. Harvey always let you in on the joke--but he was never cute about it. He helped you keep up, grinning a little when you got it, hamming it up until you didn't. And at the end of the trail is Blazing Saddles, always funny, endlessly quotable, and Harvey'd up just right. And I also won't geek all over your shoes by ticking off his many moments in that film. I know we'd all rather let Harvey take care of it himself.

Rating Game Redux 37: Pixel-ated

2008-05-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

Our local paper's Rating Game this week asks us to consider the "best computer-generated characters." While that stained-glass knight in Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) still holds quite a bit of Industrial Light and Magic-al charm, I opted for more recent synthespians (and aintcha glad that appellation never caught on?).

Gollum

Andy Serkis is motion-captured and rotoscoped into one of the two or three best performances in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. “Precious,” indeed.

(Honorable mention: Peter Jackson/Andy Serkis' King Kong.)

Jurassic Park Dinosaurs

Stan Winston’s dinosaurs all but closed the gap between the filmmakers’ and viewers’ imaginations, creating that rare moment when you stop thinking, “It’s only a movie.”

Pixar

All right, I’m cheating. But--from Woody’s wry grins to Mike Wazowski’s surprisingly expressive single eye, from the Incredibles arguing at the dinner table to Ratatouille’s hurt feelings--Pixar’s characters bridge another gap: between the computer and the cell-drawn cartoon, reinvigorating both media.

Rating Game Redux 36: "Get Back to Work"

2008-05-22T06:02:00.000-07:00

Another easy list for our local paper's Rating Game: Best Songs About Work. The following three quickly came to mind.

(And you know, I keep posting these, but nobody offers their own favorites. I hereby officially solicit your responses. Now get back to work.)

“The Promised Land”

Bruce Springsteen has written many songs about work, but “The Promised Land” captures the frustrations of working dreams deferred: “I've done my best to live the right way / I get up every morning and go to work each day / But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold / Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode.”

Something to listen to for all of you itching for something to start while you drive all night chasing some mirage:

(Now you see him, now you don't: Rest in peace, Danny Federici.)

“The Internationale”

Wikipedia offers more lyrics than you’ll ever need to this global workers’ anthem. But the stirring melody doesn’t change, and from the collective farm to the Ford plant the workers-of-the-world unite, raised-fist anger and optimism of this song remain the same.

Sing along with Bill Bragg's version, and for three minutes unite the Earth in song.

“Hallelujah I’m a Bum”

The perfect tune for when you can’t work because there’s no work to do: “When springtime does come, / Oh won't we have fun, / We'll throw up our jobs / And we'll go on the bum.”

Arthur Fields skips through the tune at 78 revolutions per minute:

Rating Game Redux 35: Duos ex Microphone

2008-05-15T05:48:00.001-07:00

(Above: My most tortured title yet.)

This was yet another one of those categories for our local paper's "Rating Game" that could've baffled and confounded: "Best Duets." Consider the thousands of wonderful pairings most of us barely remember--if we know them at all--or cannot fully appreciate, given our musical tastes. For my trio of choices, I didn't even consider opera--not that there's anything wrong with that; I just don't know one performer from another ("They're all wonnnnderful," he enthused diplomatically). And I left out the quirky ones I know (David Byrne once sung a duet with Selena).

Nonetheless, this was the easiest "Rating Game" ever--I actually have a short list of all-time favorites. The first two sprang immediately to mind; the third I had never heard--although my wife, Jill, saw them perform--and you can too, at the bottom of this post (and try not to be distracted by the video--although it's fun(?) seeing John Cryer (get it?) with his 1987 feather-cut). I have always held this duet in my head as a dream-team moment--which it is.

So for once, it seems, three is enough.

“Let’s Do It”

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong sail with humor and affection through Cole Porter’s comic ode to—well, doing it, down to the last educated flea and sentimental centipede.

“I Never Talk to Strangers”

Like Armstrong-Fitzgerald, another gravel-and-butterscotch combination, as Tom Waits and Bette Midler cat-and-mouse their way through a bar pickup, eventually admitting “we all begin as strangers” before clinking their glasses in (at least temporary) agreement.

“Crying”

Roy Orbison takes a late run at one of his standards with K.D. Lang, and the result is one of the greatest pop-opera moments ever recorded.

Rating Game Redux (34): Group Shot

2008-05-09T06:31:00.000-07:00

When our local paper asked for three ensemble cast movies, I was reminded how difficult it is to make a good movie that doesn't profit from ensemble. Even "star vehicles" improve when the secondary characters are allowed to step up; consider the floating eccentrics of most Coen brothers movies, drifting into the scene, demanding our attention, then moving on. Episodic pictures like After Hours (1985) and The Lord of the Rings explicitly forefront such contributions--in fact, as the hero(es) encounter(s) each moment, those who inhabit the new space often determine the trajectory of the narrative--or at least provide a satisfying interlude.

Still, certain group efforts are hard to miss. Here's a scant three of them.

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, Jonathan Pryce, and Alec Baldwin preen and bluster and wheedle their way through David Mamet’s best “men’s club” movie, in which real estate salesmen vie for a Cadillac, a set of steak knives—and the last shreds of their dignity.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

What’s amazing is that the sets, costumes and makeup do not overshadow the actors; in fact, these troopers join forces to outshine the Technicolor excesses, resulting in a surprisingly “personal” movie, funny (even satirical) and touching.

Tokyo Story (1953)

The great Yasujiro Ozu, with his all-but-invisible touch, has his characters whisper in our ears the sad everyday secrets of family life, whose minor separations, rivalries, and missed opportunities accumulate into a tragedy expressed as a sigh.

The Home Viewer (7): Mother May I?

2008-05-01T10:12:00.000-07:00

Here's the column I wrote for our local paper to celebrate some of May's bounty. OK, so I left out the following May observances:

Lou Gehrig's Disease Awareness Month
Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
Awareness of Medical Orphans Month
Better Hearing & Speech Month
Borderline Personality Disorder Month
Brain Tumor Awareness Month
Creative Beginnings Month
Family Wellness Month
Fibromyalgia Education and Awareness Month
Freedom Shrine Month
Get Caught Reading Month
Gifts From The Garden Month
Go Fetch! Food Drive for Homeless Animals Month
Haitian Heritage Month
Heal the Children Month
Healthy Vision Month
Huntington's Disease Awareness Month
International Audit Month
International Business Image Improvement Month
International Victorious Woman Month
Jewish-American Heritage Month
Latino Books Month
Motorcycle Safety Month
National Allergy/Asthma Awareness Month
National Arthritis Month
National Barbeque Month
National Bike Month
National Correct Posture Month
National Egg Month
National Foster Care Month
National Good Car Keeping Month
National Hamburger Month
National Hepatitis Awareness Month
World Lyme Disease Awareness Month
National Meditation Month
National Mental Health Month
National Military Appreciation Month
National Moving Month
National Neurofibromatosis Awareness Month
National Older Americans Month
National Osteoporosis Prevention Month
National Photo Month
National Physical Fitness & Sports Month
National Preservation Month
National Salad Month
National Salsa Month
National Smile Month
National Stroke Awareness Month
National Revise Your Work Schedule Month
National Vinegar Month
Navajo Code Talkers Month
Personal History Month
Prepare to Buy A Home Month
React Month
Strike Out Strokes Month
Sweet Vidalia Onions Month
Teen Self-Esteem Month
Tennis Month
Tay-Sachs and Canavan Diseases Month Link
Ultra-violet Awareness Month
Women's Health Care Month
Young Achiever's Month
National Family Month

But wouldn't it be cool to find a movie that fits each of these? Or maybe not. Anyway, go read, if you like.

For T.S. Eliot, April may have been “the cruellest month,” but May is the greediest. From May Day to Memorial Day, from maypoles to Blessed Virgins, from earnest anarchists to honored dead—and wandering around in there somewhere, supermarket flowers and drugstore perfume in hand, dearest Mom—this month is just one thing after another. Not that I’m complaining.

May Day (I)

I wonder: Does anybody in the U.S. erect (so to speak) maypoles anymore? Or is it just capering Swedes and Brits, glimpsed on CNN and looking silly? Sometimes I wish we’d all join in and start the month with a little pagan merrymaking, as in L'Auberge espagnole/The Spanish Apartment (2002)—also known as, I kid you not, Euro Pudding. A French college student in Barcelona rooms for a year with a variety of Europeans, yielding various sweet, sad, roisterous fruits.

May Day (II)

Catholic school kids know May Day as Mary’s Day. When I was in my parochial prime, we would assemble in the playground and fidget while first-graders processed toward the Virgin’s statue, crown of flowers in hand, silly and sweet minor saints. Barring your own life-experiences among God’s peanut gallery, see The Flowers of St. Francis (1950). Directed by Roberto Rossellini and co-written by Federico Fellini, the film—whose Italian title is Francesco, giullare di Dio/Francis, God’s Jester—employs actual monks, who play Francis and his followers as gentle slapstick versions of sanctity, filled with humility and the quiet urge to be happy.

May Day (III)

Also known as International Workers’ Day, when labor unionists, Communists, and anarchists commemorate Chicago’s Haymarket Riot in 1886, spurred by an act of “labor terrorism” and sparking pro-union movements around the world. Not to mention the eight-hour workday. If you didn’t take my advice last week (in the Rating Game for “Best Documentaries”) and check out Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976), now’s the time to remember the real battles fought and sacrifices made. And if you want a (more or less) fiction film, John Sayles’ Matewan (1987) also walks the coalfields—this time, of 1920s West Virginia. In his book Thinking in Pictures, Sayles asserts that the story of labor is also an American one, and so he constructed the movie as if it were a wooded-hills Western, including a Main Street showdown—except here, the hero is a collective and the guys in black hats are union-busters.

Cinco de Mayo

On May 5, 1862, the Mexican army beat the French at Puebla. Over the years, this day has been happily re-invented as a trans-border party of Mexican culture, spirit, and pride, particularly in the United States. In Real Women Have Curves (2002), Ana Garcia (America “Ugly Betty” Ferrera) and her family personify the community of love, sorrow and hope that Cinco de Mayo celebrates.

Mother’s Day

I’m as eager as anyone to support the couplet-glutted greeting-card market, but if you want to give your mother a celluloid bouquet, try The Incredibles (2004)—now there’s one super Mom—or select scenes from John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Jane Darwell as Ma Joad is pure Dorothea Lange: as sad and solid as the hard-packed fields she is forced to abandon, looking into a middle distance where she yearns to build a home for her children, one weary mile at a time. Thanks, Ma.

Of course, if she’s that “other” kind of mother, just screen Mommie Dearest or Throw Momma from the Train or Psycho or White Heat or The Manchurian Candidate or Serial Mom or Carrie or Aliens or—well, there’s plenty of Moms to go around.

Memorial Day

Formerly known as Decoration Day, it began as a way to honor the Civil War dead, but over the years has rested its soothing hand, filled with poppies and small flags, upon mourners of all wars. We could begin with Gettysburg (1993), a four-hour living journal of the decisive battle of a War that engendered too many mourners.

But a deeper urge persists, one that not only mourns but indicts the ones who cause the sorrow of those who live on. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), based on Erich Maria Remarque’s World War I novel, leaves its grim soldiers staring blankly at the future that has been left to them, as blood-soaked and filthy as the trenches they hate—and hate to leave—and as bleak as the slate skies that look down and could care less. The movie demands that, before we memorialize, we ask ourselves why we put ourselves in the position of honored dead and earnest mourner. As when I wrote about Veterans Day films last year, I’m reminded of the hesitation Lincoln expressed in the Gettysburg Address: “we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground.” As he tells us, the dead have done that already, and we would do well to trade in our pride for humility, at least once a year, on the last Monday in May.

Rating Game Redux (33): Nothing But the Truth

2008-04-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

Our local paper's Rating Game wanted the truth on Best Documentaries. Not happening, with only three allowed on the list. But here--with all due apologies to Robert Flaherty, Frederick Wiseman, the Maysles brothers, and even that Big & Tall Man gadfly, Michael Moore--is a good start. In cinema veritas!

Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976)
Kentucky coal miners strike in 1973, and Barbara Kopple marches right along, through double-dealings, drive-by shootings, homespun egos and hard-won (partial) victories. Talk about your bitter Americans.

The “Up” Series (1964-present)
Michael Apted has followed a group of English boys and girls from age seven onward (49 Up in 2005) in an epic series that explores personal and social change—and continuity.

Gates of Heaven (1980)
Errol Morris’ first documentary, an exploration of pets, pet cemeteries, the American Dream, and endless tangents, as Morris aims his camera at his subjects and lets them take over. A slyly manipulative “anti-documentary” in which the periphery becomes the story.

The Home Viewer (6): The Cruellest Month

2008-04-17T09:09:00.000-07:00

T.S. Eliot's old-timey spelling notwithstanding, our local paper thought I should do a little something on spring--which in the baleful Midwest we haven't really experienced yet--mostly bursts of fitful sunshine followed by straight winds. But I decided to consider it a Silly Season, and tunefully wedged my way into the narrow margin springtime seems determined to maintain this year.

As we turn–at last!–toward spring, stuck in my head is a relentlessly joyful tune written back in the 1920s by Harry (“I’m Lookin’ Over a Four-Leaf Clover”) Woods entitled, “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along.” The lyrics are famous for repeatedly entreating the “sleepyhead” to “get up” and “cheer up,” and commanding that we “live, love, laugh and be happy.” So we better get to it.

Live

Federico Fellini saw life as an epic dream, a memory recovered so passionately it melts the boundaries between past and present, reality and imagination. Amarcord (1973) (literally, “I remember”) looks back on the director’s childhood with equal parts affection and irony. In his hands, even the rising fascist culture of 1930s Italy becomes part of his small town’s circus procession of love, rage, longing, mischief, departure, and renewal, with a peacock in the snow, a fever-inducing encounter with first lust, a giant animated Mussolini head–and the airborne puffballs of spring. Amarcord climbs the tree of life and, like mad Uncle Teo, shouts its demands for more.

In Richard Linklater’s lucid dreaming grab-bag, Waking Life (2001), a multitude of philosophical observations/rants are delivered by a host of rotoscope-animated thinkers, freakout-artists, slackers, and crazies–dreamers all. As Speed Levitch observes, “Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments flabbergasted to be in each others’ presence.” OK, maybe a bit clichéd and/or overblown. But as the dreamer (played by Wiley Wiggins, whose name alone evokes Wonderland) falls awake into further dreams, he gives himself the chance to live many lives, sometimes merely by listening to his fellow dreamers.

To truly live, then, one life may not be enough. But each, as we see in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring (2003), has its trials. This South Korean film by Ki-duk Kim, set in a monastery floating on a lake, follows the seasons as it explores the Buddhist injunction to show infinite compassion while striving for detachment. Beautifully filmed, hushed in contemplation, it gazes at lives that, like stones tossed in the water, spread inevitable ripples.

Love

In honor of spring, let’s agree that love is revival. One of my favorite comic versions of this is Born Yesterday (1950), in which a racketeer (Broderick Crawford) gets more than he bargains for when he insists his moll, “Billie” (Judy Holliday), receive an education. Enter William Holden as the Henry Higgens-esque tutor, who gives Billie the chance to exercise the independence she already had: Just watch the scene in which she beats Crawford in a game of gin. Smartest dumb blond in movie history.

Love is also rejuvenation. Four years after Al Jolson bawled the talkies into existence (Edison’s 1895 Kinetophone notwithstanding), Charlie Chaplin made a “silent” film (with music and sound effects), City Lights (1931), marking the final appearance of the Little Tramp. Not only is this movie unashamedly sentimental, it reminds us of the beauty of silent films and the universal appeal of the Tramp. At forty-two, Chaplin seems as fresh and eager as he did back in 1914, in Kid’s Auto Race, ready to dazzle with his nimble frame and surprising attention to the small gesture. City Lights keeps the promise that the cinema so often breaks: that seeing a movie can be like an openhearted return to youth.

Laugh

Knowing what’s funny is one slippery fish to grasp. There is, of course, a simple rule: If it makes you laugh every time, it’s funny. For me, that includes The Producers (1968) and every 1930s Marx Brothers movie–but I’ll settle for Monkey Business (1931). I’d also like to add an Honorable Mention: The Imposters (1998), in which Stanley Tucci and Oliver Platt, more than willing to be ridiculous, combine Max Bialystock with Groucho to produce a farce that either of their anarchic, over-acting predecessors would be proud of. Filled with verbal sleight-of-hand and giddy disregard for life and limb (and propriety), these movies place no demands on higher brain functions–but plenty on your stamina.

Be Happy

Some movies, such as A Hard Day’s Night (1964), make being happy look easy. It’s obvious how much fun Paul, John, George and Ringo are having: You can see it on their faces. And there’s more than a little Marx Brothers in their one-liners and blithely awful puns.

Then again, happiness can be a life-and-death battle–but that doesn’t mean you can’t sing and dance. Consider Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (2002), a documentary that celebrates the relationship between music and the struggle to destroy apartheid in South Africa. Whether in mourning or joy, tragedy or victory, the comrades unite in their song of “amandla” (power), their bodies rising and falling–and rising again, like their lives, faces upturned in melodic defiance and joy.

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) depicts the struggle for freedom as a middle-class nightmare, perfectly capturing (thanks to Will Smith’s portrayal of Chris Gardner) the anxiety of poverty and the burden of the American dream–and a triumph that is not only financial. All in all, an idea that, even misspelled, Gardner asserts is worth pursuing.

Rating Game Redux (31): Sad, Sadder, Saddest

2008-04-16T07:36:00.000-07:00

In considering the "saddest songs" for our local paper's "Rating Game" this week, I must confess I fell back on what is for me overly familiar ground. So if you can stand another mention of Springsteen, read on. If not, cry if you want to.

“Stardust”

Hoagy Carmichael’s elegy to lost love–dreaming in vain, wandering in the night with nothing but memories. Could it get any worse? Well, yes:

“Dreams to Remember”

Otis Redding sees his love with another, walks away and cries; still, he refuses to give up, even though, like Hoagy, he has nothing but dreams. Now we’re at the depths, am I right? Almost:

“I Wish I Were Blind”

Bruce Springsteen also sees his girl with someone else, and figures, “though this world is filled / With the grace and beauty of God’s hand / Oh I wish I were blind / When I see you with your man.” Like sad old Hopkins tells us, “No worst, there is none.”

Oh, yeah: This is the saddest of them all. I forgot all about it; but this elfish chanteuse on Toobio or whateverthehellitis sure didn't. Watch and grin; listen and weep.

Touch of Evil: Charlton Heston, 1924-2008

2008-04-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

I may not be saying it first, but I'll still say it: Get your hands off him, you damned dirty apes. I don't care how vigorously he courted the Right, nor how effectively he became a whipping boy of the Left. When I see him in my head, he is not holding high a long-bore hunting rifle but a Technicolor Decalogue, final warning to sinners in the hands of an angry God. And more: his whip held high, the chariots plummeting. And in a quieter mood, an Omega Man watching Woodstock over and over--or most of all, the clenched-jaw cynics, munching on Soylent Green or cursing on the beach, goddamming us all to hell--Moses once more at the end, seeing creation and concluding it is not all that good.

And these images last because, as an adult, I saw on video the strange statue Orson Welles had carved back in 1958, the Mexican Heston, stooping beneath low border-town apartment-dive ceilings like John Wayne in The Quiet Man, both of them out of their elements, and transformed. He was exactly what Touch of Evil needed: a slab of marble among all those sweaty double-crossers, with his wife, Janet Leigh, packed into her foundation garments--un-dress rehearsal for Anthony Perkins just a little down that black and white road. And Heston plugged along, wading in the oily water, a practical Ahab after the Great White Orson, the double-est crosser of them all. That single late glimpse of Charlton Heston clears up everything between us, and allows us at last to set down that shootin iron and lift a toast to Apocalypse, whether pillar of fire or busted-up Statue of Liberty, car-bomb or plague-psychos. Now those are moments you're going to have to pry from my cold, dead--ah, you get it.

Rating Game Redux (30): Trippy

2008-04-08T09:39:00.000-07:00

This week our local paper asked contributors to hit the road with "Best Road Trip Movies." As usual, a huge category, but only three picks allowed. So many miles to go before we sleep.

The Straight Story (1999)
The real David Lynch takes it on the road with the inimitable Richard Farnsworth as they explore the breadth of human kindness from the seat of a tractor.

Broken Flowers (2005)
Bill Murray does his dead-on Buster Keaton impression in Jim Jarmusch’s lopsided comedy, a little trip–with dangerous curves–down romantic memory lane.

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake discover the crossroads where comedy and tragedy meet in Preston Sturges’ messy masterpiece, part Hollywood satire, part social critique, part sentimental journey.

Rating Game Redux (29): This Aint No Disco

2008-04-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

More music listing for our local paper: Best '70s Songs. Mostly off-center picks. I suppose I could've just stayed with Motown--or been honest enough to reveal my Art Rock leanings and picked ELP, Yes, Tull. Then again, there's always "Smoke on the Water"--as long as you don't pay attention to the lyrics. Anyway--for what it's worth--here you go:

“Theme from Shaft” (1971) Isaac Hayes
The Stax Records sound elevated to sainthood—and one of the few endlessly repeated singles that has never passed into cliché.

“Thunder Road” (1975) Bruce Springsteen
I suppose “Born to Run” should be the pick, but this surprisingly melodic rocker perfectly captures Springsteen’s mid-decade effort to give rocknroll a future.

“Psycho Killer” (1977) Talking Heads
Whipping up a fitting anthem for The Little Decade That Couldn’t, Byrne and Co. hand the club kids exactly what they deserve; like the man says, “I hate people when they’re not polite.”

Rating Game Redux (28): I Don't Even Want to Hear It

2008-03-27T06:51:00.001-07:00

A non-movie category this week for our local paper: worst lyrics. None of the panelists seemed to be responding, so our editor sent out a second email request for submissions. Gallant as I am, I tossed together the following. As the Cramps put it, "bad music for bad people."

“American Pie”
Pseudo-Dylan mishmash I was sick of sometime in late 1971—but at least you can dance to the Madonna version.

“Horse with No Name”
Well, maybe in the desert "there ain’t no one for to give you no pain" because there ain’t no radio for to hear this song.

“I Write the Songs”
That, Mr. Manilow, was your first mistake.

Rating Game Redux (27): Animated Response

2008-03-19T06:46:00.001-07:00

When our local paper asked for a list of "best animated films," I knew what they wanted: feature-length fare, classics and watershed moments. But what sprang to mind were the little critters, seven-minute bouts of wabbit trouble--and mouse trouble, and billy goat, and Martian. Mustache fiends. Cats who hates people. Cats who look and sound suspiciously like Abbott and Costello. Cats who thuffer thucotash. And their prey, mice and birds, falsely innocent, with startling upper-body strength. Ah, we could go on and on, could we not? Sniffles and Wolfy and Daffy (that mad, impetuous boy) and Foghorn. But you gotta be a flippin' magician t'keep a kid's attention more than five--or seven minutes--these days, so I will bow to the following three prestidigitators, stretching animation* with Sam Clampett molecular hoodoo, many frames per second.

Pinocchio (1940)

The son rejects then rescues the father in a Magic Realist wish-fulfillment chiaroscuro cartoon-dream, in which nightmare and sentiment seamlessly combine, with music.

Spirited Away (2001)

Not since Lewis Carroll has anyone better understood the fears and hopes of childhood than Hayao Miyazaki, whose beautiful film creates a Wonderland that, like Carroll’s, invents its own mythology—and knows how to keep a secret, sometimes even from the viewer.

Street of Crocodiles (1986)

The Brothers Quay’s sublimely disquieting stop-action masterpiece of impenetrable gloom and compulsive attention to movement—even the dust on their hybridized found-objects/subjects seems infused with febrile life—capturing the alternate-reality essence of animation, both captivating and delirious.

*Except for the Brothers Quay, whose animations usually run under twenty minutes or so. But for those of you unfamiliar with their work, I promise they will be the longest twenty minutes (in a good way) you'll ever spend.

The Home Viewer (5): Go, Erin, Go!

2008-03-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

So, to introduce this month's Humble Viewer version of the monthly column I write for our local paper--which will be online after this Thursday, so why do I bother posting it here? Ah, vanity, vanity--anyway, in trying to be cute, I searched an "Irish Proverbs" site to find something appropriate to get us started, and found this: In winter the milk goes to the cow's horns. Say, kids! Submit your own impenetrable sayings! Here's the column, on movies about Ireland or Irish people.

St. Patrick’s Day as we celebrate it in the U.S. may have as little to do with Ireland as corned beef and cabbage, but such fabrications and confusions still make a fine feast, whether at the table or in the movies. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats is supposed to have said of someone, “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” So, when one accuses the Irish of whimsical melancholy—or vice versa—they have only themselves to blame—and perhaps the film world as well, mightily fond of Ireland and its people, whether just as they are or as we (or the Irish themselves) would like them to be.

Emerald Isle, Lucky Charm

Few Hollywood filmmakers understood the reality-fantasy of Ireland better than John Ford in The Quiet Man (1952). He took his favorite leading man, John Wayne, and the most durable leading lady he could find, Maureen O’Hara, and plunked them down on the Old Sod to brawl their way toward marital bliss. Watching Wayne shoulder beneath those cottages’ low ceilings, exasperated and withdrawn—before exploding for fifteen minutes at a time, whether at O’Hara or her brother (Victor McLaglen)—I’m reminded how well he worked with Ford—and the Ford “family” (Barry Fitzgerald, Ward Bond, McLaglen)—especially in this film, which re-imagines Ireland without “The Troubles,” and offers perfect peace between Catholics and Protestants. Even the IRA seems genial.

Such light spirits persist in Irish films: The Snapper (1993) paves the way for the recent Juno with its tale of twenty-year-old Tina Kellegher (Sharon Curley), who becomes pregnant and decides to keep the baby. Much of the film’s focus is on her curmudgeonly “Da,” Dessie (Colm Meaney), whose clueless bluster and one-liners lead to a gradual acceptance of his role as Modern Grandfather. Once (2006) is also set in Dublin—and set to music, as the nameless “Guy” and “Girl” form a compelling, magical duo, their lives expressed as song; to be sure, an Irish ideal.

Irish Troubles

Unfortunately, it isn’t all merry eccentrics and lilting melodies. From the Blight to the Famine, from Home Rule to the Easter Rising, from outright war with England to civil war among themselves, Ireland has had its share of “The Troubles.” Many great films have risen to accept the challenges of this tragedy; a few stand out:

In the Name of the Father (1993) Daniel Day-Lewis proves once more his ability to deeply affect an audience—here, as Gerry Conlon, who in 1974 was wrongfully accused with three others of an IRA bombing. The film pours outrage and sorrow on the errors and malice of a system so intent on laying blame and righting wrongs that all it accomplishes is radicalizing the innocent.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) Ken Loach’s bitter history lesson. 1919 brings revolution, with civil war quick on its heels. The film eventually becomes a classic brother-against-brother story, brutal and heartbreaking.

Odd Man Out (1947) Carol Reed directs James Mason (as Johnny McQueen) in this fable-like tale of a Belfast Nationalist on the run. More “Ulysses in Nighttown” than action flick, Reed’s quasi-surreal epic leads McQueen in almost total silence through a world whose shadows are as menacing as the politics that drive him.

In America

Over the past two centuries, the Irish story has been also an immigrant’s story. Movies such as In America (2002) and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) have interpreted the decision to travel “into the West” as struggle, reconciliation, and sometimes triumph. But once in America, and generations pass, the climb seems steeper, the terrain less certain. In The Last Hurrah (1958), John Ford follows the Irish to the political arena, in which party machines, mass media, and entrenched corruption pit themselves against Ford’s typical hero: unassuming, optimistic, tenacious. Spencer Tracy gives one of his rough-tooled/fine-tuned performances as the mayor (based on real-life Boston Mayor James Burley).

Even harsher battles are fought on the streets of Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone (2007), which begins like a particularly engrossing Law and Order episode, but, under Ben’s direction and with its remarkable cast—especially his brother Casey and Amy Ryan—the film explores guilt and innocence, sin and salvation, with fierceness and rueful acceptance.

Roaches and Rabbits

In America, the earliest “Gangs of New York” hurtled at each other with fanciful names—Roach Guards, Ducky Boys, Dead Rabbits—and Martin Scorsese’s 2002 picture attempts to capture those bloody collisions as an immigrant tale of rejection and assimilation, followed by oblivion. It was Yeats, once more, who writes of Byzantium that it is “no country for old men”—and the gangster Irish America is no exception: the young themselves may not survive the bludgeoning. Scorsese continues his interrogation in The Departed (2006), a cell phone-infested, bullet-ridden proving-ground. Nicholson’s Frank Costello asks a man, “How's your mother?” and the fellow replies, “I'm afraid she's on her way out”; without missing a beat Frank replies, “We all are. Act accordingly.”

In the end, though, it seems that even in their murkiest incarnations, the Irish never lose an otherworldly sensibility—at least in the cinema. With Miller’s Crossing (1990), the Coen brothers situate their Irish, Jewish, Italian and what-all gangsters in an alternate 1930s universe of snappy comebacks (“Where’d you get the fat lip?” “Old war wound. Acts up around morons.”) and wind-blown hats, where “Danny Boy” becomes a Tommy gun ballad of casual havoc and cool under fire—in short, a movie in which everything that can go wrong, does—citing a law that, not coincidentally, appears to be named after one “Murphy,” assumedly an individual of Irish descent.

Rating Game Redux (26): Novel Movie Ideas

2008-03-04T09:39:00.000-08:00

Our local paper asked for "Best Movies Based on Novels." The following three came to mind pretty quickly. I'll follow this with an addendum.

The Lord of the Rings (2001-03)

Despite plot changes and deletions, Peter Jackson exuberantly devotes ten-plus hours to J.R.R. Tolkein’s never-can-be-filmed work—and pleases just about everybody, even those who find the books a bit creaky.

In Cold Blood (1967)

If Capote’s work is a “nonfiction novel,” then Richard Brooks’ film is a fictionalized documentary. And thanks to Conrad Hall’s dust-bowl-noir cinematography and Quincy Jones’ exclamatory music—and most of all, Scott Wilson’s and Robert Blake’s Dick and Perry—the movie gazes into the abyss with lidless courage.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

The first postmodern novel (which just happened to be written in the late eighteenth century), Tristram Shandy’s fractal-ized narrative becomes a Russian nesting doll of a movie-within-a-movie—without restraints. As funny a deconstruction of an already-deconstructed book as it is of filmmaking—and the egos necessary to make a movie about a man who cannot stop referencing himself.

More great novels-to-movies. The rule for me here is that the movie should (a) refelct the "spirit" of its source and/or (b) re-imagine the novel. After all, if I want just the novel--all its plot, characters and details--there's always, you know, the novel.

Wise Blood
A Clockwork Orange
The Maltese Falcon
The Big Sleep (Bogart version)
Naked Lunch
Dracula (Coppola's version, Lugosi's performance)
The Age of Innocence
Ragtime
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel's and Kaufman's versions)

A decidedly partial list--in both senses of the term. Feel free to add your own.

Oscar the Grouch

2008-02-26T12:57:00.000-08:00

As much as I admire No Country for Old Men--perhaps the best (American?) movie since Raging Bull--and even as I write, "It describes evil perfectly," I wonder how much we needed it--and all right, maybe we do, if only to notice evil's bland advance, a cheap crook with a gimmick--two, if you count the flipping coin--who ruins everything for the rest of us. But like those kids at the end, we'll take the cash and grin in complicity, bare-chested in the giving, while the Bad Man rolls "further up the road." And something else, maybe more: I admit my eyes filled with tears as Ed Tom Bell/Tommy Lee Jones (and has Jones finally separated himself from his character by the merest slanting line?) tells his dream about his father in the mountain pass:

It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past ... and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.*

I'm not sure which ached more, the thought of that fiery horn or the waking up. Any of you out there an orphan, father gone, can bawl along with me, in this "world more full of weeping than we can understand." And I thank the Coens for a good cry, and for reminding us--OK, reminding me--that much is taken, and much remains--and more will go. Jeez, even the last roaring moments of The Shining make me sad now, Father Jack losing himself, love turned upside-down "in all that dark and all that cold."

(But the brothers made it up to us Oscar night, with an image in their acceptance speech that made me laugh out loud: Ethan, eleven years old, down at the airport, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, Joel shooting their first movie: Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go.)

*Thanks, IMDb; I'll trust the accuracy of your quote.

Home-Made Film Festivals (5): Scorsese Without Tommyguns

2008-02-20T10:47:00.000-08:00

Below: The last of the "home-made film festivals" from a THIRD site I'd tried to maintain. So, although I may want it not, I will waste not. (I'd like to continue these, but my other blog constantly calls.)

We tend to associate Martin Scorsese with crime films, but he has made a number of compelling movies that, while they avoid the Goodfellas crew, still explore his recurring themes of lost love, over-reaching ambition, and even the trials of the spiritual quest.

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Based on Edith Wharton's novel, this film's social infighting is almost as ruthless as the business-as-usual mayhem of his wiseguys, as Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is forced to repress his love for the disgraced-by-divorce Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), amid the "useless beauty" of late-nineteenth-century New York.

The King of Comedy (1983)

Along with After Hours (1985), a pitch-perfect dark comedy. Robert De Niro as Rupert Pupkin ("often misspelled and mispronounced") is as hilarious as he is scary, while Jerry Lewis delivers his iciest performance since Buddy Love. And let's not forget Sandra Bernhard's voracious stalker-fan. Together, the three handle this tale of fifteen-minute fame like dynamite-jugglers, at once precise and reckless.

Kundun (1997)

A meditative-ecstatic biopic of the young Dalai Lama, as beautiful as it is heartbreaking, a genuinely transcendent movie that painstakingly builds then sweeps away its sand-painted mandalas, infinite sanctity and human impermanence finally reconciled.

Rating Game Redux (25): I Heart These 3

2008-02-12T08:01:00.000-08:00

Just in time for that most romantic day of the year--that's right, February 12, the birthday of not only Abraham Lincoln but Cotton Mather, Lorne Greene, and Forrest Tucker--yet another "top" three list submitted to our local paper. A quick Tom Waits quote: "Life is a path lit only by / The light of those you've loved."

Lost in Translation (2003)

John Keats gets it right:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

For an audio version, check out the Trembling Blue Stars’ song, “The Ghost of an Unkissed Kiss.”

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Despite its aggressively UN-romantic title, Fassbinder’s remake of two Douglas Sirk movies quietly submerges us into the ecstasy and agony of romance, as a late-middle-aged German woman and her younger Arab boyfriend face race and class antagonisms—and their own weaknesses—in their struggle to hold on to each other.

“The May-Erwin Kiss” (1896)

Eighteen seconds of kissing, at the dawn of projected motion pictures. “An osculatory performance” that has been repeated thousands of times, but you can see it here first.

Rating Game Redux (24): I've Seen All Good Logos

2008-02-12T07:57:00.000-08:00

Here's another list I submitted to our local paper that has nothing to do with film--and I think I'll stop apologizing. No one's reading, anyway--and that is not a plea for attention, but feel free. Besides, it was fun writing about "Best Band Logos."

Yes

Roger Dean, who also illustrated most of the band’s albums, designed a flowing, chunky, yin-yang-y lower-case logo that perfectly captured the bright-speck-in-a-big-universe vibe of the quintessential ‘70s art-rock band.

The Who

The target, perfect for a bull’s-eye band dead-on stuttering about their generation, part mod, part rocker—with that arrow shooting straight up, big and bouncy. And the simple lettering, evocative of The Beatles’ formal font, as if something were being passed along, from one magic bus to another.

The Cramps

Drippy monster-letters evoke The Cramps’ late-night blue-glow punkabilly jitters. No more disco, no more pogo, just the thump and gurgle of “bad music for bad people.”

Home-Made Film Festivals (4): Kurosawa Without Swords

2008-02-06T06:22:00.000-08:00

Filing under the Redundant Department of Redundancy, I'm simply continuing to empty a non-active website I started late last year. I've written about all of the following before, but someone's gotta satisfy my search for order ("the compulsion to repeat," as The Good Doktor Freud put it)--and in true OCD-fashion, that someone is me.

As influential as his samurai/historical epics may be, Akira Kurosawa mastered other genres, from noir to fantasy to social drama. But throughout his films he continued a conversation between Stoic acceptance and mystic transcendence of things as they are, resulting in films that look with sympathy on human weakness without ignoring the price we pay.

High and Low (1963)
While this sustains more than enough tension for any kidnapped child story, its focus is on personal loss and public responsibility, as well as class divides, as kidnappers mistake a chauffeur's son for his industrialist employer's boy, and the rich man has to gamble everything as he weighs the cost of doing the right thing.

Ikiru (1952)
Kanji Watanabe, a bureaucrat (played by Takashi Shimura with excruciating blankness/despair), learns he is dying of stomach cancer and feels he has wasted his life. Constantly pained, Watanabe follows a circuit, from fear to mercy to death to victory, that not only rescues him from hopelessness but ennobles those around him. A heroic triumph expressed in small gestures.

Red Beard (1965)
While there is an air of the samurai to this film--it stars Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa's John Wayne, so to speak—it's actually a story of healing as well as honorable service, as the gruff doctor, nicknamed "Red Beard," urges his high-born intern to bow low to the poor he tends to. An "epic" of the transformative power of compassion.

The Home Viewer (4): Love Is Strange

2008-01-30T11:26:00.000-08:00

(Here's the latest piece I've done for our local paper.)

As Valentine’s Day approaches, the Home Viewer trusts you to find your own favorite cinematic love, whether it be Titanic or Gone With the Wind, a mere Ghost or a Pretty Woman. As for me, I’ll wander down meaner streets to the lonely places, where the Valentines are blue, and the love is mad, blind, or lost—and sometimes found.

Mad Love

--Or, as the French put it, amour fou, plunging into icy Freudian waters, searching in dim dreams for pleasures without any principles. There’s Mad Love (1935) itself, in which director Karl Freund (cinematographer for Browning/Lugosi’s Dracula) makes a pact with that little devil Peter Lorre, and together they paint an expressionist portrait of a brilliant surgeon deformed by his needs. Mad Love has two strange bedfellows: Gun Crazy (1949) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), in which impotency is cured at gunpoint while passion mingles with shame. All three accept fatal excess as the everyday, and let its mad lovers misbehave all the way.

Blind Love

If not mad, does love go blind? Tom Waits sings that “the only kind of love is stone blind love,” and the only way to find your love is to close your eyes. Which can be dangerous. Consider all those film noir fall guys, from Fred MacMurray’s insurance investigator in Double Indemnity (1944) to William Hurt’s poleaxed lawyer in Body Heat (1981)—actually more or less a remake of Double Indemnity. But it isn’t just the femmes who are fatale: Charles Boyer keeps Ingrid Bergman guessing with near-fatal results in Gaslight (1944), and Jimmy Stewart has in the end only himself to blame for getting so dizzy over Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958). Ah, the ache of (I’ll quote Waits again) that “blind and broken heart that sleeps beneath [your] lapel.”

Blind love, though, can be a remarkable thing, unconditional, infinitely compassionate, redemptive. Akira Kurosawa's Akahige/Red Beard (1965) gives us the great gift of Dr. Niide (Toshiro Mifune), a doctor in a charity clinic whose deep humility and good will—and humor—is untainted by false pride or false humility. He simply moves forward, implacable and self-effacing, healing as though he has no other choice and shining a light on everyone he meets so they can see clearly their failings, strengths, and needs—including the need to stand with him in love to accomplish whatever job awaits.

Lost (and Found) Love

So far, it’s been mostly risks and falls. And you must admit there’s something inevitable about the losses of love. As Cagney famously barks out in Boy Meets Girl (1938), it’s the Only Story: “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl!” Wes Anderson applies his typical pretzel logic to this formula in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), as everyone confronts their loves, mad, blind and what-all, sometimes reckless, sometimes calculating, sometimes even suicidal. But, like Royal Tenenbaum himself (Gene Hackman having the time of his life)—his character loving everyone almost as much as he loves himself—these dedicated eccentrics find their lost loves only when they finally do love others as much as themselves, and devise ways to save each other from lovelessness. It appears, then, that Royal’s gravestone doesn’t lie as it announces he “Died Tragically Rescuing His Family From The Remains Of A Destroyed Sinking Battleship.” That’s as good a metaphor for love as any.

And as the ship sinks, drastic measures sometimes must be taken to save the innocent. Sling Blade’s (1996) Karl (Billy Bob Thornton) has lost almost all love, but still manages to give what he has to young Frank (Lucas Black), “nervous” and lonesome, hanging onto his mother even as she slips from him. And while Karl may be lost in the horrors of his childhood, it is hard to deny that the final blade he slings, like Michael with his flaming sword, frees Frank and his mother and helps them all find at least partial peace.

Well, the biggest risk we could take this time around as Humble Viewers is Sally Potter's Yes (2004), which cannot be described without its sounding more than a little silly. The movie is set in present-day England, but everyone speaks in rhyme. (I kid you not.) It is in part about a passionate love affair between an unhappily married woman, "She" (Joan Allen), and an expatriate from Beirut, "He" (Simon Akbarian). And although Yes is about a great many other things—I will not detail them here, lest you disbelieve or storm off—it returns, with ecstatic affirmation, to love, particularly in its insistence that to love we must surrender to the other, and treasure the new home because it is the home of the one we love, who lives in ours now—and they become one home.

I should give the final word to “The Cleaner,” the movie’s wise housekeeper, who insists,

... everything you do or say
Is there, forever. It leaves evidence.
In fact it's really only common sense;
There's no such thing as nothing, not at all.
It may be really very, very small
But it's still there. In fact I think I'd guess
That 'no' does not exist. There's only "yes."

Yes almost breaks your heart, but at the last moment opens it instead. Near the end of the film, “She” makes a video, looking in the camera to ask God if He can forgive her for not believing in Him. I might be wrong, but I think God answers with, as The Cleaner asserts, the only response possible. A small word, but it’s the key to finding what was once lost.

(Note: I know this should be about home viewing, but I’d like to mention the best off-center/dead-on love story I’ve seen in a long time: Juno, the tale of “fertile Myrtle” “the cautionary whale” whose shenanigans—“one doodle that can't be un-did”—make us love her for exactly what she is.)

Rating Game Redux (23): A Short Stretch

2008-01-25T05:35:00.000-08:00

Back to movies for our local paper; this time, Best Prison Movies. Once again I offer minority opinions, allowing my fellow panelists to laud The Shawshank Redemption, Birdman of Alcatraz, Bridge on the River Kwai, Stalag 17, and even The Longest Yard. I hope they all make someone's cut.

One I should've mentioned: Jacques Becker's Le Trou/The Hole (1960). Perhaps the best prison escape film, lean and direct, claustrophobic and dismaying--just like prison.

Brute Force (1947)
A relentless parable about fascism and the politics of terror starring Burt Lancaster, with Hume Cronyn as the sadistic guard who both manipulates the warden and tortures the prisoners while wearing the same glassy-eyed smirk.

The Hill (1965)
Somewhere between Goldfinger and Thunderball, Sean Connery delivers a perfectly controlled performance in Sidney Lumet’s sand-blasted tale of a WWII British military prison camp in Libya, where the prisoners are made repeatedly to climb a hill. Yes, it’s Sisyphus in khaki, an absurdist’s view of power and nonconformity.

Hart’s War (2002)
Stalag 17 meets Mississippi Burning, with Bruce Willis channeling William Holden and Colin Farrell as the innocent forced to confront a delirious space where racism, justice, and duty clash. The result is at once noble and unsettling.

Rating Game Redux (22): Am I Blue?

2008-01-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

My latest list contribution to our local paper. This one's so slight it's almost not there. But still, here:

Best Songs With a Color in the Title

I’ll take the easy way out and give myself the “blues”:

“Blue Velvet”
Sappy, spooky—and beautiful in its own way. Besides, no other song makes me think simultaneously of David Lynch and Bobby Vinton.

“Crystal Blue Persuasion”
Tommy James and the Shondells go mellow, and produce their most pleasantly melodic hit.

“Almost Blue”
Pure cool jazz from Elvis Costello, who once more proves he can write any kind of music he pleases. After “My Funny Valentine,” perhaps Chet Baker’s greatest cover.

Home-Made Film Festivals (3): Tom Cruise, Master Thespian

2008-01-22T06:29:00.000-08:00

Despite his public persona, Tom Cruise has often managed to mark up his celebrity with enough nicks and outright gouges to help us forget the automatic smile and relentless charm, and see a sharper, rougher shape, surrendering to the role--and to the good directors who have helped him in these efforts.

The Color of Money (1986)
It’s important to realize this was released the same year as Top Gun. Martin Scorsese anticipates Cruise’s emerging image--and dismantles it, as he sets him against Paul Newman, in a changing of the guard that is as heartless as it is exciting. An early sign (his role in Legend/1985 notwithstanding) that Cruise was more than willing to both nurture and abandon his Cruise-ness.

Magnolia (1999)
Paul Thomas Anderson gives him the ultimate anti-Cruise role: Frank T.J. Mackey, self-help guru for ex-frat boys, profane, heartless, and cocky (pun intended), who falls apart as thoroughly as Cruise’s own status as Mr. Right.

War of the Worlds (2005)
A fitting end to this festival, in which absent dad Ray Ferrier needs to reassert his value to those around him. Ray is always on the verge of collapse, as war-damaged as Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and all but useless until he faces the limits of grinning away one’s problems. This is the second time (after Minority Report/2002) that Steven Spielberg hammers like a swordsmith on Cruise, producing dangerously honed edges.

This Bird Can Fly: Suzanne Pleshette, 1937-1970

2008-01-21T12:59:00.000-08:00

I was sixteen or so when The Bob Newhart Show started its run, and Suzanne Pleshette could not have happened at a better time in my life--although she did confuse me, and more than a little: I liked the show, but really liked her, and I wasn't sure why. She seemed the opposite of everything I thought I needed: a bit too able to see through her husband's weaknesses, above most of his stammering objections, almost cool in her appraisal of his worth. Me, I craved all the forgiving I could glom my clammy little hands onto, and a blind eye to all my faults, and unquestioning admiration--but Emily Hartley would have provided very little of that. Besides, she was twenty years my senior.

--And was that it? Was she simply the quintessential Older Woman? There was the throaty voice, those big beautiful eyes, that self-assured set to her frame. But I think it was more than post-adolescent leering--or misbegotten mooning. Or at least not simply that. She was a promise somehow, that when I finally grew up the rest of the way I might run into someone who'd look right at me, and if she smiled it would not be a courtesy but a fact. I'm lucky that Someone came along, and she has kept that promise--for twenty-six years and counting--but I'm also happy that Emily shook me up just enough to wake me up just a little, and help me see more clearly what I should--well, see more clearly.

Besides, once I made the connection to Annie Hayworth in The Birds (1963) I realized Pleshette had been taking me to task practically all my life, almost smiling, head cocked, cigarette (oh, poor Suzanne) resting in her hand, the weary world her intimate companion and constant challenge, as much relished as endured, like anything worth wanting.

The Home Viewer (3): The Four Corners of the Earth

2008-01-17T14:10:00.000-08:00

(Here's the latest monthly column I've written for the Galesburg Register-Mail. Note that I have taken on the humble task of capturing all of world cinema in 1000 words or so. Where would I be if I didn't know everything? In a pickle, that's where. Of global proportions.)

On January 26, Knox College will hold its International Fair; I’d like to take this opportunity to celebrate the promise that, no matter the corner where we start, if we travel as curious and generous explorers, we may end up as friends.

The Asian Corner

Asian filmmakers appreciate the visual potential of cinema; from hyper-realized song-and-dance frenzies to austerely beautiful tableaux, from gun-fu standoffs to epic widescreen, one can almost forget the mundane elements of plot in surrender to aesthetics.

But the stories assert themselves amid the visual splendor. In Raise the Red Lantern (China, 1991), Zhang Yimou explores the walled-in palace of an old man who takes a fourth wife (the stunning Gong Li), who unwillingly enters the squabbles and maneuverings of the wives, trapped just as she is but determined to recreate the worst elements of the world outside. A red lantern is raised outside the quarters of the wife whom the lord will visit, and it becomes as much of a warning and curse as a sign of favor. Yimou’s camera looks down on the house as the seasons pass and invites us into secrets no one should have to keep.

One of the simplest stylists, Yasujiro Ozu is also one of the most profound. Tokyo Story’s (Japan, 1953) plot is barely there: Aged parents visit their children in the city, are patiently endured, then return home, where the wife dies and there is a funeral. But with these simple notes Ozu composes a remarkable symphony, contemplative and heartrending, in which love, loss and reconciliation find full voice.

Bridging all kinds of gaps, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Japan, 1961) may dedicate itself to the beautiful compositions we expect from Japanese films, but in the foreground is his Samurai bodyguard (Toshiro Mifune), the original “man with no name” who strolls into a town populated almost exclusively by bad guys and plays one against the other, all for a “fistful of dollars” (well, yen) until he is the “last man standing.” Kurosawa gleefully borrows from hardboiled crime novels and Westerns—and, lucky for moviegoers, turnabout is fair play, from Clint Eastwood to Bruce Willis.

The European Corner

Like Ozu, Vittoria De Sica focused on the everyday, with epic results. The Bicycle Thief (Italy, 1949) has never lost its potency. In postwar Italy, a father stakes his family’s future on his bicycle, necessary for his job (ironically, posting Hollywood movie posters around town). The bicycle is immediately stolen, and the man and his young son embark on a city-wide search that manages to capture every facet of both their relationship and the larger world through which they roam, one as opposed to their success as any government bureaucracy.

As World War II faded, European cinema looked inward, particularly the French New Wave. Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (France, 1959) follows his alter-ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), as he wanders from his distant parents into the streets, petty crime, a juvenile detention center—and then famously to a beach, where, suspended between land and water, he turns and stares into the camera all his solemn sadness and hidden dreams. Truffaut would make four more Doinel films, but this one remains as the truest expression of a young artist on the run and left behind.

Speaking of running, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (Germany 1998) propels his heroine like a time-traveling bullet through a Berlin only an Xbox could’ve built. As Lola tries to save her bagman boyfriend from the mob, Tykwer tosses her, most of the city, and us like zero-gee pinballs, until it all ends in tragedy. Or does it? The movie ramps up again, and again, offering alternate-universe recreations of her run, and the power of narrative literally to make and break—and re-make.

The African Corner

Despite its own rich cinematic history, particularly since the mid-1960s, modern Africa is most often seen through Western eyes, from Out of Africa (1985) to Blood Diamond (2006); even an African film like The Gods Must Be Crazy (1981) can’t get started until it practically bonks a Bushman on the head with a Coke bottle. One of the best films to reflect this dualistic/“filtered” view is Battle of Algiers (Algeria/Italy, 1966), which alternates between the French citizens/colonizers and the Algerian revolutionaries/terrorists. Presented in an unapologetic documentary style, the film explores the shared violence that sullies the colonial legacy.

Also facing an “African problem,” but with great compassion and beauty, even humor, is Moolaade (Senegal, 2004), directed by Ousmane Sembene. The title means “protection” or “sanctuary,” which a woman gives to four village girls who are about to undergo female circumcision. The film, though, is more than an exposé of a social concern; it interrogates the past, anticipates the future—with mingled hope and apprehension—and celebrates the undaunted courage of everyday people.

The American Corner

For a US film, I was tempted to discuss anything by Martin Scorsese, but the fervid hopes, wild humor, and dark despair one could say marks much of “American” cinema is captured perfectly in the Brazilian film City of God (2002). Imagine Goodfellas in a favela—or better yet, forget the Hollywood comparisons and brace yourself for a fiercely original and appallingly honest observation of life in its last extremes.

Which leads me to the States. If I will not indulge my Scorsese fixation, where can we go for some real deep-fried, quick-talkin', old-fashioned American mischief? I’m torn between two audacities: Spike Lee and the Coen brothers. For some reason Do the Right Thing (1989) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) seem to foot the same bill. Both are filled with music and dangerous curves, overblown egos and “startlements”—while bouncing along quite different American roads. Taken together, they lay out town and country with sly honesty and bittersweet affection.

Eventually, all roads lead—well, to all roads, as in Babel (2006), Alejandro Iñárritu’s continent-hopping exploration of the ties that bind. And they pain us, intertwining just about everything we worry about today—relationships, poverty, terrorism, loyalty, the search for home and safety, the fear of lost connections. Babel provides an opportunity to feel the sharpness of the four corners of the Earth and to remember what we all share.

Home-Made Film Festivals (2): Overlooked Steven Speilberg

2008-01-16T09:10:00.000-08:00

It may seem impossible, but the director who single-handedly invented the summer blockbuster has made a few movies many of us have overlooked--some would argue justifiably so; but they're worth a viewing, if only to compare them with his more visible efforts.

Empire of the Sun (1987)
Like The Color Purple (1985), maybe a little too pretty for its own good, but it's an interesting companion to Saving Private Ryan as it follows the often-surreal trials of Jim, (young Christian Bale in a remarkable feature-film debut), separated from his British parents when the Japanese invade Shanghai in 1941. In true Spielberg fashion, the transition from childhood to adolescence occurs in the midst of delirium--here, from prison-camp starvation to atomic blasts.

Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001)
A truly strange hybrid, A.I. is Golden Boy Spielberg's memorial to Ice King Stanley Kubrick. In the process he lets slip some of his more Kubrickian tendencies, particularly his cynical side. But this--like E.T. and Catch Me If You Can--is also another "little boy lost" movie, perhaps overlong by about thirty minutes, but determined to remain true to Stanley's sardonic scorn for humanity's inhumanity.

1941 (1979)
One of the last of the Young Turk self-indulgent megabudget flops, it bears repeated viewings if only to catch every well-timed slapstick disruption, jaw-dropping set-piece, and fearless camera swoop, not to mention all those SNL and Second City slickers. It's easy to think of Indiana Jones as you watch a Ferris Wheel plow its way along a pier and a U.S.O. dance become a jitterbug Armageddon, while a Japanese sub noses along the coastline, its crew--perhaps with the audience--mourning the loss of "Hollywoooood!"

Rating Game Redux (21): Rebel, Rebel

2008-01-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

When our local paper asked for a list of "songs about rebellion," I saw lots of ways to do this: political ("We Shall Overcome"), social ("Signs"; you know, "Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind"), even personal (Eric Burden barking out, "Don't push me!" right after informing us whose life it is in the first place). I think I tended toward the last; even the Beatles' "Revolution" seems to be more of a dropout/head's dismissal of politics than a direct response to any legitimate public ill. And I never miss a chance to mention Springsteen.

“C’mon Everybody”
Eddie Cochran’s joyous snarl against his parents’ punishment for his throwing a party while they’re gone—“Who cares? C’mon everybody!”

“Revolution”
Paul McCartney shows admirable disregard for his vocal chords in the service of announcing as loudly as he can that it’s gonna be alright.

“Growin’ Up”
Early Springsteen in full-throttle Dylan mode: “I took month-long vacations in the stratosphere / And you know it’s really hard to hold your breath / I swear I lost everything I ever loved or feared / I was the cosmic kid in full-costume dress.” Yep, when they said “Sit down” he stood up. Ooh-ooh, growin’ up.

Reuse, Renew, Recycle: Home-Made Film Festivals (1)

2008-01-11T06:10:00.000-08:00

Before I was given the opportunity to write a monthly column for the wonderful folks at the Register Mail, I had suggested a weekly mini-film-festival piece; but the editor felt it stepped on the toes of the "Rating Game." Before the dust settled and I started writing my present monthly column for the paper, I had assembled a few of these and posted them on another site. And in an effort to "simplify, simplify, simplify"--and to cannibalize anything I've ever made--hmm, maybe like Tarantino (see previous posting) I am beginning to eat my own tail; oops: one-a those "lest ye be judged" moments; gee thanks, God--I'm shutting down the old site, and moving those postings over here. So here's the first, "French Crime Wave."

note: The image layout was intended to convey the sense of a pile of posters; I'm not very good at this kind of thing, so please excuse the mess.

Part hommage, part parody, part self-conscious de-/re-construction, French gangster/crime films manage to combine hard-boiled cool with self-conscious "interrogations" of their Hollywood counterparts. After all, it was French critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier who first used the term film noir to describe American movies like The Maltese Falcon, with their brooding atmosphere and obsession with the "dynamism of violent death." So we should celebrate the following classics of French noir as true partners in crime.

Shoot the Piano Player (1962)
David Goodis' hardboiled novel, Down There, serves as the source for Francois Truffaut's second film. Almost a comedy, the movie still manages to capture the suffocating atmosphere of a noir in its (anti-)hero's self-reflexive glance over his shoulder at a past that inexorably catches up with him.

Touchez Pas au Grisbi/Don't Touch the Loot (1960)
Critic Philip Kemp aptly describes director Jacques Becker's visual style as "unstressed elegance." Add to that dapper, sleepy-eyed Jean Gabin, and the result is a world-weary, ultra-cool meditation on friendship, the passage of time, and the nuances of the double-cross.

Bob le Flambeur (1955)
Speaking of cool, Roger Duchesne as high-roller Bob embodies the kind of grace under fire that helps define the French noir hero. His closest American counterpart might be Robert Mitchum; but under Jean-Pierre Melville's direction we receive a surprisingly tender take on the no-regrets tough guy who literally gambles everything to protect his personal code.

Film Comment-s

2008-01-10T07:16:00.000-08:00

I sent a list of the 20 best films of 2007 to Film Comment magazine, mostly because I could win Criterion Collection DVDs. I Am Curious (Yellow), you are mine! The list is in alphabetical order, and as a "bonus" I've included a little rant I sent to FC with my list. "Grr!--there go, my heart's abhorrence!"

The Bourne Ultimatum
Bug
Charlie Wilson's War
Eastern Promises
God Grew Tired of Us
Gwoemul/The Host
Hot Fuzz
I Am Legend
Juno
The Kite Runner
Lonely Hearts
No Country for Old Men
Ratatouille
Reign Over Me
Rescue Dawn
The Simpsons Movie
Smokin' Aces
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
This Is England
Zodiac

Best direct-to-video release: Futurama: Bender's Big Score

The Rant:

As far as the FC critics' poll goes: So there's room for Grindhouse but not I Am Legend? Will Smith perfectly suspends himself somewhere between Tom Hanks' Cast Away hysteric and Tim Robbin's jaw-clenched paranoiac in War of the Worlds, and the movie itself knows when to shut up and let the suspense build on its own, no muss, no fuss. I'd much rather encourage Smith than Tarantino, whose video-clerk enthusiasms seem at last to have imploded, leaving us with the hey-ma-lookit-me version of the ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail--or, as Plato describes it, a creature from which "nothing went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him, ... his own waste providing his own food." Except Tarantino keeps making us watch him eat.

Rating Game Redux (20): EAT

2008-01-08T07:54:00.000-08:00

This may be about as far as I'll ever travel from "an autobiographical film journal," but the compleatist in me urges I present this latest list I thrown together for our local paper. And while I will admit I wanted to write only about Rachel Ray, losing myself in a dreamy fog of cooking steam, contemplating how a woman who talks out of the corner of her mouth like Eddie G. can so captivate--nay, enthrall--one's attention, until all that remains is the lingering waft of sweet garlic and the quiet burble of brimming saucepans ...

Where was I? Oh, yeah: Best TV Cooking Shows.

Good Eats
Alton Brown approaches the culinary arts like a High Camp OCD sufferer with a deep commitment to cotton-ball molecular models and a Zealot’s conviction that boiling water deserves as much attention as a standing rib roast.

The French Chef
While some might argue Dan Aykroyd’s Saturday Night Live parody would suffice, nothing beats a solid half-hour with the twittering, chicken-dropping, joyous bluster of the original celebrity cook.

Emeril Live
I know, I know: Rachel Ray is cuter. But Emeril’s “food of love” crusade convinced us that food has feelings, too—even if, every once in a while, you have to BAM! it into submission.

By the way, did I mention Rachel Ray? I can't quite recall. You know who I mean? Has a couple cooking shows? Travels, spends some $40 or so, cooks in 30 minutes, and so on? Rachel Ray, right? You know. Don't you?

The Rating Game Redux (19): Nice List

2007-12-18T11:43:00.000-08:00

This time around, the Register-Mail asked for Best Animated Christmas Specials. As always, three is a cruel number, and much had to be discarded--such as the '70s Rudolph (hovering at mid-camp for the past decade or so) and the indie-'90s pleasure of (here comes a great pun) Olive, the Other Reindeer/1999 (check out those too-cool-for-school voice characterizations here). But I have committed to two masterpieces, and one cruel doodle for the kiddies.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
This captures the spirit of not only Peanuts but Christmas itself, bending low to prop up all of us, like the droopy little trees we are.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966)
Dr. Seuss, Chuck Jones, and Boris Karloff make perfect sense together: part whimsy, part slapstick, part Gothic benevolence, all dedicated to making our hearts grow three sizes.

“A Tale of Two Santas” (Futurama episode)
In the year 3000, Santa (voiced by John Goodman as the anti-Burl Ives) is a homicidal robot convinced that everyone is on the “naughty” list, insuring that “X-mas” continues to be a time for all to gather together—in abject terror.

The Home Viewer (2): 'Tis the Season

2007-12-06T12:26:00.000-08:00

(Note: This is the latest column I've written for our local paper. But you can read it here first!)

What’s that small light shining from movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story? And why does the theme from A Charlie Brown Christmas run so pleasantly through one’s head? Inside that light and beneath that melody lies an impulse, generous and optimistic: to stand like Whos in Whoville, “heart to heart and hand in hand,” despite the Grinch’s worst efforts. This year let’s consider movies—“Holiday” and otherwise—that ask us to stand together, despite all differences and distractions, in faith, hope and love.

Faith

In Shadowlands (1993), Anthony Hopkins plays C.S. Lewis, whose level eyes may be fixed on God, but which fill with blinding tears when his new wife, Joy (Debra Winger), dies of cancer. Lewis has insisted that “pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” but the call stuns him. It takes a heartbreaking effort for him to learn that “the pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal."

Halfway around the world, Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997), a meditative-ecstatic biopic of the young Dalai Lama, unfolds in beauty and distress. This is a genuinely transcendent movie that first painstakingly builds then sweeps away its sand-painted mandalas, infinite sanctity and human impermanence finally reconciled.

With both Tender Mercies (1983) and, more overtly, The Apostle (1997), Robert Duvall listens carefully to Texas flatland wind and Southern peepers, his lonely men sand-blasted and baptized, slowly, quietly, until they surrender—not without a struggle, but still with trust in their allotted places.

Hope

Well, I’m trying to avoid the standards, but to understand hope we have to face despair. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) recognizes this more thoroughly than we’d like it to. George Bailey does not wish simply not to be, but never to have been at all. However, he has lives to save, including his own, so he must go on. The evidence of his necessity is too overwhelming, almost as shocking as his earlier urge to tear it all apart. And in living both the hysterical despair of his life—the loss of that small sum of money an agony—and the helpless misery of his never-having-been, George plunges back to himself, careening down Main Street like Job reconstituted in the nick of time.

While Frank Capra’s film is assertive in its mercies, David Lynch simply grins sheepishly as he reveals his kind heart with The Straight Story (1999), the true tale of an elderly man who drives his riding lawnmower hundreds of miles to see his estranged brother. Visually, a paean to Midwestern landscapes; spiritually, a slow-and-steady affirmation that, because we are all neighbors, we really can go on, no matter how steep the way.

—Even if it leads to the limitless Gobi Desert, in The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003), a “semi-documentary” about a family of nomadic herders and the new-born camel who refuses to nurse, causing monumental concern. The animal is a valuable commodity, to be sure; but it also is one of the family, and the anxiety caused by its refusal and the efforts to coax it to nurse—ultimately, through song—form the movie’s fable-like narrative arc. Like Frank Capra’s film, disaster seems always imminent, but so are the bonds that drive us together, even the camels. It is the suspense of love, breathless until accepted.

Love

It’s Christmas Eve in Joyeux Noel (2005)—based on actual incidents—and a German tenor emerges from his World War I foxhole, small Christmas tree in hand, singing “Adeste Fedeles,” and all combat ceases. Despite the penalties suffered by the German, Scottish, and French soldiers who met to Keep the Day and bury their dead, their carols ring true with clear and melancholy joy.

Seven-year-old Damian (Alex Atel) of Danny Boyle’s Millions (2004) sees saints; he’s also come into some cash: a giant bagful of “jolly old Pounds” destined for disposal before Britain switches to Euros. Damian assumes it’s from God; as he says to his older brother, Anthony (Lewis McGibbon), “who else would have that kind of money?” This remarkable glimpse into childhood faith comes without sentimentality, just the delight of the shining irrationality of love.

Kanji Watanabe, a bureaucrat (played by Takashi Shimura with excruciating, blank-eyed despair) who has wasted his life, learns in Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) that he is dying of stomach cancer. Constantly pained, Watanabe follows a circuit, from fear to mercy to death to victory, that not only rescues him from hopelessness but also ennobles those around him. A heroic triumph expressed in small gestures.

The Home Viewer (1): In Which They Serve

2007-11-13T10:12:00.001-08:00

The good folks--in particular, Jane Carlson--of the Galesburg Register-Mail have given me a new outlet for endless prattle: an "occasional column"--in the old-fashioned sense of the term, in which I write about films suitable for certain occasions--called "The Home Viewer"--which, stalwarts of my postings might remember, is the name of my first blog. If good artists borrow and great artists steal, what the heck are you if you steal from yourself? Oh, yeah: a blogger.

First up: Veterans Day. Here--because in the end this Viewer is not quite as Humble as he makes himself out to be--it is:

The Classics

Of course, before becoming a veteran one must do some soldiering. Few films bring us closer to that hellish business than Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998). Legendary director Sam Fuller says somewhere that the only realistic war picture would involve shooting live rounds at the audience. Yikes. Still, Spielberg comes close, in a movie about making a small gesture of kindness amid massive bursts of brutal chaos. It begins and ends with a single veteran, whose memory is the film, which in turn provides glimpses into the varied hearts of front-line combatants. In the end, whether Ryan "earns it" does not seem as important as his searching face, eager not to forget why they fought.

In Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978), the undertow-pull of memory draws down both the strong and the weak. Beneath the homecomings and long-gone fades of its steel-worker vets, the war itself shrinks to a cramped, isolated space where combat is Russian Roulette made irresistible only because it's all that's left. Critics have taken as ironic the final scene, in which Michael (Robert De Niro), Steven (John Savage), and their friends and family tearfully sing "God Bless America." But tragedy demands its epilogue, and sorrow its music.

Soldiers, though, can bring back more than fear and pity. In Glory (1989), Edward Zwick pays tribute to the Civil War's all-black 54th Regiment, and the stellar cast (Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes) personalizes the experience of fighting for a cause larger than oneself, as the 54th's soldiers endure the bigotry of the Union they defend and transcend all doubts, proving their worth cannot be measured by any other standard than their own.

Ones You May Have Missed

Based on the true story of the Army Rangers and Philippine guerillas who rescued 500 American survivors of the Bataan Death March - losing twenty-one Filipino and only two American lives (with 800 Japanese soldiers dying in the surprise attack) - John Dahl's The Great Raid (2005) meticulously charts the complex strategies necessary to maximize success and minimize loss behind enemy lines. And get out your handkerchiefs for the footage of the actual rescued prisoners and those who risked everything for them.

Another film more about survival than conquest, Sahara (1943) offers a microcosm of war by pitting a single ramshackle tank crew (led by Humphrey Bogart) and hitchhikers of varying nationalities, religions, dispositions - and allegiances: at one point they're joined by a German soldier - against the desert itself, drawing them closer to not only death but each other. A remarkable movie that reveals, with slam-bang heroics, humor, even tenderness, how soldiers left on their own can achieve both military and moral victories.

Speaking of soldiers on their own, Danis Tanovic's satirical-somber No Man's Land (2001), set in 1993 Bosnia, dismantles futile warfare in the confines of an increasingly public foxhole/trench, where enemy "combatants," frozen by a landmine held down by the weight of a third, wounded soldier, wait - and debate the "virtues" of a conflict so absurdly convoluted it may as well be settled in a muddy hole, while the press, blue-helmeted U.N. troops ("Smurfs") and the world wait with them. This is "bringing the war back home" literally by the seat of one's pants.

Ones You Need to See

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and The Big Red One (1980) express Samuel Fuller's typically matter-of-fact dictum, "all war stories are told by survivors." Fuller, a World War II combatant himself, in the second picture follows a sergeant (Lee Marvin, unforgettable as a "carpenter of death") and his men all the way through their war, including the liberation of a Nazi death camp. It's grim work, demanding appalling impartiality.

For his part, William Wyler finally brings 'em home in The Best Years of Our Lives, frank in its depiction of the difficulties-personal, economic, and social-a trio of veterans (Frederic March, Dana Andrews, Harold Russell) face. The standout is Russell as Homer Parish. Russell had lost both hands while training paratroopers, and he was awarded two Oscars for his role. These three demand a real Veterans' Day, when we should pay tribute to their service, nurse their wounds, and, for future veterans, make promises we intend to honor.

Rating Game Redux 18: Once More, with Screaming

2007-11-02T13:47:00.000-07:00

Another vain effort, this time in the service of "3 Scariest Horror Movie Scenes." A contrarian part of me wants to point to the appalling death of eroticism in Showgirls--every time I look, my leer turns to stone!--or the nameless terror of the words "Extended Version" and "Quentin Tarantino" on the same DVD box--but I get it: only actual jeepers and creepers admitted. so here's a random three, strewn like broken blossoms along the bread-crumb trail, lost in the gingerbread woods. Say goodbye, kiddies:

1. Karloff’s entrance in Frankenstein (1931), back to the camera, then turning around in close-up, his dead-alive face, “blank and pitiless,” filling the screen. My Dad told me kids ran from the theater. Smart kids.

2. Wendy sees Jack’s writing--“All work and no play …”--in The Shining (1980), and finally realizes she’s in a horror film.

3. In Audition (1999), a young woman sits, her phone ringing unanswered, a big burlap bag behind her. Just as we assume the scene will end, Something in the bag lurches. The later, all-but-unwatchable revenge-torture scene is almost less dismaying than that simple movement of the sack, which captures every promise we wish horror films wouldn’t keep.

Oh, and Jeff Goldblum at the mirror in Cronenberg's The Fly. And The Exorcist, every four minutes. And John Hurt's face hovering over the egg in Alien. And bedtime in the original version of The Haunting. And, when I was a kid, the dripping jaws of The Black Scorpion descending. Good Lord, as they used to say in E.C. comics, it simply doesn't end. (Choke!)

Halloween Roundup '07

2007-10-22T11:04:00.000-07:00

At long last, kiddies: the Dark Carnival is back in town, so let's start like the guilty things we are, and spend a long and terrible day in the dark, "feeding the alligators of the mind," as little Stevie King puts it. The Roundup this year is a bit Grand-er in the Guignol department--even the (relatively) bloodless Peeping Tom rubs one's nose in It a bit too gleefully--so you may need to check your finer sensibilities at the door. But Halloween comes but once a year, a Day of the Dead as worthy of celebration as precious mortality deserves, a cinematic haven for lost children and broken promises--I'll admit, mended roughly, but still, pray-tell, sometimes found.

8:00 am The Thing (1982)
John Carpenter is given a big budget, and he hands it over to special make-up effects fan-favorite Rob (The Howling) Bottin, who with ferocious recklessness extracts like recalcitrant molars all the subtleties from John W. Campbell's original story, "Who Goes There?"--and aren't we the lucky ones. Ice-cold in every sense, the movie still delivers the fun of watching everybody, including Wilford Brimley, freak out, not to mention one of Kurt Russell's patented reluctant-tough-guy performances, all the while wearing the single most enviable hat in the history of cinema, outside of a Yosemite Sam cartoon.

10:00 am The Host/Gwoemul (2006)
Whenever I find myself bowing too low in reverence of the Gothic--sniffing solemnly the Blakean "sick rose" of secret love worming its way through the night, destroying, illuminating, the final "moral tale"--I chug a dose of Pacific Rim moonshine. Not since the New Wave shook n stirred the crime picture in the 1950s has a genre been so thoroughly tom-fooled as in Asian horror films of the past decade. This South Korean picture, for instance, recognizes the slapstick beneath Armageddon--imagine Kubrick with a sense of humor (Let us not forget that he cut a piefight scene from Dr. Strangelove)--and sees gore as simply a kind of fatal banana peel in our collective paths. This movie is scary because of/despite its silliness, one and then the other, as campy as Gojira, as creepy as Ringu.

12:30 pm The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Well, depending on which way you lay your squint, so to speak, this is either a Halloween picture or a Christmas one. But I wanted something for the kiddies--while not denying King's gators--and Tim Burton/Henry Selick's sweet-salty treat does nicely. I never tire of its visual style, which owes equal obeisance to the elongated sweep of Joseph Mugnaini's illustrations for Ray Bradbury's High Gothic stories, Charles Addams' dim-corner bottom of the inkpot, Edward Gorey's crowded, cross-hatched Victorian nightscapes--and above all a kind of Day-Glo effrontery, adamant that All Is Well. And it is: After all, Danny Elfman sings!

2:00 pm Peeping Tom (1960)
The movie so toxic it killed its director--at least his career. After thirty years of beauty and grace, Technicolor generosity and black-and-white sensitivity, Michael Powell delivers a rancid Valentine to all his fans, and exposes the pathology of cinephilia as an end-stage disease, with voyeurism as a mere symptom of a much more serious condition. You'd-a thunk Dylan had gone electric, the howls of outraged sensibilities so thoroughly drowning any apologetics--until Martin Scorsese "rehabilitated" Powell decades later and, like any good anatomy professor, insisted we approach the cadaver. A picture that refuses to become less appalling with repeat viewings.

4:00 pm Isolation (2005)
Imagine if Ridley Scott were all set to direct Alien--then the budget went south. So he re-sets the film on a small farm in the middle of Irish nowhere, and substitutes H. R. Giger's amor fou shape-shifter with, um, cows. Sort of. Isolation's director, Billy O'Brien, makes a picture you can hold in one hand--if you're crazy enough. Dark as the inside of an old barn at midnight, sloppier than a mid-Autumn farmyard, this triumph of hand-made, animatronic ick plays gene-splicing hob with the viewer's need to know vs. the desire to look away.

6:00 pm 1408 (2007)
A little dinnertime fare for the squeamish. I won't belabor the point that movie adaptations of Stephen King material are more miss than hit. But every once in a while he gets actors surprisingly dedicated to the uneasy mixture of humor and depravity--with a workmanlike tragic finish--that marks his material. Sissy Spacek, Jack Nicholson, E.G. Marshall, James Caan, Kathy Bates, Christopher Walken, Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Anthony Hopkins--and, of course, every single dam actor in Stand by Me and The Green Mile--have given King perhaps more than he deserves--or perhaps not; I'm still not sure--and made something happen: lasting impressions amid claptrap and clutter, performances that have as much genius as foolhardiness. John Cusak digs especially deeply here, and gives new and startling meaning to "carrying the picture." Cusak refuses to believe the movie's a thrill-ride goof--or that it is, but so thoroughly so that all lines become blurred. I've known a person or two who have felt that De Niro wasted way too much talent on a bum like Jake LaMotta; but I think great performances know this, and couldn't care less. Lucky us, John Cusak barrels along with the same kind of blissful/willful ignorance, and hooks his arms in ours for one giddily sick yellow brick roadshow.

8:00 pm 28 Weeks Later (2007)
Short answer: I have teenagers. But, if one is looking to fill the zombie-hole, this'll do. Danny Boyle's prequel is the superior picture, but this triumph of jiggy-cam splatter barges into the living room with appropriate savageness--whilst not ignoring the requisite social commentary that seems to keep afloat most contemporary mass-gore offerings. Loud and fast, ultimately disposable, but with a good clean bite. (What kind of Crypt-Keeper would I be if I didn't do that at least once?)

10:00 pm Re-Animator (1985)
I have been whistling past this garish graveyard for a number of years--extolling its "virtues," grinning in fond--albeit queasy--remembrance of its heedless excesses--but not committing to an actual viewing. Director Stuart Gordon arrives just as the most rabid period in horror films had begun to wane--and hot-shots the genre with a psychotronic spoonful, ODs for everybody, tied off nice n tight by Jeffrey Combs, who in the '80s played the I'll-get-you-for-this avenging nerd to Bruce Campbell's Evil Dead-ly cranked fratboy. A messy end to the Roundup, I'll admit, but those of us who'll watch this many horror films get what we deserve--and so none of us (belated apologies to Bill S.) will escape whipping.

Rating Game Redux 17: Cereal Viewing

2007-10-02T14:12:00.001-07:00

The latest newspaper Rating Game involves "classic" Saturday morning cartoons. Well, many of the cartoons I consider "Saturday-morning classics" actually began life during Prime Time, sometimes twice a week. Even the Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1950s were presented as evening fare--"Overture, douse the lights, this is it ..." But as I made the first turn of childhood--ten years old in 1966--many of those dim but animated memories had seeped down to Saturday morning--which was already being calcified with Hanna-Barbera stopped-motion animation, ha-ha, cartoons with clever one-liners and fine voice characterizations, but whose aesthetics were pasted on like last-minute addenda to a committee meeting, bland and featureless.

Nonetheless, the '50s and early-'60s Prime Time soldiered on, scratchy reminders of the years before my second decade rolled inevitably, no turning back, and on into extended childhood. Spongebob, anyone?

Crusader Rabbit
The first TV cartoon series, a near-parody of superhero comics. Co-developed with Jay (Rocky and Bullwinkle) Ward, the series proves that, even at the onset of TV culture, kids found irony entertaining.

Jonny Quest
Best. Theme song. Ever. And a grand wish-fulfillment--for Boomer boys, at least--of life as one Ripping Yarn after another. Originally aired during prime time, it eventually made its ways to Saturday morning and immortality--The Venture Brothers notwithstanding.

Winky Dink and You
An interactive ‘50s cartoon: 1. Purchase special plastic sheet for TV screen plus crayons. 2. Draw on plastic sheet whatever Winky needed--a staircase, for instance. 3. Most kids drew right on the TV screen. 4. Winky was deeply hated by parents.

Of course, so many more, eyeballs popping, feet propeller-ing, explosions reverberating. As a kid, I had a fey love of Caspar the Friendly Ghost; all its sins remembered, I still hold a dark fondness for the cartoon that taught me that one could be sensitive and feared. Machiavelli without tears.

Rating Game Redux 15: The Literary Life

2007-08-30T11:50:00.000-07:00

Hard on the heels of Mizzy and the TV-Tones, our local paper has asked us to wax autobiographical, and list the three "best books your high school English teacher made you read." Now, far be it for me to indulge in self-absorption [INSERT GIANT SLOBBERING ALL-ENCOMPASSING SMILEY EMOTICON HERE]; still, I took a shot. And while I left out all kinds of things--the poetry of John Donne, a pleasant smattering of European short stories, The Screwtape Letters and Metamorphosis (although the last two don't count; I found them on my own in my high school library--a cool cover has often helped me judge a book, old saws to the contrary notwithstanding)--I think the ones I picked reflect genuine eye-openers as "I traveled in the realms of gold," back at the mid-point of High Late Adolescence.

King Lear
At 17, I shouldn’t have been ready for a play about the madness and despair that can come with age; but the heart-breaking degradations of Lear’s situation—whether or not of his own making—compelled me to open my eyes to the “primal sympathy” we share in suffering.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
For better or worse, since reading about Huck and Jim I have been convinced that the best stories depend on journeys, from On the Road to Lord of the Rings—and back to The Odyssey and forward to Star Trek.

A Clockwork Orange
A rough ride, but hey, it was 1974, and what better time to read a book that brutalizes not only youth but also the forces that seek to suppress youth?

I can remember hearing about James Earl Jones as Lear--maybe I even saw it, on Great Performances. It seems 1974 wasn't so bad after all.

Rating Game Redux 14: All Together Now

2007-08-27T13:22:00.000-07:00

Unlike last week's impossible mission, I did not hesitate to choose the three best TV theme songs for The Register-Mail. And while many more than three would be better--as always (my heart breaks to leave out The Dick Van Dyke Show or Mr. Ed--although both are mentioned in passing--let alone the deeply reassuring strains of the various covers of the Law and Order theme--a melody that I greet with Pavlovian immediacy, mouth watering for both crime and punishment, with cool guest stars, Columbo with a better wardrobe--I chose the following for an obvious reason: their complete internalization by anyone my age--50 and counting (by cracky)--who, as David Byrne once sang, "grew up in a house with a television always on."* In particular, the first involves snapping fingers; if pressed I will confess I enjoy hearing that sound in a song more than hand-clapping--which has its own all-systems-go attractions. The second features whistling--every song should feature whistling, even classical music. And the third gets even more iconic in my head if I think of the Mad magazine parody. ("By the way, how's your Mom, Ed?") Together, these three have served to gleefully deaden intellectual faculties for decades, providing for many of us a respite from rational thought and pragmatic deliberation. In other words, truly mystical experiences.

The Addams Family
Vic Mizzy (Mr. Ed, Green Acres, F Troop), who sings the lyrics himself, embeds into the collective TV Generation mind a literally finger-poppin’ paean to all things creepy, kooky, and of course ooky.

The Andy Griffith Show
As Andy and Opie head off fishing, Earle Hagen (The Dick Van Dyke Show, That Girl, The Mod Squad), who does the whistling himself (another multi-tasker!), perfectly captures the breezy, casual mood of the best of all sitcoms about small-town America.

Dragnet
Dom-dah-DOM-dom. Dom-dah-DOM-dom-DAH. Like Jack Webb’s persona, this manages to be no-nonsense, relentless, surreal, and implacable, all at once. Just the facts, courtesy of composer Miklós Rózsa.

*And Good Grief! how could I have forgotten The Twilight Zone? I apologize to the little boy I once was, happily scared to death by that theme, a little spidery dance along my spine, sharp and venomous.

By the way: Suavity. Some have it, some don't. (Lest we forget, Don, lest we forget.)

Rating Game Redux 13: These Lists Just Got a Whole Lot More Impossibler

2007-08-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

So, the Register-Mail call went out: "Three Best Movie Lines." That's right, for once a no-brainer. All I needed to do was wade through eighty-plus years of talkies and emerge with three little lines that once and for all closed the case.

Ahem.

What could I do? I chose at random--although one had been a part of my email signature for a few years, and another is one of two great lines from Unforgiven--the other being, "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."--while the Raging Bull mantra really is among my actual favorites; it reminds me of the contrarian insistence that the best Shakespeare line is poor King Lear's five "never"s at the end of everything--his wits, his life, the play, and all.

On a personal note, there's also the list of friends' favorite lines, the ones they've latched onto in their own quirky responses to movies. My favorite of these is Stephe's, who, despite all the justly famous lines of Casablanca, prefers Rick's comment when Sascha kisses him after Rick lets the young refugee win so that his girl won't have to sleep with Captain Renault: "Crazy Russian!" So best be damned; these are simply some that have stayed in my head, long after the more quotable quotes have slipped into, if I can manage the phrase, enervating ubiquity.

From the final scene of Raging Bull (1980):
Jake LaMotta: “I'm the boss, I'm the boss, I'm the boss, I'm the boss, I'm the boss ... ”
(Greek tragedy, middleweight class.)

From Unforgiven (1992):
The Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) on seeing a man die: “I guess he had it coming.”
Will Munny (Clint Eastwood): “We all got it coming, kid.”
(Judgment Day, with a squint.)

From Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959):
The Amazing Criswell: “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.”
(It’s funny because it’s true.)

Rating Game Redux 12: Sound of Female

2007-08-14T09:57:00.000-07:00

Preoccupied as I am by yet another writing project, this site languishes. And the current entry--despite potential cheeesecake appeal--will do little to re-vitalize things, being a non-movie list I submitted to the Galesburg Register-Mail. But, thing of Nature as I am, I abhor a vacuum, no matter how quiet and relaxing, so here you go:

Three Best Rocknroll Bad Girls

Poison Ivy (Rorschach)
Sidewoman for the infamous psychobilly Cramps. With album titles like Stay Sick and Smell of Female (I kid you not), one almost has no choice but to submit to this latex-lovin’ orgone gone wrong.

Pat Benatar
Before you groan, let me hit you with her best shot (OK, with that you may groan): 1991’s True Love, in which she covers 1940s-‘50s R&B tunes with irresistible gusto. You haven’t heard a bad girl triumphant until you check out “Don’t Roll Those Bloodshot Eyes at Me.”

The 5.6.7.8’s
You know, the “Woo Hoo” band, a Japanese three-piece girl group who for twenty-plus years has shaked-n-baked American music with a combination of wide-eyed affection and sly-fox grin.

Rating Game Redux 11: War Isn't Hell ...

2007-08-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

... Picking only three "best" war films is. In responding to our local paper's latest call, I realized one would need to subcategorize the genre to even approach any kind of list. I opted for war films that were at once intensely personal and thoroughly fed up with the whole bloody mess. Even then, so much is left behind, from Ballad of a Soldier/1959 to Three Kings/1999. And I've offered no real surprises here, no early Sam Fuller (Fixed Bayonets! or The Steel Helmet, both 1951) or mondo weirdo cross-gender war-as-metaphor freakouts (Bob Clark's Dead of Night/Deathdream/1974, Joe Dante's Masters of Horror entry, Homecoming/2005). Just bigtime classics--my comments slightly expanded from the original newspaper version-- with an Honorable Mention to All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

And due apologies for not posting in a long time. I'm working on Something Big, and it takes up much of my time. But not to worry: If it never gets published, I'll just slather it all over a new blog.

Paths of Glory (1957)
The organizers of a hopeless campaign during World War I cover up their incompetence by condemning to death three arbitrarily chosen soldiers, defended onbly by the seething--but impotent--moral outrage of Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas, in a performance so achingly clenched you can almost hear his teeth grinding down to the nubs). With Full Metal Jacket (1987), this marks Stanley Kubrick’s ongoing dissection of the blind brutality that underlies unchecked power.

Ran (1985)
Akira Kurosawa adapts King Lear as a meditation on the loss of compassion in the face of greed. Among the most overwhelming scenes of battle filmed, Saving Private Ryan’s digitized apocalypse included.

The Deer Hunter (1978)
War is reduced to a game of Russian Roulette in which the winners fare worse than the losers. Michael Cimino and a peerless cast (Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, John Savage, George Dzundza, Chuck Aspegren--and that Immortal of the Screen, John Cazale) tally up the costs of war as everyday moments of despair and survival.

They Should Not Perish

2007-07-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

I know I'll find it difficult to avoid philosophy or theology, let alone moist-eyed pathos, while writing about Offret/The Sacrifice (1986), Andrei Tarkovsky's final film--or any of his movies, for that matter. He is perhaps best known for Solaris (1972), if only because of the 2001 comparisons--both are mystically obtuse SF movies, all but entropic in their daunting leisure--or Andrei Rublev (1969), which also unfolds with custodial deliberation, as though Tarkovsky were displaying one of the title character's painted icons, and feared to scrape off the smallest flake of the holy image.The Sacrifice, though, is even more fragile, an overtly spiritual, even supernatural parable of First Questions--as Alexander's (Erland Josephson) grandson, "Little Man," remarks at the film's end, lying alone under the dead tree he and his grandfather had planted, then watered frequently in a ritual (Japanese, according to Alexander) to encourage spontaneous rebirth in the dead limbs, "In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?"--and End Times--the country calm of Alexander's home, on his birthday, is shrieked into fighter-jet hysteria as World War III erupts, somewhere in the distance. Filmed in Sweden, with Sven Nykvist behind the camera, starring one of Ingmar Bergman's frequent players, and set in a beautiful, pale, Dali-tree-spotted rolling plain and shoreline, The Sacrifice accepts its station in (cinematic) life and holds out to the viewer light-and-shifting-shadow tableaux and one-shot monologues that drew me in and claimed ownership, in an effort both anguished and transporting, filled with abysmal thoughts (in the Nietzschean sense) and the labors involved in fulfilling a pledge.

We once took a bike ride along the Hennepin Canal in northern Illinois. I found myself alone, the water on my left, a tree-line on my right, with corn fields coming and going beyond. As I moved along, the hiss and rustle of the light leaf-cover on the trail and the flicker-dapple of the tree-shadows on my face, the moment was the same as when I was twelve or so, the light and the sound, the movement and air. I was sentimental in my sadness over the time gone, and then almost despairing, then almost giddy as I jounced along. A simple moment, but for five minutes I felt a kind of levitation, and everything was filled with Grace and I was not alone.

Told you, right from the start.*

The Sacrifice comes close to that brief spell along the Hennepin, but it adds an overt magic realism that permits a copy of Da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi, lurking behind a deeply reflective pane of glass, to become at once a promise and a threat; and that allows Otto the mailman (Allan Edwall) to serve as a guide through not only the ethics of sacrifice but the mysticism, even witchcraft, of mercy. Otto gives Alexander a map of Europe from the 1600s; when he informs the household that it is not a copy but an original, he is told he shouldn't, that it is too large a sacrifice. "Of course it's a sacrifice," he agrees. "It wouldn't be a gift if it weren't a sacrifice." Well, this may not seem like much, but it's the foundation for the film, as Alexander, who has been mourning the lack of spirituality in the world--but who, when Otto asks him what his relationship with God is like, answers, "Practically non-existent"--falls to his knees when the world threatens annihilation, and chokes out a garbled Lord's Prayer, promising God he will surrender everything--his home, his comfort, his voice (he is a writer), and all contact with his family, especially his Best Beloved, Little Man--if all is set aright. And Otto presents a way to seal the pact: Alexander must sleep with the servant Maria, a witch, according to Otto. The resulting scene, with Alexander washing his hands and Maria feigning ignorance until she accepts him in paranormal, gravity-defying comfort, combines the film's threads of Western and Asian spirituality with a tender, "pagan" physicality.

I will let you work your way through to the end yourself; suffice it to say, though, that when Alexander describes his relationship to God, Otto considers the answer and comments, "Sometimes that may be best." In any case, despite its insistent quietude interspersed with roars and tears, The Sacrifice--with its own significant bike rides--moves--all right, even levitates--along its trail with achingly familiar beauty and sorrow, its losses both touching and necessary, its gains as filled with sorrow as joy. I do not want to reduce this movie to empty dualities, but I hesitate to take you exactly where it heads--if only because you may find yourself somewhere else, maybe even nowhere like the Hennepin, as the film tallies up the cost of the gift even as it shows us the bright faces of those to whom it's presented.

*And sorry for the cut-rate W.B. Yeats impression; the original sentiment, from "Vacillation," goes like so:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

I've been stealing from him--and often this particular poem--for thirty years--and waiting for my own fiftieth to come and go, to see if Yeats was on the square with this. I think he was.

The Tattooed Heart

2007-06-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

Tom Verde (Hugh Jackman) stands next to the Tree, counting the hundreds of tattoo-rings around his arms that mark his life--one that shines and fades, three times, with the light of moon-phases shot through gold and milky sap--and each is shadowed with forgetfulness. He has lived through centuries of loss without reconciliation, and needs monumental urging to finish and be done.

Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (2006) is easy to dismiss--J. Hoberman is particularly snarky-eloquent:

"Solemn, flashy, and flabbergasting, The Fountain--adapted by Darren Aronofsky from his own graphic novel--should really be called The Shpritz. The premise is lachrymose, the sets are clammy, and the metaphysics all wet. The screen is awash in spiraling nebulae and misty points of light, with the soundtrack supplying appropriately moist oohs and aahs."

This is his first paragraph. I suppose it's rhetorically proper for him to support these assertions, but the rest of the review simply continues to sneer; there's nothing, it seems, in either Aronofsky's movie or Hoberman's review that is necessary. Both, one could argue, simply make a lot of noise.

There is a moment--noticed, as I checked, by other internetters--lifted shot-by-shot from Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952). His morose bureaucrat (Takashi Shimura) has just found out he has stomach cancer. He walks along a silent city street, past a construction site--a shower of sparks fly--and into the street, where he is almost run over by a truck--and at that moment the sounds of the world crash out, like a switch thrown. In The Fountain it is Tom walking from the hospital and his cancer-victim wife (Rachel Weisz), and the scene is repeated in every detail. Aronofsky, then, makes a film about immortality and necessary death that itself has a long life, stretching along the--yes, lachrymose--trail left by movies that share its concerns. And so comparisons with 2001: A Space Odyssey are inevitable--and in some ways unfortunate--but not entirely inaccurate nor off-putting. I have also recently watched once more Steven Soderbergh's 2002 remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), another movie that approaches both Aronofsky and Kubrick--which in turn hearken to any number of experimental, non-narrative films made in the decades before.

So for me the first step toward accepting The Fountain was in its own willingness to become a part of the long march through oft-repeated themes and visual tropes. Beyond that, however, are its graphic novel sensibilities, eager to cut from scene to scene, the sheer experience of sequence equaling "narrative": first we see this, then that, then the next--and we make connections, many of them visual. This film works for the viewer only if each scene does; and the scenes themselves make sense only in their relationship to the one that precedes and the one that follows. The particulars of character and plot fell away for me--I was satisfied with the mere repetition of certain lines ("Finish it," "Together we will live forever," and, most anticipatory, "Death is the road to awe") and images.

And it is mostly in the images that this film compels us to supply meaning, from the Tree itself, to the various incarnations of Jackman's character, to Rachel Weisz's face. And the road to the city, the interior of the nebula, the lights in houses and labs, all move in each major sequence (past, present, future) to imply an arc that moves very simply--from doubt to faith, from anger to acceptance. To step among such archetypal goings-on, one must abandon all malice. Admittedly, this is a supremely self-indulgent film; but, I confess, so are most of my favorites, from Nosferatu (1922) and Citizen Kane (1941) to Eraserhead (1977) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999), as well as the films of Guy Maddin and the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmejer, and the silent collages of Joseph Cornell. Together such filmmakers play (to steal a Maddin title) the saddest music in the world--and also ask us to forgive each other--and the filmmakers, of course--for loving such self-indulgence, all of us guilty in our pleasures, but rewarded. Aronofsky made an ambitious collage, one fraught with the perils of its own extravagance, but in the end as beautiful as a starlit night--speaking of which, one more lengthy quotation, a curative to Hoberman, another bit of beautiful excess and sky-gazing reconciliation, this one from G. M. Hopkins:

"Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!"

If you can put up with that, The Fountain shouldn't be much of a problem. The trick is to let it be itself, not the poem or movie or whatever you wanted it to be.

The Friday Club (13): Pet Sounds

2007-06-26T08:29:00.000-07:00

Domestication was a Paleolithic sign that humans had moved beyond mere subsistence and had not only the incentive but the leisure (if I can use that word for those alternately dusty and mud-caked ages) to develop all kinds of everyday human stuff, from tools to artworks, as well as language and perhaps the beginning of a "spiritual life." The first domestic animal appears to be the dog--and not, like goats and pigs, primarily for food (although that use seems likely), but as a working partner--and, as most pet-owners would agree, a companion. So the idea of a "pet" is as old as flint blades and cave paintings.

Like our forebears--and most everyone--I've had my share of pets: two dogs in childhood--Spike the Collie/mutt, Georgie the terrier/mutt--as well as my sister's Siamese, Ch-Chi (my mother's childhood nickname), and of course various birds and fish, and a late encounter with gerbils. As an adult we've had a cat, Boo-Boo (named after Shirley Feeney's stuffed cat), two dogs--Patty the mutt and currently Frank the Pug--plus, largely due to children, sundry birds and fish and rodents, as well as a few baby rabbits plucked from the yard and kept for a while in the house, serving as characters in a low-key Disneyesque short of gentle mishaps and cutie-pie antics.

I sometimes profess unconcern, even disdain, for our pets, a curmudgeonly frown worn as a counterpoint to the kiss-kiss hug-hug fuss made over wee beasties. But I know--from Georgie and Chi-Chi, even Boo-Boo (taken in when we were first married)--the power of pet ownership, especially as one begins something--adolescence, adulthood, the Stone Age--in other words, that larger act of moving outside of one's immediate needs and recognizing something outside of oneself, even one's species, and accepting a bond that we manufactured millennia ago with, it appears, mutant wolves--both of us, then, unlike others of our kind, setting off together in unequal gait--sometimes one stepping ahead, sometimes the other--along the valley floor, hunter's knife and artist's charcoal both at hand.

Sunday
My Dog Skip (2000)
Almost any dog movie--even this Friday's selection--can threaten sentimentality. The mere sight of a child--especially if he is uncertain, alone, or frail--holding a clear-eyed canine seems the whole story itself, with no need for detail. But My Dog Skip, as often as it picks up that broad maudlin brush, knows how to position the boy--played pitch-perfectly by Frankie Muniz--and his dog so that they stand between the boy's fears and the other side, whatever that may hold. And those fears are not ill-founded: His protective father (Kevin Bacon) had lost his leg in the Spanish Civil War, and the hometown baseball hero (Luke Wilson) returns in shame from World War II. And maybe it's too easy to go on about a small thing in a ruthless world--not to mention the film's veering toward Tom Sawyer-like or "social consciousness" subplots; and Skip is phenomenal, gregarious and decisive to such an extent that it sometimes seems his owner simply tags along--but the movie refuses to let us forget that the simple kid-and-pooch bond is potent because it is so simple. And the joy we are allowed to feel in their idealized relationship is tempered by the inevitabilities of human years vs. dog years, and how they intersect in love first, then sorrow, then memory.

Monday
The Yearling (1946)
I saw this on TV when I was a kid, and what I remember most--aside from the absolute prettiness of the yearling--was the look on Claude Jarman Jr.'s face. His Jody seems ready to grow up, but the imperatives of farm life, his dependence on his parents and the safety of the homestead impose a permanent slightly wounded look on his face--even when he smiles--OK, beams--at the deer. Gregory Peck previews his later fatherliness in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), but his Ezra Baxter has less time to see the bigger picture--although both fathers feel almost helpless in the face of required killing, glimpses into the prehistoric beginnings of this story, the pretty deer and the oiled gun necessary in the same movie.

Tuesday
The Story of the Weeping Camel (2004)
This "narrative documentary"* concerns a Mongolian family's troubles with a camel that refuses to nurse her new calf. In his review, Roger Ebert acknowledges it is "reasonable" to mention the camels' names--Ingen Temee the mother and her white calf Botok--"since they are so much a part of their nomad families." Something large looms here: a view of the earliest human relationships with domesticated animals. Yes, the camels are a vital resource, and the family's concerns make sense as they consider the loss. But their anxiety is not merely proprietary; as they send for a musician to play the music that should urge the mother to nurse--and which should move her to tears--we know that they are not merely concerned about goods, but another mother in their midst, another child. As the camel weeps, so do some of the people watching tear up, just a little, just enough to reassure us that we are also allowed to be moved. The film has given us a beautiful landscape--and more, a loving family to witness, and to emulate if we can. In their bond with their animals, they do not turn away from each other. They are simply in the same family, and their love awakens with the cries of an infant.

Wednesday
Duma (2004)
I just finished teaching for "College for Kids," a two-week program at Knox College. One of my students in "How to Watch a Movie" suggested we screen Duma in response to my need for a movie that would display all the elements of film we had been talking about--camera placement and movement, shot length and sequence, lighting, sound, and so on. While I had something more "adult" in mind (but nothing above PG), I wanted to reward her participation, so we watched most of it over a period of two days. And while Duma was "well-made," in that it had the budget to pay attention to the possibilities of sight and sound, I was most struck by the image of the white South African boy with his orphaned cheetah. The animal's face is beautiful but a bit distant, a perfected cat's face: round-eyed--a little surprised anyone's looking--but still composed, confident in its lean, zero-to-sixty-in-three-seconds hyper-ventilated frame. At the same time it seems fragile, as much as the boy who hangs on to it. Often, it's difficult to tell who's protecting whom. Together, they often seem out of place--at boarding school, in a motorcycle sidecar, on the desert plain. The only thing that makes the image comfortable is the subjects themselves, trusting each other, cheek-to-cheek in a landscape that, either out of malice or love, tries to thwart them. This is the first of two Carroll Ballard films this week; the other is The Black Stallion. But a number of his films (such as Fly Away Home/1996 and Never Cry Wolf/1983) would suffice, if only because he recognizes that the purest setting for human-animal stories is the wilderness, the sky, even the paddock--any place the animal belongs. In his movies, humans meet them more than halfway, setting a bond that merits our respect.

Thursday
Best in Show (2000)
Sometimes, though, all respect is lost, all around, between humans and their pets. While Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy and friends tend to expose (with sometimes cruel glee) their subjects' frailties--Waiting for Guffman (1996) makes me wince perhaps more than any of their films--a certain (albeit often merely residual) affection remains, something Guest learned playing Nigel Tufnel, "going to eleven." And so, as cringingly awful are the dog-show people in Best in Show, we never discard them. And while we may not care for them much--if we did, how could we laugh?--we see that they understand pet ownership as much as any less self-consumed dog-lover, at least in some cases, particularly Guest's hound-lover, Harlan Pepper, the jowly fellow who "used to be able to name every nut that there was." There's a joke in there, but it's too easy. I'd rather watch this movie's telling combination of dog-love and self-love, the first suffering for the second, while the dogs somehow seem above it all, our better halves.

Friday
A Boy and His Dog (1975)
And what happens when this human-dog bond is all that remains? Depend on that little madman of speculative fiction, Harlan Ellison, to provide a vision dangerous enough to contemplate a reverse Old Yeller, in which, to be as blunt as the movie, it sure isn't the dog who's put down. This is a black comedy that manages to be deeply humorless, intent on adolescent apocalypse and the fine-tuned effect of a sledgehammer as instrument of social commentary. It loves its ugliness, its sardonic dismemberment of the square world, its petulant refusal to let anything live beyond the capabilities of one's teeth. And it is, of course, compelling. A fresh-faced Don Johnson and his telepathic dog maneuver their way through this revenge fantasy with our complete attention, almost innocent in their direct appreciation of how crappy everything is, and the necessities generated by accepting the carnivore's code: Eat, don't be eaten. If one must suffer a nuclear Holocaust, this film argues, at least one should bring along a trusted pet--in this case, Blood (voiced by Tim McIntire), smarter than his owner and quicker on the draw. The always-contentious Ellison gives in not an inch--until he admits the secret strength shared by a boy and his dog--even as he upends it to serve his nasty, riveting ends.

Saturday
The Black Stallion (1979)
Remove the tattered cities, the subterranean mutant suburbia, and all that uneasy eating, and A Boy and His Dog gets close to The Black Stallion--although the latter most certainly decides on, to understate the case, a less scarifying version of mutual protection and sacrifice. One of those children's movies that refuses to pander, its depiction of the partnership between Alec (Kelly Reno) and The Black informs us we have entered a kind of fable, beautiful, dark and full. And the friendly troll/wise wizard is no less than Mickey Rooney, whose Henry, the wise trainer, is nothing but Puck as a father. Visually, director Carroll Ballard stresses the horse's shining darkness in chiaroscuro counterpoint to the often-dazzling terrain Alec and The Black course along. As stirring as another late-'70s crowd-pleaser, Rocky (1976), The Black Stallion joins Stallone's film in understanding that competition is most ennobling as an internalized thing--and adds the connection that stretches way back, when men and horses barely knew one another, but somehow figured in each others' dreams, like those all-but-hidden cave paintings--food at first, naturally, then slowly in tandem.

*I suppose it would be insulting to call it a "staged documentary," although that is more apt. Like Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the north (1922), Weeping Camel uses real people in their own environment to tell a story typical of their culture. And if Flaherty's film is considered the birth of the documentary, then Weeping Camel should be proud to stage its narrative; after all, whenever we look back at our lives we do the same, form stories, and replace those with the events themselves. It is the simple process of memory, as good a system as we have, and movies like Weeping Camel flourish in the act of recreating reality as immediate filmed memory.

The Friday Club (12): Bad Beginnings

2007-06-20T07:39:00.000-07:00

Before we end in dogma, I'd like us to begin in heresy--or at least outrage--which may be the virtue inside heresies. As bad as a beginning may be, we should consider it generously--with caution if you like, even fear, but without malice. Because--when I'm being very brave--I know one must "test his mettle / In a crooked ol' world"--even though I also know that one can become reconciled with heresy, forgive it its mess and smoke, and gain strength along the way, as tenuous as that strength may be.

So in this spirit of outrage tempered by amity--and I know that sounds pretty limp, but (at least for watching movies) it'll do--let's spend a week with dubious origins, and lay our hands on the palpitating machine that drives us forward into the past.

Sunday
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Oh, Stanley. You (re-)tell a simple tale: The first step toward humanity is murder. In the opening section of 2001, "The Dawn of Man," Kubrick pastes fab fur on lithe dancers and lets them Raise Cain--with the help of a big square open piece of black, like an idiot robot's mouth opening, inexplicably--but relentlessly--hungry. And as the howling Lucys of the film masticate prehistoric tapirs and bludgeon their own for a waterhole, we feel we do not have to blame ourselves--it is food and water, after all--but in that act of, if not forgiveness at least understanding, we set ourselves up for a "billion-year spree" that takes only a moment to cross but infinity ("and Beyond") to understand. And even then we're stymied, as the curve of the Earth is matched by the curve of the Star-Child, and the same music swells, an echo-cry from the satiated throats of the hominids we still are.

Monday
Alien (1979)
More horrible appetites, as Ridley Scott takes it like a man--literally, in a movie obsessed with misogynistic body-terror. All orifices contain teeth here--and then protrude, with more teeth--and the feast is promiscuous--and prodigious--in its appetites. Every five minutes someone's slipping in or out of something (un)comfortable, or spraying something all over everyone, or in turn being drenched with something viscid, as Some Thing waits. And where? In the deepest crevice of male unease: birth, here presented as sentence and means of execution to John Hurt's Kane (hmm), so eager to drop into the hole and peer into the wet opening. In this movie, the origin of species is indeed heretical, life-denying as it purports to bring forth life, boring like acid down down down to the frightened core.

Tuesday
Frankenstein (1931)
Karloff is almost nothing but a frame and a face--but what a look he gives us: as much a wounded child as a vengeful ghost, a brute with a pianist's hands. His "New Prometheus" not only cringes from fire but curses humanity--wordlessly, with those watery eyes shining like quicksilver. At its best, James Whale's movie still hearkens to the silent era (only five years gone) in its breathless stare--with jump-cut--at the Monster's face, willing to traumatize Little Rascals across the Depression, quiet as dawn--but without any promise. It is a Thing born in hysteria--watch Colin Clive's Bad Doctor as he flings himself against the Monster, claiming to know what it's like to be God. And maybe he does, if only because of the misery and sacrifice the making brings.

Wednesday
Altered States (1980)
When William Hurt's Professor Eddie Jessup descends into the waters of the isolation tank, you know it is a burial, almost at sea. And even though the film propels the moment into birth, from the start a menace hangs over the proceedings--except, unlike Universal Studios' Deco graveyards and Metroplis-a-poppin' labs, Jessup's Castle Frankenstein is shiny and air-conditioned, grant-funded and cool. But that does not save him from Frankenstein's curse--nor even the Monster's, since Jessup is both: creator and creature, the Thing that pursues and is pursued. And as Jessup travels farther along the evolutionary road, he moves further within--then back, at Ken Russell-patented fever pitch, the search for the beginning a sickness and addiction, with a will of its own. His "altered state" is merely a return--but of course unnatural, the clock's hands snapping as they're forced backward.

Thursday
Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)/Tarzan and His Mate (1934)
When I was a kid, I read Burroughs' books as well as saw the movies--the latter as one is supposed to: on Sunday mornings, the Sugar Pops (which were Tops!) floating uneaten as stock-footage elephant stampedes saved the day from White Hunters with pencil-thin mustaches. I still love these movies--and fondly recollect the books--although their incipient (and too-often outright) racism began to disturb me somewhere around age twelve. [1] Still, what caused me the most unease was Tarzan's beginning, the infant Lord Greystoke lost in the jungle with his doomed parents, alone in the makeshift cabin, found by the apes--genuinely scary in the books (again, as memory serves--and it surely does)--and swept into the trees. It was with relief that I turned away from Tarzan's infancy, grateful to see Johnny Weismuller's confident smile and steady footing, comfortable in the jungle. Because he began in abandonment, imminent danger averted only within the rasping fur of a gorilla. For me, there was nothing adventurous about that. Just a terror to be forgotten. I did, however, admire the knife he retrieved from the cabin, and the glint of "civilization" it provided in Deepest Darkest.

Friday
Quartermass and the Pit/Five Million Years to Earth (American release title) (1967)/X-Files: Fight the Future (1998)
Professor Quartermass and his science-fiction/horror adventures have been a British pop culture staple--on TV, radio and film--for half a century. Unfortunately, none of the three major films in the series (The Creeping Unknown/1955, Enemy from Space/1957--both American release titles--and the above-mentioned title) are currently available on Netflix. However, if you want a pretty accurate representation of the uneasy path Quartermass negotiated, you could do worse than the X-Files movie. [2] Both deal with aliens who arrived on Earth a long time ago, and who since prehistory have exerted enormous physical and psychic power over us--and both even leak terrible goo when punctured. Discovered under "Hobbs Lane" ("Old Hob," aka the Devil, you know), the alien ship and the remains within not only wreak havoc, but prove to be the source of much of our primeval anxieties over the dark holes into which all our fears descend, taking us with them, wide-eyed and transfixed. Like The X-Files, this film posits an external source for these fears. Unlike Kubrick's pre-humans, whose nervously shifting glances were earned by sheer exposure to predators, in Five Million Years to Earth we have been infected with our fears, which use us as a conductor of energies that are not only dismaying but destructive.

Saturday
Batman Begins (2005)
How admirable is a Batman movie that takes its time getting to Batman? I know the movie's title, but I still appreciate the conviction in carefully, often compellingly, mapping out for us the phobic source of Batman's persona, and the moral weight he had to shift to squeeze from under the fears that compelled him. Like Tarzan, Batman begins as an orphan; and in his perceived abandonment he ruthlessly carves away his past--until it stands next to him--no, swoops down, dry wings against his stricken face, pinching him with little rodent claws and lifting him upright. Christian Bale's mouth and jaw, so often undecided whether to clench or quiver, serve him well as he faces Batman's violent, sad start--as well as his pulp code of justice through terror, with enough regret to allow him to peel off the Batsuit every once in a while, so that he can try to be a good son.

[1] And if you'd like to be discomfited yourself, just read Jungle Tales of Tarzan, in which we are treated to the interspecies attractions and voyeuristic gazes of the young Tarzan, who hated "Mbonga's black savages" but (fruitlessly, thank goodness) loved Teeka, a particularly fetching she-ape among "the sullen bulls and the snarling cows of the tribe of Kerchak, the great ape." Not the best of literary diets for an adolescent. But compelling.

[2] Stephen King's The Tommyknockers owes an even greater debt to Five Million Years to Earth. It is a maliciously funny book, a Creepshow whose notion of just desserts is distinctly rancid.

Handy

2007-06-19T08:25:00.000-07:00

I'm more than midway through "College for Kids," a two-week program held on our campus every--well, almost every--June. I've been teaching for it since 1998, mostly broad-based theme/genre courses like "Science Fiction" (always a big draw any year a Star Wars movie was released), "A Brief History of Comedy" (Guess what? Someone getting hurt is funny!), "Unlocking the Mystery" (pyramids to riddles, Holmes--Sherlock, not John--to Genomes), and this year, "Heroes and Villains"* and--gee, what a surprise--"How to Watch a Movie."

My experience in the movies course thus far is comparable to the times I taught Film Art at our local correctional facility--and I make the comparison without malice to either tot or con. But both have often disappointed me by not sharing my enthusiasm for particular movies, or scenes, or the effect of camera placement and movement, shot sequence, color and light, sound. Both groups, for instance, grow fidgety and flippant over 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I revere without embarrassment--unless I'm teaching it to inmates or children, when their boredom and disdain tarnish the glow and muffle the tone of every coldly beautiful--and emphatically leisurely--moment. Just today, I showed the children selected sequences--to illustrate the relationship between music/sound and image--and I could feel their relief as I stopped each scene--each of which was punctuated by their giggles and wisecracks. The only cultural reference-point any of them had with the film was the giant-chocolate-bar-as-Monolith in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory--which, when I saw it, I appreciated as homage to a cinematic icon, but which today proved a mere distraction. (I found even myself referring to the Monolith as "a giant candy bar"; oh, the fawning squeak of the quisling, eager to fit in!) Showing the movie at the prison, during the EVA scene, when Frank is fetching the AE35 unit, I was queried, "Is this a silent film?" I told him Kubrick would have been pleased by the question; still, it was not, I think, intended as a compliment, no more than the comment that 2001 is like Burton's film--the backwards-comparison particularly stinging.

But how petty can I be? Why should I expect universal acceptance of Film as Art (even if the course at the prison proclaimed so in the title)? And what matter if it isn't? But even more, I should understand my students' unconcern. After all, the movies are shared by everyone. Most films, even many of the "serious classics," are infinitely more approachable than their counterparts in literature--narrative as well as dramatic. The wall between most contemporary readers/audiences and Chaucer or Shakespeare, Milton or Spenser is quite tall, as it must be, given the removes of time and culture. And even more "modern" fiction encounters resistance, either from feminists or multiculturalists or other social empower-ers. This too is not only common but of course desirable. Passive consumption of art defeats the purpose, so to speak, since most art requires participation of some sort, dialogue rather than monologue. And the movies provide the readiest opportunities for such participation. This is in some ways its greatest strength as an art form. Like Dickens' novels, movies are so popular that the audience claims ownership, and provides movies all necessary sustenance by its mere attention, whether in appreciation or ridicule, or both. Even the most consumptive cinephile can hawk up a justly deserved gobbet in cinema's face.

Again, the ease with which most of us can adore, deride, or ignore cinema is linked directly to its ubiquity, and when one reacts to something so easily accessible, one does so with whatever's right there at the time, whether it be a TV commercial with Fred Astaire dancing with a Hoover or a greedy kid zapping himself into mega-choco-land--or even another, "lesser," film, in heavy rotation on basic cable, film school by osmosis, creeping in with repeat dinnertime viewing. Whenever we try to understand things, we use what's handy: "The Kingdom of God? Er, well, it's like seeds sown, or a treasure hidden in a field, or a fishing-net lowered into a lake." Why do we do this? Perhaps we will never be ready to know what cinema, itself a kingdom in hiding, is really like. So we make it out to be like something else--or make each movie like another. We can keep going, then, movie after movie, like those farmers of Paradise scattering seeds, letting grow those things we know, to help us little by little understand the things we don't.

So OK, 2001 is obscure and aloof. But it is like a silent movie, and its images have seeped into the visual culture. So it gets what it deserves, and doesn't escape a whipping. And lucky me, I've written myself to a point where it doesn't matter, as long as we keep watching, if only to see what we know in every cinematic enigma, every Rosebud and Monolith, tossed into various furnaces--or onto various soils, some fertile, some thorny, some rocky. It appears, then, that it may not be the movie's fault, but where it lands. Me, I'm going to keep talking and talking and talking, to any child or felon who'll listen, and try to soften the ground a bit, to see what purchase can be gained.

* ... in which at one point we wondered whether video games had heroes or villains; I instructed them to conclude No. But I did suggest maybe the gamer him/herself was the hero, not Link or Mario. (You may now roll your eyes.) But there's good news: They all concluded heroes were everything villains weren't, so it seems the cultural moral compass still works, more or less.

Rating Game Redux 10: Copland

2007-06-15T09:58:00.000-07:00

The Register-Mail has sent out the call for "Best TV Cop Shows." I'm not sure the following are the "best," but two of them are surely influential, while one is a personal favorite. I used to laud its virtues when it was on--to the bewilderment of my friends, as I recall--but to this day I'm convinced that Robert Blake's career has never been what it should, and while one can point to the monumental achievement of his Perry Smith in In Cold Blood (1967)--and his promising turns in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) and Electra Glide in Blue (1973)--those seasons on Baretta remain the broadest consideration one can take of the strength of his nervous, frightened bravado and surreal expressions of an always-forming self. Little wonder that the only director to see this in him since the '80s is David Lynch, who white-faced and flash-froze Blake to play the bi-locational "Mystery Man" of Lost Highway (1997). Yes, it's the last credit listed on the Internet Movie Database, and while that may be Blake's fault as much as anyone's, I still yearn for one more long look at those darting, watery eyes and lead-pipe frame, his mouth curled in an uncertain grimace, his hands fluttering like the wings of that damn cockatoo.

And oh yeah: Keep your eyes on the sparrow, cos that's the name of that tune.

Dragnet
With this bedrock police procedural, Jack Webb insinuated himself forever into the American TV consciousness, as matter-of-fact as the unmoving camera that gazed at every square-jawed interrogation and inevitable arrest.

Police Story
Ex-cop Joseph Wambaugh’s anthology show (featuring ‘70s stalwarts like Tony Lo Bianco, Vic Morrow, and James Farentino) was groundbreaking in its warts-and-all depiction of police officers, and paved the way for all later “realistic” cop shows.

Baretta
Ignore the silly bird Robert Blake had to interact with; what remains is the first Method Actor cop show, in which everyone—cop and crook alike—seems anguished.

Adventures with the Night People: Film Noir (et Blanc)

2007-06-14T11:12:00.001-07:00

In 1955, Jean Shepherd began broadcasting on WOR in NYC. But--before the unmatched gift of A Christmas Story in 1983--I knew him best from NJ public TV--Shepherd's Pie in the late '70s--and of course his many published stories of Golden Memories and Havens 'o Bliss. And noodling around for information on John Cassavetes' directorial debut, Shadows (1959), I discovered that Shepherd had Cassavetes on his WOR show, and, according to the Internet Movie Database, "loaned his assistant Ellen Paulos to Cassavetes to help with [Shadows]." (One of the opening credits of the film reads, "Presented by Jean Shepherd's Night People"--which is what he called his listeners). I was simply thinking of jazzy, noir-ish films of the late '50s-early '60s when I came across this--not trivia by any means, but evidence of the Great Integument that, if examined closely enough, reveals itself spread out everywhere,* holding us all together with surprisingly fewer degrees of separation than we could imagine in our most Baconian dreams.

Still--albeit soothed as my hand lies along the unbroken expanse of said Integument--I digress.

Sort of. Because in the late 1950s and early '60s, all kinds of Night People stood up in the movies and called out, allowed at last to begin to draw attention to their after-midnight struggles toward dawn. I watched Man in the Middle (1963) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) in my usual haphazard manner, simply wanting to see Robert Mitchum and a heist movie, once more noodling--and once more pleasing myself with a sudden melody, as these two came together in their focus on race--more specifically, the hell to pay for racism. Shadows stands in their midst, so to speak, a work-in-progress that snaps like jive gone stone cold, a strange hybrid viewpoint: race from both inside and out, as Cassavetes' jazz sensibilities improvise with his Black actors to take a stab at some after-hours truth. It may not quite get there--and neither do Man in the Middle and Odds Against Tomorrow--but, again, I'd like you to hear this accidental chord I managed, Humble as usual, but for once along a kind of groove.

Man in the Middle--set in 1944 in India, where relations between British and American forces were, it seems, strained--plays a little like A Few Good Men (1992); except Mitchum's Barney Adams, the court-martial defense attorney, is, at least at the film's start, more of an insider than Tom Cruise's Daniel Kaffee, more ready to play ball and help convict his client, who had shot in cold blood a British soldier. But as Adams prepares his boilerplate defense, he begins to realize that Keenan Wynn's Charles Winton is a genuine psychotic--and that everyone knows it, but is still eager to have him executed to prove the Americans don't play favorites, that the British can trust them. Things stink; the film keeps reminding us of the heat, the remoteness of the locale, the ease with which expert testimony and the simpler mechanisms of justice can be shipped out or intentionally fouled up. And like a true hardboiled hero, Adams puts his career on the line to give his man a fair trial.

But something else is going on here. Winton is indeed insane, but the expressing symptom of his illness is simple, goggle-eyed racism. Winton's delusion is painted in white and black--and black scares the hell out of him. He sneers, he coils, he rages, and the trigger is a black face, a whiff of miscegenation--interesting, because Winton's only ally is Kate Davray (France Nuyen), a Chinese-French nurse--and she is also Mitchum's love interest. Why? At first, it seems just because. But maybe not. His attraction underlines his increasing hostility toward the powers-that-be and his growing unconcern for What People Think. Still, his relationship with her is typical for Mitchum: offhand muttering followed by no-escape clinches. In the end, a bit odd, although Nurse Davray emerges as the most determined truth-teller, as she too risks her position to track down the transferred/exiled psychiatrist who knows how crazy the defendant is. But again, the movie gives its audience no other choice but to agree that racism is simply paranoid delusional psychosis. There is no evidence to the contrary.

Less self-consciously Hollywood-ish, (at least, seemingly more seat-of-the-pants), is Robert Wise's masterful Odds Against Tomorrow, a heist film perched at the tail-end of noir--and the midpoint of the first great surge of the Civil Rights movement. Its cast is pitch-perfect: Ed Begley as the Old Man with a Plan, all but washed-up and literally gnashing those famous choppers over the chance for One Last Score; Harry Belafonte as his vibes-playing right-hand-man, a boiling-cool sharpie completely immersed in a New York world of sweetly sad gray dawns and smoky nightclubs, his dapper car coat cut as cool as John Lewis' score; and Robert Ryan as the muscle, a good-ol'-boy whose tough-guy matter-of-factness is matched only by his little-boy insecurity. And just when that seemed like enough, we get Shelley Winters as Ryan's devoted wife--as always half-wheedling, half-scolding, and near-dangerous, like her pal Marilyn; and Gloria Grahame as the lonely neighbor whose bathrobe could use a tighter cinch, her lower lip out, her eyes down, once more in a lonely place. Just watching them makes one claustrophobic, they fill up the spaces so much.

Blacklisted Abraham Polonsky's screenplay gives them plenty of scenery to chew, and at the center of the Plan, the Setback, the Execution, and the Crack-Up is again an illness bred out of paranoia--and here, severe self-esteem issues, if that does not sound too distractingly Oprah-tic (sorry). Ryan's Earle Slater is a racist; it's his only defense against self-doubt and despair. (There's a crying scene with Shelley Winters (Earle doing the crying) in their hotel room--in only the second windy hotel I know of, the other the Earle(!) in Barton Fink--that is about as unsettling as anything that man-mountain has done on screen.) [Spoiler Alert: Skip next sentence if you're going to Netflix this one.] And of course, Earle's mistrust of Belafonte's Johnny Ingram bollixes up the deal, and leads to Begley's agonizing death in the alley, shot full of holes slammed in one by one by faceless cops, mere instruments of Slater's hysteria.

It was illuminating to run into these two at the same time, my desire for one thing leading to another. I'm not sure how successful these movies are as direct confrontations with racism, but they serve as allegories of a sort, in which the racial divide leads to madness and death. Within a few years, plenty of people--not just in Selma, but watching Selma at home, with Cronkite trying to analyze the symptoms--will get a good look at the snake pit's grinning inmates, dressed up like sheriffs and cops, mayors and governors--and just plain folks--their compulsions captured in grainy network black and white, ironic, accidental noirs with code heroes square-shouldered and waiting where the sidewalk ends for the gunman's decision.

*Case in point: Preparing for this piece, I found out Bob Clark died in April. In his memory, and despite everything I said back on October 12, 2005, I really was happy about the possibility of a remake of Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972). Good-bye, Bob.

Ratings Game Redux 9: The Big Town

2007-06-07T13:03:00.000-07:00

Next week's Register-Mail list focuses on movies set in Chicago. While plenty of films fit this category, many are not actually shot in the city. But I've chosen movies that depend on location shooting, and that appreciate Chicago's big-shouldered capacity for scrutiny and mayhem, a city that looks older than it is--considering its post-Colonial birth and, you know, that fire--standing at the top of the state, sending out railroad tracks like Walt Whitman's spider, that "launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself." One could argue Chicago invented the Midwest; but it's at least safe to say it invented itself, and still tries to draw everything to it, to "catch somewhere" "till the ductile anchor hold."

(Note: No John Hughes movies; I left that Day Off to my fellow Gamers.)

Blues Brothers (1980)
“It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses.” “Hit it.” So begins the quintessential Chicago journey-quest, a mission from God that reveres every famous landmark it (almost) demolishes.

The Untouchables (1987)
The Union Station/Battleship Potemkin homage indicates the mythic qualities Brian DePalma gives Chicago, at first bathed in darkness (and blood), then shining like gold in its triumphant climax.

Call Northside 777 (1948)
Assertively shot on location, at mean-street level. Reporter Jimmy Stewart dogs working-class neighborhoods and brick-and-granite bureaucracies to free convicted murderer Richard Conte.

The Friday Club 11: Outside Over There

2007-06-04T09:24:00.000-07:00

(apologies--and thanks--to Maurice Sendak)

The child looks up, cheek resting on the wall, the texture of the surface clear in front of her eyes, nubbled and mottled, but smoothing out the further she peers, way up to the light switch, out of reach. If she could flip the switch she could go into the next room. It's just the small dining area between the front hall and the kitchen, but it's dark now, and while she "knows" nothing's there, she also knows that if she goes into the dark room she will become afraid, or worse: propel herself through the dark and maybe tumble over something--a chair or the table's corner--full speed, which will hurt--or worst of all, fall onto Something cruel, sudden and firm and grasping. And that's where it stands, as does she, leaning her smooth cheek on the wall, one more look at the light switch, before going back, and finding bigger people. She doesn't ask them to return with her to turn on the light. That's one more thing she knows: Few except another child (and not all of them) understands about Outside Over There--and that with even a little conversation it becomes less clear. In any case, it remains, hiding in the dark.

Some children, though, do manage to edge themselves into or tumble across the room. And look what happens:

Monday Little Fugitive (1953)
Imagine a movie directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, or John Cassavetes that had no conscious desire to help build a New Wave in cinema. This is the effect of Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin's movie about a small boy who mistakenly believes he's killed his brother and hightails it to Coney Island, where he spends two days while his older brother searches for him. An extroverted The Cat in the Hat, in which anyone outside the house has to return to normal before Mom gets home, The Little Fugitive loves its gee-whiz early-'50s freckle-faced boy almost as much as it does Coney Island--some would say the real star of this fairy-tale-verite wander through the joys--and the near-joys (a kid can do only so much with the money he gets from soda-bottle refunds--which in 1953 is admittedly quite a lot) of hot dogs and pasteboard buckaroos, Tilt-a-Whirls and try-yer-lucks. Like any old-style tale, the shocking catalyst for the child's journey--(imagined) fratricide--is soon forgotten as he makes his way through an idealized--but so-simply filmed--reality in which every day (well, at least two of them) is a holiday. And the adult gatekeepers of pleasure--ride attendants, barkers, soda jerks--while always looming, also recede in the distance, merely there to crank the handle and keep the Carousel spinning. A completely recognizable Wonderland for pennies an hour.

Tuesday Spirited Away (2001)
As usual, Hayao Miyazaki shows us how well he understands children. As Chihiro/Sen and her parents walk down the dark tunnel, the little girl holding her complaining mother's forearm, her father striding with a Dad's glee at giving his daughter a little adventure, we know we are only at the very beginning of a mystery, but we also know that none of the wonders to come--and there will be many--can match the feeling of anticipation as the family makes its way across the field and into a story. Chihiro/Sen settles into her Wonderland, and Miyazaki-as-Lewis Carroll allows her the opportunity to build a life, even a family, out of this invented mythology, this dreamscape that refuses not to be as solid and even visceral as the food she eats and the dragon-lover she accepts, in all innocence but with proper devotion. Poignant and honest, this is a movie that believes in its world without irony--and it has to, or the little girl will never leave it.

Wednesday Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)
Like the book series on which it is based, there is much irony in this film; however, while conspiratorial winking at the audience would demolish Spirited Away, the fun of Lemony Snicket is that one must put on a wry face to navigate its rocky coast. The mordant/morbid narrator sets the tone, and the film's atmosphere--Edward Gorey-meets-Dr. Seuss--tosses us like careless dandelion seeds into a creaking wind of monsters and murderers. At the center of this is Jim Carrey, the world's scariest ham, who roars around as if we are all partially deaf, bullying us--yes, just as though we were helpless children--with manic scorn. Imagine Cruella DeVille on speed and roller skates, and you can guess at the mayhem inflicted on the children--Klaus (Liam Aiken), Violet (Emily Browning) and Sunny (Kara and Shelby Hoffman)--apt pupils all, who eventually return fire. This is the kind of wish children's stories so often fulfill: to suffer the cruelties of the adult world only to learn and prevail.

Thursday Tideland (2005)
Terry Gilliam's movie has much in common with A Series of Unfortunate Events--except Tideland plays for keeps, and the child in danger, Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), needs to go it alone. Even her White Knight, Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), is more threat than promise, despite his own (perhaps) ignorance that he is a monster. Not for the faint of heart, Tideland is nonetheless a film that, as Gilliam points out so dryly in his DVD on-camera introduction, asserts a truth--or at least a hope--about children: When you drop them, "they tend to bounce." It may seem heartless to illustrate such a thesis with a real child (actor), but I think Gilliam never loses what he calls "innocence"--maybe in some bipartite Blakean sense--in the attempt to watch the child fall and bounce back, surviving amid fire and wreckage.

Friday Oliver Twist (2005)
Another directorial Imp of the Perverse, Roman Polanski, chooses well when he finally gets around to making a movie for children. He gives himself the restrictions of a well-worn plot, and approaches it simply and unaffectedly. While Tideland hurls its child down a well to see it bounce, Polanski edges Oliver carefully, even gently, no matter the misery that fall entails. Oliver's Outside is London, and his monsters the stuff of Henry Mayhew's* world, as real as Big Ben, as fantastic as demons and changelings. We are asked to pity Oliver, but he eventually becomes our support, braver for having fallen into the dark room, and kinder for having suffered so much cruelty.

Saturday Labyrinth (1986)
And children find cruelty waiting in strange places. Jim Henson's universe--whether we visit Sesame Street or Dagobah--is, to say the least, rough around the edges, full of sudden, barking orders and dismissive sneers, self-absorbed egos and lurking danger. He gives these impulses almost full control over Labyrinth, despite the calming effect of David Bowie's silly hairdo. More than any other film for this week, this one hones closest to Sendak, as the girl--an adolescent Jennifer Connelly--goes on a journey-quest to retrieve her younger brother from the Goblin King. Like Outside Over There, the Freudian subtext is not all that sub-, and the unconcern of the denizens of the maze--into which she must descend to retrieve not only her brother but the remnants of her own childhood--as often menace as rescue. She may not fully recapture her share of childhood--and is soundly punished for trying--but the attempt itself redeems her, and in the process reconciles her to the cruelties she will soon be party to, simply by dint of her own entrance into adulthood.

Sunday Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
As we reach the end of this week's Club, climbing, as it were, the rabbit-hole's ladder, we move from Jim Henson's to Guillermo del Toro's labyrinth--and his is a strange circle to enter, part Tideland doll's-eye scorn, part Evil Muppet ambush, part deeply unfortunate events. A true fabulist--by way of horror comics and pulp thrillers--del Toro understands that the scary maze in the woods is a haven compared to the literal fascism of the adult world Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) tries to step ever-so-lightly through, the worse walk in the dark, where the house squeaks and gibbers its gossip, and the grownups carve away at each other in the name of something no one--not just the child--completely understands. The revolutionaries who triumph are, as history informs us, the most fairy-tale element of the film. The groping terrors of the Labyrinth, on the other hand, wait in dream's final promise to give the little girl a final rest and resurrection. Del Toro plays hard, but he knows that, if children do indeed bounce, it is only because they can, not because anyone helps them.

*He co-founded Punch magazine with Mark Lemon, but he also wrote London Labour and the London Poor, a phenomenal work of social research--and social criticism--that considered practically every facet of the daily lives of the lower and under classes. The details of Oliver's existence--especially his sojourn with Fagin and Co.--can be seen in Mayhew's work. I'm sure Dickens had his own experiences as an impoverished adolescent to draw from, but what fun--if I can call it that--to read in Mayhew descriptions of the same pickpocket training exercises that form Oliver's larcenous education, and to see the organization that framed the disorganized crime of the dimmer lanes of Jolly Olde.