Heavenly Creatures (1994). Credits. Like Badlands, this puts us in the world of two people who commit a crime. A New Zealand girl and her English friend are both oddballs. Illnesses bring them together when they have to sit out physical education sessions. The precocious English girl leads the other into her imaginary world of "art," premised on storybook court life. They fabricate this world together, what they call the "fourth world," to which they also believe themselves able to travel a few times a year with a special "key." It's better than Heaven because it doesn't have any Christians. There's a nice, giddy scene when they chase each other through the woods, one plays dead, then they tear off their clothes running. In due time, the parents begin to think it unhealthy and even to believe there is a homosexual aspect: we see that they haven't got it quite right, since Pauline is playing the part of the male from their made-up story. But later an explicit eroticism emerges. Mostly theatrical special effects portray the dreamworld as clay figures the girls have made (though not in clay-mation, which might have supplied a better indirect version, cf. Marquis). Something like animations in Eraserhead might have suited better, not to be weirder, but somehow cruder, less "well-done." There is some "morphing" style computer work, but mostly the effect is of giving away too much, the way Spielberg movies do. Often this film seems a subversion of all the family grandeur of modern movies, but that's not demonstrative enough, which may be better for the sake of subversion. But definitely the whole thing is a great setup for a very disturbing result, and it makes the perfect argument for showing us the brutality of the crime. If it had stopped short of that, cut away or simply left it to the epilogue, the whole thing would've come off a charming jaunt of parodic dementia. As it is, a cleverly drawn-out anticipatory sequence (shrewder dramatic use of slow motion here than in most action films) has the effect of making you uncomfortably empathetic, because it is only from the girls' point of view that we know what's going to happen. The act itself is excruciating by effect. The actual blows are edited out, but in a series of reaction shots of the girls, we get perhaps the most graphic expression: from the panicky nervousness of the brink, to impulsive rage, the frenzy of it, even the more nervous one deciding to step up and take her part in delivering blows. The reaction of the victim is the most excruciating. The beginning sequence of the film is annoyingly grandiose and virtuoso, precisely in horror-film and Spielberg style: camera movement as some kind of necessary enhancement -- there's nifty tracks, craning shots, editing always on movement, etc. This has a counter-effect, too, as even the wonderment virtuoso grandeur gets a measure of subversion by doing the story of these girls. [11/94]
Whisky Galore! (1949). Credits. Like Man in the White Suit, of Alexander Mackendrick's other films, this has the excited pace and progression that serves for droll counterpoint. A little island off the coast of Scotland, thirsty for liquor during wartime rationing, is blessed when a ship carrying a load of whiskey wrecks offshore. The local do-gooder, head of the island guard, sees fit to guard the prize, though none of his troops will support him. Tipped off by the resentful bartender that the ship has been looted, he brings in authorities and there is a mad chase to hide the booty. As also in White Suit, the community is the main character in this social comedy. There is probably not a more direct and gleeful homage to liquor in film. The only thing I can think of that approaches it is the incidental celebration in the Thin Man films. It has resonances with, superficially if not otherwise, The Wicker Man (it's a comedic parallel), and is a precursor to Bill Forsythe's work, Comfort and Joy and Local Hero. [11/94]
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993). Credits. Cozy, lucid cinematography (afternoon light) and a drier dramatic style temper ambling narrative. This is certainly a 60s-70s episodic novel and it would've been one of those joyride films of the era. For all that, though, it's too flat. The metaphorical chains are given best translation right after the credits and, as it turns out, right before the closing ones, when Tom Robbins himself is doing voiceover. These amount to framing scenes, like literary flourish prologue and epilogue. Right after the former, the film settles into prose, very prosey (if not prosaic) dramatization. When the last scene occurs, where Sissy is burning the letters in the fire, I was thinking finally it's going to take off again and: the end. The problem of the squatter gang segments of My Own Private Idaho, with the Henry IV doubling, is that of this whole film. Most likely it's the matter of the transposition: distilling a "plot" from this kind of literature and playing it out. And why is it that someone like Van Zant, of all people, would insist on this kind of literality? Is it symptomatic of that larger issue that even when treating exceptional or marginalized subject matter, if not also commenting outright on this marginalization, one can ignore, or marginalize, the matter of form itself? This may already be the case with the book. But even if the book merely embellishes its "content" with a florid style, it is still a different process, since the characterization will at least be woven with the metaphor. People make these movies from favorite books, out of affection or some sheer impulse of imagination, say of who they see playing the parts, but in many cases precisely where it's no justice to the book to do so. The movie becomes nothing more than a costume party with the theme of the book. [11/94]
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994). Credits. This business of tacking the author's names onto titles, especially of "classic" works, is a pretense of authenticity, especially in the case where someone else's name is writ large on the production, Coppola with Dracula and now him passing it on to Kenneth Branagh (though Coppola's name is still in there, too). It's false modesty, pretending a magnanimous reclamation of the original, but really appropriating the aura of it, a kind of merger of statures, a supposed matching of reputations. It's also like saying "the Mercedes" where you'd otherwise say "car." Of course, it's all the more pretentious when the movie is ludicrously unworthy, as this one is. The Frankenstein is shoddy romantic grandeur that, as if it hasn't become apparent by now, shows the extent of Branagh's aspirations. He pumped up for this movie: sufficient explanation for the laboratory scene where he runs around the machinery with his shirt off, then atop the boiler-tub womb shouting "Live, live." All of course to give Frankenstein the most grandiose -- to mean definitive -- treatment. The pretense to the romanticist context of the book could be no more evident than that. Every self-respecting romantic hero of the 19th century spent his mornings on Nautilus equipment (apologies to Captain Nemo). We get more of the story than we've had before, but done worse. The scene with Boris Karloff and the little girl with flowers in the 1931 film expresses the pathos of the monster's situation better than this entire film. Branagh is not a bad actor but, curiously enough, everyone else in this movie comes off badly. The plotting and the direction of the actors has them all pitched in romance novel tones, in the latter day sense, extravagant and simplistic at the same time. The worst extent is Tom Hulce whose big-hearted, sympathetic cohort becomes a parody by the second time he warmly extends an arm to Frankenstein (and he does it almost every time we see him: the possible exception when he is instead mopping Frankenstein's brow at his sickbed). Even Robert De Niro as the monster is disappointing. Though there was a pretense of expectation in this casting, another extravagance, there was also hope in De Niro, that he might humanize the monster, bring out the part of Shelley's story where the creature learns to recognize its situation and then make its vengeful resort more terrible. De Niro's short segment to bring this off is that when he hides out with the peasants, and in the scene with the blind man (made famous by Bride of Frankenstein and Young Frankenstein, both more fun, comedic, and for that, though not necessarily, still the two best Frankenstein movies) he gives the best expression of the creature's self-awareness. But this segment is ruined by its silly presentation of the family: they're Hallmark peasants, complete with a Christmas scene, a warm, busy young couple and their children kissing lovingly while the ground is freezing out their food supply. Grandeur and compression at the same time, having to be so brief with everything but still do it big, makes it one high note, as if it could be a string of crescendos. [11/94]
Pulp Fiction (1994). Credits. Gruesome humor in a cheeky reflection of suspense for entertainment. It's an imagination exercise of throwing various predators into the same tank and seeing the relativity of evil that results. Reservoir Dogs has a more parabolic completeness, but this one elaborates pulp cultivation as a formal experiment. It has the arch conceptualization of Jim Thompson, with the orchestration of Hammet (Red Harvest, at least) and even Chandler, but also more generically of modernist cinema and literature. Modular, almost algebraic, largely pop reference work: when the overdosed Uma Thurman is lying on the floor in the home of the dealer of the mistaken drug, the two board games that can be seen in the frame are Operation and Life. It's overwrought with that at times, reference as a pat value, as if simple invocation bestows texture or even profundity. The irony of the naturalistic skew, the way characters constantly trail off in elegiac debates about quotidien pleasures -- foot massages, pork, TV shows, the bible, or even conversation itself (Thurman and John Travolta when they return from the retro restaurant) -- often as if arguing theological paradoxes (and in a couple of cases precisely a theological quandry), came formulaic with Quentin Tarantino, sometimes serving as nothing more than a set piece, even as incongruous: the discussion, at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs, of Madonna over breakfast. Breakfast is the ritual of these discussions for Tarantino. There is some subversion of crime and action films going on, of even violence itself. Bruce Willis in this film serves that purpose, an even greater source of troping than the more obvious Travolta, who received all the press. Suspense, in this film as in Reservoir Dogs, is built on mundane details, the minutiae and daily logistics that grand action films leave behind to contrive great stretches of extraordinary and choreographed action. Here the forgetting of a watch sets up a more subtle suspense (and once again, the joke on machismo is the sentimentality of the men), and the plotting of elements such as pop tarts in a toaster, the incongruity of a gun, and a toilet flushing. In this, Tarantino suggests Hitchcock as much as anyone else. Tarantino is particularly clever with the schematics of what is just off or out of the scene, not only in his broader cutting up of chronology, but in the narrower scope of each scenic context. He contrives scenes as indefinitely extended, creating dramatic context, and thus anticipation. The great example is again that when Willis's character sees the gun in his apartment, and then shortly after when Marsellus (Ving Rhames) crosses in front of his car carrying a box of donuts. Tarantino uses overlapping chronology in a way that doesn't cheat on the plausibility of immediate circumstances. The encounter between Willis and Travolta resolves in the time of one pull of the trigger, not in hyperbolic action sequence. The quick resolution is also like that in more realistic westerns or Samurai films, the latter alluded to when Willis later chooses a Samurai sword from a store of weapons. The intersecting lives bit is cliche in movies, now, but Tarantino doesn't contrive that, he uses it as a plotting device, like an architect to get different views of an otherwise fairly simple line of action. It's an amazing combination, a celebration of suspense that doesn't lack faith in events themselves to be dramatic, a kind of subtlety of pulp that is outrageous in its macabre fun, not in its action. [10/94]
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Credits. Tim Burton's gothic quaintness, and obsession with Holiday archetypes, dispenses with humans altogether for a schlock-opera puppet show. Burton (who wrote this script, Henry Selick directed) is the popular epitome of the goth phenomenon, an adolescent sentimentality of the grotesque, Romanticism of American culture harking back to its 19th century trappings for suburban eccentricity. The Wynona Ryder character in Beetlejuice was the express persona of this. Edward Scissorhands was the best mesh of this romantic and freakish, its incongruous trimmings making nice allegory. Batman and Batman Returns both had festival motifs, the latter of Christmas, already a Christmas of Halloween conception. Batman Returns was broad and schematic, already very operatic, using also musical themes for a clash of icons. There is a clinical psychological phenomenon of infatuation with holidays, Christmas being the most emblematic and problematic of them in American culture. It's hard to know how much Burton is a case of this, and how much a comment on it. But, as in all the previous, there's the high-toned schlockiness, the shift into prefab self-pitying melodrama in Edward Scissorhands, the overwrought movie-quip phrasemaking in the Batman movies. This one is more efficient, more streamlined and compressed, and the fact that it's animation, stop-motion puppets, keeps it from the garishness of overacting (as, for example, in Batman Returns) and allows the fascination of objects and process to upstage the dramatic conceits. The fable aspect keeps getting Burton tangled in moralism, and it's hard to tell whether it's a residue, coming with the property, so to speak, of all that kiddy culture, or if he's really applying it. The heavy-handedness is in the main, here, as Jack Skellington suffers from burnout and emptiness. It's also the setup for the love story, of course, but his soul-searching sets up realization of the error of self-abdication. Even if I agree with the intentions, here -- and in general I think Burton's work wants to encourage an embracing of difference -- or the derived message in effect, there are risks of using the codes, or modes. Oogie-Boogie, the boogeyman, has a games-of-chance motif and is simply stipulated as bad guy, even among the spooky ("that no-account Oogie-Boogie"). There's an implication scarcely removed from that of the segment in Pinocchio where little boys turn into donkeys if they play pool, drink beer and smoke. It's good to be discriminating (not all difference is necessarily good or beneficial), but one then also has to be discriminating about how one discriminates, to avoid simplistic moralistic equations. Going all out for a musical, however, Danny Elfman's score is not as good as his work for Scissorhands or even the Batman movies. The music, and particularly his own singing for Skellington, is straight out of 70s rock opera, which gives it a very different kind of romanticism, without the eerie charm. [10/94]
Quiz Show (1994). Credits. Fictional account of the famous quiz show scandal of the 50s, when Charles Van Doren, son of poet and professor Mark, eventually confessed to the rigging of the competition. A clever script is given competent production by cast and director. The evocation rolls along, unfolding at a pace and on a scale worthy of Preston Sturges, perhaps closer to the best work of Barry Levinson, particularly Tin Men, not entirely surprising since he has a bit part here and is said to have been slated to direct it. Robert Redford does well, though the material certainly gives him more to work with than, say, Ordinary People. There is the self-reflective trap, of course: a dramatization that tries to tell us that the deception of dramatization is bad. And the conception doesn't seem to go farther than the American version of the age-old truth/deception opposition. (This is where Barton Fink becomes pertinent, in the way that it comments on this opposition between two possibly reciprocal idealisms: Hollywood sensationalism and the lofty veracity of [at least a certain] theater.) It avoids the Capra preachiness and is at its best with an in-stride commentary, an ironic, snappy equivocation, a counterpoint characterization. That with the ensemble presentation prevents any pat protagonism. The scriptwriter works the idiomatic candid expressions in round robin so that even platitudes are tied to characters, none of them becoming the sympathetic absolute. This comes off here like the strong suit of the portrayal, in contrast to something like Michael Tolkin's work, especially The Player, where the portrait itself comes off too conjectural. There's showiness, as typical of contemporary movies: Rob Morrow's accent is uneven and often sounds like some burlesque of Robert Kennedy (the resonance may even have been intended, which would fall under the following point), and as witty and jaunty as it tries to be, there's still the kind of spoonfeeding so prevalent these days, so many filmmakers calculating the ignorance of their audience, the most obvious example being a quick cut to an anonymous guest at the Van Doren country home telling Morrow and the viewer that the Shakespeare quotation is a game that father and son play. [9/94]
Eat Drink Man Woman (1994). Credits. Everyday comic lyricism about gourmet chef and his three daughters, all preoccupied with the issue of marriage, perhaps more so with the transitoriness of things. Leitmotif of traffic comes to the metonym of the traffic cop waving on. More modest and ironic than The Joy Luck Club, uses a less proclamatory intercutting to assemble parallel incidents in the lives of the family members. Has the wryness and rhetorical punctuation lacking on the broader level in The Joy Luck Club, and is the obverse of the latter's ponderousnous. [9/94]
Le Jour se lève (1939). Credits. If the sophistication of the subject matter is striking, that betrays as much about the American films of its time as those of today. Despite the melodrama that results -- and that itself despite two quips, close together, from separate characters, disparaging melodrama -- it's a sturdy drama and fascinating for showing at least some patience and acceptance of extra-monogamous involvement. The jealousy involved is matter-of-fact, testimonial. Even the antagonist is at once less and more extravagant than a formal villain: less so because there is some sympathy in the portrayal, more so -- and perhaps this is the more telling -- because his behavior is allowed the kind of persistence that would be nagging and puzzling in a "real" person: overarching contrivances that are also banal. The story of the father of Francoise is a great stroke. It's a realistic scheme that ripples back through the level of representation, playing with the factitious, and presenting also the dissimulation involved in portrayal (interesting as a precursor to the Cassavettes school of realism). Long dissolves are used as frames for the flashbacks. [9/94]
The Thin Man (1934). Credits. Mixture of comedy and whodunit produces skipping irony, a droll glancing of society. A happy father meeting his future son-in-law soon turns a gangsterish scowl to his "girlfriend" right after he finds her entertaining a gangster. The entangled man stalks off at night with a long shadow but the girlfriend turns up dead. A montage traces the ripple of the news word-of-mouth, whimsically scanning the social strata, including an apparent maid indulging her rapt friend. Nick Charles/William Powell is introduced shaking a Manhattan and Nora/Mryna Loy enters, in fancy dress, dragged by the dog, Asta. Our reluctant detective is in the midst of his friends. While the police start their flatfooting, Nick is constantly boozing. He's married an heiress and aspires to kicking back, while she gets intrigued by the circumstances, the chance to see him do some snooping. All this is spun from a logic of displacement, and the social comedy as if from the fabric of murder mystery contrivances. The charm is of course the couple: a paradigm of wry, playful, unflappable, tacitly trustful companionship. The enthusiasm for liquor is a character trait, but it also seems like a post-prohibition binge of reference, if not an outright ruse, an exaggerated compensation for the sophistication of sexual reference. A scene in the bedroom shows Nick and Nora with separate beds, and the contrast, after all the schmoozing and glibness of urbanites and underworld alike, seems as willful as imposed. On top of this is Loy's crack about the gleam in her father's eye and Powell's mugging reaction -- mouth and eyes agog -- seems a taunting parody of censorship. The punchline to this is delivered at the end when Powell turns away his separate bunk, putting the dog in his place while he approaches Loy in her bunk and then we get a shot of the dog covering its eyes. The thickening of the plot never ruffles our smart pair. It only builds up a kind of background of screwball-pitched fretting, through which the couple jaunts. The constellation of conniving acquaintances has an aspect of Hammett savvy, but it's also like the supporting cast of straights in a Marx brothers movie, only more streamlined, composed and better acted. The jovial mockery of the street types, acquaintances of Nick's gumshoe days -- in the scene of a party thrown for them (where one guest introduces himself happily as someone Nick sent up the river), or when Nick goes on police interrogation (which puts no damper on a domestic spat and a woman throws a frying pan almost right at the camera, making it, for a second, seem very spontaneous), or when a goonish bodyguard posed as a waiter orders the guests to have a cocktail -- has its own stylized fleetness, little punches and pricks of a smart-aleck realism. The dinner scene at the end manages a double parody, posing the collection of petty squabblers at high brow table setting as the whodunit convention of gathering all the suspects, and vice versa. The contrivance itself is given the jest by the fact that the police forcibly escort all the guests. The dinner is brought off almost solely for the joy of watching everyone squirm and clamor under suspicion, Nick and Nora conducting (for fun and pun, and the wisecracks here are the least subtle of the film), and the revelation and murderer are dispatched so quickly as to seem relatively insignificant. The flourish is shown even in a scene where Nick and Nora leave the hotel with Asta and are met by the policeman: as they walk along and talk (about the murder, of course) they keep stopping, the camera framing them while the established reason does his business. [9/94]
Things to Come (1936). Credits. Old-fashioned imagination of the future that, while ambitious in its scope, is poor dramatically. Demonstrates the longstanding tendency of science fiction, especially in film, for ponderous, pretentious, naive universalism and adolescent abstraction. This is even more conspicuous dramatically in this case as characters are presented instant with sweeping profundities, their line of action announced readymade as high-symbolic issue. The most ingenious aspect of this film is its futuristic regression, something that even anticipates the post-Star Wars era of sci-fi movies and the post-apocalyptic premise (not necessarily as recent). A war starts up in 1940 (the most accurate part of its prophecy, though perhaps in retrospect the easiest) that lasts more than 20 years and decimates society, the result being a medieval situation among the remains of progress up to that point. Fuel is a rarity -- a precursor to Mad Max and its spawn -- and at one point a denizen is seen using his "old" Rolls as a horse-drawn vehicle. Here Ralph Richardson injects a bit more pith into the film and there's even a stretch of dialogue that's sharp. The art direction and special effects offer mainly art deco flying machines, "future" tanks and airships, more to the catalogue of Yesterday's Tomorrows from a Smithsonian exhibition. Brazil tropes films like this by playing off of anachronistic effect, the way ideas of the future become dated, representative of the past. [9/94]
Mr. Wonderful (1993). Credits. Modest slice-of-life romance, with sympathy for every incidental character, encouraging in some aspects, though it eventually fills out another kind of logical subordination (Dillon's character good-naturedly quips "every pot has a lid"). The girlfriend says to the ex-wife that one person stops crying and another one starts, something to that effect, the relay or La Ronde of desire. The inverse view of this could be Beckett's desire circle, in for instance Murphy, summed up by his line that "desire unrequited is a short circuit," which has an interesting, if forced, resonance, here, because of the electricity theme: Matt Dillon's character is a worker for Con Ed and there is a motif of lights. There's a great credit sequence with lights and Manhattan. Nice touches of restraint, here and there, at least compared to contemporary fare. An example is in the evocation of the relationship, the ex-wife pays ex-husband a visit and picks up a cassette tape, commenting on it with just a little expression and gesture. Later I realized there was no mention of what the tape was, what the song was and that there was no sound-track filled with other pop songs. [8/94]
True Lies (1994). Credits. Ordeal ritual, but what is even more ritualistic by now is the hyperbole. Macguffin, plot twists, secret agent doubling, etc., have allegorical and reflective aspects, but have to be injected with steroids. Constant moving camera, de rigeur, and the pile-on sensibility. Creates implausibilities, such as when either side initiates a big, violent chase in public. When the Arab terrorists go after Arnold (S., that is), they quite ludicrously risk their cover, what would have to be necessary to bring their "plot" to fruition. Obviously that is not what matters, here. But it makes the secret agent stuff a shabby pretext, mainly a costume affair to get Arnold in James Bond mode. For this there is the whole opening sequence, a straight steal from Goldfinger, which was already self-parodic. The twists of the plot, such as the false agent, the wife thinking she's the real agent, etc., are thrown down at juggernaut pace and with an oafish, macho sense of humor. The comic is all generated from conventional bedroom wisdom, folksy naturalism, jokes about getting enough and desperate ineffectuals (Bill Paxton, here). Arnold runs and grabs a Harrier jet fighter like the otherwise usual abandoned gun, and in this game of brinkmanship, from movie to movie as well as in each of them, any jokes about wielding the biggest tool are taken in stride. Perhaps not even inadvertently, the big sexy scene climaxes with blows -- of violence, that is -- as Jamie Lee slams Arnold around (Cameron's requisite female machismo). Reportedly, people have found her striptease to be offensive, and I'm wondering who they are who watch a whole film of this fare and pick that out to object to, especially when there's the interrogation scene, a much more willful and less compromised exhibitionism justifying self-righteous jealousy. Is it not more significant that in the terms of this inflationary stimulation, scoring is preferably some spectacular impact or violent eruption, or best of all, an explosion? It's like the old joke about life and baseball: sex is a good metaphor for violence. Presumptions about scoring, hitting, defeating an opponent in an ordeal-style showdown while delivering the killer quip (popping off?) seem to be related to sex by way of something more general to them all: the notion of achievement, of a kind of proprietary efficiency, that underwrites the sense of results from any activity. [8/94]
Seven Samurai (1954). Credits. This is the definitive hero action adventure, an archetype for any culture, so it's little wonder it gave rise to The Magnificent Seven. How it's really epic is in the way it draws out the situation, it's social breadth. Like the samurai themselves who make a map of the village to plan their defense of it, the film covers the interaction in numerous convolutions: between and among villagers, the samurai, even city denizens. The benevolence, nobility and ability of the heroes is contextualized, and though not directly debunked, dramatically qualified. It's a social portrait of feudal society and an adventure drama, without those ever seeming exclusive or distinct. The Toshiro Mifune character is an important device, between farmer and samurai, a kind of cross-section of all the characterization, commenting sometimes directly in lines, but always dramatically. It's one of the most amazing cases of the comic relief, a broad comic figure, disguising the tragic crux. The scene which reveals his origin is also the one which presents the savage symbiosis to its greatest extent, and it's only the middle of the film. Even after these revelations, the contract and the main action must still be carried out and this in itself is one of the great aspects of the film. You see how compromised everyone is, you get a statement of the entire social predicament, the parable made explicit, and then it goes on: what gives it epic proportion. If it were only a matter of this, of the dramaturgy, it would be great enough. But it's also directed magnificently, a model of narrative. Akira Kurosawa uses elision so that it is expansive, allusive, rather than simply convenient or constrictive. He sets up action so as to be discovered, not merely expected. The two cases in the early part, where the first samurai is encountered, then when the silent one has his duel, are presented from the vantage of bystanders. This is a cinematic vantage, too, visual and reportorial, establishing characters and anticipation before doing so with the plot or the dialogue. It's encounter and not merely explication. The scenic presentation points the plot forward, but it also gives the expansiveness of the whole, it directs you to that, the gesture to indicate the story's opening up on a bigger picture. There in the crowd watching the samurai shave his head are both Mifune and the young samurai. The main samurai even has an auspicious eye contact with Mifune. From the drums that start on the Toho logo, the music is great and there are themes and variations that always seem to add some sense to a scene as well as express it. An example is the music for the shots of the passing samurai in the city, which is strident and jostling and formalizes the presentational aspect while otherwise the position of the cut to the shots has been the only signification. And there's also a tinge of irony in it, a mock arrogance. The music is used well, which also means it's often not used, and it circumvents the problem of incidental and theme music in Western scores. [5/94]
Brief Encounter (1946). Credits. Somewhat pathetic inflection, a tearjerker and probably annoying for any resolutely unsympathetic disposition, nonetheless full of interesting dramatic and cinematic strokes. Best at expressing the mundane circumstances of the affair. Flashback structure is the intersection of these, allowing thought-perspective fluidity and also the presentation of the characters from objective and subjective positions, though the former is only minimal as an introductory frame. Great sequences of dissolve interpolation: the woman looking out the window of the train lapses into fantastic projection of the affair, with a triple overlay, since we transfer to and from her own reflection in the window, the passing countryside and the "scenes" of her imagination. At one point when she comes to in her surroundings, there is a splendid scrim or rear-projection dissolve, in which she at first appears in her armchair against the scene of her imagination, and this fades into the surroundings of the apartment. [3/94]
Island of Lost Souls (1933). Credits. Black and white works better for effect, especially compared to the color of more recent versions, in which the monster make-up looks all too costumey. The make-up and costumes in this old black and white are better shaded in, and even the sort of kinetic giddiness of its era translates into vague exotica, certainly a remoteness. But, also of its era, there is a production-line conception: the kind of minimal plot that comes from expeditiously generating the product from the idea, the milieu. There's a savory ham job typical of Charles Laughton. His is the kind of haminess that is delectable, not bad. He's not the frenectic madman of James Whale's Dr. Frankenstein, Colin Clive, but a composed deviant scientist who even makes a gentility of his endeavor, rather like a despotic nobleman or evil prince. Also there's Bela Lugosi, who is a less clever ham, but whose broad style works here for a crude ponderousness. Interesting document for female as exotica, here literally made "beast." Kathleen Burke is advertised and even listed in the credits as "The Panther Woman," the only way we really know what she was "made" from. Her figure, look and manner seem a remnant of the silent era, and the Victorian sensational exotic. She's dark, with wide, tapering eyes, with the sort of indistinct, abstract ethnicity that's supposed to stand for exotic in general. She's supposed to have been made from a beast, but, conspicuously less conspicous than the other beast-people, she's really tailored as attractive female object. Her character doesn't figure as prominently as is promised, another quirk of this kind of plotting that wants to have lots of features to sell, even when it has slighted them. [3/94]
Rain Man (1988). Credits. Dustin Hoffmann takes his turn in the now requisite tour de force performance of a handicapped person. He nonetheless gives a good performance, though it may not be all that challenging, since so much of the character is in the repetition of the script. When he explodes, is pushed to sudden fits of terror, he's quite convincing. This is a competent narrative, for the most part, though it suffers from an expository extravagance, repetitive in its own right, due to narrative compression. The scenes at the beginning, with Tom Cruise trying to cinch the deal, have that sort of over-awed delivery that comes from movie makers really getting into it, trumping it up with rapid fire lines and editing, often as if they think something short wouldn't suffice to get the point across. It's a kind of hyperbolic evocation that seems to have grown from suspense movies and thrillers into the general currency, especially for anything that's supposed to be big and serious and pressured. Psycho-theatrical revelation comes in later when hot water prompts a manifestation from Hoffmann. Again, though this certainly isn't peculiar to films but is in the culture at large, it's as if the bonding of the two and the becoming human of Cruise wouldn't suffice if there weren't some Oedipal drama or submerged personal history to it. There is a nice interplay between Cruise and Hoffmann. For Cruise, it's a juicy character, since he gets to play something a bit more critically devised. His character has almost no patience with Hoffmann's, having kneejerk reactions to him and telling him to stop acting like an idiot, stubbornly resistant to any sympathetic response, or to even considering that it might be something other than willfulness that a person doesn't just act accordingly. The scene near the end with the custody conference also is commendable for trying to portray the defensiveness of Cruise, his nervousness and prolepsis. But this scene too suffers from the director's heavy foot. [3/94]
Coup de torchon (1981). Credits. Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280, which for some reason is 1275 ames in French (meaning what's left after the number of people who are killed?), is reset in North Africa, apparently on the eve of WWII. Much of the plodding, pulpish aspects of the book are pruned, particularly the entire explication of the marriage. At the end, the trailing off into dementia is presented with much the same results. A protrusion of tragic symbolism becomes less heavy-handed than in the book, since here it is more like milking a joke. The framing shots of the main character apparently pondering picking off a group of black children may be somewhat confusing to those unfamiliar with the book, but they actually serve here to clarify the messaniac duty idea of the character. The change of locale has some clever social implications. The Catholic church certainly serves well in this context, and the writers have added their own sarcastic comments by having a dialogue between the cop and the priest take place while the latter nails a replica of Jesus to a cross, then again at the funeral when the wife asks the priest if another piece of statuary is gold. Lingering hand-held camera, similar to Herzog. This and the narrative ellipsis and editing give the film an unceremonious to-and-fro style that expresses the openness of the location -- arid expanse and the way houses are open to it -- and the languorous detachment of the people. The best segment is from when the cop goes to another town to consult with officers there to the moment at which he turns the screw on the same after framing him nicely. Philippe Noiret is a great stroke as the lumpen sheriff, a dissembling bum like a W.C. Fields character with an evil twist. [3/94]
So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993). Credits. Mike Myers's mugging and asides seem misplaced from his Wayne character, as if they had to tow that aspect of Myers into this movie even though there is no other frame for it. His reflective sense keeps getting pulled back into the story, like just another lovable feature of this guy. When an establishing shot precedes an entrance into the woman's apartment, the movie really announces the shabby grandeur of romantic comedy narrative and then there is a joke delivered by Myers about the very set, which is then as quickly washed in with all the other humor that is set-piece for the evening. Similarly, Myers's buddy, who is an undercover cop, makes reflexive with his boss (Alan Arkin), by telling him that he wants to be yelled at the way the captain yells at Starsky and Hutch. Later, the irony is undercut precisely because they have to break down and tell us they were playing. Self-reflective irony is as packageable as anything else. Predictable plot with another oddball indulgence by Amanda Plummer. In an otherwise bland pallet, there is a nice use of wipes, such as one that moves with a streetcar. [3/94]
Richard III (1956). Credits. Excellently acted version of the villain play. The production is somewhat too theatrical, in the sense that it looks too much like a movie sound stage, but there are some interesting details and lots of shots where Laurence Olivier gets a nice dark, watery quality to help tone down the technicolor. Interesting for a demonstration of film-acting's effect on Shakespeare (along with Hamlet and Henry V), particularly good in this case where the character of Richard, infamous for sinister overacting, gets a toning down, becomes shrewder. Olivier's almost blasé style, his phrasing, and his more select way of biting in to the lines, make Richard, both the character and the role, seem much more sophisticated (although he too can't resist keying up on the "my kingdom for a horse" lines). Ralph Richardson is great, here, in the same way. The direction is clever in sneaky little cinematic ways, opening the mise en scene up depth of field. There are several shots in which background action is framed by foreground, and this is worked into the first-person device also: Richard speaks to the camera and often indicates action going on in the distance, as through a window in one scene. The sense of perspective is marvelously heightened by this. In one scene in Clarence's cell in the tower, after he has told his dream to the keeper, there is a shot through the bars of the door, apparently framing off the scene nicely enough and punctuating it with the fact of Clarence's confinement. The camera draws back to reveal the shadow of a head, in turn now framing the window-hole of the door. This proves to be Richard, as we may well have surmised. It also links with a whole series of shots of shadows throughout the film, a motif for intrigue, even an obvious metaphor nonetheless appropriate to Shakespeare. The battle finale is a disappointment, for this same reason. The theatrical look of all the previous makes it glaring in contrast, location as movie theatricality, and especially since the location looks like California or Spain or something, with great mountains in the distance and arid plains. It's drawn out in epic costume movie style, seeming dull and flat after the rest, and the music becomes jarring and suddenly too ceremonious, as if only the volume increases to suggest the suspense. Another jarring directorial intervention comes when the boy mentions Richard's shoulder: there is a sudden suspense-movie blast of music, thrusting the point at us, as Richard freezes and turns slowly around. It's as if Olivier thought it necessary to make this explicit. The triumphalist and melodramatic ending, which closes off the story with the happy refrain of self-assuring hindsight, locating it in the same perspective as the Henry V plays, is given an extra flourish by Olivier with the crown effect at the end. The image of the crown, held up in glorious refrain, punctuating the restoration of the monarchic line, is also an invocation of Richard's driving principle. The play shrewdly demonstrates the susceptibility of the rules of succession to manipulation. [3/94]
Peking Opera Blues (1986). Credits. Relentless suspense contrivances, at least interesting as an artifact of how kung fu choreography has insinuated itself into a total narrative conception, with every event broken down into minute suspense narrative. Characters are of course abstractions for pretext. It has the attempt at charm characteristic of the apparently new breed of action movies from Hong Kong (or at least the ones the West is now getting), but none of the charm of the Chinese Ghost Story movies. The acting is demonstrative, like teenagers play-acting, trying to signify things broadly and emphatically. Not quite as lushly heavy and ambitious as John Woo movies, but snatches of sentimentality with gooey electronic pop music, as in the former, jolt in every so often. The editing is so dictated by action movie rhythm that the whole thing is broken down into rapid-fire, multi-angle diagramatics, and even when something else is established dramatically in one shot, it cuts off the next second. The hiding gimmick -- someone is always hiding from someone else, or some object has to be concealed -- raised to the raison d'etre of at least this example of the genre, becomes tiresome in any single sequence, let alone over the whole movie. [3/94]
Yellow Earth (1984). Credits. One of the earliest of the "fifth generation" films, Zhang Yimou was cinematographer, and this work seems closer to his than to director Chen Kaige's later work, like Farewell, My Concubine. A communist travels to remote northern China to collect folk songs, and stays with peasants. A young woman becomes enamored with the newcomer and his stories of the changes in way of life for the south since the revolution. There is a figurative working of the folk song content in the story. A style of recitative derivation is established at the early wedding ceremony with a local folk singer. Later the woman's thoughts are a voiceover song, as she is seen drawing water from the river. Sparse, establishment-shot composition throughout; scenes often built from simple variation of camera placement. Effective rhetorical use of shot repetition, either exactly or of different takes with same placement. This is also used narratively to set up expectation, anticipation, then to also add slight variation or incongruity. Good use of ellipsis throughout. When the daughter delivers water to the communist, her father and brother out plowing the land one day, the variation of shots suddenly shows her not there, and the father says, "she didn't even say goodbye." This juxtaposition also seems to match that of metaphor in the Chinese poetry and, in this context, the folk lyrics. Perhaps less programmatic or didactic, this and the ending seem to use ambiguity in a way that might have seemed profane according to the established directives. Great scene when sister flees by way of river and her brother sees her off -- intercutting of the two yelling back and forth meshes into water shot montage (reminiscent of Woman in the Dunes, among other things). The ending with the dragon ceremony and the communist arriving in mirage-like ambiguity (even lapping himself), the boy running against the crowd and the hat in the river plays various melodramatic resolutions against each other. The last shot, apparently the title, when a vertical pan ends on "yellow earth," repeats another great shot in the film when the moon is seen in an upward vertical pan dropping slowly down the frame. [3/94]
The Man in the White Suit (1951). Credits. Social comedy gem about a monk-like chemist who is onto a formula for an indestructible textile material and the havoc it wreaks with labor and management. The extrapolation gives it a fantastic angle, almost science-fiction, like The Invisible Man. The social, political register of the effects anchors the fantastic, keeping it from the kind of universalizing you get in science-fiction, while at the same time the fantastic and the farcical temper the political. The counterpoint scripting and dramaturgy, where ironies and apparent contradictions are ticked off like a chain reaction, anticipates the dislodgic of Monty Python, but really shows that to be well in a tradition of circumspect parody. Example: Gough, as young industrialist who, together with the leaders of the textile industry, is holding the inventor against his will while trying to get control of the formula in order to suppress it, reacts defensively to news of a worker strike demanding the material not be produced: "What do they think we can do, we don't control the thing." On the broader scale, there is the irony of labor and capital arguing the same point but remaining mutually suspicious. The plot is heavily streamlined, pared down to the line of action and environs, and the details of "daily life" are caught only in relation, but cleverly so at that. It's so contained as to seem claustrophobically tied into the working world, extraordinary though the circumstances might be, and this is actually a provocative contrivance, analogizing the absorption of capitalist, scientist and worker together with the causality of the market, like a reflection of spending your free time talking shop. There's an obliqueness to the direction, sometimes making the thing rather rushed, but the cumulative effect is of a deft detachment, although not the same as, for example, Local Hero, or Le Million. The white suit itself is done with some minimal reverse effects, effective all the same: it's even reflectively figural, especially for black and white film, since it plays on contrast and reversal of relations. Nice sound effects for the contraption are worked into the musical score. [2/94]
Jurassic Park (1993). Credits. Hyperturd.
[This is a snipe, as indicated by the ⊕ symbol in the index. It means one shot: making the shortest possible work of dispatching with something, a cut that also says it doesn't deserve more time. To be fair -- which is not the rules of the game, something the movie plays by no less than any esteem of it -- here's the longer:]
The Tyrannosaurus Rex attack sequence is great, among other things the height of computer graphics work that most movies after would not care to live up to. This is primarily for the shrewdness of Spielberg in using a rainy night to cover for all the effects, blend them in, whether the giant puppet machines or the CG. The counterexample is right here, in the same movie: the first sight of the sauropods in daylight shows how vaporous CG is, how parade balloon-like they look. Acceptance of this aspect of CG goes for the movie as a whole, as for everything about Spielberg's part in this technocratic credulity for everything, in movies and out: inflationary excess, a certain kind of more of less, passing for any other kind of quality. Whatever volume and weight Spielberg is able to suggest for the T-Rex, with cleverness about the faults of the effects as well as subtlety of the broader sense of effect -- contrast of stillness before action, small before large as the ripples of water in a glass, sound before sight, and then editing in the action that follows -- is part of a package of such awful, rank, pandering teleological family crap. If you want to know just how much crap they're feeding you, check out the piles of dinosaur shit. Even that's inflated, thus the snipe remark. Jurassic Park isn't just a movie version of selling out science. It's a major event of science selling out.
The Story of Qiu Ju (1992). Credits. A back formation of neorealism that seems to sophisticate it, to give it a finer grain. Much here to indicate the possible misreading the West is so ready to give Chinese "art," simplistically consigning it to dissidence. After the West has managed to glamorize this "new wave" of Chinese films and what it too readily takes for crypto-commentary, here is an affectionate portrait of the workings of the communist bureaucracy on the everyday level. A woman seeks an apology from her village chief after he kicks her husband in the testicles, which, in a grand indirection, is the displaced object of the whole chain of events. She tries to follow procedure to lodge the complaint and has to climb the hierarchy, traveling each time to a farther and larger community. The formal progression is played to comic effect, but it also provides for an excursion of "common" life in a contemporary China. Hidden camera was used to film interviews with unwitting actors: in one scene a young couple comes to register for marriage and the camera documents the teasing to which they are submitted by the "official" (who is an actor) and their humble embarrassment. The contrast of the parable structure with the documentary and naturalistic material, of peasant with big city lifestyles, and of ordinary with official procedures is a deft and wry elaboration. Even Gong Li's performance, which is well-timed seeing her recent glamorization in the Western press (she made People Magazine's list of most beautiful people), though it could've been a showcase wallowing, is involved and deliberate without being hammy, and well couched in the oblique comic tone of the whole. Gong Li is introduced in the opening shot: a long shot of a street packed with people walking toward the camera from which, after some time, she appears, pushing a man in a cart. This shot alone is marvelous, a clever mise en scene piece and a nice introduction of the main character, a compact expression for the narrative "focus," for the drawing of main characters out of the crowd, out of the flow or fabric of the social body. Throughout the film, the characters stand at angles to each other when they speak, without looking at each other, often staring off or looking at the ground, sometimes leaving long pauses before they respond. The farcical cast of the work makes it even shrewder than some of the Italian neorealist works it suggests and also makes for a sharper contrast when the more serious implications occur. When the sisters arrive in the big city they are lost and helpless, and also targets. After learning that they may be too conspicuous as peasants, they try to blend in by buying a couple of jackets and wearing them over their clothes. This and the drama that ensues when they lose each other is similar to Bicycle Thieves. Qiu Ju seems to appeal to another realism, as if to recollect other rhetorical aspects to trope a perhaps too-codified solemn realism, presuming of course that there is any change being played out here in the Chinese situation at large or in the more limited context of film production. The systemic commentary here is not wholesale condemnation. It's a parable of good intentions leading to bad results, but it no more ushers an encompassing critique of communism than The Philadelphia Story does of capitalism or democracy. Just as telling as the Chinese government's reaction to the variations or deviations in these "fifth generation" films, is the West's willingness to see these as political allegories, or crypto-critiques of what is taken to be an undesirable government, when, that is, Westerners read a more Western aesthetic style and then seek out political meanings in a plot that doesn't have them overtly. [4/93]
Howards End (1992). Credits. The beginning and ending are sloppy movie drama and the production and costume design reach a grandeur for which there's no comparison. It's movie as a design show for spanking new period stuff. Despite the over-shimmer, the production research was attentive to differences not only of class, but of disposition within class, which is also the strong point of the whole film. The contrast of the Emma Thompson family's progressivism and the Anthony Hopkins's family's stately conservatism gives the movie it's best material and this is what the movie brings off best. [3/93]
Aladdin (1992). Credits. Of course there's the multi-color-washing of the original tales and their ethnicity (not merely Arab, by the way, but Jewish and Christian, too, since the tales involve an Arab cosmopolitanism even in earthy humor), an absurd '90s version of the earlier Disney white-washing (or Nordifying) which is no less ideological for being more crudely financial in calculation. More atrocious is the aesthetic effects all this tailoring produces: the hyperkinetic visual plan of arcade games, disgusting adult pop hits making the vicarious infantilism blatant, and then the horribly cynical stroke of cute-animal sidekicks, the pitch to the stable toddler audience that's like shaking a rattle to keep them distracted through the "story," not to mention hook them on the products. Despite the more traditional ideological problems of the scare-tale of Pinocchio, that film is the pinnacle of Disney animation and, by the way, song and music writing, from which the current Eisner-led Disney films are the abysmal fall. This is family junk-bonding. [2/93]
Malcolm X (1992). Credits. The importance of Malcolm X is supposedly measurable in film running time, but so much of that is spent on a dance sequence. I don't suppose I should be the person to speculate on what Malcolm X would have thought of the relative importance of such a dance in his life. After all, apart from the racial jurisdiction for such comments, Spike Lee among blacks feels duly anointed as having the stature most worthy to be weighed with that of the subject. In this same matter of proportion of feature length to lifetime, there's also the problem of the minutes leading up to Malcolm X's death, the ominous "real" time being greatly disproportionate in the film, and all that played with so much teleological pregnancy that it produces the bizarre implication of a kind of human sacrifice, or martyrdom, as if Malcolm X's death were a condition of his being revered (which, by the way, may not be the same thing as actually listening to what he said). Despite all of this, Denzel Washington does a great job of getting the intonation and the mannerisms of Malcolm X, and acting the part besides. He "acts" Malcolm X, all the resemblance coming from that. [12/92]
Badlands (1973). Credits. Although Bonnie and Clyde covered the self-consciousness of outlaw lore (Bonnie's manipulation of notoriety), and although the fugitive couple already had a long line in American film, going back at least to Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once, Badlands expands the story of an outlaw couple into one of the shrewdest portraits of romanticism in general. The account is at once more close, claustrophobically empathetic, and generalized. It's plotted so that the crime is almost incidental, creeps up. This is also part of its astute depiction of a rural American deadpan, a laconic manner even and especially in the face of drastic events. It captures this salty, cruel matter-of-factness, even impassiveness, like no other film I know. It works as a black comedy, certainly has that sort of force and affective contrast, but it's hard to use that as defining. Malick uses an elliptical narrative, lifts the montage and voice-over to the general plan, generalizes lapse. It's an indirect narrative, something removed, or even suspended, at least by conventional narrative standards. But this suspension is neither strictly realistic nor formalistic. It's actually more a narrative, more narrative than what really amounts to realist drama in predominant film convention. It works as an account, a story being told, Sissy Spacek's voice-over the narrative account of the character Holly. Malick leaves aside the literal sense of depicting the account: the pictures don't just illustrate the words, or the words explain the pictures. He compiles all this as material in a broader narrative way, an associative, even dreamlike way. He does with fiction what Christopher Marker or Trinh Min-Hah do with documentary. That he's being also more lyrical and more dramatic does not amount to any less a document, and it has the effect of implicating the empathetic involvement with the imagination of the characters, as is made most conspicuous in the segment where Holly speaks of the pictures in the stereopticon that we look at. The beauty of the film is thus counterpoised, uncanny, since it accompanies not only the killing and the loopy candor (the way Holly tells the various victims or even narrates her inopportune perceptions), but also the romanticizing of the characters. Malick's touch for this is consistent, whole: the memory-like evocation and obliqueness, the elliptical, assemblage pictorial aspect of the whole, and in instances or details, such as the burning house, the shot of two little boys under a street light, a llama in the woods and Spacek's amazed reaction without further comment. The realist point the film does make by virtue of its elliptical form is the aimlessness and drifting of these characters. Martin Sheen and Spacek are also instrumental in this, playing them listless, mundanely vague. Sheen is perfect as Kit, giving him all the right physical mannerisms, and the whole range of character, the deadpan, but also the abruptness, the weird and hokey exuberance, and even the smarm. Malick's keenness was also in making Kit scary by the contrast of his character, not a gangster or film villain, but a banal, even laughable fellow that just as suddenly and impassively pulls the trigger. For this reason, as well as the whole ironic portrait of romanticism, Badlands is a completely different creature from the host of fugitive couple movies of the last ten years or so, many of which cite it and pay homage to it as part of their hipness. [2/98]
Batman Returns (1992). Credits. Comic opera, or at least a kind of operatic camp conception. Despite all the obvious Goth dressing -- and the sense of "goth" by the 1990s is more of what "gothic" was, say in the 1890s, including as suburban bourgeois, than Batman with Gotham City -- it's more as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that the comic book fare is given its most interesting movie rendition to this point. Just as Edward Scissorhands brought fable figure to what was unbridled manic outré in Beetlejuice, the iconic comic book, the villains no less than Batman, gives Burton lines to color in. Burton needs a foil, just as here he also provides one. The topsy-turvy of the Batman iconic, where good takes on the aspect of night and darkness, and evil invests (literally, cf. etymology) the guise of the light-hearted -- clowns, penguins and cats (though the latter offers ambiguity in this cross-wiring) -- is a readymade for Burton, and for him to give it a tone more lurid than the 60s TV series camp, though fortunately not taking it ultimately more seriously, even less so than his previous Batman. This is the first movie that reveals the pattern of Burton's Christmas fixation, not only because it was after Scissorhands, but the way this symbol subversion was like that of Batman. This sublimated subversion of Christmas -- a fixation in which the symbolic revenge is all too predicated on what it acts like it's overcoming, and its skew is after all quaint; and, as with the trajectory of his work in general into Disneydom, Burton makes it palatable all over again, repackaging -- would have its explicit statement in The Nightmare Before Christmas. There's still a lot of schlock, but this may be the one work of Burton's that's ambiguous enough whether it's actually appropriate, in some batty way. [6/19/92] [8/31/92]
The Shining (1980). Credits.
Hokey aspects of the Stephen King novel are not eliminated, but the treatment makes this exceptional to all other King-based films. It's Kubrick, of course. Spacy. Not only in the sense of loopy, but it seems to be about topography, as well, a topomania or agoraphobia. Kubrick's iciness, the alienation tactic, goes in two directions here, the extremes placed together in scenes with Jack Nicholson and his "imaginary" hotel staff buddies: they are blank with unchanging expressions, while Nicholson does this weird parodic mugging. But there's also a shrewdness to it, and what's interesting is the way that horror movie fans seem particularly annoyed by this film. Kubrick's made a kind of Brechtian horror film, and perhaps the horror for those who want their conventions is that he's violated them. It's parodic and horrific at once. It's not the neat countereffect of Dr. Strangelove, but it does something similar. Nicholson's Jack Torrance, because of the sarcasm and giddy overacting, is never grave enough to seem superhuman. There's no towering monstrous mystique to him, like Dracula, or those indestructible killers in hockey masks. At the same time, his humanness, even his camp, is strangely pitched, oblique. Herzog achieved this best for horror in Nosferatu, even using a kind of comic pathetic to make things very creepy. Shelly Duvall is well cast, for the same reasons, and Danny Lloyd, the child, is good. In conventional horror films, there has to be a familiarity as a kind of base, into or onto which, the alien object is placed. Strangely, almost paradoxically, while the horror involves suspense, it also involves convention so much as to be predictable. The audience wants to be reassured even as it's being threatened. It's sublimation. To go for a kind of horror that's broader than that, if you make the frame itself alien, the familiar itself skewed, then you disturb the empathetic patterns. But Nicholson's character also has resonances. He's a type for men with a dismissive, sadistic humor. In the same way that Rosemary's Baby was a paranoid fantasy for a mother's fear for her child, The Shining serves for the mother and child's fear of the father. The supernatural is also used allegorically. When the Scatman Crothers character explains that places can shine just like people, it serves for the psychological investment in sites, with space, cabin fever, etc. The best moment for all this is the shot of Nicholson looking over the model of the hedge that cuts to an overhead shot of the real hedge, with Duvall and the boy as dots in the center of it. The grasping, Guignol aspect is still there: the recurring image of the blood pouring out of the elevator seems predicated on something else entirely, doesn't even make sense in the hokey logic of the story, it's just a big stunt image. [6/92]
[From notes made c. 1989.] The Shining is a dream meditation, nightmare though it would be, on space and haunting. It's a topography or topology that works in the rebus way of dreams via haunting or possession as the device, and that also through childhood or child-like formulations. Whether that's "there," in Stephen King's book, or even in Stanley Kubrick's rendition, though the latter certainly makes this more prominent, is actually the point in a whole other way, even by being beside it. What is "there," present, for the phenomenal, spirits, memory, trace, haunting, possession? For "shining," as the term is used in this story. What is "there" in a dream? It's hide-and-seek, and the way place, setting -- even location as both inside and outside the movie exegesis -- space and spacialization, have to do with this, and with the trade-off of persona, "spirit" or characterization. As we would say the place or setting was a character of its own, or a house is haunted, so too we have the sense of a person, and this figure even made express, as a place inhabited by others, haunted or possessed. And of course this can all work as figure for, with memory, and there are cues for that in the movie. All this is also "there" as both looming and unnoticed, like a watermark or the largest name on a map, that you can both see and not see. It's hidden in the broad daylight of Kubrick's arch and spacy elaboration (more a counterpoint or less conspicuous approach than King's). As if the attention paid to the event, the plot, what occurs in this setting, were strung on and jerked in by the perceptive detour of a snag, a hook.
The hotel is called Overlook, a term which says all that as well as the more obvious things in the plot, the physical situation of a mountain vantage and the charge of looking over that Jack Torrance has both as his job and as a parent. The topograhy is also both vista -- open wilderness, abandonment -- and confines, agoraphobia and claustrophobia, and even inside the hotel there is as much the isolation of expanse. The labyrinth outside the hotel, the hedge maze, figures this further and there is a segment where Kubrick makes this express, the inside/outside convolutions of space and the sort of sinister sense of overlooking, an almost godly view, but which is also the figurative sense of holding one thing in another simply by sight, thought, reference. (Someone once told me of a sort of vertigo she got, a creepy sense when looking at a map, to think of herself in all the real world as if contained or held there, encompassed by the reference.)
What has often been described as Kubrick's chill, his cold or clinical feeling or affectation, is here played out according to a triangulated pun: horror, winter and a representational mood (aesthetic distance, as it's referred in some cases or for some purposes, but that's not necessarily apt for other reasons). Everywhere where a Kubrick style weights/waits as an excess commanding no deserving attention, not or no longer deserving attention, it's suddenly necessary to follow. Against certain inclinations. The drawn-out pace, the anti-climax (measured, by the way, against conventional senses of what thrill, gripping, suspense are supposed to be), the tone that often seems ironic or satiric. Hide-and-seek, cold and warmth, exposure or enclosure (there are various incidents of locking out and locking in, trapping or trapped by), the other as threat or safety, good place and bad place, inside and outside, this topology trades off the values, like the Moebius strip of the maze, or the invagination of the body itself. Danny says there is a little boy that lives in his mouth.
A place and ghosts. Spectral transmissions. Haunting. The spirit of things. Is spirit space or extension or does it only inhabit absence? But not only against some superstitiousness, as if to give an explanation. Peopling. People the house, and people the people. The microcosm, the model "containing" its referent, the part engulfing the whole, is also the figure, analogy, for persona, people haunting people, and thus people being like the hotel, the building, the model. And vice versa: the hotel as person, persona. The "shining" as it's called, suggests also another aspect of the figuration of each and any of the characters. Oversight. Inhabiting. Natural and sur-natural habitats. A parable of (dis)placement.
Aliens (1986). Credits.
An extrapolation of the Alien material, it's also a demonstrative derivation, in a beefier, cheekier and hokier tone. It's Alien hyped, a sequel as cult ceremony of the original. Plot formula is reflexive of genetic and the singular monster becomes an alien horde. The good natured celebration unfolds at such a pace and with enough new wrinkles that it's engaging, despite it's preconception and strutting. Cameron makes the premise a vehicle for his own line about the ambivalence of technology (cf. The Terminator), emphatically falling on the side of its usefulness by the time of the climax. The drive of the plot manages to keep the hokum low, but in the last two confrontations it bursts out. The Ripley v. alien queen duel is a burlesque of the feminist subtext of the original, the notoriety of the strong woman protagonist which Alien shared with Halloween. But it's not really shrewd enough to be burlesque: it's carnivalesque. The bad mother is now the alien queen, instead of the computer system (just as the robot here turns out beneficial), and it boils down to her fight with good human surrogate mom Ripley and her high-tech prostheses. One of the few outright false notes in Alien was when the rocket blast didn't disintegrate the creature. More hard to get around in Aliens is the way Ripley survives the opening of the air lock. [2/95]
Also in Film / Script as a study.
Dances with Wolves (1990). Credits. Reward for multicultural jingoism: white poontang.
The Abyss (1989) Credits. Heavy pop. As if the movie already by its title didn't already cry out for metaphor, make a ploy for the "highest" stakes, with the trick of evaluating, elevating, by dropping the bottom out of. I want to read this film as the most perverse. An extravagant example that is shuddering, quaking. Causing and caused. But before we get to the heavy matters -- and I want to return to the game of weight played here, of gravity, to respond to the notion of falling in an abyss -- I'd better start on a more humble precipice. A safer edge. Something smaller (perhaps more dangerous, then, after all). This movie seeks new heights by new depths. It's a ploy, and it plows the greatest trenches, trenchantly. I want to risk these bad puns because there are other things to be said by them. The Abyss wants to risk death like no other, because as every other. One character dies and is revived as a tactic, a practical death. Another is able to risk the literal abyss by breathing a kind of man-made amniotic fluid (the reference to the womb is made express). I will not ignore the not-so-sub texts here, even if I don't refer to them directly. Another problem, supposedly less "deep." Back before the fall. By now James Cameron has established an anthropo-technological species ordeal where the military is always an extension of this technology, if not to have subsumed it or consumed it by this movie, which makes it a kind of pinnacle (by inversion again). You can reread all this through a more sarcastic sense of the thing's grandiosity: even at a level of manipulative plotting, story-formulaics, something analogous will have occurred, as would be suggested by the play of Aliens' premise to its "conception," mercenary or otherwise. Wouldn't it be more to the point to see the extra work framed as mercenary? Besides, as I get back to the problem, we will find it one of the formulation again.
At each moment of the ordeal, each little ordeal that makes up the Ordeal (what about this, too?) -- there is this problem: how to pass one's self (off); how to experience, to see experienced, one's life by one's death, which amount to the same. This problem is somewhat explicitly suggested (apparent contradiction) by a series of subjective shots throughout the film. Each of which comes at an apparently traumatic or confrontational moment. The film no more succeeds in its expression of this than it simply, unconsciously produces itself through such windows. It raises itself from one level of problems to another, but "problem" should not be taken here to mean strictly symptomatic. How does one survive one's self, one's own experience, even when, should I say especially, it is that limit case, the exemplary, the apotheosis of the near-death or death experience? Scanning the film in its completion, or assuming it as a whole, one can turn these incidents inside-out in their contextual arrogance. Don't forget that this is neither absolutely a conditioning of the film, a kind of psychological deepening, nor a cutting of the film (undercutting), a kind of smug or sneering ruse pulling the film's bottomloss metaphor out from under it. Something of both of these should be utilized, however, played out to no end, abyssmally. In the form of even a bad or poor abyss. (And how about that title for giving everyone the temptation of a bad review.) Yes, that too, but . . . One woman determines that her only chance of survival is a kind of literal sur-vival, living over: to let herself drown in near-freezing water so that she can be revived. To drown to death so that she will not drown to death! Why then do they play it out as they do? A question with rings. Already on the brink of death, of which abyss, the characters are pressed further to the brink. That wasn't quite the brink, yet, this is! As a group, but further as individuals for whose sake? But how can I live my death if I don't live to tell about it? To live to say, "I can't describe it." There's no way to tell. [1989]
All of this is the utmost seriousness as action adventure, entertainment. You have to get the full chiasmatic effect of that, each side carrying the other. The Abyss is really where all this came out first from Cameron, the precursor for Titanic and Avatar. If melodrama or popular entertainment are forms of the most basic -- not to say simplistic or perhaps juvenile -- wish fulfillment, then Cameron is taking the sort of technological aesthetic obsession via things like Alien -- obviously through his rendition of it in the sequel -- and making the ordeal into vicarious exposure therapy. Art, enterainment, representation, are already sublimation, ways we can deal with some things mentally that we can't deal with directly. The Abyss is dealing with perhaps the biggest one: life itself, death. But "dealing with." Precisely to handle this means in the seriousness of an action adventure, a melodrama, and also in the inevitable closing off of the allegorical, thus truly metaphysical implications, into the literality of plot, and by diegesis's only literal bottom of the ocean trench, and the way things occur there, the tone of it making as much the what.
The scenes at the end, the encounter, are Disney-like when the alien carries Ed Harris's character, as if flying, like Peter Pan, and like Close Encounters, and looking ahead to Avatar. And when the aliens show him montages to communicate, and they show his typing in the underwater (and submersed in breathing fluid) communication system, it's a foreshadowing of texting, but also in a way on the same kind of forestalling or selling short, on display, demonstration itself. Why not show when he saved her life? That was a segment the film went to great lengths for already, stretched out, doubled up on the doubling up on, tripled up on. The extension of each abyss, death itself, the "abyss" itself, therefore how literal, how figurative, and especially as each such limit is not the absolute limit but to be overcome. This is the outbidding on wish fulfilment, but even more assuredly presuming the limits, the mortality, the more airy and "deep" (even bad pun intended -- it's the title of the movie, fercrisakes) and spacy. This is where Cameron really goes off the deep end, even before Titanic and Avatar. But it's also important to note it, to take it seriously even as the cultural or social artefact in all its pretension and inflation, even as drippy. Re-view: second viewing, a re-viewing, both the extended, alternate edition and after time, make the movie not as showy in a convenient way, tone it, temper it, and also show how the photography is better in many respects than Cameron has paid attention to in other works. But precisely the length -- the lengths gone to -- to plot out: the marriage and working relationship, had to get that all together in the situation.
Batman (1989). Credits. A glossier kind of cheese. Between the frames v. between panels. Not so much Jack Nicholson as the Joker as the Joker as Jack Nicholson. What happens in translation is that the overwrought aspect of the pulpish comics becomes strutting. The film's title sequence is a cinematic detailing of an engraved Batman insignia, as if at once microscopic and aerial. What does this mean? Where would it occur? It would almost be enough to locate the issue with this configuration. The expressionist lushness of the sequence is a kind of filmboy virtuoso play, fetish and spectacle at once. The matter of scaling counts all that follows in the furrows that have been made literally into figuratively and vice versa. Trademarks, copyrights, signatures, crests, symbols, icons, insignia, masks, can all be counted into the unravelling of this materiality, itself phenomenal -- and this sort of pop spectacle makes that term a kind of double agent. Batman is a cipher counting in all directions, and against other cipher-positions, in a series or serialization in which the various (supposedly conflicting) claims, allegiances, pleas, of fans get intercut, montaged, celled or panelled, according to the trade-off between comics and cinematography. And the problem of citation and supplementarity can be seen as multiplied about like the number of images (supposedly separate) that it takes, first, to make a comicbook story, but then, as if an exponentialization, required to make a motion picture. (The problem of thinking "motion picture.")
A man who wears a costume suggesting bats bears on the costume an insignia that is the shape of or a representation of a bat. Already there in the whole Batman oeuvre, this takes on extra signification in the instance of this film, where the bat suit was such an issue because it was fake musculature, answered within the premise of the film by being intentionally designed as such by Batman as a kind of armor. Like Robocop and the scene in Aliens in which a dummy standing for an actor who stands for an android is ripped apart by a giant mechanized puppet standing for an imaginary real creature, the man who is his costume, who must fill the suit just as he's filling the role, both within and outside the frame of reference, extrapolates himself in a graphics, and gets imprinted both ways. It's a prosthetic iconic. By the time we get to Dick Tracy a year later, movie costume and make-up, to the extent of machinery with all the effects, is displacing the face of the star. The actor is getting "into" the role in a whole different degree, disappearing in the part to be recognized that way. Alter egos. The circuit of symbol and emblem also involves the icon and trademark.
This movie also involves how the larger fare of Batman inverts symbols or associations, too, something that suits Tim Burton's goth inversion of pop. The hero adopts the bat, otherwise a sinister or at least dark figure associated with evil (vampires and such), while his arch-villain, The Joker, subverts the form of the clown (although many people find clowns already sinister). The movie takes this further by tying up their origin stories, and Nicholson as the Joker then gets to spoof the dramatic conceit, and keep the inversions spinning: "So you made me, but I made you first. How childish." [7/89]
M (1931). Credits. A crime drama that makes a social cross-section, the point of view scanning and skipping, this is one of the best films of all. While there are relatively important characters, there are is no protagonist in the usual sense. Follows the Soviet films, in this respect. It's a precursor to High and Low and its drama and intrigue are the same: the anatomy of an investigation provides social parable, contrasts and allegorical flashes, without pat symbols or morals. The child murderer has already struck before and we are introduced to this by the tension of parents. The first shot is macabre humor, children counting each other with a rhyme about chopping someone up. The opening sequence is famous, the disappearance of another child shown indirectly, through the waiting mother, the empty dish on the dinner table, an abandoned ball and balloon. Two administrators talk on the telephone while the details of the investigation, of which they speak, are dramatized in montage fashion. This is the definitive film statement of the parallel of cops and crooks, in a broadly social way. Crooks gather to contend with the child murderer because the police investigation raids are hurting them. At their meeting, a wave of one speaker's hand is match-cut on another speaker, this one in a smoke-filled police conference. Lang cuts back and forth between the two meetings. The cops and criminals have a salty familiarity with each other, the know-how of habitués, and a kind of inevitability, despite which and sometimes because of which they throw big surprises at each other. The whole film has the same matter-of-fact tone. The pace is slow, patient, almost methodical like the investigation, but it builds up to its turns, climaxes, its strokes. The sense of this is also created by its lack of music. It opens and closes without fanfare, and during the story, you hear only the sounds. This includes the killer whistling ("Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt Suite, reportedly done by Fritz Lang himself), a sound which becomes important in the plot, but it's got an eerie presence to it against the lack of a score. There are Lang's obtuse character shots, here of policeman "Fatty" Lohman from floor level looking up at him in his chair (cf. the sudden shot from the side of the men in Metropolis). [3/89]
Moscow on the Hudson (1984). Credits. Director Paul Mazursky evokes the Capra myths of the 30s and 40s, but its Capra strained through sit-coms. You get the when-it-rains-it-pours plotting, how when a point needs to be made there's a convenient string of evidence for it. The film begins in the Soviet Union, with a placard perception of ills, the KGB, the long lines for toilet paper, etc. After these shots of meager existence in the U.S.S.R., a meager meagerness, a hurried, TV-compressed, expedient reference to meagerness, you get the fabulous juxtaposition of New York City. The contrast is almost humorous, the way it's pumped up. Williams is a saxophone player in a Russian circus band and loves American jazz. His friend, the circus clown, wants to defect when the troupe gets to NY, and Vladimir is even pressured by the KGB to be an informant and keep tabs on his friend. In New York, he is suddenly inspired by his friend's lack of fortitude, and it's Vladimir that ends up defecting. After an inexplicable dizzy spell, he finds himself with a bottomless well of courage and will power, he becomes psychologically invulnerable, not even threats to his beloved grandfather will sway him. In some ways the grandfather character is, despite the TV gimmickry, one of the more interesting characterizations of the film. When he gripes at the TV set, the typical Soviet programs with their kind of sham, it's a flush of the banal into the film. Otherwise it's a Capraesque gloss about simple folk, with all these boxed-in ethnic characters stewing in the melting pot, but reaching the conclusion that their problems here are all part of their glorious exodus and struggle for freedom, as opposed to their problems back home which were oppression. Then a lot of bad self-consciousness juts in at the end, where the film staggers through some kind of crescendo, trying to say something big about America, about the world, about people (not necessarily in that order), but all it really says is: folks are just folks but especially when they're in America. Williams gets worse as things get more serious, or at least emotional.
8 1/2 (1963). Credits. Fellini's supposed masterpiece about a director that can't make his next film is a textbook on aesthetic burnout, the problem of the buildup of both legitimate and ridiculous criticism for the modern artist, sophistication coming to a head, the mixture of art and reality, etc. I remember coming across the same issues in Voltaire's Candide, only that work was a huge parodic tirade against the notion that all is for good. In Fellini's film it seems to boil down to "life is a holiday," but that's not the idea the film is lambasting. It's an intellectual burlesque, more fun and wry than really profound. It's also silly, sometimes too self-conscious, indulgent (yes, that's the word, Woody Allen), and has lots of propped-up outs to save it from those criticisms. And then again, it's about all that. It's a sort of archetypal modern work that's easy to imagine and Fellini gets to have his cake and eat it to, right down to cheating death and tragedy. It's a burlesque of tragedy, but there's a graspiness to it, also. Fellini has Guido go on, of course, smudging the lines between reality and fantasy. It's the height of his film-making, though, in many ways, his lyrical camerawork, the fluid style, the sophistication of neo-realism, a sort of meta-realism, the free-ranging imagination. It's a cluster of great bits of style and well-made images: the opening sequence with the man on the string and the suffocation in the tunnel, the spa passages with the moving deep focus groups of people. [ ]
This is a movie that demands a certain accomplishment. To know where it falls short, you'd have to know how far it's gone, go that far with it, appreciate that much. Conversely, the more dismissive you are, the less you know what you're dismissing (but that's dismissive in general). In the early party scene, at night with the tables on the plaza and the dancing, where the Nino Rota score first comes in full force, there is a man at the table asking questions of Guido in English. It struck me that one question in particular could have been a set up for a bon mot, a witty rejoinder, something for Oscar Wilde to turn on itself. Guido doesn't even have this to offer. But just as with the intellectual writer who nags at Guido throughout, the film offers a contrast of the said and the seen -- it's a movie against its script, a remarkable case of playing this contrast or tension, rather than the illusion of harmony as with the dual recording system -- and Fellini offers a visual witicism, the image equivalent of bon mot. This movie is his best argument of that -- the culmination of his orchestrated movement style -- while it's also a very good representative of Fellini's non-argument, his abstention, his attempt to sidestep or displace, depending on how you look at it, but also both. Precisely the complication of ambiguity over the either/or type of question. It's the art of looks, and this does make it at once more superficial and perhaps expansive, as opposed to the profundity of a classical or conventional sense. The sense, perhaps, of words or speech, in the scheme of privileges there. Not that there isn't depth of focus, and Fellini expands the pallet in that way, too, particularly with movement, for the moving image. He's not exempt, of course, from the snags and paradoxes of language, writing, etc., and there is a current, a drift, a thrust of his work, as of neo-realism, that is for or implies a naive immediacy or relation to things, not to mention how that is presumed thematically, "deracination" and such. 8 1/2 may represent a crux for this, however, a kind of Hegelian moment where neo-realism, if not representing cinema itself, encounters itself, reflexivity, self-consciousness to the point where it must portray, even embrace, its own -- artifice. It's the Goedel incompleteness theorem of movies via Italian neo-realism. All the shots of Guido's glances, including the one that has become definitive for the movie and Marcello Mastroianni, the second time at the spa he looks off at an approaching woman, tilting his head and pushing his glasses down, thus play, implicate, involve the pun, the duplicity, the Mobius strip of "looks," and this does not preclude the most superficial sense, something Fellini, particularly with this movie after La Dolce vita, has been remarkably keen to entail. That parallel piece about a tabloid journalist precedes this one, Fellini bringing the social context of celebrity and notoriety into the self-examination. There is no less an observation of a banality in this grand arc as in details such as childhood whores, the inevitabiltiy of desire as well as shame and guilt, the nasty spats of morality and petty lying this produces. It's not fortuitous that the supposedly nobler pursuit of truth in art is linked to this matter, always more banal in its unfolding and anguish, if it shouldn't be overall (and Fellini is sharper with this tone, somehow both more glancing and bearing at once, as opposed to Antonioni, for example, who mostly sinks with the gravitas of this matter). [1/2/11]
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Credits. There are some essential problems with this film, but within its scope it's well done. The problems: The film isn't so tough and shocking after all when you read the book. It has toned down Kesey's view so much that, while the book manages a broader comment on society, the film seems confined to mental institutions. Kesey was writing about mental institutions in 1963, but the film still has to martyr McMurphy, so it's got shock treatment and lobotomies. The McMurphy character is cruder in the book, rougher, less conscious or shrewd than Nicholson comes off. The crux of the book is that McMurphy is as much manipulated by the system as manipulator. The film doesn't have the pinch of that, there's a safeness to it and to the McMurphy character. It's broad statement is a kind of easy thing about freedom, and McMurphy is a free spirit who's going to be physically constrained, they're just going to tie him down. The antiheroism is tamer (and of course more contradictory, since he's really a hero anyway). The acting in Cuckoo is the best part. This is the big break for a whole clan of actors, especially De Vito and Lloyd, and it's a great ensemble performance. It's efficient acting, serving the purposes of the film. But it may be the most unrestrained good imitation of the mentally ill in American cinema. The cast all seem one fabric, balanced between eccentric energy and matter of factness.
Children of the Corn (1984). Credits. Didn't they think what they'd be inviting with that title? Boy is it ever. Another Stephen King adaptation, which must be true to the spirit of the creator, because like every movie adapted from his work except The Shining, it has the same easy sensibility. But this one is directed so hackishly that it fails to do what the worst slasher movies can do, and that's make you jump. There is nothing really horrible or terrific or fantastic in this film, just polish of major release. Everything is simply dramatized the way movies are supposed to dramatize. The head of the demonic kid gang, Isaac, looks like a dwarf and has a miniature adult voice that sounds dwarfish rather than childish. But he's also got those Damien looks and there's been enough of that in three Omen movies, though apparently not for King and this director and a certain fandom. All the kids are supposed to be creepy just because their evil kids. You know, it's really scary to have a bunch of demonic children. Malachi's a pretty scary looking kid, with his big teeth bulging out his lips and his harsh eyes and red hair, but then he runs around yelling "seize her" and "outlander" and other pseudo-King's English hogwash and it's too stupid even to laugh at. The actor who plays Malachi belongs in some Satanic rocker movie, where he can be scary and stupid at once.
The Ruling Class (1972). Credits. More method in madness from the folks who brought you the '60s. This run-on play adapted for film is a long, slow spiral downward, supposedly into the depths of the profundity of the insane. Unfortunately, it's all too sane. It's an easy set-up and there's still some charm to it: the heir to an earldom is a classified loony who will show up the instituted lunacy of the ruling class. Peter O'Toole is the kind of actor to bring off this role. He's a tall, lanky, off-handed ham. He's a big skinny kid having fun pretending and he gets into the roles that way. There's one instant in this film when he's up on his cross (he thinks he's Christ) blessing everything, a mock sermon on the mount, and he makes the insanity delectable. You want to follow him around blessing the pygmies and giraffes and wallabies and the society of women engineers. "Enjoy yourselves, have sex," he says earlier, with his fey, giddy matter-of-factness. O'Toole keeps the parody from echoing its object too much, from sounding like bombastic nonconformity or cheeky flower talk. The film is directed comically early on, but becomes far too schematic later. In the end, there's a rationale slapped on everything. All the whimsy and figurative play gets straight-jacketed. The result of The Ruling Class is predictable, even if the route it takes is not. Jack the Ripper, for example, as the personality the insane Lord Gurney converts too from Jesus, has some interesting implications, but the deck is still stacked. When he speaks before the House of Lords as the new Earl of Gurney, we see through his eyes: the Lords are decaying corpses. This is intercut with a third-person shot of O'Toole, his reaction. It's heavy theatrically, especially since it's a pretty easy metaphor, but more importantly, what exactly do they think they're telling us? That Jack sees the light through his murky glass of insanity? And which persona? Jack the Ripper? And then, what is the light for us? This is hip symbolism, a hip image of the rotting establishment, but it doesn't jibe, it's tacked in. And how about those screams? First Jack, then his wife at the end. Just some blood-curdling for effect? Ruling Class fails just where King of Hearts does: there's too much method to its madness. You don't get an unhinged world here, madcap, as in Duck Soup, or Bunuel's surrealist parodies of saneness. You get middle-of-the-road madness, theatrical madness, an insanity bracketed by tastefulness or hipness, in whatever combination.
Dune (1984). Credits. High expectations from Lynch after Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, but this is unfortunately just a dramatization of the book. There's lots of Lynchian touches, hints of his nightmarish sense, times when he piles up images going from lyrical to viscous. But so much of Lynch's feel for texture is made to ring hollow by the pretentious, heavy-handed sci-fi material. Frank Herbert might be entertained by his imaginative variation, but all the interesting stuff gets ruined by the messianic crap -- as if we didn't have enough of it in our world. No matter how maligned or unhip Star Wars is, and even in spite of its own pretensions, its brand of cavalier space fantasy is the antidote to the pondering of Herbert or Arthur C. Clarke. Dune is loaded up with similar mock-historical detail, but with none of the charm, and much less laisez-faire for the cinematic (this despite the promise of Lynch). It's bookish detail, the story still too overworked. In trying to compact the whole novel, Lynch uses lots of hurry-up exposition, which only shows that he skips some stuff ripe with climactic possibility. At one point, I thought it would be better to strip off the dialogue and music tracks and leave only the other sound (sound being one of Lynch's strengths): a big illustration of the novel. Lynch uses lots of his affective montage, a stream of symbolic images for some kind of prophetic continuity. If he'd just gone all out that way, like Eraserhead, the film could be one big dissolve, a two-and-a-half hour movie trailer, that at least wouldn't let you down as narrative. Kyle MacLachlan as the hero/messiah is such a bland goody that when the baddies pop up, the Harkonens in their steamy, industrial world, you're hoping they will become the focus of the film. Lynch should have made the whole thing from their point of view: Geidi Prime is really his kind of world. It's a dank world with its own logic: some kind of creepy womanless planet that, of course, is more interesting for its texture, the way Darth Vader and so many villains are. When Sting, playing one of the Harkonen heirs, steps out of his steam bath later, on Arakis, and Kenneth McMillan, as the Baron Vladimir Harkonen, gleams and nearly licks his chops, there's another dimension never dreamed of in Darth Vader's world. You wonder what Feyd (Sting) has in store for mister blandy-two-shoes: maybe he'll literally eat him. McMillan has by far the most interesting character. He's a disgusting fat blob with boils on his face and he's infatuated with his own brand of evil. He chomps and scowls and spits when he talks. When the Harkonen hordes in their bulging black ships attack Arakis, they mop up the Atreides troops and by then you want it as much as expect it. The industrialized, rubber-suited honchos make the Atreides look that much more wooden. It's hard to tell just where all the blame for Dune goes. Lynch gets most of it because he wrote the script as well as directed. But it also has the De Laurentiis name on it, Dino and his daughter, and that's the stamp for lavish oddball flops. From King Kong to The Bounty, there's a similar sloshy but uninteresting aspect to the De Laurentiis films, despite the difference in casts and crews. Perhaps if there's not a direct causal link -- too much of a hand in his productions -- then there's a case for the producer as auteur. Dune may be more interesting than King Kong and Flash Gordon, but it racks up with them as big budget hack work.
Montenegro (1981). Credits. A bourgeois housewife living in Sweden takes a trip into lowlife paradise and returns home seemingly cured of her mid-life malaise, until a title pops on the screen with the punchline (followed by another to tell us it's based on real events). The movie is one long joke. The understatement takes you in at first. There are things like garden shears and knives floating around and turning up in incongruous places, and the surly Eastern European scene, a makeshift swank lounge Zanzi-Bar where fights break out and then they all start singing about fucking. The director applies a prim style which he can then subvert. The film has a sleepy coolness that works for its urban setting and for the mundaneness of the incongruities (like the knife in the head). In the airport, soft electronic bells signal flight departures and everything is ordered and peaceful: modern life isn't chaos, it's hypnotism. But there's a heaviness around the corners. There's a Christ theme lurking around and some "ooh-ah" shots that keep the film from being the smug joke it wants to be. When the woman tells the family about her encounters, she puffs up and helps make it even more outrageous. Her family doesn't believe her, the audience knows the truth, but in one instance during her report, we're still spoon-fed it. I wished we had seen the man tripping and falling on a bar of soap, if we have to be shown anything about him at all. There's an earlier scene when she does make love to the man and she blows up at him before they have torrid sex. The scene is punctuated with the old fireworks shot, then the next shot is a champagne bottle popping open, a thematic match cut to the husband playing around latently with his doctor. It's as if the director were afraid of the heaviness jumping up out of the understatement and tries to counter with pure silliness.
Repo Man (1984). Credits. It's a teenage wasteland movie, but it's got a sense of humor about itself and a pile-up storyline that doesn't pile up crap. It's almost the same story as Liquid Sky, but not pretentious. Repo is a slicker, less forced and artsy film, while the other preens on its radical chicness. Perhaps it's less complicated by putting the brackets around itself. The fantasy that has been given a place in these counterculture films is conscientiously hoakier here, and when the irradiated car takes off into the air with the one true believer at the wheel and Estevez along for the ride again, everything has fallen together neatly, like The Wizard of Oz in reverse. It's a fairy tale for grown up, jelled out kids. Estevez pokes his head out the window as the car zips over the skyline and says, "Wow, this is intense." It's just another joyride, like the one he had with Stanton earlier. It's a cornball ending in quote marks. (Again for contrast, Liquid Sky's ending with the flying saucer was an attempt to be meaningless and parodic of profundity that ended up being meaningless, but pretentious, grasping.)
Metropolis (1927). Credits. It's really a giddy movie. This piece of German expressionist design work doesn't seem to have stumbled upon anything profound, in fact, its big idea is that hand and mind must be mediated by heart, which gets mankind about as far in social development as the beehive. Lang's M is a far better social comment and much more exciting work. Metropolis is childish, but on that level it's still fascinating. There are some curious shots in this silent film, such as when the Master of the city questions one of his advisors about the paper found in workers' pockets. Lang shoots the two of them face forward, cuts to a title card, then has a shot from side of the two men, an abrupt view from the wings. It's jolting and has a clinical feel, a studious effect. The whole film is stark from the bare allegorical treatment. Expressionistic though it is, it has a gloomy, hollow, studio feel. It's claustrophobic, not tightly, oppressively so, but all the sleek barrenness makes you long for an exterior shot, and it encloses the characters in such a way that it works with the highly simplified story to create a pinched, cloudy world.
Alien (1979). Credits. Alien is a monster movie given a big-movie aura, a sweeping, panoramic cinematography and art direction. (The monster movie it so treats is It! The Terror from Beyond Space, of 1958.) Ridley Scott's direction keeps everything remote, preoccupied. The mute, undemonstrative plotting, with minimal, oblique dialogue, seems designed to avoid the expository excesses of science fiction and horror film tradition. Like Hitchcock's The Birds, it makes a virtue of presenting this imaginary premise without further trying to justify it, and Alien projects the same kind of zoological catastrophe into the potential of outer space, where it's technically not implausible. More importantly, this film is affecting. The style and tone and the very good acting by the whole cast make an imaginative outer space adventure, and also a horror film, regardless of plausibility. The monster is one of the most cleverly diabolical ever devised, symbolically playing on all the fears about infecting and rupturing and puncturing the body. It's terror from the inside and out. In contrast to the old gothic superstitions, played out in films of the 30s, and the atomic mutants and crypto-communist identity fears of the 50s sci-fi films, this monster is traced on a more sophisticated biology. The vampire, the atomic mutant and the bizarre alien biology have now gone through the more sophisticated knowledge of the mosquito, or insects and parasites in general, then extrapolated into the scientific netherworld of unexplored space. Our superstitions and fears are not alleviated by science, but refined. Superstitious projection reverses direction, from a mythic past, where once glimpsed creatures were dragons and sea monsters, and vampire bats were transmogrified humans, to an exuberant nightmare of the future, of creatures yet to be glimpsed, our modern biology giving the semblance of detail. The biological detail, plotted and designed as much as explained (and here the movie charts the evolution of visual devices in significance, or perhaps credibility, which is reflexive of film), makes for a Rocky of the human species, guts and determination against uber-animal. (See further comments here.)
Zelig (1983). Credits. Best formal exercise of Woody Allen playfulness, though by this film his melodramatic formula has become too pat, something even groping and evasive about it, especially because it keeps finishing off all the self-irony. Can one be grandiose about criticizing the ego's grandeur? It's still a good joke, even one over on someone as grandiose as Orson Welles, if you look at it that way. Was probably the kickoff for his whole essay period, the way his films became whims or fancies. And this one has that all up front, lifted out of the literality of a drama, it keeps Allen more iconic but makes him more pertinent. Symbolic, like jokes, of course, for Freud. And it's done with great formal sophistication, by Gordon Willis, the editor and the technicians, but with a nonchalance, a toss-off flair that's one of the good aspects of Allen compared to the rest of American movies.
Bedazzled (1967). Credits. The twist on the Faustian scheme, and the joke of the whole conception, is making the drama so grandly petty. This is, of course, still in the spirit of Goethe's work, which is a comedy, and a satire of broad scope. Here, the Faust counterpart is a fry cook in London and the devil is a sort of 20th Century merry trickster. Cook's satire is thus double-edged, the religious frame satirized as well. Cook is tall and deadpan and even his slight stiffness as an actor seems part of his satiric disdain. He floats around as some foil of the pop world, as when he "sings" in a proto-punk song, "I don't love you," "you fill me with inertia," and similar countersentiments. Even then the joke is that the turn is an immediate sensation. Moore is short and demonstrative, much more an actor, and he actually gets to show off more as he changes characters in his various "wishes." Directed by Stanley Donen, of Singin' in the Rain fame.
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Credits. Orson Welles's American version of The Rules of the Game, the American landowners being displaced by entrepreneurs. While not as shrewd overall in some respects as Renoir, Welles has put his thumbnail to an American high society of an earlier era, a turning of eras. He scrapes up the mother-son thing, a peculiar passion that can lead to ruthlessness, Tim Holt's insufferable brat gentleman psychologically tethered. The turn of the century cheeriness, the enthusiasm, is worked out nicely as a ruse in the beginning. The early scenes, with Welles narrating, set the stage cinematically, a montage of passing fashions with a reminscence narrative, avoiding the setpiece relegation of many Hollywood costume dramas. Even more of a gothic feel than in Citizen Kane. Welles has been described as pompous. But in these two films, his bluster is as apt as any talent or sophistication. There's a theatricallity, but it's still sharp and fluid -- it becomes showy and grasping in Touch of Evil and Mr. Arkadin. Pomposity has everything to do with his subjects, in Citizen Kane and again here in Ambersons. Welles's cinema isn't compressed, it's not railroaded the way his contemporary Hollywood pictures are. It's manipulated, showy, fast in it's own way, but also elaborated in so many other ways, the famous mise en scene and deep photography. It may be bloated, in a sense, but this manages to be appropriate, just as the sensationalism that could have led to a War of the Worlds broadcast is to the subjects of these films, to the American fabric of them. In some ways, Ambersons is both darker and more unassuming than Citizen Kane. The narrative itself is less complicated, at least with the flashback bravado. But Welles knows how to make any scene more complex without flashbacks, with his depth of field planning, and simply with the narrative arrangement so that it not only has its place in the progression but also turns the thematic screw tighter, or adds a layer to things. In the scene which reveals the death of the mother, we see the grandfather awaken to some commotion and arise, the camera pulls back, George (Holt) glides across, the camera pans with him, he is met by his aunt coming from the other direction and she stops him to say, "She loved you," or something like that, nonetheless indirect. It's not simply artsy or theatrical, or cinematic. Welles was certainly the developer and champion of the mise en scene that the Bazinists made of him. His shot construction throughout "Ambersons" is amazing, with either moving or stationary camera. Perhaps the greatest shot is that with George's face seemingly superimposed on the long-shot figure of Joseph Cotton, seen from above leaving the house. It's actually a shot through the upper story window, with Holt's face reflected. The big brat hangs ominously, iconically, a devil ghost over the whole town. The relationship between Holt's character and Agnes Moorehead's is also ingenious. Moorehead is great in the role. Their conversations are a version of that twisted family confidence, the gossip, probing, manipulating and misunderstanding.
My Dinner with André (1981). Credits. The idea was to restage a conversation at a dinner table and the trick is as much in when the film was made, when it came out. It's a relief from the clip-clip narratives of its day. Most of the time, there's more to the manner in which these two speak and respond than in what they're saying. They give the conversation a massaged kind of passion, a warmth and zeal scripted and worked into spontaneity, in place of spontaneity itself. But there's an innocent patness to it. You want not so much to be at the table listening as to join in with the desire to have this recording of the conversation with just these two people, more or less relevant, talking in just this way, etc. When I saw the film the second time I found myself following along and anticipating the fall of the words, their process and rhythm, as much as anything else. It's a contradiction, the formal one of posing something as (relatively) unposed, but it also folds into the conversation itself, what they talk about. Malle's tried to keep this naive touch (cf. Passolini and Ozu for the facing shots, similar to this, but Malle doesn't do that) but that means minimizing the verisimilitude as much as the stylization. He gives hints of a conversational progression, every now and then wandering off to the action of the room or converging the conversation on the action (as when Andre's talking about stuffing your face just as Wallace is putting a bite in his mouth). And there's a drama, as much for the object as for the portrait: if you add drama to a conversation you can also be demonstrating the way conversations have their drama. When Wally finally speaks I had my little cheer for him, because he gives banal counter to Andre, who goes on all the previous time about mystic experiences and merging theatre and life. Andre comes back at the end and dovetails with Wally eloquently. But like a parallax, you see this film flicker between the views: a merging of life and theatre, itself, or a wry formalist pun on the loftier notions that serves, the paradox being as good for the quotidian as for the superphenomenal, and as possible with the difference of art and life as with their fusion.
The Third Man (1949). Credits. One of those works when everything clicks, and the whole clicks along. It's a fun movie, worked out with wit, the delivery makes it clever, astute, even as more pat thinking peeps out in certain places. It cuts against the grain of Hollywood thrillers in which Nazis are the villains and hard-boiled, though sanitized Americans, the heroes. There's something of the same squalid us-and-them ideology at work, implied by Harry Lime's protection in the Russian zone along with lines like Joseph Cotton's "You used to believe in God" (although that can be chalked up to Cotton's character, as well). But it's the form that hooks you, this wry gallop of a movie. Reed has great flair and imagination in this project (though allegedly Welles gave a hand, and there's enough evidence of his influence). His use of the Dutch tilt is a predecessor of the sense of it in the Batman TV series: already Reed is getting a campy effect from it. But he also makes less campy, no less sure moves, involving even the tilt for instance when he drops the famous untypical zither music off the track for the last chase sequence in the sewers and picks up contrapuntal editing that Eisenstein himself would have been proud of. This sequence has a measure of confusion which is apt: there's not an attempt to plot out the chase. Cotton was a great choice for the dupe, his connection to Welles notwithstanding. He plays the big silly American, as attractive for his vigilante naiveté as he is pathetic. Welles is cast in the usual role, the genius-ham playing the pompous tragic character, here much more a real villain. The role does Welles as good or better than he does it. It tones him down, makes him subtler, less grandiose -- or adds more banal scheming to his grandiosity: the lines about the dots down there (from up in the Ferris wheel) and the Borgias in Italy and democracy in Swizerland. The latter famous line is much in the vein of the calculating drama of Welles, characters grandiose in his and their own conception, but it's given a slick, mean twist by the context of this two-bit, black market crook. Vali's character comes off most incongruous to the conception, as if her faithfulness and lovey-ness could be swallowed straight. Strangely, it's the scene between Holly and Lime that bears this out most: in the gondola when Lime draws her name in the heart and arrow on the foggy window -- a bizarre suggestion that seems to be too serious and sarcastic at once, and may have been some lurch, a half-baked effect, by the makers, whether Greene or Reed (or Welles?). Finally, however, it works out that playing the woman straight makes a comment on her, and in the final shot the more serious undertone breaks through. The film ends ingeniously, prefiguring many latter day works schooled in such ironies. It has a nice detective story tight ending, a marvelous trick-line resolution with the funeral (I imagine a variation on the adage about a gun on stage in the first act, substituting an open grave in the first reel). It's a joke-like symmetry following the tragic strokes of the sewer sequence. Then comes the final shot, which outstrips the tableau beauty of other Hollywood movies as it compromises their resolution. The detective story resolution to the Lime plot has turned out incidental, and the effects and questions spill over even as the ending is "formally" achieved. It's a predecessor for Chinatown. Chan Is Missing more explicitly addresses the detective story aspects and arrives at the same kind of ending, spiraling out when it's supposed to be closing; and The Player's undermining of the Hollywood rule of happy endings would have to count itself in the line of this.
All text of film comments ©[year noted in each] Greg Macon
