The Limey (1999). Credits. Steven Soderbergh does a Peckinpah imitation, inadvertently close to Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia in quality, unless that, too, was intended. All the flash-forwarding and cutaway overlapping can't make the script of Lem Dobbs less inane. I suppose they thought of the film as something more like Le Samouraï, but when their existential Limey has cutaways in which he's hugging people goodbye, the Mary Tyler Moore Show effect achieves something even worse than Alfredo Garcia. There's almost nothing to this movie but a conceit, a childish infatuation with a deliberate badass. [2/00]
Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace (1999). Credits. Universal smarm. More digital, more Disney. Clamorous pandering. In some ways, in general tone, it's better executed than Return of the Jedi, but it amounts to the same low. This film, however, reveals the crass extent of Lucas's formula. After all this time, he offers nothing but a fourth cookie-cutter installment. Mashing material into the same pattern as the previous three films would've been unimaginative, even if the material had not been. The pod race is the stupidest part of the movie, save the obvious Jar Jar Binks. The pod thingies themselves are absurd, only make sense as another specious reference to a movie, in this case Ben-Hur, as part of Lucas's conceit that in this way Star Wars is dignified as tapping into culture and myth. But the design of these pod things, and the scale of the race, the speed and action, are so hyperbolic there's no vantage, no grasp of them. You can't even get the satisfaction of them, the way, perhaps, you could with the fighter sequences in the earlier films or the hover-bike bit in Jedi. And the two-headed race announcer is the worst sort of injection of banality, sports and TV media a boorish gimmick, a kind of narrow-premise joke in which familiarity overwhelms the skew. You call this an escape? Star Wars betrays religion: little boys wishing they had special powers. [4/00]
Bowfinger(1999). Credits. Where do the people who make movies come from? Are they idiots? Would it take idiots to become the idiots who are successful at making idiot movies? Or is it the breaking into the movies that makes the movie people idiots? If you made a movie about a bunch of geeks and nerds and people with awful aspirations and delusions, you might get some laughs, and then you might provoke other reactions, make some people feel sorry. You might be mean-spirited or cheap, presuming humor only in disparagement of something you consider so obviously inferior. You might be really cruel and even exploitative to spend so much time holding up such people for amusement, let alone scorn. Despite whatever value there would be in offering a testimony to such people, an exhibition of them might not be worth it. If, however, these same geeks and nerds and people with awful aspirations and delusions were "successful," if they had extravagant wealth at their disposal and lorded it over an unlimited supply of geek wannabes, presuming, as such and because of such, superiority, then these geeks would be much easier to hold in contempt. They'd be worthy of contempt. Now, here's the most difficult question in all of this: which would you identify with? Steve Martin's Bowfinger -- his script which isn't very well directed by Frank Oz -- is playful and light-hearted and has some clever bits and is even shrewd in some ways about Hollywood and its sycophants, and there's a good double role for Eddie Murphy, despite its TV series conception and the easy value it gives Murphy to play a freaked-out megastar and his freakily humble brother. But there's something curiously even more pathetic than portraying pathetic people in the way this film gets good-natured about them and has them succeed. There's a pandering smell to it, a mollifying one, showing those funny goofy people who lack self-awareness to actually be shrewd con artists and then celebrating their success. It's like the movie is saying, don't you good movie watchers out there worry, nerds, too, can make it in Hollywood -- and that's a happy ending! How, then, would such goofy deluded nerds, who are also regular wonderful people, be different from the successful, smart-ass Hollywood exec played by Robert Downey, Jr., or, even more, the parasitic guru played by Terence Stamp? [3/00]
Sherman's March (1983). Credits. Have you ever been in a situation where you thought, "If I wrote down what these people are saying and presented it as a script, no one would believe it?" The audacity of Ross McElwee was to carry his camera around and actually shoot what people were saying. He didn't even hide the camera. Familiars of his were either so used to seeing him with a camera or just that immodest. A few times his interlocutors comment about the camera, and one even says that McElwee's persistence in filming is cruel, but none of this apparently made them feel less shy about what they were saying. In a way, McElwee has trumped Albert Brooks's Real Life: the same comedy about the filmmaker's proclivities interfering with his project really is the film, the document. The film confirms in an inverse way the point of Real Life, the pretense of objectivity: banality is captured by talking to the camera, not by trying to hide it. The demonstration of this is what, relative to the point of Real Life, seems so enlightening. It's very difficult to portray, to act out, this kind of banality, and when a homespun model type spouts her "philosophy," that particular pitch of weirdness to her inanity is from those private, indulgent dialogues, the ones so secret, yet so common and familiar, so momentous and so mundane. There's something pathetically profound about the indulgence the whole film is, McElwee's awareness of his compulsion no less compulsive. And that goes even if the whole thing is a put-on, if McElwee is as droll and conniving as he often seems. But a person who can find it in him to spend so much time documenting all this doesn't strike you as outside it. The camera, here, is not a guarantee of remoteness. [3/00]
All About My Mother (1999). Credits. All About Eve + A Streetcar Named Desire = City Lights of Cabiria. [1/30/00]
American Beauty (1999). Credits. Adult juvenilia. From the start, this film is pat commentary, a prefab criticism about prefab life. There's a scene of the family around the dinner table and the conclusions are drawn. Pauline Kael said that she resented movies that showed families praying around the table, because this was a stamp of their moral value. Here, you have the same thing in a kind of inverse way, a currency of hip disaffection, a shorthand for all the assumptions we're supposed to share with the film-makers about suburbia, a cliché dissension. The film simply asserts that suburban life is humdrum and nowhere and unfulfilling, it doesn't demonstrate it. What it does dramatize, beginning from those assertions, is a kind of teen boy fantasy escape from adulthood version of adulthood, complete with absurd rhetorical-effect contradictions and groping tragic aspirations. The terms are even confused and contradictory, as for example, when we are shown the successful, well-cropped homosexual couple in the rolling compass of suburbia shot. Are the gay men as empty and dreary in this suburbia? Or are we just supposed to know and assume that straight life is dreary in suburbia but that we're cool and accepting of, like, you know, alternative lifestyles? This is supposed to jive with the big dramatic mechanism of the plot, the climax, but that's all a McGuffin in only the sensational sense, a pretense of tragedy. The death, here, too, is in the manner of a very common scheme in American movies, whereby something only seems significant, "dramatic," if death is involved, usually as a consequence, and that death usually must be murder. In the case of this movie, the death curiously, and somewhat despicably, has the effect of a triumph, of ennobling this man while his wife is being castigated for her aspirations -- she's implicated in the death symbolically, even if inadvertently, by the machinations of the plot, which aren't very deceptive -- very much like Dangerous Liaisons. Thus the death makes the film only more melodramatic, not tragic. And it's juvenile in its melodrama, with obstacles convenient for the ends desired. When the square dad decides to drop out of his totally uncool career life, he's had all this useful information with which to bribe his employers into a comfortable separation package. His fulfillment is in his lust for a high school cheerleader, which provides the film with its artsy flourish special effects. He buys his high school dream car, lifts weights in the garage, has his moments of pure giddy joy smoking pot with a teen, and admonishes his wife to return to those days of just hanging out. All of which amounts really to regression. Aren't those the trappings of, well, suburbia? The pot-smoking scene, regardless of how well it's done, is one of those belated revelations that American movies are always giving us, like Meg Ryan's fake orgasm in the deli, or transexuals in The Crying Game, discovery as fad. As if there aren't people all over the place who still smoke pot and are parents and have stressful, dreary, humdrum lives. The silliest conceit of all in the film is the neighbor family, the sensitive, cool boy with the reactionary dad and the poor crazy mom. This is also what produces the most absurd, whimsical contradictions. Pains are made to stipulate the severity of the father, his military sense of discipline, his dictatorial watch of his son. But the kid has a room full of expensive video equipment, a contradiction in its own right, which he got selling drugs he keeps in his room and telling his father he gets the money from various jobs, say, as a waiter. Then, at one point, as a stupid exposition for a plan to run away, the boy says, "I have $40,000." So why did he bother living with the dad? In an early scene, the father is alarmed at the doorbell, but later watches and says nothing as his son takes the neighbor man into the house. That the son would even be able to lock the door to his room is contradictory. [11/99]
The Black Stallion (1979). Credits. A fanciful children's story is executed so beautifully, and without pandering to or tailoring for children, that some of its dramatic moments are almost incongruously impressive, even frightening for adults, let alone children, and the biggest dip into melodrama is a mesmerizing cinematic sequence. For example, this story about a boy who befriends a wild Arabian stallion and then rides it in a race also has, incidentally and without ado, an extraordinary shipwreck sequence. Director Ballard, who prior to this had made a short film about pigs, shoots animals and humans alike with the kind of fascination of wildlife photography, and the whole thing is done in a similar remote way. While the plot is made more oblique, the sense of watching is heightened. The centerpiece of this approach is the sequence of the boy and the horse on the island. You could say that it has all the virtues of a silent film, but like the silent films so well shot and directed, you don't really think of them as silent. There's plenty of sound, used well also -- Ballard even masks the image in favor of sound at times, including one running sequence where the trade-off helps create suspense -- and on top of that a great musical score by Carmine Coppola. When the characters speak, there's an instant of surprise because you'd already been surprised at not hearing so much dialogue, but as they continue, they don't disrupt or alter the tone of the film. Coppola's score is an assortment, including, for example, Arabic and bluegrass influences, but the whole has a similar light touch, elliptical, using space the way the filmed story does. What's fascinating, too, is Ballard and Deschanel's use of space, distance and position, in the shooting. Ballard likes to frame tight on fairly long shots, so that something is out of the frame, usually part of the horse. He does this in a way that emphasizes movement. In one scene when the boy is trying to approach the horse, after longer shots that frame the two at some distance, the shot is set closer so that the head of the horse comes into and leaves the frame. This is how he delivers the suspense of the horse approaching the boy. In running sequences, there are shots of the boy riding the horse almost as across the top of the horse, and which rock and glide as if they are being tracked by another rider. These shots are amazing the way they give the sense of movement compared to, say, long shots of the running horse. But in another case, Ballard has a long shot of the horse cantering across the sand, the timing also of which gives the sense of movement as elusiveness. The climactic race sequence would never have needed its turn of the screw. Wide angle shots tracking around the turns, the thundering rhythm of the hooves suspending all other sound, make a more captivating ride than any plot twist, and at the moment of an otherwise ordinary climax there is the most dashing and elegant stroke of the film: there is a sense of floating on the movement, the ground has become fluid with the shadow of the horse gliding, and the film drifts back to the boy and the horse on the island. [3/00]
The Dreamlife of Angels (1998). Credits. Melodrama of the mundane. So many movies nowadays are pitched this way, wanting to be "real" but wanting the real to be so much drama. While this film is for the most part executed well, it's melodramatic from its plan to the detail of a blatant moment right out of City Lights, Isa grinning to herself outside a hospital just like Charlie Chaplin when he sees the woman cured of blindness. The story tries to compress the trajectory of a relationship, and it heaps momentous turns into a pace of days. The intersection of the characters is conveniently compact, their beginnings smelling of contrivance since they all meet each other in the story. You wonder why someone in this group couldn't have known someone else before the movie started. Most contrived is the first meeting of the club owner, the girls having to coincidentally encounter him as a stranger. When he turns out to be a big part of the story, you wonder why they had to meet him that way the first time, why, for instance, they didn't meet him at the club, since he is the boss of the bouncer friend and all. Dramatic sympathy now tends to be narcissistic projection, Lars von Trier being the extreme example. While this film is nothing so grossly demonstrative, there is affinity. The hand-held camera is the most obvious, and it hits you right at the start. This air of realism is now such a dragged out fad, it's the stamp of fausse verité. The movie's best contribution is the portrait of the masochistic girl. The depiction of her controlling desire to suffer would have sufficed for a compelling account, for realism. It's amazing how this part, so sharp, is in the middle of so much easier, whimsical material. Natacha Régnier, by virtue of this part of the film, is more affecting than the somewhat too darling Élodie Bouchez, and Grégoire Colin is great in the role of the despicable, chilling. There's a credit on this film for "artistic collaboration": was she afraid people would think she emptied the piss pots? [6/99]
Bulworth (1998). Credits. The passive actor, acting passive. In all Beatty's movies, he's this figure thrown about, in a jumble more unruly or less concerted than Altman's. Like Shampoo, this film is a flurry of action, a stream, a restless progression, a run around town. It's a lot of business, Beatty caught up and constantly moving (and in one case, when he dances with Halle Berry, trying to impress us with how well he can move at his age). Nothing really profound, but a profound desire to be happening. This one is sharper in some of its outright comments than Shampoo, but in the end it turns into a latter day Capra movie. The only thing different from Capra, here, is the race issue and the language. It's a Capra movie that says "muthafucka." Why, even the gangsta gets the grassroots spirit and wants to join hands at the end. Beatty switches off as usual, has to have about three different endings, all of which feel like manipulations. He seems to have turned back to a politician, but no he loves the girl, but then so it will be more profound befitting the subject matter and so it will return to its Kennedy airs, he has to top that ending, too. What rings the silliest is the shot of the top of an overpass or bridge and who it tells us was the culprit. Politicians have far too many other tactics at their disposal than pulling the trigger. [4/99]
Erotikon (1929). Credits. Machaty's earlier silent film is pure silent melodrama. He follows the general conventions and style, although there are flourishes here of what becomes more his own style by Extase. By the time of the sound era, Machaty is making better silent movies, even with minimal sound. Already there is the smart detail. The paintwork is more interesting than the big picture. Despite the gushing, the seduction scene has sharp strokes, is affecting and even beautiful. Machaty gives his attempt at the representation of looking into the other's eyes (which Derrida says cannot strictly be portrayed): alternate shots of the man and woman looking into the camera that dissolve into each other. Like the kissing shot with dissolve in Extase, this suggests other things, as well, mystic or psychological. To me it seems an equivalent for the sensations corresponding to the other, that while you see and sense a person distinct from you, they are "internalized," they move you, affect you, invade or possess you, by the feelings they cause inside you, the reactions. This is more pronounced in erotic moments. Not to mention all the rest that comes on top of that, effusion, penetration, bonding, uniting, etc. Some beautiful photography of the kiss follows, and then Machaty once again concentrates on the prostrate woman's face while the man moves somewhere vaguely below. [4/99]
Extase (1932). Credits. Here's a great example of great direction of not so good material, particularly the script. The telling of the story is everything, and this film, at least of Machaty's work, is analogous to the case of Charles Dickens, where sentimentality, melodrama, even hand wringing, is done with superb rhetorical effects. Machaty not only kept to the silent-movie tactics, he has refined them by this time, even while sound has come on and he uses it here, minimally with overdub, but also superbly. There's the economy of pictorial narrative, even when you can resent what's being signified. The first sequence quickly demonstrates what a marriage is worth, trailing off in a beautiful, deft stroke, a shot of Hedy Lamarr strewn on the bed, then one of her hand as she fidgets with her wedding ring. Later, there is a sequence where the husband and wife are sitting at a table outdoors, the husband in his newspapers ignoring the wife, while she watches dancers and singers longingly. Matched to the close-ups of the faces and their expressions of this contrast, there is a shot of the husband's foot stepping on a fly or bee he has swatted down, a turn of the sentimental screw. While this sets up a chain of signification, the life-affirming and impassioned love animals, the passionless and oppressive kill them, that is simplistic, it's also effective sympathetically, a portrait of the woman's sense of things. This same signification becomes more complex even as sentiment through at least two routes. There's a sequence where a farmer oversees the mating of his horses and all the eroticism of the human lovers is displaced onto this, with plenty of lurid effect, agitated editing, camera movement suggesting panting and heaving. The displacement is so blatant even as that, it's hard to imagine it wasn't intended as comic even back then. This may have been what got the film banned when it was first released. Otherwise, except for the possible matter of adultery, it's hard to see now why this film was considered offensive. Machaty uses other kinds of displacement. He tells the story in other details, in close-ups of things other than faces: the hand with the wedding ring, a drink with ice in a glass, the husband's glasses. When a train is used to signify a character letting off steam, the other marvelous stroke of this, despite the melodrama of the symbol, is that the train has just played a part in the plot, as well, was a major factor in the creation of the suspense. This weaving, the allegory coming from the material of the story, tempers the comment. It's interesting, too, in contrast to the more didactic style of, say, Eisenstein's cinematic metaphors, such as Kerensky turning into a peacock. Machaty renders a kiss of the truly passionate lovers with a dissolve, a superimposed ghost of the woman floating towards and over the man. The ending is the precursor to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but is a strange mixture of communist and Chaplinesque melodrama, nonetheless brought off well, with subtle touch. It's amazing how something, this whole film, can be so subtle and so extravagant at the same time. [4/99]
Citizen Kane (1941). Credits. It's deft, knowing, a cross-section of American life, history, its ethos, a cinematic textbook with enough rhetorical ingenuity to surprise you every time you see it. Like the ad of its day said, "It's terrific!" It has such a scope of what can be done with film, which is why it's also a textbook. In general, so-called great works are pertinent because of their compass, their scope, but also because their pertinence, what they are keen to, keeps them timely after their time. There's a trick in that we naively come to see the hokum of the past as representative of it and are thus surprised by savvy works from the same time. Kane is one of those shards of acuity poking through. Also, by contrast to so many other American, especially Hollywood, movies, Kane is so sharp and sophisticated, even in its grandeur, and not merely grandiose. Its keenness to even banality is what makes it great, why it has such breadth, and not the fact that it's lofty. It makes so many other big American movies seem melodramatic, overwrought but narrow. Then, of course, it's about egocentrism, the presumptive and imposing desire for recognition, what becomes a kind of spiral, an infinite regress, of reflection and blindness (what could even be a figure for this, near the end of the film, there's a shot of Kane walking past a mirror which then has a whole train of his reflections, an infinite regress). In the thread of the story about Kane's second wife, Susan Alexander, which is based on William Randolph Hearst's relationship with actress Marion Davies, Kane is an anatomy of the stages of egocentrism in a relationship, each failure and retraction leading only to another appropriation, until Kane at the moment Susan is walking out on him, says he'll do what she wants from now on and not what he thinks she wants! In the scandal with Boss Jim Gettys, Susan protests, "But what about me?" while the others, including Kane's first wife, discuss the consequences for them, ignoring her. The selfish ploy of giving -- Kane would represent this folly on a grand scale, having the wealth and notoriety that is merely the dream of so many others' pettiness and petulance. Jedediah (Joseph Cotton) reproaches Kane for wanting the public in the same way ("You talk of the American people as if you owned them"), and Kane once finishes his wife's sentence, "People will think," with, "What I tell them to think." The character, Kane, represents these different qualities himself, and the whole thing, the work of Citizen Kane, gives us these things for empathy together. We always have to incorporate more than one thing in order to understand why we identify with it. We are thus as prone to empathy with the villain as with the hero. In the character of Kane, there is this egocentrism, idealism and desire for fame or aggrandizement which serves as much for empathizing with, to see in myself. Jedediah is opposed to Kane because he cares much less for wealth and attention and even comprehends Kane's loneliness in all that. But in Kane himself is the same conflict, as he despises the old money guardian he was delivered to and all he stands for, while becoming as much a tyrant, all the while this expressing Kane's conflict between a humble contentment and the misdirected acquisitiveness trying to regain it. Another mad spiral, Kane as an apotheosis for success's failure, restless achievement without satisfaction, like the cycles of "phase people," always discovering the new thing that will be the answer. The lesson about empty success was not novel, but the dramatization of it is what is most striking in Citizen Kane. The way, for example, Kane is first drawn to Susan Alexander because she is so simple, but then takes her up into the same cycle, is where the two sides, Kane representing the overbearing others and Kane representing the insatiable self, converge. All this is mapped out so marvelously, the cinema brimming over as expressiveness, a theatrical form as composed as literature, or indeed music (as Eisenstein would have it). Welles did so much you can't sort it all out at once, but it's well-documented by now: deep focus, the play of framing between the camera and frames in the set, the broken chronology and overlapping narrative, the mock newsreel with all its effects, the montage passages, the great rherotical use of dissolve, etc. [3/99]
Hands on a Hard Body (1996). Credits. The documentary version of They Shoot Horses Don't They? but it's going on today, not during the depression of the 30s. What this story lacks compared to that other is a Jane Fonda character, a perspective of thorough disaffection. The film is a montage of the participants' accounts and this concentration gives the sense, for better and worse, of sports coverage (Bennie's repeated line about "human drama thing"). While there is a fascinating demonstration of how unpredictable human endurance can be, the human interest tone tends to ennoble, if only by omission, what is the absurd, if not malicious point of the whole thing. There are two or three incidental clips of the management who conduct the contest, but no interview with one of them comparable to the interviews with Bennie or any of the other contestants. The focus is inside the contest. This could provide a sort of Sisyphean vindication of the contestants, but it's hard not to see this as playing into the promotional ends of the perpetrators. [3/99]
Kundun (1997). Credits. Martin Scorsese gives subjective moments of the Dalai Lama, even point of view shots, at the same time that the belief, not to say myth, of Tibetan Buddhism is played straight. So you get put in the place of the Dalai Lama as a small child, watching his parents' feet as he lies in bed, but then you, as the omniscient third party, watch the child identify the false teeth of his previous incarnation. Scorsese even gives us a dream of the Dalai Lama's. But there is no subjective version of the divinity the child is otherwise given to know: did Scorsese feel that would cheapen things, or be rude to the Tibetans, or is he humanizing the Dalai Lama in a way similar to what is done with Christ in The Last Temptation of Christ? He certainly adopted a more diplomatic approach to Tibetan Buddhism. But while there's good material here, something a bit more involved and attentive than the trendy reverence for Tibet, this film is still awkwardly between the sacred and profane. What's inadvertently humanizing about it is it's biopic plan, an event narrative, which makes it puffy and prosaic at once. This tends to make the subjective moments seem like the reactions of an outsider to the fancy costumes and scenery. Scorsese has tried to mute the plot, somewhat, suggest something more meditative and airy. He works some of the Tibetan precepts in nicely, such as the sand paintings, which serve as an allegory for even film. But the lush reproduction and presentation of it all, and especially by virtue of this figure of the sand paintings, seems contradictory in some way to the Buddhist experience, especially of its sense of emptiness. [2/99]
The Thin Red Line (1998). Credits. No war movie has ever done quite what this one manages. The closest to being as sad is Paths of Glory. It's also similar to A Walk in the Sun in its plot and some of the material. The editing in the attacks is amazing, emphasizing confusion and impact at once. Malick manages a lyrical approach to war that becomes more affecting than shock and gore. There is the overall elliptical style of Malick, a skipping narrative that works loosely and cumulatively, more like memory. There is the voiceover, which here is complicated by being multiple and sometimes comes off less ironically than in his previous two films. But there is something else that is emphasized in this film, an emphasis in both Malick's work and in the history of war movies. This film is largely about reaction. Malick refracts everything through reactions of the characters, the whole thing is built on reaction shots. This implicates the viewer, not in a way that is original in film, of course, but in a way that is more original for war movies. It's made explicit in the film's first and only real gore scene, this countering typical war gore in other ways. After the army company is surprised to find no one awaiting their beach assault, they just as quietly discover two dead bodies in high grass. There is a shot of this, but the camera begins to drift up and to the side. The next shots are of the faces of the soldiers seeing this, one of them unable to either look at the bodies or entirely leave them. Another soldier becomes agitated, strikes out at the foliage. The character Witt is a strange apotheosis of this empathy, always turning up to look at the wounded or dying, carrying a strange infatuation which seems to derive from the death of his mother. Witt is also a Billy Budd. His voiceover is the principle one, although as a demonstration of what he says about everyone being part of one mind, the voices of others are often even confused. Witt's spoken thoughts and the flashbacks to one soldier's wife are the less subtle parts of the film, where it seems Malick may have softened up from the sharpness of Badlands or even Days of Heaven. But there are two twists which affect each of these things, qualify them, locate them within the characters, the things portrayed rather than the portrait, and suggest that Malick is still as shrewd. Malick's style which is at once deadpan and lyrical, something suggesting Herzog, even, at times, is still in this film. There are the smooth cutaways which then include nature, animals, plants and fascination, and give the sense of benign indifference to human concerns. Perhaps the best stroke of this in the film is when a native islander, here as unaffected as the crocodiles or birds, who is on neither side of the war, strolls languidly past the stalking troops. The sequence of the storming of the village is the most moving of all, and compacts all the statements about war more effectively than anything I can recall. After building up the horror and fear of a desperate situation in the longer previous sequences, we see the same company rout their enemy, the dread turning as quickly to the other side. This is where that action editing, the confusion and impact, is most amazing, the music meanwhile remaining slow and mournful. It's similar to, but even more moving than, the countereffect of the airstrike sequence of Apocalypse Now. In a fine cast, Nick Nolte gives a particularly great performance. The use of George Clooney and John Travolta as buffoonish brass is clever, but they're still too distracting and awkward in this film. [1/99]
The Opposite of Sex (1998). Credits. No throttle. Smart aleck reflexivity which makes this another film that's really lukewarm theater. There are good lines, good touches, even some sharp stuff and reflexive tricks, here and there, but it's relentless with the narrow scope of its accomplishment. It's like taffy being turned over again and again: sometimes the dialogue (when the older gay man brother grabs his blackmailer to physically threaten him, for example, he spins out such a ridiculously clever spiel), certainly the whole part of the plot about Carl, the cop, and the romance with him that's very unclever (and Lyle Lovett's terrible screen presence there, too), but finally the endless machinations of the whole thing. The acting, save for Lovett, is pretty good, the relentlessness of the script being the real drawback for the characters portrayed. Kudrow continues to show that she's far better material than Friends. Ricci is, of course, good, but she's quickly becoming as convenient to type as a sardonic young woman as she was the sardonic little girl of Adams Family. That's hardly growing in your career. The Ice Storm was a much better opportunity and performance. Still, she makes the best of this part, if anyone had to play it. Part of the problem with these spiffy offbeat films is that they do not leave behind the sensationalism of the big box office stuff. [12/98]
The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). Credits. This is the cross-section of Fassbinder's quality. There's a kind of balance between the best and worst aspects of him in this film, so it can seem sublimely decadent or smugly shoddy. Towards the end of the film, the Douglas Sirk influence shows through, and it's at that point that some of the flightier turns seem a part of the burlesque. When you think of it this way, an allegory of Germany done as Sirk melodrama parody, it has a sparkle. But even if you turn it in that light, there's still the ambivalent results of Fassbinder's hasty moviemaking. There are individual scenes which contain at once the sharpness of such dispatch in the editing or the shots and the droopiness in the acting. Fassbinder's a sort of underworld Hitchcock, superbly articulate with film but not with actors, and even at that he's sporadic, gusty. There are great stretches and then toss-off stuff. An example of the great is when Maria Braun goes to the train station and sees the notes for all the other missing men nailed on the fence, the sound of hammering or pounding comes over, as echo of the nails and as the sound of a terrible clock. [10/98]
Shampoo (1975). Credits. While the script has got a few good strokes of perception here and there, it's a run-on movie, a staged commentary. The farce plan packs all the partner-swapping revelations into one day and the compression makes the characters' attitudes a conceit, applied and not developed. The indirection of the political commentary is conspicuous, thus not as subtle as it pretends. Like later Beatty projects, there's some flair and an earnest attempt at critical characterization, but it's still trendy, maybe a little more sophisticated, but still a milieu piece. The title betrays the conceit, as the emphasis on the hair dresser's world is not what it suggests. "Tangles" would've been better. Goldie Hawn comes off really well in this cast. Beatty has one really great moment, his stammering attempt to own up to Hawn, but this is unfortunately what he's built his act out of ever since. [9/98]
Clockwatchers (1997). Credits. This film is light and sharp at once. From the beginning, you may fear, probably as a reflex from other movies, that it's going to be smug, but its opening pose rolls into a joke and then it continues rolling through deft little barbs. And, amazingly enough, and it's amazing this should be amazing, it's actually done with film. It's not simply that the story is told filmically, with images as well as dialogue, but that the rhetoric, the timing and tone of it, are also brought off with the film, the way it's shot, without being hyperbolically cinematic. This is actually rare, since the exception to the restless, almost desperate signifying of filmness in movies, videos and commericals is a kind of dressed down theater, one-line ideas delivered in dialogue. Here's a film in which they've done some work, some editing, not only in the film sense, but in the wider sense. In a world where Dilbert comics are displayed in offices without affecting the absurd logic they lambast (i.e. they are appropriated), as if they were jokes about physics or fate, or a world full of, as one web site recently pointed out, office-based sitcoms, it's risky to think a smart comedy about office life would really have any sway. Nonetheless, this is a smart comedy about office life, and more particularly the fate of women not just in it, but because of it. Of course, it's more generally about life, but that's also because there's barely any area left that's not infected by this managerial conceit. Toni Colette, the lead, is especially good, but Parker Posey and Lisa Kudrow peek through their trendier images with good acting in sharp characters. Maybe the clothes make the woman, or the actress. The film was written and directed by women who insist on the pertinence of an unromantic view, even to the extent of avoiding any sort of movie romance "out." One of the great strokes in the film is a moment when the temp worker is ignored on the street. It not only sets up her own ruse in the plot, but it foils movie world expectations with a bit of professional world muck. The end falls into too much plotting. Though it's not the degree of abject alibi problem that is death, murder or guns in the vast majority of U.S. films, it's the same problem on a much less sensational scale. The business of theft in the office becomes a completely different matter when it's the result of some strange kleptomaniac. The import is shifted, the room for allegory narrowed, because the cause has been assigned. The office environment can produce the same results in people without some extra element. [9/98]
Touch of Evil (1958). Credits. This is Orson Welles camp. It's full of great tricks and a seedier kind of bluster, lots of filmic jokes, like the one near the end that matches Heston to a bullfighter, then Welles to the bull. But it's a silly movie. From having to accept Heston as a Mexican (well, after all, he was El Cid, wasn't he?), or even Akim Tamiroff, with his Boris of Bullwinkle accent, as a Mexican, to the very silly dragged out conclusion, complete with stumbling dragged out deaths, through the Westside Story blocking of the gangsters in the opening long take. [9/98]
Slums of Beverly Hills (1998). Credits. Natasha Lyonne is the tone of the film. She's not a great actress, but she's apt for the role and she gives the film the artless quality of Penelope Spheeris's direction. The director of this film, Tamara Jenkins, does not provide that same quality everywhere else, and the film, as its script, is not so much naturalistic as prosaic. It makes good material for the players and it's well cast. Marisa Tomei is particularly good. She makes not only a nice contrast for the characters she and Lyonne play, but also an intersting contrast of acting and non-acting styles. Alan Arkin is good, as are Corrigan and Marienthal. Even the smaller parts provide good moments for actors we haven't seen in a while: Carl Reiner, Rita Moreno and especially Jessica Walter. Though not pretentious, it has some indulgent flights, the sort of autobiographical details that seem more likely memories or wishes than facts. It's not trendy shtick, as you could suspect from its ads in the midst of all the faddish 70s nostalgia. But it is a coming-of-age story, which despite the 70s twist, is an even bigger, more enduring movie fad. While its modestness is good in some respects, it's too modest about being a film rather than a dramatized novel. [9/98]
Your Friends and Neighbors (1998). Credits. Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men was a good exercise in low-key brutality, but there was something brittle and overcalculated about it, especially its conclusion. He was stacking the deck, but he still played it well. In his new film, he's showing all the works: it's nothing but the manipulation. Here's a story about a group of yuppies in which it's stipulated that they haven't seen each other in a long time, but then they get together enough to commit adultery with each other and tell each other sadistic fantasies. It's amazing that the story would get through so obviously underdeveloped. This is entirely film-maker conceit, the characters sitting around mouthing the commentary about them, including, to the most ridiculous extent, the character laboriously presented as amoral being asked if he thinks he's good. But what could the commentary be? Nothing is demonstrated about these people or their lives. It's all preconceived, reverse-engineered, a dramatization built out of comments you might make about people. Indie-artsy film-making is now one-line ideas. Rather than develop some characters and then revelations about them, LaBute spends time dragging out applied points. The most blatant is the steam-room scene, again an inexplicable intimacy from the premise, where the amoral character is supposed to shock everyone by his sexual favorite. The story he tells gives away its point early, but he goes on and on, tediously shocking us, and even more annoying is the fact it's a conspicuous suspension of the reaction shots of the listeners, who then finally look all flabbergasted, don't you know. Jason Patric, who helped produce the film, must have relished playing this part. Although he does a good job with it, the part is idiotic, a sort of evil straw yuppie, making all LaBute's commentary of them express. Men are narcissistic, making love to themselves, a fine point worth making, but as if it weren't enough to state that with Patric practicing his own sex talk, or Ben Stiller, as a drama teacher, overenunciating during sex, LaBute drops in a scene where the most unlikely of them says it out right, that he's his own best sex partner. The one good scene, in all respects, is the encounter between Patric and Catherine Keener in the bookstore. Keener, who's very good in her role and has a great voice, and Patric make the encounter seem strikingly candid. The scene is fraught and it demonstrates the brutal candor of Patric. It's a moment where action and speech are the same, as the drama, and not simply the obnoxious couple of talkiness and staginess. [9/98]
Donnie Brasco (1997). Credits. The best role for Pacino in a long time, maybe since the 70s. There's a nice critical spin on the character, showing a pathetic side, and Pacino cuts out the strange broad stuff he's been doing since The Godfather, Part III. Though it wades a little too deep in plot at times, the story produces nice effects, if indirectly. Pacino's character gets relegated and the script plan gives the character significance in absence as well as presence. Depp is fine in his role, mostly managing to blend in, not be conspicuous, which is what his character has to do. The film gets too pushy with suspense techniques, and clumsy ones at that. There are at least two scenes in which suspense hulabaloo makes it obvious something's not going to happen. [8/98]
Four Days in September (1997). Credits. Modest film about underground group who kidnap an American ambassador in the days of the military dictatorship of Brazil. It benefits from not being action hyperbole, and even more in its own right, from a calm, unrushed style. This is from the actors, particularly the lead student. Arkin, who's always had a similar unspectacular appeal, is good here. But at the same time, and despite the benefits of not being clamorous, the film is too prosaic. [8/98]
La Maman et le putain (1973). Credits. Sharp, involved portrait. It runs on for 3 1/2 hours and after about 2/3 of that the only pretension seems to be the title. But even that works out to be an effective misdirection. Most of the way, it seems this is a portrait of the male character (Leaud). He's the technical and dramatic point of view. His dissolution and dandyism is demonstrated as much as proclaimed, the virtue of even the modest means of the film. The characterization is not contemptuous or merely parodic, or even moralizing. He has a certain amount of self-irony and when he gets worked up, he's inspired and inspiring. What the film manages to convey is this passing relationship to banality. In some respects, the fact that it isn't spectacular as a film is thus effective, shrewd, and not merely an applied realism or banality. It focuses on the dialogue, the conversations, and avoids a scenic establishment. Certainly grandiose cinema is that concernced with the impression of the setting, but even some kinds of realist cinema (and this doesn't mean wrongly or excessively) counter this by effectively making distinct the setting, the locale or trimmings, precisely in distinction to the grandiose. Here, the characters come and go, refer to their locations, the garret or cafe, but through the whole, you get the incidental sense of the surroundings. At one point, when a character draws attention to the surroundings (in the restaurant at the railway station), there's an almost didactic presentation of his reference. In this scene particularly, the avoidance of scenic splendour, whether majestic or sumptuously gritty, seems calculated. It's an attempt at minimizing without being self-conscious, to produce the effect of meeting someone and, during your conversation, being relatively unaware of, or at least unimpressed by, the surroundings, even when that is where you reside. Leaud is a compliment to his role, dashing and banal at once, which is the register of the film. The film has the import, the weight or significance, of Masculin feminin, while being almost contrary formalistically. What that film did for the same kinds of people prior to 68, this one does for them after. The film's virtue is to present lots of conversation (the manipulations and idealizations of the characters) and still demonstrate how the characters don't live up to what they profess. The haphazard way in which even libertines fall together, the petty jealousy (and the peculiarly acute and hypocritical jealousy of the male) which they do not recognize as still part of their thinking and thus cannot forsee, the shifts in their attention at precisely the moment when some dramatic development has been realized, are some of the fine perceptions of this treatment. At the end, when the "younger" woman pours herself out in drunken confessional, the awkward import of the title bears down melodramatically or at least as heavy-handed. But as she goes on, her already extavagant use of the modifiers "maximum" and "super" gets worse, she acknowleges the effect of drunkeness, and then you remember that Leaud's character said to her before that she says things that sound like the "messages" of certain movies. She starts off as if to fix the judgment of the other two but she betrays herself as well, not only the desperation and conjugal ideal beneath her proclaimed indifference, but thus even the depth of her ambivalence towards them (and the amibiguity of the title, not only of who it refers to, but whether it refers to more than one person). And the apparently climactic last scene only offers us the chance to be as susceptible as the characters, since it repeats incidents they've referred to and even what we were shown at the beginning of the film, the three hours since also cleverly playing on our forgetfulness. The circularity works both ways, suggesting as much for the opening sequence as the final one. The first sequence otherwise would seem an easy parodic comment on the male character, but the ending shows him to be as impressionable and vacillating as the woman. And the results shown at the beginning make the conclusion of the end suspect, melodramatic. [7/98]
Carla's Song (1996). Credits. A reluctant working class hero in Glasgow helps out a strange girl on a bus and she turns out to be from Nicaragua with a terrible past. It's set in 1987, at the height of the U.S.-backed contra campaign against the Sandanista government and it's the sort of storytelling for didactic purposes you might expect to see raising support at the time. The fact that it's telling the story after the pertinent situation makes for an interesting contrast and has varying effects on it as both drama and pedagogy. The hindsight factor plays a big part, too, as you watch it, knowing that the U.S. largely had its way in Nicaragua (and the Panama affair and Barbara Trent's film on that have happened since). There's a moment when Scott Glenn, as a man heading a private aid effort in Nicaragua, criticizes a fellow volunteer for getting carried away with descriptive prose in a report she's written. "This isn't War and Peace," he says, "we need facts." Incidental reference like this to the value of expedience over indulgent artsiness may be part of the testament, but it also provokes the issue. Earnestness and humble deference to your subject matter do not make you immune to contrivance, and this film certainly has its manipulations. The selection of material, the progression, and the concentration, give you the point of the story soon enough, so, for example, the discovery a playful makeout scene leads to is not surprising. It's when Carla's nightmare is dramatized that Glenn's line really has boomerang effect. As in Dead Man Walking the earnestness to dramatize, to tell the story, goes so far as to be counter to effect. In both films, this "objective" narration goes against the relation of the experience, since in each case the story of a past is being told to another character, who is thus the best stand-in for the audience. The urge to realize these accounts on the same level actually, then, also undercuts that very experience, implying that we are less capable of responding to a witness of events than to events themselves. A point for the opposite side of this contrast is made by this film, too. By far the most effective and evocative scene of the whole film is when they are riding on the top of the bus and Carla is translating for George. After some fun talk about whisky and such, some of the fellow travelers are telling about their struggle, and as Carla translates the words to George, she begins to well up and cry. We are aware of the compact of meaning even the revolutionary slogans have for her, of the very specific and real content when she speaks of people giving their lives for freedom. A scene like this is dramatic because of its testamentary virtue: that is what it's dramatizing, that is its drama. The drama of Carla's nightmare is also that it is now, unfortunately, only Carla's nightmare. Our drama, and George's, would be having to experience it indirectly. The urge to show it seems also to concede too much to a media world for which the dream is not so much mediation as immediacy. Robert Carlyle is much better in the hands of Loach than he was in The Full Monty (this film came before). But the real discovery here is Oyanka Cabezas, who has that sort of uncultivated screen presence that some children have. She's pretty and meek and ingenuous and her emotion does not seem to involve acting. Even in less conspicuous moments, that is, less tearful ones, you can see the emotion rise in her face. All the better an argument for the virtue of testimony. [7/98]
The Spanish Prisoner (1997). Credits. Patiently performed and directed, with a nice attention to unglossy mundane detail, it's intriguing and allegorical most of the way. There are patches of the Mamet dialogue, his peculiar mannered reproduction of halting and interruption, that can't be gotten around, but they are minimized by the concentration of the plot as well as the execution. There's the similar studiousness to characterization in Mamet's work, which comes out strongest in female characters, interestingly enough, but here it's contained and integrated. It manages to be apt for the circumstances, not formalistic or conspicuous. The plot makes the movie most like House of Games, but it is precisely not the mannerism of that film, its execution making it more like Homicide, which is still the best film work of Mamet. But while Homicide takes the premise of dissimulation and spirals outward, this film resolves all too nicely and plainly in thriller conventions, which gives it nothing more than the charm of being a sort of unassuming Hitchcock. That's entertaining only up to a point, and it also makes it as narrow and appeasing as the more melodramatic Hitchcock thrillers. Not only is the allegory minimized, the implication contained, the plot gets silly, its resolution making the whole thing far-fetched. The ending realizes the paranoid fantasy, literalizes it, makes it the paranoid fantasy of the film itself, then just as quickly and idealistically cures it. As a twister, it's not particularly sharp. There are so many signals and portentous details that you can figure things out, after which the plot's elaboration is grandiose (and there's one crime that's just an absurd extent). The clues are more interesting without the solution, because prior to that, they have suggestion for all sorts of other things, about business and deception, trust and curiosity, the randomness and confluence of events and people. Campbell Scott has much to do with the tone of the film, giving the character just the right modesty and solicitous quality, without being mawkish or intense. Similarly, Martin is good, and he's also a good choice for the role, what with lines like the one about people being pretty much what they look like. He's got just the right register for making his character seem either lofty or personable, and each by turns. But his later appearance is one of the sillier conceits of the plot, something that comes off as pandering, if not to an audience, then to the filmmakers themselves. Though I imagined a better path for the movie to take much before the last confrontation, in that scene I imagined a better "out" line for Scott, one with meaning for the film as well. He could have said to the Martin character, "You? That's disappointing. I could have at least admired your ingenuity, but now you're just a piece of a plot." [7/98]
Ermo (1994). Credits. It's a pithy realism in the manner of Story of Qiu Ju, following that one in being a sort of response to or at least turn from socialist idealized realism. It doesn't have the formal structure, either as script or direction, of the Zhang Yimou film, but is more anecdotal. While that may be an advantage for verisimilitude, at least in spots, this film is certainly not as eloquent as Zhang's work. But it's also definitely not the picturesque, mystical excesses of Chen Kaige. A hard-working village woman (there are still communist values in these "fifth generation" films, but they are often given twists, even while in places they can seem all too earnest) holds a grudge against her catty neighbor and wants to show her up by getting a TV set bigger than hers. The neighbor's similarly hard-working husband helps the cause by driving the woman to town to sell her goods and later to work. But the woman becomes so obsessed with purchasing the TV that it makes a perversion out of her industriousness and hard-headedness. The story follows other forks in the road, such as an affair, which while seeming all too likely, almost contrived, is nonetheless presented as being so suggestive to the characters themselves. What comes of this, however, is not so easy to expect. There's a return to status quo and then even a rapprochment of the rival women, and the empty victory of the TV set is cast against this normalcy (the family asleep in front of the electronic snow of the TV) rather than some disaster. There's definitely a chain of events, a logic of consequences, known to some (and the viewers) and not to others. [7/98]
Lamerica (1994). Credits. Works modestly and allows effects to build up, sometimes creep up on you, all the way to the end as the beautiful effect of the whole. Italy is to Albania as America was to Italy, thus the title. A shady Italian capitalist in Albania gets the tables turned on him, a look at Albania from the ground, so to speak. But despite the parable neatness of that, and its being a pretext for showing the chaos and distress, it's amazing how softly the film brings it off. It uses an almost drowsy pace, the pace of the gratuitous visitors, as the counterstroke for the incidents. First it's the businessmen themselves. Talking genially with the prospective Albanian employees, the senior Italian partner turns quietly, then turns back and blows up at them. The stripping of the younger Italian begins with the tires of his sports utility vehicle, which the film presents as a matter of cuts, minus the act itself. One minute he's zipping past all the refugees, the next the shiny car has naked hubs. The driver shouts out that he won't leave until he gets his tires back. Then even the abject slips up in this same droll way. One of the two most striking sequences is when the speechless old man wanders off and is approached by a group of children. They clutter around him, then in the same smooth, dusky shot, they set fire to him. He's out of view. They put him in some sort of stone structure, like a great oven or kiln. The whole sequence has a kind of indirection, even a contrary beauty. The other great moment is at the end, where director Gianni Amelio gets an uncoaxed poetic effect out of a series of close-ups and still camera shots. The faces are both distant and close. The close-ups humanize the refugees, but they also leave them mute. The scene has a naive quality, putting us there among the refugees, but it's also striking. [7/98]
Pocket Money (1972). Credits. An exercise in banality, it seems modest and slight, almost monotonous in its anticlimactic method, and though it tries to be subtle about it, the statement of a humanist moral is put in the mouths of the characters. But it has relative value, as a sort of inverted romance of the cowboy world in decline, and certainly as portrait. This is Terrence Malick's first script, before he directed Badlands and Days of Heaven, and his take on things is already established. Malick's eye and ear is not only for rustic expressions but for a certain kind of misdirection of conversation. These men betray the skew of their perception and ambition in the way their speech is a sort of aside. They don't really speak to each other so much as just out loud. They react to things with homilies and parables, and it's not always that these are impertinent but that their aptness has no practical effect. The summations are more perceptive than the speaker knows. This material provides Newman and Marvin each with one of the best roles of his career, certainly more intersting in being neither heroic nor heroically tragic. Newman gives a midwestern inflection that adds to the incongruous banality (at one point, the character is associated with Chicago), and he serves the role as well as it does him, since the realism is neither as glorifying as say Cool Hand Luke or as popularizing as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This may be the perfect role for Lee Marvin, that is to say the best of his lot, because the pithiness and even pathetic aspect are more character than his usual roles as heavy or stalwart have allowed him to show. [6/98]
Dream with the Fishes (1997). Credits. Dream in a fishbowl. Making movies in your own back yard: it's not really alternative when all you want to alternate is the locale of your narcissism. While blockbuster versions of suburban neighborhoods persist, there's a whole set of trendy indies that, despite renouncing the excess of gloss and special effects, are really no less about seeing yourself on the big screen, your world projected, the scope of the world nothing but a projection for you. The trendiness of the fugitive story, of pushing the limits, is hard to cut from the whole history of mavericks in the U.S., or more broadly of Romanticism, but in the last ten years this sort of road movie has become a pretense of a pretense. This film shows the level of derivativeness, the notion of transgression become platitudinous. [6/98]
The Searchers (1956). Credits. Whether or not it's the best western, it's easily the best John Wayne movie and certainly a great film. Wayne's persona is a good resource for the cantankerous Ethan and Ford gets the most out of him. From Ethan's gibes to the crazy Mose Harper, this is one of the pithier portraits of the west, even if Monument Valley and the lipstick on Natalie Wood are too grand. The depiction mixes the corny and the harsh in a way that seems apt for a frontier America which could've led to the modern one, if we're any evidence (it's similar to Night of the Hunter in this mix), or at least that avoids either jaunty, Boy's Life wholesomeness (à la Shane) or heavy-handedness. [6/98]
Deconstructing Harry (1997). Credits. The seams are starting to show. While he's still inventive, even with self-deprecation, Allen's films are looking less like whole works and more like patches. He repeats jokes or gags in the same movie (here the out-of-focus bit), drifts and digresses more in a less pertinent way, and is less artful about declarations of himself (here the scene where he visits the sister). There's a sense even to the contrivance of the plot that is not only the grasping of the character, but Allen's grasping as well, an odd formality to social life for his own ego. But as with all Allen's work, this is also the amazing parallax. Even in decline, there's still the fascination of whether it's the portrait or the thing portrayed, Allen slipping back and forth across the fourth wall, in and out of the screen, like the character in Purple Rose of Cairo. [6/98]
A Brief History of Time (1992). Credits. Mark E. Smith says in one of his songs, "scientists and their bloody childish reading habits." Here's a documentary to demonstrate. It's hard to tell when Errol Morris is being mock naive, but this film is almost too prosaic either way. Stephen Hawking talks to us and Morris intercuts anecdotes from a select group of family and friends and then movie illustrations, unfortunately in this film, often of the more childish of Hawking's metaphors. There's something to be said for the willingness to think out what other people think obvious or naive, or even trite. But when Hawking poses some of his questions, such as what comes before time, it's difficult to hear anything other than a very literal inflection. Nonetheless, he manages to demonstrate that his powers of thought are being used elsewhere, and he also demonstrates a certain modesty about himself, about the relativity of his own thought. [6/98]
Alien: Resurrection(1997). Credits. With her sharp jaw, protruding area around her lips and high forehead, Sigourney Weaver as she gauntly ages is looking more and more like the aliens. There's all this stuff about her being the product of genetic engineering somehow crossing her and the things, never mind that they never give us the essential component of why or how that cross is supposed to occur. The climactic result of this, so much more specious genetic thematic variation, is just another death's head monster, though it's supposed to look kind of like Weaver, a step towards a more human monster, some kind of blonde beast version of the alien. Despite the thought that may provoke, the oafish in-jokes of this film and the cloddish repetition of the sensation is so far removed from any allegorical inspiration as to make it impertinent. What difference does it make whether the inflationary infatuation of Alien has the pedigree in its title or is called Species or Relic or Mimic? This film is no less crass and preconceived than any of those other variations, which means the sequels have become their own cheap imitation. Alien degeneration through inbreeding. [6/98]
Two Girls and a Guy (1998). Credits. Not even so much a filmed play as an actor's exercise, this turns out to be a showcase for Downey. It's a show-off piece, but there's plenty to see. Downey's one of those freakishly unihibited people for whom acting is a reflex, a compulsion. In his case, the compulsion goes on off stage or screen, which is why this film is reflexive as much for Downey as anything the script or role brings to him. Which, then again, is apt for the script. It's only apparently one of those quirky little indies about young adult sexual intrigue -- so many line up on video store shelves, you don't even know if they came out on film -- and its virtue is that such a scenario is a point of departure. It's surprising because it doesn't have either a contemporary farce resolution, some sort of quirky but quaint triangle, or, what's both worse and even more frequent even for such contemporary farce, the great presumptive and mollifying true love ending. It doesn't quite cop out on the issues it sets up, the way Sex, Lies and Videotape did so drastically and popularly. It most resembles The Ice Storm in the line of its action and what it suggests. Neither of them are necessarily contrary to "true love" ideals or interpretation. But both are more subtle, effective and circumspect. They're portraits of people who might have those ideals, rather than feel-good tracts for those ideals. The production is low-key, shot on location in a loft. Probably due to incidental noise, portions of the dialogue have been dubbed back over and these patches are awkward, the actors giving a rushed, read-y delivery. The direction is also rushed in other parts so that the delivery is very theatrical, especially with the two actresses. Downey's entrance thus, if inadvertently, breaks the staginess. In other cases where there are thematic statements, the rushed delivery seems a matter of self-consciousness, as if the actors or the director were embarrassed by the express arguments of the script. And the director does get carried away with Downey and the whole exercise of solitary candor, letting it go on well after the point. But this is a tough line to negotiate, since the point is also indulgence, and the real pay-off of the whole affair is when Downey looks at himself in a mirror and begins to admonish himself in second person. This is after he's been reproached for his duplicity by the two women, and as he begins to speak to his reflection, in the manner of "look at you," "are you just going to go on like this," and "I want you to promise me right now," it's mise en abime. All the resonance of the reflection and duplicity, even more generally the doubling, opens up. Even the sense of the compulsion is redoubled, as his soul-searching assumes a role, the form of a speech addressed back to him. [6/98]
As Good as It Gets (1997). Credits. One of those spiffy American packages, a film that's fairly well executed but doesn't hold up. The more you think about the plot, the hokier it gets. It evaporates in your conscious grasp. Like the Taxi TV series of Brooks, the characters are simultaneously interesting and sentimentally construed, as if the marvelous pallet of their peculiarities were not too complex a thing to be resolved by humor and good will. Here, the obvious obstacle to such good will is the proposition of having the gay man move in with the obsessive compulsive. That, as Graham Greene said of the man's return from Shangri La in The Lost Horizon, is where the story really begins, not to mention the happy ever after part, a love affair with a man who won't step on cracks. The role is such a showboat for Helen Hunt that it's hard not to hold that against her. She does a fine job, earnestly producing the tears and smiles and warm feelings and melo-catharses for us. Nicholson has gone off to some stage or movie set of his own. Some actors start out bad, like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, but get so used to being on film that it tempers them. On the other hand, there's the ham with age factor: Nicholson, like Al Pacino, was a fine actor who now has this strange oblique haminess. In this film, that obliqueness translates well in many instances for the character's psychological problems. But it's difficult to see how the romance develops with someone who's pretty far out on the pier, and who doesn't even have the inspired effects that Ignatowski did. The surprise, here, is Greg Kinnear, who is without haminess, without caricature, and even without earnest or at least conspicuous acting. [6/98]
Gabriel over the White House (1933). Credits. The speech Walter Huston, as the President, gives on the ship, when he tries to pressure the world powers into disarmament by threatening that the U.S. will commit to an unprecedented arms build-up, makes this film uncanny, even if the balance of it is goofy. It's prophetic in more ways. I happened to see it in this year (1998) of Warren Beatty's Bulworth, which might be a remake (if it weren't a remake of The Candidate with Robert Redford). In both cases a sort of deus ex machina gives the political man a turn of heart. In Gabriel a car wreck causes the president to act mysteriously sullen, to appear to be inspired by a strange light and a remote voice, and then become the most dedicated reformer in U.S. history, overhauling the government to get it done. This simplistic American idea of a kind of fundamental truth beneath all the muck, a degree zero to all the angles, ought to be scary in its own right, so when you see the old pre-WWII tanks come rolling out to deal with the gangsters you might have a creepy feeling about what sort of politics this suggests in 1933. The pop fantasy treatment of the politics makes the film light, even giddy, but then in that speech, when the President is foretelling of American supremacy, there's an uncanny pertinence to even the whimsy of it all. As Robert Altman portrayed with his political candidate's loudspeaker speeches in Nashville, there is a strange soup of ideas in U.S. politics, of a persistent neophyte flavor. This concoction of expedience, whimsy, superstition and literal-mindedness produces thinking on the model of tinkering: philosophies pulled out of a hat, a self-help metaphysics. But the miraculous turn device thus has odd and disparate connotations, the angel's sword cuts both ways. It is fancy, but even just rhetorically, the fictive leap of it suggests that Americans, despite their notions of action and independence, can't seem to imagine their system changing drastically, even during the depression, and especially by the will of men alone. When it comes to getting things done, God himself is the prime mover. This is a persistent figure in American film (for example, It's a Wonderful Life, but then cf. especially The Young Mr. Lincoln and the analysis of it in the famous collective essay of the Cahiers du Cinema). It could be the piety of the superstitious, or mere pandering to such, a modern equivalent of knight tales where religion is tailored to popular fancy. Or, it could be a populist comment on the intransigence of the powers that be. Huston, for all his efforts, is somehow underused in this film. He's far more captivating as the devil, Mr. Scratch, in The Devil and Daniel Webster, than as the divine agent of salvation from the depression. There's a great scene when the pre-conversion corrupt president plays a game with his son ignoring news of trouble on the radio, one of the few moments of candor for Huston. [6/98]
The Nasty Girl (1990). Credits. Poetic didacticism. Details the mundanely compromising. The homespun, provincial register emphatically situates the scandal, the coverup. It localizes the issue of Nazi involvement and the persistence of similar sentiment. The playful tone becomes almost giddy at times, in apostrophes of the main character whistling at the camera. This even more remarkably is used for a double effect: on the one hand, the staged, cited hominess is the context for the protagonist's gosh-shucks, unflappable inquiry, and keeps this rolling at the same time as it gives Nazism the tenor of peccadilloes (like the nuns favoring the children according to their families' donations, or the guests of a formal assembly checking the hidden obscenities of paper currency behind the back of the man who wanted it banned), but on the other hand, the tone sets us up, it forces the issue of accommodation, not merely as complacency or political naiveté, but in the assurance of civic involvement or investigative zeal. The latter effect becomes more sharp in the contrast produced by the ending. In what might superficially be a hasty dramatic turn, a play for the big finish, one of those unsettling endings that throws everything open, the protagonist has a sort of breakdown. It's a paroxysm of suspicion and political paranoia, every social relation infected by the duplicity. It wouldn't be too great an extrapolation to read this as a consequence of the conflation and inflation of the paranoia of the Nazis: the paranoia proper to Nazism, that characterizes and determines it, and the paranoia about the Nazis, which can become as obsessive and frantic as the Nazi paranoia of the Jews. But more than a sudden earnest turn, a kind of political melodrama, the ending counterposes the rest of the film. Like Jake Gittes in Chinatown, the protagonist is no less susceptible for thinking she has her eyes open, and in this case even more susceptible, since the stakes of her involvement are both taking things for granted and investigating. The film poses the dilemma of this, which may be madness: you can't trust the social order, you cannot give over to this mistrust. [5/98]
Passport to Pimlico (1949). Credits. The social comedy of these Ealing Studio films is about the breaking down of structure. That's what really defines the social. They are comedies in that they play with the determinations of that structure. While on the one hand, comedy can domesticate, comfortably sublimate, pose the wildest of possibilities as straw man for our assumptions, on the other hand, comedy often thematizes, or makes material of, the borders, the very frame, which may be left alone by the solidity of theme in the "serious" film. Compare, for example, the social comedies of Ealing with the social dramas of the British "angry young man" school in the early 60s (though there are filiations that make this not just an opposition). By this definition then, the most broadly social of the Ealing films are Whisky Galore, The Man in the White Suit, and this, because they are about this disruption on broader social scales (than, say, The Lavendar Hill Mob or The Ladykillers). While in Whiskey it's an entire island and in White Suit a whole industry, in Pimlico England herself is confounded, and larger still the notion of boundaries and national identities. [5/98]
Godzilla v. Megalon (1973). Credits. When Megalon commences raining havock, it's just about the most proficient devastation you've ever seen from a colossal monster. He's got the thunderbolt things and then he shoots these red incendiary bomb balls out his mouth which cause vast explosions. I guess a creature would have to be that giant to do that sort of thing. Damned if Megalon doesn't hit the same Mobile oil building that Monster Zero scorched. They probably just finished rebuilding it. Oh, yeah, this is the one that's really about Jet Jaguar, the sleek rubber-man looking robot that can be regular size like humans or turn monster size to fight the colossals. You know how that works. Oh, yeah, and even though it's just called "Godzilla v. Megalon," there's actually this other monster, Gaigan, you know the one, and being evil, Megaro cheats and has Gaigan come in and team up on Godzilla, so luckily Jet Jaguar evens things up. That makes for giant tag-team wrestling. In rubber suits, no less! [5/98]
Godzilla's Revenge (1969). Credits. As if this would make any difference, this film actually has some of the best cinematography of the Godzilla films. Not, mind you, when Godzilla, or in this case his junior version or any other monster, is present. In a weird example of reflexive tailoring for a younger audience, like the way in which American comic books created kid versions of the superheros as if that were somehow necessary to appeal to younger kids, this film is about a little boy going through the pangs of confronting bullies, and then dreaming a lesson in courage from Godzilla's son. It's in the waking part that the cinematography is good, and that the direction, despite a corny cloying script about a coming of age melodrama, achieves a roving intensity somewhat like the Italian westerns. The mini-Godzilla is the cheeky extent of Godzilla's conversion to kitsch popular hero, daddy Godzilla appearing to teach his son to fight. Godzilla Jr. switches between a human and more colossal scale, and that only makes sense, as he's got to be able to talk to the boy, but then be a real colossal when he fights. The boy takes the lesson in courage -- and who doesn't feel brave after watching men in rubber suits wrestle -- and not only trumps his bully, but busts up a gangster ring, too! What monster movie is complete without some human intrigue, spys or aliens, going on at the same time? [5/98]
Godzilla v. Monster Zero (1965). Credits. Things are getting squirrelly. Aliens from Planet X, until recently hidden behind Jupiter, hoodwink the Earth, represented by Japan and a token American astronaut, into giving them Godzilla and Rodan. The aliens didn't need the ruse because they just come and take the monsters anyway. They travel in really great deco lamps and debunk the stereotype of doubled antenae: obviously you need only one antena on your head. But the sham subplotting serves to get one showdown on Planet X, then another back on Earth. The showdown itself is unfairly billed, since Godzilla has to tag-team with the hokey giant upright bird Rodan in order to beat the three-headed Monster Zero, which is not even its right name. The aliens have their own superior scientific numeric nomination for monsters, Godzilla and Rodan being Monsters Zero One and Zero Two (though I forget which is which). Everyone involved in this story, for some reason I'm not aware of, knows Monster Zero to actually be Ghidora. Under the spell of the aliens, all three monsters team up on Japan. As if any one skyscraper-sized creature capable of movement weren't disastrous enough, all three of them have special powers. Ghidora, following suit with Godzilla's blue flame, shoots lightning from each of its three heads. Well, you can imagine, they make quite a mess. But the ingenious Earth people of Japan whip up some technology to break the spell of the monsters, whereby they revert to their natural dispositions, which in this case is for Godzilla and Rodan to team up against Ghidora. In the middle of the colossal butt-kicking, the three of them fall off a cliff (what a cliff it must be!) into the ocean and Monster Zero emerges and high-tails it, presumably back to the far side of Jupiter. Godzilla and Rodan go back into hybernation, which they instinctively do between movies. [5/98]
Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956). Credits. The Japanese imported the idea of the atomic mutant colossal monster (the original atomic variant of King Kong was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1953), but they had a singular market for this mythos: in the case of Japanese popular imagination, this science fiction was a matter of playing out their history rather than a paranoid future. For this reason, the original Godzilla movie has resonance that is hard to remember after the mutation to a species of kitsch in all the sequels. The foundation for the camp is laid down, with the peculiar patchwork production (scenes with Raymond Burr cut into the Japanese film bear an odd, almost demonstrative distinction, as when the match stand-ins for the Japanese actors keep their backs to the camera but the shadows from their heads are cast large in the shot), and the man in the rubber suit tearing up miniature sets and toy planes and tanks. But while its special effects are distinctly less affecting than Ray Harryhausen's, the original Godzilla movie is distinctly more affecting than almost every other monster disaster in its dramatization of the human devastation. Hiroshima is more than cryptic in this film. Beyond chaotic crowds and devastated sets, there are stock scenes that look like bombing aftermath, and then scenes of long rows of the injured in makeshift hospitals and rows of school girls singing a hymn of national sorrow. The drama itself involves a circuitous working through of the development of weapons. When it seems that the discovery of a new weapon as the only hope of overcoming the monster figures the justification for the atomic bomb, this is extrapolated to a remarkable sacrificial conclusion. The inventor of the weapon consents to allowing its use, but then burns the plans so that it can never be used again, and finally destroys himself with the use of the weapon. Project that scheme on Harry Truman and the atomic scientists! It's all done with great melodrama, of course, but which makes it no less compelling. Cast in this light, Godzilla, in the manner of the Id monster of Forbidden Planet, becomes an avatar of all the Japanese psychology of World War II: the monolithic persona of the Empire turned back on them, the victims' imaginary appropriation of their own suffering, the symbolic mediation of colossal forces (an almost inexplicable calculus as far as the infatuation with scale), the popular monstration of the atomic age -- which for the Japanese was not only apprehension but legacy. (The name of Raymond Burr's character is Steve Martin.) [5/98]
In the Company of Men (1997). Credits. A patient, sparse, modest film about savage yuppie men, this has the merit of not seeking drama only in action, or seeking action only in crime and guns. But that's not saying much, these days, or rather it's saying a lot about these days, films in general, and not much about this film. That even modest little "indie" type films, Ulee's Gold for example, have to have crime to have drama, even trying to be more realistic, is the state of things, not to mention the sexy thriller cliché that has overrun the film distributors' sense of "indie." Like Heavy or Hard Eight, this film cuts against the grain of perpetual crescendo narrative. It plays low and slow, casts the viciousness of its characters against quietly mundane, which is to say without lots of sound effects or suspense music. [5/98]
Real Life (1979). Credits. Probably Albert Brooks's best film, and the one where his self-conscious injection of himself as annoying and self-conscious is put to best use. Here it serves to characterize the presumptuousness of documentary film making, what in turn can represent the aberration of anyone believing they are simply outside what they observe. Brooks likes to go for the pathetic, and that usually means being anticlimactic from the start: here it's the meager reception banquet where he announces the film project. There's almost no suspense to the involvement with the family, like certain episodes of Columbo where there's no twist, just the takedown. You know the whole thing is cockamamie from the outset. The great joke of the supposedly unobtrusive cameramen, including the mention there are two so as to incorporate the actual camera by suggestion, is given even more dimension because they look like a cross between the Mummenschanz and The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. The latter is certainly a resonance from the era, because of the way the underwater equipment was always part of the story. The horse operation may be pushing the pathetic a little too far. It was shrewd of Brooks to make the Grodin character a veterinarian, rather than a doctor, and after that to use a horse so that it all looks like broad comedy. But what is more clever about the sequence is the way the film actually documents how the mistake occurs (and of course the way Brooks helps cause all the distraction). Here there's an uncanny fold in the logic, the paradox of what the observation, the film, forces, but what it then also catches even about that. [5/98]
L.A. Confidential (1997). Credits. The movie begins with a hasty, pushy ethos montage with voiceover by De Vito. It crowds together stock footage of L.A., the narration and the music track in a kind of sloppy Goodfellas shtick, and though a follow-up shot of De Vito shows his narration to be in character, that in turn proves to be just as much a conceit. This is just one more movie that's clever in stupid ways, more so for being smug about it. It's reconstituted noir with hammy seriousness, big theme airs part and parcel with detective slang and period infatuation. They got Goldsmith to do the music and must have told him they wanted it to sound like his score for Chinatown. On it's own, the music is good, but in this film, it's a part of the pretense, evoking something else as part of the preconception. It not only serves as a reminder of how much better movie music could be, it also makes you wish you were watching Chinatown instead of this film. It was not clever to invite comparison, because especially next to that film, this one comes off as pretentious in the most facile way. What it inadvertently evokes about the 50s, in which it's set, is hammy westerns. An early scene when the L.A. cops are going to get private revenge on some Hispanic suspects they've brought in, a supposedly serious drama and commentary about racism and corruption, is like one of those cowboy saloon scenes, the principle characters all taking turns in the fight. They run around with shotguns enough through the whole film, for that, too, and the end is a preposterous showdown à la Butch Cassidy -- except that Butch Cassidy has a more plausible conclusion. The plot is a ludicrous string of twists, and pretexts for urgent dashes, and beatings and people getting knocked off. At one point, Kim Basinger's character and Guy Pearce's have been beat up by the same man, and he asks her if she's okay and she says "Yes, are you?" And believe it or not, that's not supposed to be entirely funny. Cops of three different stripes are traded around in various pairings like some silly latent love triangle. Although you see this manipulation coming from the way they play up the "conflicts" of the three -- they'll be thrown together and bond and have good hearts and all -- you don't predict just how much they drag this trick out and repeat it. There's puddles in puddles of reflection on L.A., the kind of trendy reflexivity that's not so much an air anymore as a stench. Cops and corruptions and TV shows about cops and tabloid scandal-mongers and even prostitutes being made to look like movie stars (Basinger's character is supposed to look like Veronica Lake, and here the movie's conceit is cheesy, cut-rate, like cable or TV stuff, either Basinger's doll-like conspicuousness a bad match for Lake, or Lake a bad idea for the model), but all of this stuff is incidental, so many set pieces. Worst of all, it's scandal-mongering trying to be commentary on scandal-mongering. The most apt thing from the 50s I could think of for this film was Thelma Ritter's line in All About Eve: "Everything but the hounds snapping at her heels." [5/98]
Species II (1998). Credits. The camp value has been heightened, which makes it an improvement over the original. The first film squandered the allegory of its premise (predatory female) on cheesy atmospherish hokum. This one plays it up more, also streamlining the plot, which makes it more fun. It's a cheaper production than the first, which doesn't make much difference at this level of sensation. Keep in mind, we're comparing corn and corn. The Species alien mutant cloned she-devil killer model (Henstridge) has been copied. (The film makes no bones about the sequel reflexivity play, nor that it's thus cloning Aliens and Terminator 2. There's also a curious extent of this ripoff/homage or priming/pandering in this film in that lines are lifted from all kinds of movies, including Gone with the Wind and The Godfather. I know that movies are blatantly retread nowadays, but, gosh, what sort of pitch is this?). At the same time, the killer male counterpart has been brought back from Mars, the sheer-slime form possessing the astronauts, one male of which goes on a breeding spree. Cloning project head Helgenberger has to team up with alien asskicker Madsen again under government direction, and they become a new kind of CIA: the Coitus Interruption Agency. In a (not exactly not inadvertent) parody of all the monster and slasher movie innuendo, they actually race around and bust down doors just as the astronauts are all getting it on. Talk about your suspenseful convergences. The film (more inadvertently) shifts the allegorical upshot not just to the woman's anxiety before the male (since this time it's a male predator), but more specifically to pregnancy. Immediately after coitus, the women victims give birth to alien spawn in full bursting Alien fashion. That's fast actin' Tenactin. This plays on both Rosemary's Baby and Village of the Damned. The inverted deadbeat dad (he just wants the kids at the expense of mom) stows all his dark-headed children in a barn (and fortunately somehow gets them all tunics). While this has a nice effect of carrying the scare-baiting of sexual promsicuity to full term, making the feared point the pregnancy and even giving birth, it's mostly just an excuse to have the bursting belly cliché. And here the bellies swell up and then part open in a perfect cross-hatch, to look really like the big eggs of Alien and more mechanical than anatomical. This gimmick, which played out once over already in a bunch of low-grade Alien ripoffs in the 80s, persists on some baroque level of cultish homage and pandering (and which was parodied in a speech of Ileana Douglas in Search and Destroy). Of course consistency in the premise is ignored for sheer effect. The aliens' infinite regenerative powers and ambulatory capability are sometimes conveniently limited. The female astronaut possessed with the alien suffers the birth phenomenon of the male's victims rather than becoming another Henstridge monster chick. And most obviously, why is the sexual reproduction business necessary at all? Amorphous monstrosity is all the better for suspense: you don't know how it will jump out at you next. While the "fucking" signification gets extended, even to parodic repetition, it also gets clunky and just goofy. Despite moments of sheer humor, such as when the Henstridge creature, psychically linking with the male creature while he's cruising, "sees" through his eyes and tells the pursuing cops the number and items of the grocery aisle he's in, the film never escapes its field of shoddy titillation. It panders with crude swankness in a threesome scene, and the "climax" of the whole film is a trick of getting away with felatio in special effects, which is also bizarrely sadistic because it just as inexplicably causes the death of the female creature. The final showdown scene is particularly poorly produced, the mix of the film and computerized effects comes off murky and grainy. At a stupid point of the denouement, there's a shot of the U.S. flag, one extra weird, incongruous pander, and I wanted to see a title with it: "No Aliens Allowed." [4/98]
Urban Cowboy (1980). Credits. A cash-in copy of Saturday Night Fever, which already had realist and tragic pretensions, this carries the prefabrication to the next generation. The affectation of gritty life cannot disguise the gappiness of the story, the jumps and turns that are like an adolescent's view of biography. And this all boiled up to the rite of competition around, of all things, indoor mechanical bull riding. This should not only offend any self-respecting rhinestone cowboy, but it's even a travesty of Saturday Night Fever and its dance contest. The whole bit about Winger learning to ride the bull flatly amounts to no more than obligatory suggestive dancing. And as if Travolta weren't out of place enough, a twinkly-eyed Easterner doing a bad country accent, they cast Debra Winger next to him to produce the most un-Anglo, un-white-trash looking couple. [4/98]
The Full Monty (1997). Credits. The director, Peter Cattaneo, has no comic timing. He rushes most of his punchlines, or comic payoffs, even worse the more dramatic moments. He doesn't handle the actors well, thus his lead, Carlyle, who's either too slight or too straining, provides no focus for the film. It's good-natured, and like lots of non-American things, neither flees the mundane for some eschatological fantasy nor casts "real life" into some narcissistic echo chamber. Unfortunately, it's no less formulaic and manipulative for that, reaching an unbearable pitch of suspense machinations just before the big payoff, the strip show. Various obstacles have popped up, the show's gone on, then off, one of the men drops out. Then, after being led on like that through the main of the film, the man who dropped out shows up at showtime, but as if that weren't clangy sappy enough, the leader of the group who's been pushing them all has got opening jitters and now he's not going on. This all but ruins any good faith, or humor, for the strip show. Which disposition to participate is already taxed by the fact the story's backdrop of unemployment and esteem problems is all but trivialized by the strip show device. Though it's less pretentious in it's working class aura than Saturday Night Fever, that film is still the model for this sort of enduring-spirit gimmick. [4/98]
The Big One (1997). Credits. More of Michael Moore and his give them enough rope method. Though it's not as inspired and concerted as Roger and Me, it has a more modest testamentary virtue. Shooting from the hip during a recent tour for his book, Downsize This, Moore mixes snatches of speaking engagements and book-signings with his ulterior plan of checking up on labor and corporate scheming. His one good stroke, and I don't think he makes much of a pretense to anything else, despite what some vocal detractors are saying nowdays, is to show exactly what his targets are giving him, which is also what they're not giving him, to show their evasions and excuses and self-interest. He's even following the formula of some cheeky Reaganite: he's making his lemonade. Roger and Me has been criticized for being dishonest documentary. But what sense of fact or factitiousness does that presume? When he documents the way he's turned away from corporate lobbies or factories, makes a film out of someone's refusal to speak to him, how does the onus of discredit fall to him? Similarly, in this film, he not only goes after other companies for such a banal affront, he shows the banal labor drama and corporate conniving going on over his book tour. He's inhabiting the banal places of these events, as when he meets some workers of Borders in a parking lot for their meek organization effort, showing neither the commercial sumptuousness that the corporate heads want us to see, nor a similarly dramafied newsiness of the hardship. And his offhand humor, despite whatever it may be as a psychological device for himself, persists with his protest, does not deflect from or avoid this social perspective (the way, for example, David Letterman's does) while it has at least the merit of avoiding the stereotype of muckraking heaviness or extremism which has been foisted in our public discourse. I don't think I'm prone to any illusion that Moore is providing extensive critical analysis, or even dealing with the whole issue, or that he's the spokesperson of the left in this country, or that he's even very far to the left. I'm amazed to learn, however, that there are other people who are reporting such things as if they were revelations, and as if the rest of us needed to be told this, and furthermore, as if that would go to discredit Moore and his projects in general. It's overbearing, disproportionate, to upturn Moore's sympathetic (and, by the way, not maudlin) commentary that way when the balance of duplicity and dissembling falls so vastly in the opposite direction. It also strikes me as reactive, if not reactionary. [4/98]
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). Credits. Droll pulp, a spoof of This Island Earth (more particularly, but a cross-section of science-fiction) as a Thomas Pynchon comic book. Despite it's cheap production, especially the actual film it was shot on, which is not holding up well with age, this is a rare American example of a wry, oblique style in a pop vein. It came out of nowhere, or the eighth dimension, especially since its concerted nonchalance didn't seem to exist anymore; something from a bygone era, Rene Clair films. And this treatment is everything, since the plot is just a series of comic tropes. The joke of the wunderkind Bucakroo Banzai starts right off, from an opening title, which tells of his Japanese-American heritage, to the first scenes where he goes from neurosurgery to driving a high-speed automobile straight through a mountain. It's extended when we see him playing with his team as a band at a night club, and even then by switching from guitar to trumpet to piano. [4/98]
Mimic (1997). Credits. Another bad Alien ripoff, with goofy coming-of-age story stuff thrown in, trying to have an epic sweep and be all moody and atmospheric, but developing nothing. It's got that style of direction that's like a teenager lost in the mirror. It's all a preening jumble of poses. I guess in that respect, the title is apt. But this film is not passable. After all the hoopla the whole thing breaks down into doltish action stuff, wildly compensating for its own whimsy, you know, the way the monsters can bust through steel doors 'cause it's really cool and scary but then you have to contrive obstacles for them. And even though they want to cop to action, the real story of the bug monsters, for some absurd reason, is just expository speech. They don't even bother to go after the sensation of showing it all in flashbacks! The film that can't even be bad in a fun way. The morphing fad is like the cockroaches it portrays in this film: it's overrun everything. There is a basic practical problem with computer animation, which is it is not film. It looks too shallow. Despite other things bad about it, Jurassic Park is so far the one really good integration of computer work, and there it was a matter of hiding it, of using various methods to tone down how conspicuous it is, for example, having lots of night sequences. In this film, despite the dark settings, the one thing which is not done is using the film to make the creatures interesting. And particularly, here, it would be a matter of masking and dissimulating, using shadow, for example. But computer animation is all about finding ways to see everything, to disclose, to make visible and conspicuous, in some washy, plasticky, wrinkle-less idealized way. And Giancarlo Giannini! At least in a progressive socialist world, or some kind where they had pensions, maybe we wouldn't have to watch good old actors suffer this sort of thing. [4/98]
The Maltese Falcon (1941). Credits. When O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) goes to Sam Spade's (Humphrey Bogart) apartment the first time, when they meet with Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), the cops come, then all blows over and the cops leave with Cairo. Spade and O'Shaughnessy are left to talk. They go to the window to see that someone (Elisha Cook Jr.) is watching them from the street. Spade says that O'Shaughnessy is lying to him, but they have all night, the coffee is brewing. Mary Astor falls back, saying, "I'm tired of lying, tired of making up lies. I don't know what's a lie and what's the truth anymore." Or something to that effect. Bogart, watching her, leans over and kisses her. The shot of the kiss holds and as Bogart's head moves away from her, we get a view through the window, the goon still watching from the street below, a nice deep focus shot. Among other things, this scene, as an explicit moment of something in general for the whole film, is interesting because of Spade's attraction to the woman. He disdains her, or at least shows her up. There is the possibility that he is ultimately using her. But the film does not signal precisely which is the case. There is ambivalence, or at least ambiguity and at most undecidability, about all the characters. Hammett is good at showing the weaknesses or conceits of the characters, yet for that not making them merely heels, parodic or objects of scorn. They are nonetheless effective, that is, not merely as characters, but as people they still effect things. Spade, and his milieu, are neither idealized heroic, even as anti-hero, nor completely parodic. Huston follows Hammett in this. There is all the out-of-frame material of Spade and Mrs. Archer. The gumshoe's creed of not getting involved with the woman is a romantic ideal compared to this banality. Spade perhaps lives up to it, not being vulnerable at any rate, with the way he manipulates, and especially when he sends O'Shaughnessy over for the crime. But he is not even at Marlowe's extent of arm's length. Character is compromised or even humanized by this involvement. In the case of the attraction to O'Shaughnessy, even if just a possibility of attraction, Spade himself is no more detached for showing her up, seeing her for what she is. She might seem to be beneath him, but he engages. Thus, Spade himself is as attracted by her dissimulation, pretense, conceit, as by any strength or solidity of character. It's this attraction, or even admiration, which fills out Spade's comment when he says to her, "You're good." The full irony, or play, of it involves the potential of his really admiring it, not merely showing her up. The relationship of the two characters is both more direct and more circumstantially pretense than what you get in some worked-up movie dialogue. The conspicuous example, and which provides the easiest, sharpest contrast, is the scene in The Big Sleep with Bogart and Bacall where she rates him like a horse, a pushy contrivance which was actually written into that film for concerns of Bacall's career and Bogey-Bacall hype. For that matter, the relationship of the Bogart and Astor characters, as well as The Maltese Falcon as a whole, is much more fascinating and intricate, more wry and pithy, than The Big Sleep, as just a particular case. [4/98]
All text of film comments ©[year noted in each] Greg Macon
