Room

Brie Larson and Jacob Trembly in Room

Lenny Abrahamson's Room is an unabashed triumph. The performances of Brie Larson and Jacob Trembly are among the most memorable of recent vintage. Joan Allen, stuck in a seemingly endless parade of cold bitch executive roles, gets to show some warmth for a change in a bleak picture that could have descended into morbidity if not for Abrahamson's steady hand with his cast. 

Abrahamson begins the film by showing the room mother and son are trapped in as if it were an entire universe. The detailed shots of the bric a brac of the titular room give a world in a grain of sand feel to the space; one the boy has never ventured out of. This emphasizes the humanity of their plight rather than the sadism of their captor, who is introduced well after our sympathy for the boy and his mother has been established. It also underlines how different Room is from the torture porn of a modern horror film like Hostel, in which monsters of the male id bring sheeple to their slaughter.

Room literally demonstrates how the uses of enchantment in fables and stories can ready young minds to deal with the travails of existence. Mom tells stories and reads Lewis Carroll to her son to entertain and enlighten him. This process also enables the mother to conceive an escape plan and for the young son to participate in it as if he were a protagonist in a Brothers Grimm tale.

Room is also willing to show how hard it is for victims to truly escape a legacy of abuse. The difficult transition to normalcy is portrayed as unsparingly as their captivity. It is the mother, whose strength and heroism in the room is a marvel, who is the one who is less pliable in the outside world and comes close to meeting her doom.

It is the lack of a fairy tale ending that makes the conclusion of  Room so rewarding. I haven't read the novel, so I don't know how much of the narrative structure was carried over into the film. Regardless, the final crane shot of the mother and son leaving the room after one final visit, provides a sense of how the characters have reached emotional closure with the legacy of their past. The room was everything in the world to them, but now they can, at last, leave it behind. One of the more moving shots in recent cinema. (4/18/16)
 

Tennessee Johnson

Ruth Hussey and Van Heflin in Tennessee Johnson

William Dieterle's Tennessee Johnson, from 1942, is a mediocre biopic of the 17th President of the United States, Andrew Johnson. MGM hoped the picture would find the same success that Dieterle had achieved with his biopics at Warner Brothers, most of which starred Paul Muni, but, despite attractive production values, Tennessee Johnson was a commercial and critical bomb. The first third of the film, which pictures Johnson's early struggles as a tailor in Greenville, has the same sort of regional Americana flavor that Dieterle captured well in The Devil and Daniel Webster. Marjorie Main and Grant Withers make entertaining contributions, though Ruth Hussey is anodyne throughout. Once the Civil War begins, the picture descends into an inert and humorless talk fest featuring numerous political confabs and speeches, culminating in Johnson's impeachment trial. Dieterle's direction is tasteful, ponderous, and dull. 

What little interest the film offers today lies in its mangled view of history. As I noted in my review of The True Story of Jesse James, Hollywood films before the Civil Rights era bent over backwards in an effort to placate viewers in the Southern market. Nearly all films which addressed Reconstruction took their historical point of view of the Dunning School. The scholars of the Dunning School viewed the Radical Republicans Reconstruction efforts as a calamity. As in The Birth of a Nation (where he was dubbed 'Austin Stoneman'), the villain of Tennessee Johnson is one of the leaders of the Radical Republicans, Thaddeus Stevens. As embodied by Lionel Barrymore, Stevens is bent on punishing the South for the rebellion at the cost of national unity. America, at the time of the production of this film, was participating in  a world wide conflict and the stressing of national unity was foremost on the minds of the crafters of what Parker Tyler dubbed The Hollywood Hallucination.

Therefore, the screenwriters had the task of turning one of our worst Presidents into a heroic figure. This proved difficult. There was much behind the scenes wrangling and major scenes were excised before the film was released. Van Heflin suffered an attack of appendicitis. The finished film boasts four credited writers. Its relation to the historical facts is scanty. Its preface titles include the line, "The form of our medium compels certain dramatic liberties".  The most egregious falsehood is Johnson's climactic speech at the impeachment trial, which did not occur, but there are a litany of other fabrications. Edwin Stanton disappears from history, though his famous quote on the death of Lincoln is included. ("Now he belongs to the ages") African-Americans are invisible except for a few dutiful servants and the issue of slavery is mostly avoided. Johnson's status as a Jacksonian Democrat and a champion of the franchise for rural landless whites is trumpeted. His racism and that of the citizenry is absent.

As with The Birth of a Nation, Tennessee Johnson inspired protests. Progressive figures (including Vincent Price, Zero Mostel, and Ben Hecht) petitioned the Office of War Information to suppress the film. Manny Farber demurred, writing "Censorship is a disgrace, whether done by the Hays office and pressure groups, or by liberals and the OWI."💧The controversy did not help the box office and the film's lack of success hindered Van Heflin's efforts to become a top rank star. He labors mightily and largely succeeds in channeling his character's anger and class resentment. His verbal fencing with Barrymore occasionally perks up the second half of the film. Barrymore makes no attempt to portray the actual Stevens. He is entertaining enough plying the stock villainy he also displays in It's A Wonderful Life. His version of Stevens is not quite as rancid as Mr. Potter, at least he is kind to Johnson's grandchildren. Despite a few grace notes, Tennessee Johnson is slow going indeed. 

💧 The New Republic, January 25th, 1943, pg. 119

The True Story of Jesse James

Robert Wagner as Jesse James

Nicholas Ray's The True Story of Jesse James, from 1957, is one of his more wan and underwhelming features. Part of the problem is the three leads; Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter, and Hope Lange. A triple scoop of vanilla, if you ask me. The film seeks to present Jesse James as a youth who emerged from the Civil War addicted to the thrill of violence. Mr. Wagner was not up to the challenge. He could outline the suave patina of a modern psychopath in A Kiss Before Dying, but the Dionysian rage demanded here is beyond him.

The screenplay, credited to Walter Newman and based on Nunnally Johnson's script for the 1939 Henry King biopic, is wholly beholden to the romantic myth of the Confederacy. Johnson's Southern sympathies can not only be gleaned from the two James pics, but also his screenplays for The Prisoner of Shark Island and Tobacco Road. In this film, James is a callow youth galvanized by Yankee aggression and brutality into becoming an outlaw. Despite being born below the Mason-Dixon line, I recognize this as a pernicious myth. James was not a heroic rebel, but a sociopathic brigand. The cinematic portrayals of James that come closest to the historic truth are Robert Duvall's in Philip Kaufman's The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid and Brad Pitt's in Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. For the real story and not the legend, I heartily recommend T.J.  Stiles' superb biography, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War.

There are a few moments in The True Story of Jesse James in which Ray seems engaged: a riverside baptism and a tracking shot of James and his wife strolling down main street. Mostly, though, it feels like Ray is fulfilling his contractual obligation to 20th Century Fox and nothing more. Ray and cinematographer Joe McDonald craft a handsome Cinemascope picture, but the screenplay's usage of multiple flashbacks results in a jumble. There is little narrative clarity or momentum. The film features Agnes Moorehead, Alan Hale Jr., John Carradine, and Frank Gorshin. 

Best Performances of 2021

Renate Reinsve

Actress

Renate Reinsve                           The Worst Person in the World

Paula Beer                                    Undine

Jasna Djuricic                               Quo Vadis Aida     

Yilka Gashi                                   Hive

Lea Seydoux                                 France

Tessa Thompson                          Passing

Rebecca Hall                               The Night House

Milana Vayntrub                           Werewolves Within

Actor

Mads Mikkelsen                           Riders of Justice   

Simon Rex                                    Red Rocket

Nicholas Cage                               Pig

Andrew Garfield                           Tick, Tick...Boom!

Harvey Keitel                                Lansky

Ralph Fiennes                              The Dig

Supporting Actress

Jennifer Ehle                                 Saint Maude

Kotone Furukawa                         Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Riley Keough                                 Zola

Mia Wasikowska                           Bergman Island

Lea Seydoux                                 The French Dispatch

Jessie Buckley                              The Lost Daughter

Supporting Actor

Mark Rylance                                Don't Look Up

Jamie Dornan                                Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar

JK Simmons                                  Being the Ricardos

Casey Affleck                                The World to Come

Ben Affleck                                   The Last Duel

Benicio Del Toro                           The French Dispatch

Mads Mikkelsen

               

France

Blanche Gardin and Lea Seydoux in France

Bruno Dumont's France is a black comic melodrama with more tonal shifts than any movie I've seen in quite awhile. American reviewers, for the most part, found the film baffling, with some objecting to the protagonist's unlikability. Lea Seydoux play the title character, named France de Meurs, a celebrity telejournalist who, despite her wealth and success, suffers from spiritual emptiness. The film shifts back and forth from satirizing network news to detailing France's listless private life.

The shifts are disconcerting, pointedly so, helping us feel the dislocation of France's life. France seemingly has little connection with her husband and son. She occasionally drops by to see them (housed in a luxe apartment with an incredible art collection ranging from classical antiquities to a painting by Gilbert and George), but spends most of her time working at the studio or jetting off to interview Tuareg freedom fighters. An automobile accident causes her to reevaluate her life. In a more conventional melodrama, this incident would push her to be a more warm and compassionate human being. To a certain extent, this happens to France, but Dumont is too ambivalent about his subject matter to take the easy way out. France, feeling her life is veering out of control, quits her job and takes a rest cure at a sanitarium in the Alps; much like in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. There, being French, she has an affair with a mysterious stranger. The affair does not lead to a happy denouement, but to more chaos and confusion in France's life. The film takes even more twists and turns, but I am not going to play the spoiler.

I appreciated Dumont's satire of the media. Reality, in our time, does not just exist for itself, but, also, as a staging ground for its reenactment on mass and social media. France is both complicit in this and a victim of it. She is shown staging her news reports, both with the Tuareg fighters and a boatload of refugees, for maximum effect and ratings. Being a media star, she has sacrificed her privacy. She is constantly being besieged by her admirers for autographs and selfies. She is also sometimes confronted by vociferous detractors. Her life becomes tabloid fodder.

Dumont also seems to be trying to make some sort of statement, and I think he is less successful here, about France as a nation The film opens with a shot of the French tricolor flapping above the presidential palace. President Macron makes a cameo, fawning over a flippant question from France. The film is rife with images of Parisian landmarks. A long shot of France's auto accident tip its chapeau to Gustave Caillebotte. I'm not sure what this all means, but it is targeted for local consumption and partially explains the bafflement of American critics. French culture and priorities are quite different from our own. The Cartesian dualism and Catholicism of French culture stands in opposition to the Protestantism and objective utilitarianism that dominates the perspectives of most Americans. When Americans see a character like France suffer, and no one suffers more chicly than the French, there is a disconnect. We see her her luxurious lifestyle and eye popping couture and wonder how she can be unhappy. What an irritating woman, we fume, she has it all and is still miserable. American see material trappings well enough, but have problems discerning the outline of a soul. The French accept that the two are poles apart.

France primarily worked for me because of the performance of Ms. Seydoux. She is in every scene and carries the film on her shoulders. It is not an ingratiating or showy performance, but one that seeks to show the mask a woman has created for self preservation. The cracks that appear in her façade are the raison d'etre of this film. Dumont is very gifted with performers and France contains a cast that offers nary a false note. Blanche Gardin is particularly entertaining in the Eve Arden role as France's wisecracking assistant. Still, this is Seydoux's show. If it is time in France for a new Marianne, France could do a lot worse than Ms. Seydoux.     

Gustave Cailletbotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day

 

Bridge of Spies, The Forbidden Room

Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies

Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies left me underwhelmed, a feeling I've experienced with a lot of his prestige pictures. He remains one of the cinema's most proficient technicians, but his self-consciously serious films are ultimately undermined by their lack of intellectual rigor. Spielberg is so intent on following his gushy Hollywood heart that his pictures end up being overly platitudinous. 

Once again, Tom Hanks is called upon to embody American values and there is no actor better at portraying earnest decency. However, there is not much else on display. Hanks has little to play off against except for Mark Rylance's justly praised performance as a Soviet spy. Amy Ryan is wasted in a stock role, as is Alan Alda. The CIA and anti-commie hysteria are set up as straw dogs to be knocked down.

What most hinders the film is that the parallel story of Francis Gary Powers is not nearly as compelling as that of his Russian counterpart, Rudolf Abel. Like Brad Johnson and Alison Doody before him, Austin Stowell, playing Powers, must have thought his ticket to immortality was guaranteed by signing onto a Spielberg film, only to be consigned to the dustbin of history by the director's terminal blandness.

Spielberg does score one directorial coup in the waning moments when Hanks' lawyer flashes back to the victims of the Berlin Wall crisis as he gazes on New York tenements from the LIRR. Dynamic moments like this, though, are sorely lacking in Bridge of Spies. Even the historical waxworks of Lincoln came to life more often thanks to a sharper script. Spielberg's artistic complacency has meant that he hasn't directed a fully satisfying film since Catch Me If You Can. 

In contrast, Evan Johnson and Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room displays the value of a director continuing to explore his personal obsessions regardless of alleged thematic import. The plot, such as it is, is a batshit amalgam of movie genres. Narrative sense is happily tossed out the window as Maddin dives into his unconscious where a trove of early 20th century cinematic tropes emanate; as they have since his debut.

The Forbidden Room

The Forbidden Room is Maddin's first feature collaboration, but it is firmly entrenched in the territory staked out previously in his oeuvre. Much like recent Godard, the spirits of the cinematic past (the ghost of Gosta Berling forever calling The Prisoner of the Desert) are conjured in a cinematic séance.

The Forbidden Room brims with visual invention as Maddin and Johnson dice and splice their players into a hallucinogenic bricolage. Silent film titles and facial features melt into one another. Three strip Technicolor Westerns merge with Noir, and the green funk of a submarine picture. Indeed, emulsification is both Maddin's theme and practice.

Happily, despite the usual awkward avantisms, the film is an enjoyably frothy cocktail. Cinematic history is toasted as pieces of its rich tapestry, with names such as Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling and Mathieu Amalric, float by. By most standards, The Forbidden Room is a bit of a mess, but it is one of the few recent films that will repay multiple viewings. (4/16/16)

I Was Born, But...

A multifaceted silent classic from 1932, Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But...is foremost a family comedy; a "pop up book for grown-ups" as the opening title reads. Much of the exterior footage of young boys getting into hijinks on vacant lots will remind American oldsters of the Our Gang or Little Rascals shorts. There is prepubescent smoking, hunts for sparrows eggs, pinky swears, playing hooky and, something not seen in American comedies of the era, public urination. Despite the underlying themes of class consciousness and modernization, I was Born, But... is chiefly memorable for its depiction of young boys at liberty making mischief. There is an anarchic spirit to the film that is rare in Japanese cinema.

Ozu was, in 1932, a young and energetic filmmaker. His use here of exterior tracking shots would be anathema to the older, more austere Ozu. As with other masters of film whose career spanned decades (Renoir, Ford, Mizoguchi, Lang, Hawks, etc.), things were lost and gained through the years. Renoir's Toni is often cited as the first neorealist feature, but I Was Born, But... could also be cited; as could The Musketeers of Pig Alley for chrissakes. The vagaries of capitalism has lead to the family's recent move. The two young sons react to the change of surroundings by acting out. By film's end, they are reconciled with their family and fully integrated with their peer group. The totems of Japanese modernism: electric plants, commuter trains, automobiles, are omnipresent. As is the specter of poverty and the rigidity of the culture. I Was Born, But... chafes against that rigidity, but it is a note of ominous foreboding that the two young boys want to be generals when they grow up. 

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RRR

N.T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan Teja in RRR

S.S. Rajamouli's RRR (Rise, Roar Revolt) is one of the outstanding commercial and critical successes of 2022. Commercially, the film trails only Top Gun: Maverick in worldwide grosses and it is currently racking up impressive streaming statistics on Netflix. Critically, the film has mostly inspired hosannahs. I can certainly understand its widespread popularity. The film is an awesome spectacle with bravura action and dance sequences. The two leads are charismatic and the production design is  handsome. The film displays that the Indian film industry (Tollywood in this case as opposed to Bollywood) rivals those of America and China in technical ingenuity. However, I think most critics have been deluded by the breathtaking surface of RRR. Despite a few effective sequences, the film is largely moronic with the depth of a puddle.

Still, it is very much a film of today. My son reports that this is one of the few films of recent vintage that has inspired enthusiasm from the gaming nerds at his workplace. This is because, like most of the recent Marvel and DC movies, it has the momentum and flash found in video games. For most of its running time, as its two main characters engage in feats of derring-do, it reminded me of Assassin's Creed; the game rather than the movie. So, if you want a movie with one dimensional characters, a simplistic battle between good and evil, lots of action, some music and dance, deeply unchallenging themes, etc. (and millions do want the escapism and narcotic effect of this) , RRR provides the goods.

Some intelligent critics, particularly Richard Brody, have defended this film for its positive political stance which celebrates Indian nationalism. The British Raj is the villain of the piece which seems to be set in the 1920s. I have no problem with this and certainly will not defend British imperialism. Stories, epic poems and films are an ideal format for expressing the mythic underpinnings of a nation be they American Westerns of the first half of the Twentieth Century or Virgil's Aeneid. For this reason, the historical inaccuracies of the film don't bother me in the least. What does bother me is that RRR lacks any sense of nuance. The cruelty of the Brits in this film is of the cartoon level and the performances match that low bar. The one sympathetic British character reminded me of the token "good" Indian one finds in a host of mediocre Westerns, most specifically Tonto in the Lone Ranger serials.

I also thought that the use of violence in RRR verges on pornography and jars with the spritely adventure musical trappings of the rest of the film. Some may take umbrage with a Sam Raimi and Peckinpah fan arguing this, but I found that the flogging sequence, in particular, did not fit within the mythic framework of the film. It is belabored and ridiculous (like the film as a whole) and functions as torture porn.

RRR is indicative of the limitations of most of today's CGI blockbusters. I was reminded of the criticism of Inigo Jones' masques by Ben Jonson that Peter Wollen includes in his Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (pg. 110):

                                          ...O Showes! Showes! Mighty Showes!

                                         The Eloquence of Masques! What need of prose..

                                         Or Verse, or Sense t'express Immortall you?

                                         You are the Spectacles of State! 'Tis true

                                         Court Hieroglyphicks!  all Artes affoord

                                         In the mere perspective of an Inch board!

                                         You aske noe more then certeyne politique Eyes,

                                         Eyes than can pierce into the Mistereyes

                                         Of many Coulors! read them! and reveale

                                         Mythology there painted on slit deale!

                                         Oh, to make Boardes to speake! There is a taske!

                                         Painting and Carpentry are the Soule of Masque!

                                         Pack with your pedling Poetry to the State!

                                         This is the money-gett, Mechanik Age!

Now I don't believe a film has to tell a story or offer a tidy moral, but its cinematic signs cannot be devoid of meaning if I am going to enthuse about it. RRR, like many movies today, is an advertisement for itself. 

             

Vincere

Marco Bellocchio's Vincere ( which means to vanquish), from 2009, is both a political allegory and a study in erotomania. The film follows Mussolini's first wife, Ida Dalser, from her initial meeting with Il Duce to her death in an asylum in 1937. When Mussolini rose to power in Italy in 1920, he sought to hide any evidence of this union. He wanted to do this for a number of reasons, most pointedly because of the probability that he was a bigamist. Almost all evidence of his union with Dalser and his fathering a son with her was expunged. The facts were only uncovered by journalist Marco Zeni in 2005. Dalser was prevented from causing trouble for her paramour by being kept in a series of institutions until her death; a fate that also awaited Benito Jr. who died in an asylum after receiving repeated coma inducing injections in 1942. 

The allegory is a bit simple minded, Il Duce pulling the wool over the eyes of the Italian Populace and then enslaving them just as he does with Dalser, but Bellocchio displays so much visual imagination and energy that I was bowled over. Bellocchio utilizes newsreel footage, animation and snatches of films that range from Chaplin's The Kid to Giulio Antamoro's Christus to show the tenor of the times and the sweep of history. His use of The Kid, a scene where Jackie Coogan is being ripped from the loving arms of The Tramp by the authorities, effectively mirrors the desolation Dalser feels when separated from her son. I've never seen newsreel footage interpolated so well in a fictional film. Bellocchio effectively displays Mussolini, usually shown haranguing vast crowds in squares, conjuring a magnetic hold on the populace through personal appearances and the media. 

Bellocchio's rationale for the use of newsreel footage is a sound one. The film is told from Dalser's perspective and, by 1920, Mussolini was out of her life. She only catches glimpses of him in the cinema. The actor who plays Mussolini, Filippo Timi, goes on to play Benito Jr. in the film. What is sometimes a wrongheaded cliché in Hollywood films (see especially Carol Lynley's dual role in Preminger's The Cardinal) works well in Vincere, particularly in a scene where Benito Jr. mimics his father's overheated oratory. 

What carries the film is Giavanna Mezzogiorno's titanic portrayal of Ida. The moment she locks eyes onto Mussolini's rebellious young socialist, she is a goner and Mezzogiorno embodies the delusionary nature of complete romantic infatuation to a tee. I remember how much Bellocchio's Devil in the Flesh got a rise out of me when I saw it in San Francisco in the 80s and Vincere similarly evokes the erotic pull and blind folly of romantic love. 

After Yang

Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja and Justin H, Min in After Yang

Kogonada's After Yang is an adept Sci-Fi tale of a metaphysical bent that lacks the corporeal substance to make much of an emotional impact. Yang is the AI companion to the adopted daughter of Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith. Yang malfunctions and the daughter is devastated, leading the couple, particularly Farrell's character, to reassess their priorities.

If this sounds rather dry, rest assured, it is. Even in the excellent Columbus, his previous film, Kogonada displayed a tendency towards aestheticism that threatens to drain his scenes of vitality. Despite a frantic VR dance in the opening sequence, After Yang lacks dynamics. The characters do not fart, fuck, blow their noses or eat with gusto. Jodie Turner-Smith barely has a character to inhabit. Colin Farrell mainly mopes about his family kitchen or tea shop. Everything is overly clean. Heck, the film is so devoid of profanity, narcotics, nudity or violence that I can't believe it wasn't rated G. I guess it was rated PG because mortality is an adult theme. 

Yet, despite my petty bitchery, After Yang engaged me as a meditative musing on loss and memory. Its attempt to graft a Cronenbergian hailing of the new flesh onto a domestic drama is commercially foolhardy, but impressive in its striving to expand Kogonada's artistic reach. When the characters are able to tap into Yang's memory banks, Kogonada foresees that the multiverse's recording of human experience will probably outlive humanity itself. Yang is the most human and empathic character in the film, despite his bot status. Justin H. Min offers a superb performance of single-minded delicacy. Yang can fully focus on a child's needs because he is not distracted by his own needs or the host of anxieties that humans carry with them. Kogonada suggests, as his major influence Kubrick did in 2001 and AI, that the sentient machines humans create may carry with them a spark of humanity that will outlive our inevitable demise. 

Quick Takes, August 2022

American Gothic: Barbara Kingsley in Honeydew

Devereux Milburn's Honeydew is an effective amalgam of American Gothic (more Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class than Grant Wood) and Lynchian surrealism. Virtually plotless and devoid of humanistic uplift, the film seems designed to frustrate and infuriate the general audience and, reading the appalled reviewers on IMDB, that is exactly what it has done. For true horror aficionados, then. Featuring Sawyer Spielberg and Malin Barr, and with a compelling and wordless turn by Lena Dunham.

Domee Shi's Turning Red is an anodyne allegory about a girl reaching puberty. This colorful Pixar film boasts superior production values, but Nick Kroll's Big Mouth covers the same subject matter more incisively. 

Aaron and Adam Nee's The Lost City is a Sandra Bullock vehicle that recycles Romancing the Stone. Pleasant, but forgettable. 

David Mamet's Redbelt is a formulaic martial arts picture from 2008. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Alice Braga are the dull leads. Familiar motifs from Mamet's work appear, such as sleight of hand and working the con, but humanistic uplift is not in his wheelhouse. 

William Wellman's Other Men's Women, from 1931, is a routine programmer. Railroad engineers Grant Withers and Regis Toomey make up a love triangle with Mary Astor. Supporting players James Cagney and Joan Blondell perk things up considerably during their brief appearances.

Paul Soter's Watching the Detectives, from 2007, is a subvariant of High Fidelity. It replaces the record store setting with a video store and also nicks an Elvis Costello song for its title. The lead female role is a mashup of the madcap heiress of 30s films with the manic pixie dream girls of the aughts. Stunningly unoriginal and uninspired. Don't blame Cillian Murphy, Lucy Liu or Jason Sudeikis. 

William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist 3, from 1990, is jaw droppingly goofy horror. Blatty's direction is inept and his scenario nonsensical, but a talented cast makes the experience campily entertaining. George C. Scott delivers a performance that rivals Rod Steiger's impersonation of  Napoleon in Waterloo for bombast, but, despite the utmost provocation, does not phone it in. Brad Dourif wins the acting laurels. Samuel L. Jackson, Fabio and Patrick Ewing appear in a bonkers dream sequence. With Harry Carey Jr., Ed Flanders, Kevin Corrigan, Nicol Williamson and Viveca Lindfors. 

Chris Peckover's Better Watch Out, from 2017, is a clever mashup of Home Alone, Scream and Funny Games. Fiendish fun for the horror aficionado with strong performances by Levi Miller, Olivia DeJonge, Patrick Warburton and Virginia Madsen. This barely released feature deserves a wider audience.

Barbara

Nina Hoss in Barbara

Christian Petzold's Barbara didn't quite shake me to my core like his Phoenix did, but still marks him as one of the more interesting current filmmakers. Starring, as in Phoenix, Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld, the film tells the tale of an East German doctor exiled to a rustic hospital because of her attempt to defect. She has a West German lover and seems poised to escape to him when fate and a hunky doc played by Herr Zehrfeld intervene.

The film is in a more realistic and objective mode than Phoenix which is more subjective and poetic. Petzold depicts the paranoia of living in a police state, but never caricatures the Party's enforcers. Likewise, Barbara herself is portrayed as prickly and ambivalent. Petzold gives his actors room to make their portrayals three dimensional. These are not heroes and villains, but people muddling along, each with their own reasons. When Hoss and Zehrfeld discuss the use of perspective in Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson..., Petzold is commenting on his own attempt to offer multiple perspectives on the defunct workers paradise.

Barbara ends with an act of sublime self-sacrifice. A heroic ending to a tale that refuses to romanticize its heroine or her plight. (10/5/16)

Phoenix

Nina Hoss

Christian Petzold's Phoenix fills me with excitement that I may be coming in at the end of a great collaboration. Petzold and Nina Hoss have gained a steady crescendo of acclaim as the new Fassbinder and Schygulla or Sternberg and Dietrich. Phoenix lives up to its billing and how, as Petzold leaves the final turn of the screw of this quiet thriller in the capable hands of his lead actress.

Hoss plays a holocaust survivor who took a bullet to the head and, after surgery, looks nothing like her former self. She returns to Berlin to seek out her husband, who may have betrayed her to the Nazis. Her husband, thinking his wife and her extended family dead, recruits Hoss to impersonate herself  so they can split her inheritance. The film is a self-reflexive delight, a study of acting and impersonation that boasts some of the finest performances in recent memory.

Petzold is asking us to suspend our disbelief, the plot has many improbabilities, in order to portray the legacy of Nazism in the collective German memory and in film itself. When Hoss' bandaged character walks shakily outside her hospital, the ghost of Eyes Without a Face is not far. When the character has metamorphosed and walks chicly to the titular nightclub where she will first see her husband in her new guise, her veiled figure conjures the spirits of Pabst, Lang, Wilder and Fassbinder. Petzold presents love and beauty as fleeting, but understands their power to overwhelm our senses. 

It is the sound of Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash's Speak Low, a love song of quiet power, that ultimately punctures one character's illusions at the climax of Phoenix. That Petzold uses one of my favorite songs as a repeated motif may make me more susceptible than most to the film's denouement, but I have no qualms about recommending Phoenix unreservedly. A treat for the mind and eye. (9/24/16)

The Worst Person in the World

Renate Reinsve

A film neither particularly romantic nor comic, Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World blows apart genre conventions to create a full blooded portrait of thirty year old woman's struggles for self realization. Renate Reinsve plays Julie. who grapples with her professional identity and biological clock while living with an older comic-book artist, Aksel ( Anders Danielson Lie). However, she becomes intrigued with the younger Elvind (Herbert Nordrum), an immature barista. Complications ensue and, for once, the results are delightfully and consistently messy.

The film's romantic triangle remains balanced throughout. Each of the three has their virtues, faults and reasons. As Sheila O'Malley has noted, "Trier resists stark binaries." The film has no heroine or villain, no best or worst person.  All three main leads are three dimensional and sympathetic in a film graced by superb performances. Only the supporting roles on the periphery of the film have hints of caricature, especially Julie's father and Elvind's environmentalist girlfriend. 

One clue to Trier's intent is the drunken defense of Freud offered by Aksel. Seemingly a red herring, this gratuitous reference actually points to a number of Freudian concepts embedded in the film, most particularly ambivalence. The film's characters' interactions display that each relationship, no matter how loving on the surface, contain currents of both adoration and antipathy. Julie has trouble settling because she is in touch with how unsettled she is inside. It is significant that the most romantic moment in the film occurs when Julie literally puts her life with Aksel on pause to race across town and embrace Elvind. It is a day dream, a fantasy within Julie's mind. Romance is the stuff of dreams, but love and family are hard work; and who wants to work all one's life. 

The film is less successful illustrating another Freudian concept, wish fulfillment. I am not going to spill all the spoilers (and the Freudian concepts of this film are a book topic not an essay topic), but I will say that I felt Julie's dream sequence was too literal. However, I should note I am married to a shrink and feel that even the dream sequences in Wild Strawberries are too literal, so take this with a grain of salt. Whatever petty gripes I have, The Worst Person in the World is a must see.
 

The Lineup

                      
Don Siegel's The Lineup is a topnotch B thriller from 1958. Derived from a television series, it suffers somewhat from its perfunctory police procedural format. Siegel seems much more interested in the two psychotic hit men, ably portrayed by Eli Wallach and Robert Keith. Their relationship foreshadows that of Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager (RIP!) in Siegel's The Killers. They are all lonely men trying to live outside the law, which seems to be Siegel's primary focus in his best films, such as his masterpiece, Charley Varrick. Keith's character even says a line which Bob Dylan swiped and altered for his Absolutely Sweet Marie, "...to live outside the law you must be honest."

As Andrew Sarris has pointed out, Siegel's experience as an editor served him well in shaping action scenes. The sequence near the end of The Lineup, like the shoot out at the conclusion of Madigan, is a model of crisp action direction and editing. Stirling Silliphant's script gives a perverse edge to the yarn and the San Francisco locations (some of which are long gone like the Sutro Baths) stirred a nostalgic pang of remembrance from this former resident of Baghdad by the Bay. 

Top Gun: Maverick

                      

"Today I am a pud" reads the first line of Lester Bangs' review of James Taylor's One Man Dog from 1973 and I am in a similar critical position today vis a vis Top Gun: Maverick. 🌓 Bangs had already excoriated Taylor and his work in his famous essay "James Taylor Marked for Death", but was man enough to praise JT, a teeny bit, for exhibiting signs of artistic growth. Similarly, I regard the original Top Gun as odious, but will admit the new model is an improvement.

Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the producers of Top Gun, were responsible for a number of highly successful films in the 80s and 90s that were monuments to impersonal filmmaking, full of flash and choreographed action, but devoid of nuance and feeling. Joseph Kosinski, like Tony Scott before him, has been hired by the producers (and Simpson is still listed as a producer even though he died in 1996) for his technical skill more than his artistic elan. The producers have been amply rewarded as Top Gun: Maverick is, by far, the commercial success of the year. 

The film is well cast and constructed. The young cast members are all appealing, Jennifer Connelly is an improvement over Kelly McGillis and Val Kilmer is given a moving cameo. However, I felt the film was as anonymous as the enemy Cruise and his cohorts were fighting. I also thought the film would have been more moving if Cruise had been killed off at the end. However, Hollywood seems extremely reluctant to kill any Tom Cruise character. I think he dies in Taps, but that was before he was a lead. Otherwise, he has been indestructible. So, Top Gun: Maverick is a bloodless war film, with only faceless baddies meeting their fate. Since the film seems to endorse destroying Iran's nuclear capability, I find this morally questionable. Freedom isn't free and the next time we tangle with Iran, men and women will die. 

🌓 Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, pg. 114

Exit Through the Gift Shop, The Rape of Europa

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop won me over with its good natured look at graffiti artists and their ambivalent relationship with the established art world. The film was started by Thierry Guetta who sought to document a burgeoning movement by filming artists such as Shepard Fairey and Swoon as they spray, affix, silk screen and assemble their works surreptitiously on private and public property. Mr. Guetta amassed thousands of hours of video, but lacked the organizational skills to cut it into a viable shape.

Enter Banksy, one of the artists Guetta documented, who shaped the footage into an amusing and provocative whole. Banksy's take on all this is nicely summarized by its title: which suggests how capitalism coopts even those rebelling against it. This point is again made in the coda of the film in which Guetta himself has become a mediocre, yet commercially successful graffiti artist.

The liveliness of this documentary was emphasized to me by the one I watched next, The Rape of Europa. Based on Lynn H. Nicholas' highly praised book chronicling the Nazi's looting of the European art world, the film is a stodgy parade of talking heads. If you are interested in art and World War 2, like I am, the film is a passable illustration of the book. As a stand alone film, it is listless. (9/29/16)

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Michelle Yeoh sporting a googly third eye in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Everything Everywhere All at Once ranks as the surprise hit of 2022. It has played continuously in theaters in Portland since its March opening. I was entertained by the film and, since it verges on two and a half hours long, that is no mean feat. The film is full of the goofy humor that punctuated the Daniels' previous film, Swiss Army Man, with, fortunately, fewer fart jokes. The cast is uniformly good with particularly memorable efforts by Michelle Yeoh, Jenny Slate, and a virtually unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis. The frugly costumes are especially memorable.  

However, I think the film fails to create the believable and moving portrait of family dynamics it attempts, much less a believable and explicable multiverse. Most critics have compared this film favorably to Doctor Strange 2. Certainly there is a lot of common ground between the two films: the multiverse, cartoon violence, third eyes, youthful lesbians, etc. Nevertheless, the sense of loss and bereavement that lurks beneath the surface in Doctor Strange 2 was more palpable to me than the familial discord of Everything Everywhere All at Once. This defect is not fatal to the light entertainment that is Everything Everywhere All at Once's goal, but it suggests that the film's charms lie on its surface and not in its non-existent depths.   
 

Nope

                    
I was surprised how indifferent I was to Jordan Peele's Nope. Whatever its symbolic import, I never cared enough about the main characters to become emotionally involved in their struggle for survival. One note performances from Daniel Kaluuya (sullen) and Keke Palmer (frantic) did not help. I did enjoy the efforts of Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott and Keith David, but the film never came alive for me.

Peele is working on a larger canvas here and, technically, the results are impressive. Peele seems to be trying to make some sort of statement on the conflict between American dreams (Hollywood, TV, Westerns) and American reality, but how that meshes with a UFO hoovering up the populace is beyond me. Not a bad film, but not a good one either. 

Carmen (2003)

Paz Vega in her usual state of dishabille in Carmen

Vincente Aranda's Carmen, from 2003, is entertaining romantic fluff. I will make no great claim for the film, but, considering it was never released in the US and has a mediocre reputation, I was pleasantly surprised. Aranda handles the spectacle adroitly. The film is handsome without being stodgy. Costumes and sets are colorful, but the film never resembles an operetta.

Speaking of which, Aranda and his collaborators have purposefully avoided any link to Bizet's opera. This Carmen harkens back to the source of the opera, Prosper Merimee's novella. Indeed, Merimee is a character in the film, introduced traveling in Spain in 1830. He becomes entwined in the fates of Carmen and Jose, a naïve soldier who loves her. Their story is told mostly in flashback, as Jose reminisces to Merimee while he awaits being garroted (!) by the authorities for his many crimes. Jose Nieto's score provides a suitable backdrop for this passionate tragedy without stooping to invoke Bizet. Aranda also uses folk songs and Fado well. 

The conventional wisdom about the film is that the leads weren't up to snuff and lacked chemistry. I think there is some truth in this. The best performance in the film is by Jay Benedict as Merimee and he is mostly an observer of the action. Leonardo Sbaraglia is somewhat wooden, but the part is well nigh impossible. When Carmen first beds Jose, she taunts him about his virginity and Sbaraglia in no way resembles a chaste innocent. However, since Carmen has Jose by the balls throughout the film, Sbaraglia's inexpressiveness is somewhat akin to that of a callow youth who cedes his will to a wily temptress.

Paz Vega, who plays Carmen and is best known in this country for Sex and Lucia, is another kettle of fish entirely. Partly because of her beautiful bod (on full display here), she has never been taken seriously as an actress. I think she is decent here, especially with physical schtick, but the role cries out for indecency. Carmen has to be fiery and Vega never lights up the role the way Carmen's best interpreters (Maria Callas and Dorothy Dandridge) have. Victoria Abril displays more fire and eroticism with one poke of her finger in Aranda's Lovers than Vega does here.

So, the passionate spark needed for a romantic tragedy, despite much groaning, panting and sighing, is not evident. This doesn't mean Aranda misinterpreted the story, but that he and his players fell a little short. Aranda knows that Merimee was a Romantic with a capital r. The scene where Jose caresses the dead Carmen, which verges on necrophilia, demonstrates that he grasps what Mario Praz called The Romantic Agony, the linking of sexuality and mortality by the Romantics. I also enjoyed the shot of Carmen's death, an overhead shot of blood enveloping a corpse on a marble floor which is a nice tip of the hat to Hitchcock's Topaz. 

John Vernon and Karin Dor in Topaz

Race with the Devil

Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, Lara Parker, Peter Fonda and the real star of Race with the Devil: their indomitable recreational vehicle

Jack Starrett's Race with the Devil,  from 1975, is moronic drivel. Warren Oates and Peter Fonda drive a Winnebago into The Texas hills north of San Antonio and encounter virgin sacrificing Satanists who sport capes. A barely ept thriller that has few elements of horror. Cruddy dialogue. Bad continuity. It is padded with motorcycle and travelogue footage. I did enjoy Starrett's use of the Texas locations, especially the honkytonk sequence. The two female leads scream, a lot, snakes are battled with ski poles, and the late R.G. Anderson is the sheriff. 

There is a peculiar subgenre of pictures involving RVs. One of the first ones was Vincente Minelli's The Long, Long Trailer, a Lucy and Desi vehicle from 1953. A thematic thread through a number of the following is the concept of rugged individualism contrasted with the delusions of omnipotence that it generates. A very American theme since, at least, Moby Dick. The best exemplars of this are Albert Brooks' Lost in America and Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes. To its credit, Race with the Devil toys with this theme furtively, but it is soon lost in the carnage. 

See also: RV, We're the Millers, Spaceballs, The Incredibles, Stripes, Rat Race, The Blues Brothers, Escape to Witch Mountain (it flies), Kill Bill 2, Leisure Seeker, Sightseers, About Schmidt, Meet the Fockers, Hollywood to Dollywood, Nomadland, Supernova, Breaking Bad, The Wild Thornberrys, Independence Day, 2012, Into the Wild, Captain Fantastic, The Lady in the Van, Slither, The Osterman Weekend, Winnebago Man, National Lampoon's Vacation, and many more.

See also stoner vans: Cheech and Chong, Scooby Doo, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Dazed and Confused, etc.