Thanksgiving

               
Eli Roth's Thanksgiving received a better than average critical reception for a horror film, but sank at the box office. I found it rather tiresome. It reenforced my feeling that Roth sits, at best, amongst the second rank of American horror genre specialists. The plot, concocted by Roth and Jeff Rendell, is a repackaging of Scream. We have a clutch of fresh faced 'high school' thesps terrorized by a masked mystery man. Once again, the police seem hapless and the local television station helps spark a media frenzy. Everything seems second hand. especially the "John Carver" Pilgrim mask of the villain that is a homogenized variant of the "Guy Fawkes" mask worn by Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta.

Not that Roth wants Thanksgiving to be bland fare. The killings are gruesome and the first act group trauma aims to say something about our country or something. A stampede at a Black Friday sale at a Best Buy-Wal-Mart- type store is based on a clutch of such events, but is so cartoonishly overdone, "Free Waffle Irons" is the giveaway. that, subsequently,  the film only retains a smidge of interest when indulging in black comic killings that revel in decapitations and intestines resembling blutwurst. Roth's cast is not as memorable as in the Craven films and this is fatal. We have no sympathy for or empathy with the intended victims and, thus, no suspense is generated. Everything, even the murders, seems rote. 

The film is not helped by its lack of local flavor. Supposedly set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, but shot in Canada, the film evokes poutine instead of chowder. There are a few attempts at a regional accent, but as usual with Roth, the cast is left to its own devices and stranded amidst a meaningless mise-en-scene. Roth is fine with framing shots and constructing sequences, but, from Cabin Fever on has proved clueless when it comes to enlivening his casts. If you can't establish heroes or villains inside your set-ups, the audience will not be able to enjoy your cinematic thrill ride much less swallow indigestible thematic material. Whatever his artistic or thematic intentions, Roth has not made a satisfying film, just mechanical simulacrum of better ones. I respect his knowledge and love of horror films, but find his work wanting. 

The Scarlet Letter (1934)

Colleen Moore

Robert G. Vignola's The Scarlet Letter, from 1934, is a woeful film in terms of its design and execution. Slow and ponderous, its 69 minutes feel like three hours. Vignola, who had some success during the silent era helming Marion Davies comedies, directs in an overly static fashion, the lone tracking shot is some 67 minutes into the film. The film contains very little of Hawthorne's sinister romance, just a few highlights padded with lame attempts at comic relief. Like nearly every film adaptation of this book, it eradicates most of the traces of the supernatural contained in the novel. This version is worse even than the Roland Joffe adaptation starring Demi Moore which, at least, has more vulgar energy to it.

I don't think the novel is unadaptable, but there are hurdles. The world of the Puritans was so far removed from modern America that even in 1934 the producers of the film offered a disclaimer at the beginning:

This is more than the story of a woman -- It is a portrait of the Puritan period in American life. Though to us, the customs seem grim and punishments hard, they were a necessity of the times and helped shape the destiny of a nation.

The irony is that Mr. Hawthorne would have been appalled at this statement. His life work in letters stands as a repudiation of his Puritan forebears and their values. The Puritan legacy hung over Hawthorne his life, particularly that of one of his ancestors who helped judge the Salem witches. Even during his bucolic years at Bowdoin College in Maine, there was no escaping his Puritan forebears, Hawthorne was once given a demerit for picnicking on the Sabbath. An adaptation of his greatest book must contain both sturm und drang and a healthy dose of weirdness. Hawthorne portrays a reality that contains more mysteries than religion and reason can explain.

The 1934 film follows the lead of the 1926 version directed by Victor Sjostrom and starring the great Lillian Gish. I find that version to be too lightweight, but it towers above the 1934 flick. Colleen Moore, who was in the midst of a comeback try, was most renowned for starring in flapper colonies during the silent era. She studied Miss Gish's performance and creates a good facsimile of her dignified mien, but was not really suited for this role. This was her last film role, but she invested well and was noted for doll house designs. Hardie Albright is a complete washout as Dimmesdale, projecting mild indigestion rather than inner turmoil. Henry B. Walthall (The Birth of a Nation's "Little Colonel") repeats his role as Chillingworth from the Sjostrom version. It is arguable whether Walthall had made the transition to talkies and he would be dead within two years of the release of this film. 

The best film version of the book is a little seen television series from 1979 starring Meg Foster, John Heard, and Kevin Conway. The mini-series format provides enough amplitude to fully explore the novel's themes and uncanny digressions.

Two Nicolas Cage Films: Butcher's Crossing and Dream Scenario

Nicolas Cage in Butcher's Crossing

John Williams' Butcher's Crossing is the most powerful and finely wrought of his four widely disparate novels. A novel about a buffalo hunting party stranded in the Rockies for the winter of 1874-5, the book is notable for its Hardyesque descriptions of a natural world that dwarves and brutalizes insignificant creatures like man. This would be difficult to translate into any film adaptation, but Gabe Polsky's valiant attempt falls well short of capturing the power and density of Williams' work. 

Fred Hechinger stars as Will Andrews, a naive Easterner eager to journey from innocence to experience. He falls in with and bankrolls Miller, played by Cage, who is eager to hunt buffalo in an obscure nook in the Rocky Mountains. This sojourn ends badly and Polsky's depictions of the deprivations Miller and his band face seemed bland and undefined to me. Miller is supposed to be an Ahab-like character whose greed and obsessiveness endanger his men. Despite Cage's best efforts, Miller here seems more peevish here than mad. The deterministic fury of Williams' prose never finds its way into this adaptation. Polsky manages to convey the ecological warnings contained in the novel, but little else. The finely etched characters of the book are not in evidence and the director's overreliance on close-ups works against the man versus nature theme that is central to the project.

Kristoffer Borgli's Dream Scenario is a better Nicolas Cage vehicle. The Norwegian director's first American project, based on his script. concerns a meek biology professor (Cage) who begins appearing in the dreams of random people. The professor is initially entranced by his bizarre celebrity status, but things take a sinister turn and the professor soon finds himself to be a pariah and scapegoat. Unlike Butcher's Crossing, enough space and context is given the players that they are able to render three dimensional performances. Cage is adroit and memorable in a role that requires him to underplay. Also effective are Julianne Nicholson, Tim Meadows, and Dylan Gelula.

Nicolas Cage in Dream Scenario

Borgli's hand on the tiller is not always firm. He oversaturates the film's colors in attempt to merge the film's reality and dream life, but the end effect is negligible. The film occasionally feels unwieldy, overladen with current baggage like cancel culture and media oversaturation. Still, this is a promising first feature and I am eager to track Borgli's progress. Cage had a bad patch in his career when he seemingly churned out four or five B Action flicks a year to pay off his debts. He has risen out of that slough to do some of the most interesting work of his career: Renfield, Pig, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Willy's Wonderland, Color Out of Space, Mandy, Mom and Dad, Snowden, Dog Eat Dog, Joe. Not all of these films from the last decade are successful, but they do represent an effort by Cage to broaden his range and find work that reflects a quest for artistic stimulation rather than financial renumeration.

Biff's Favorite Pop Music Releases of 2023

1)     Olivia Rodrigo                                                                             Guts

2)      Buck 65                                                                                               Super Dope!

3)     A. Savage                                                            Several Songs About Fire

4)     Big Joanie                                                                                   Back Home

5)     Allison Russell                                                                        The Returner

6)     Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Guebrou                                               Jerusalem  

7)     SZA                                                                                                  SOS

8)     Bombino                                                                                         Sahel

9)     Homeboy Sandman                                                        I Can't Sell These 

10)    Lana Del Rey                                                                       ...Ocean Blvd 

I also enjoyed releases by Lori McKenna, Zac Bryan, The Ducks, Little Simz,

Romy, Armand Hammer, Arlo Parks, Elle King, Billy Woods and Kenny Segal,

Tyler Childers, Colter Wall, Iris Dement, Fruit Bats, Quasi, Bob Dylan,

Willie Nelson, Fever Ray, Wednesday, Blondshell, The National, Belle 

& Sebastian, and Young Fathers.                                  

Sound of Freedom

Jim Caviezel

Both the commercial success and critical mauling of Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's Sound of Freedom are a bit baffling to me, but, to a great extent, one is connected to the other. The Christian themes of the flick attracted viewers in the heartland while the coastal critics went apoplectic over the film's ties to QAnon. One hundred years from now, the film will be of little interest to anyone except American cultural historians seeking to picture the divide between blue and red states in 2023. Future film historians will be able to find little of interest in this decently crafted, yet unrelentingly bland expose of child trafficking. 

Part of the vapidity of Sound of Freedom stems from the anodyne presence of leading man Jim Caviezel. An all purpose savior for Christian audiences since the success of The Passion of the Christ, Caviezel projects little except stoic earnestness. Monteverde tries to play off Caviezel's woodenness in a Clint Eastwood sort of way, but Caviezel cannot project the indignation and macho bristliness that emerge from beneath Eastwood's taciturn facade. Only when Bill Camp shows up about halfway through the film, as a former Columbian cartel fixer who has reformed and dedicated his life to busting child traffickers, does the film generate any signs of life. 

Monteverde utilizes the Cartagena locations well, but the picture has little in the way of real suspense or engaging action. The arc of the narrative is eminently predictable and the pace, plodding. It is difficult to make a film about exploitation without being exploitive. Sound of Freedom manages to avoid that conundrum, but with the result that the picture is almost totally drained of vitality.

Quick Takes, February 2024

Hannah Gross and Michael Cera

In descending order...

I found Dustin Guy Defa's The Adults to be the most overlooked American film of 2023. Michael Cera, Hannah Gross, and Sophia Lillis play siblings temporarily reunited in the Hudson Valley town they grew up in. Still reeling from their mother's death some years before, the trio bond and bicker, shifting from intimacy to distance and back again. The film is, for the most part, a chamber drama with a dark sense of the ridiculous, but one outdoors tracking shot stands out by arcing the relationship between Cera and Gross with an arresting sense of forward movement. Each of the menage has an unhealthy cloud hovering around them and Cera is too lightweight in appearance to resemble an embittered gambler, but he is able to project his character's insularity and mastery of silly accents. Ms. Lillis is ridiculously accomplished for her age and nails her character's flighty anxiousness. Ms. Gross' performance is my favorite of the past year by an American actor. 

If you enjoyed Julie Taymor's work in theater or films (Titus. Frida), track down the DVD of her Metropolitan Opera production of The Magic Flute from 2006. The cast is above average, but the real reason to see this video are the production values and costumes. As with her theatrical productions of The Lion King and A Midsummer's Night Dream, phantasmagoric effects create an ongoing sense of wonder. Ms. Taymor seems more hip to the Masonic underpinnings of the opera than most.

Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman's Theater Camp is a witty mockumentary in the tradition of Christopher Guest. The production values equals that of a summer camp production, but the performers, even the juveniles, offer fun caricatures with verve and humor. I especially enjoyed Ms. Gordon, Ben Platt, Alexander Bello, and the forgotten co-star of Saturday Night Fever, Karen Lynn Gorney. A must for theater nerds.

Emma Seligman's Bottoms is a slightly above average comedy from the director of the superior Shiva Baby which also starred the talented Rachel Sennott. An attempt to broaden her range and appeal, the flick is a lesbian variation of the high school losing your virginity farce.  Bottoms shows that Ms. Seligman still has yet to master the framing and timing of her physical physical schtick, yet there are any number of actorly bits that keep one engaged. Despite the number of long in the tooth thesps who have already nabbed a fine arts degree playing high schoolers, the troupe is enthusiastic and sharp. I especially enjoyed Ruby Cruz, Havana Rose Liu, and Nicholas Galitzine's miming to "Total Eclipse of the Heart". 

Ben Wheatley's Meg 2: The Trench is utter tosh with bad CGI, sops to the Chinese audience, and endless exposition and rehashes of the first film. There are redeeming element. Jason Statham is always an asset in action films and Mr. Wheatley's technical mastery is as much on display here as in his art films. I especially enjoyed the opening sequence and the finale, both of which almost redeemed the rest. Almost.

Deadpool

Tim Miller's Deadpool is one of the more delightful comic surprises of the past year. From the opening titles, the movie signals to the audience that it is more of a sendup of the comic book hero genre than another attempt to inflate such a tale into a myth. As the third and fourth walls of the medium are dispensed with, Ryan Reynolds utters sardonic asides that serve as commentaries on the proceedings. Reynolds exhibits more personality and fun than heretofore, even with his mask on. 

Mr. Miller is a first time director and it is a little difficult to gauge how much credit he is due for this genuinely funny comedy. He does seem to handle actors nicely. Morena Baccarin and TJ Miller provide able support as Deadpool's squeeze and best bud, relatively straightforward genre roles that provide a warm counterpoint to Reynold's ADD corrosiveness. The writing team of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick scripted Zombieland, another successful mixture of comic narration and genre tropes. Whether Mr. Miller is a one hit wonder or not, it is the screenwriters who deserve the most credit for Deadpool's zingers and disses. (12/2/16)
 

The Rite

 

Ingmar Bergman's The Rite, from 1969. is a paranoid short film produced for television. This little seen chamber drama has just nine scenes and is performed on minimalist sets. A magistrate (Erik Hell) in an unnamed country investigates a trio of actors ( Bergman stalwarts Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Bjornstrand, and Anders Ek) on charges of indecency. The majority of the film consists of the magistrate interviewing the trio of actors individually. The banal and awkward judge tries to browbeat and bully the thespians. They are a shaky troupe in the last gasps of a menage a trois in which Ek and Thulin's characters have been cuckolding Bjornstrand's older husband. He is less volatile than his compatriots and knows he is the glue holding the company together, but he is weary of his burden. The trio unite to perform the indecent piece, a Dionysian fertility rite that demands a sacrifice. Eternal art triumphs over the transient power of the state much as in Bergman's The Magician. As one character puts it, "lilies will shoot up out of the asses of carcasses."

The film is very much in the God is dead and modern man is going to pieces mode that had been Bergman's default since at least Through a Glass Darkly. Hell is other people and human dynamics revolves around power struggles between creatures who may be half mad. Bergman himself appears as a dimly viewed priest in a confessional and provides no comfort for the supplicant or the viewer. The magistrate brings up the actors' personal life and financial dealings, a Kafkaesque portent of Bergman's future troubles with Swedish authorities. Sven Nykvist's black and white cinematography is stark and bracing. Enormous close-ups provide the appropriate sense of claustrophobia and spiritual nausea. The compactness of the film's structure saves it from edging into the miasma of morbid psychology displayed in such half cocked features from this era as Hour of the Wolf and The Passion of Anna, but what do I know, I also think Cries and Whispers is subpar Ingmar. What keeps this recovering Bergmaniac coming back to the man's work is his mastery with actors. All four main actors are superb, none more so than Ms. Thulin who artfully balances her character's sensuality, neuroses, and neediness.