Friday, August 31, 2007

Walking Flower Pots

Zombi 2 (1979)
directed by Lucio Fulci
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

It's amazing how good a zombie film can look on paper - zombie vs. shark, downer ending, plenty of nudity, plenty of gore - and still be a slog to sit through. After all - in a zombie movie especially - those disparate entertainments should be ends in and of themselves. That is actually a man wrestling a shark while a topless model-type scuba diver looks on. A trim ninety minutes, nice squishy eyes.

I've convinced myself without convincing myself.

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Moto Cairo

Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937)
directed by Norman Foster
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix



On one level, there's Mr. Moto, who's on the case before the movie even begins. On the second, Peter Lorre, who acts like he's a step ahead of the joke the rest of the actors are trying to catch up to. Surely his enthusiasm for the role tapered over the ensuing two years (eight features!), but not here. Moto makes Charlie Chan, with his vaudeville hijinks and badly paced reactions, look like a history lesson from the pre-funny years. Less a relic than maybe the most fundamentally "international" production ever made, solely for the sweat of one dear man's brow. Highly recommended (thanks Syl).

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

My Milius

Red Dawn (1984)
directed by John Milius
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix



My enduring image of John Milius is the director zipping around the desert set of The Wind and the Lion on a dirt bike with an American flag on a short pole behind him. A nutcase, in other words. The Wind and the Lion was and probably still is my dad's favorite movie, and like a lot of movies I grew up with, I wear it near and dear. There's the Indianapolis speech from Jaws, of course, and Conan the Barbarian and the "ol' Potomac two-step, Jack" bit from the corrupt Presidente of Clear and Present Danger. So much good!

Red Dawn is ridiculous. The politics are offensive (registered gun owners are the first Americans the commies lock up, kids who took a beating from their dads are stronger for this new national nightmare, etc.), and, strained through Patrick Swayze's sobbing performance, funny to the point of unbearable. To Milius' credit, he obviously understands how outrageous it gets; once the Reds move in, the local cineplex shows Alexander Nevsky and advertises - what else? - free screenings. But a Russian soldier prying a handgun from the dead fingers of a man shot out of a truck with a "They Can Have My Gun When They Pry It From My Cold, Dead Fingers" bumper sticker is so far out of control, it's better to argue the merits one can argue back on planet Red, White, & Blue.

To that end, the opening sequence, and Milius' consistent on-location use of a uniquely American landscape (you can't mistake Alberta for New Mexico) sells a kind of deep-seated fear about foreign invasion that's honestly hard to imagine until you see paratroopers setting down outside a high school on the Great Plains. It's great moviemaking, however jingoistic the messenger. Plus: picture credits!

Monday, August 27, 2007

As Himself

Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001)
directed by Stacy Peralta
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

There's so much good footage here, all anchored by that black and white shot of the Zephyr gang in t-shirts, jeans, and kid hair for miles. And it's obviously a great story - youth and the grace of empty backyard swims. You could argue that, since this is the story Peralta and Craig Stecyk decided to tell - since Dogtown is the way they convey the images, the photos, the history they have - that the MTV Cribs-style pace and organization don't matter. That this is Peralta's story, to tell as he chooses. And it's nice to hear the joy these men still have for the people they were. But means have to count for something, and it's hard not to wonder what someone else could have done with those Super 8s. Like the "Love in Vain" sequence in Gimme Shelter, don't you know - maybe Sean Penn has a personal anecdote he can tell us about that, too.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Wild at Heart

Repo Man (1984)
directed by Alex Cox
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix



Repo Man feels different ("Small. Yellow. Different."). It's edited differently - in a series of sometimes fast, sometimes slow progressions forward through time. A day, a series of weeks, hours, nights and mornings. There's a real urgency to its punk protagonist's disillusionment and anger, an uneasiness in how he relates to supporting characters who serve, in turn, as friends, associates, or antagonists. The movie's funny and even exhilarating, goofy and a little haphazard. Don't quit your day job, Emilio - you're a glowing car classic.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Fry Cook on Venus

Superbad (2007)
directed by Greg Mottola
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at Oxford Studio Cinema

Teen comedy writers (even those Freaks and Geeks darlings) need to start remembering that Ferris Bueller was the same slick asshole charmer at the end of his sick day that he was when it started. "Joyously emphasizing male friendship, respect for women, and open dialogue between opposing demographics?" "No matter how unapologetically vulgar their words, no matter how single-mindedly priapic their preoccupations, these men and boys are good and decent and tender and true?"



Is friendship - and characters articulating what it means to them - really so rare in movies that Superbad's emphasis deserves such superfluous praise? Or is the triumph of platonic love in one more last night of high school more than a little disappointing? Cameron never stood a chance with Sloane; the lesson in those prank phone calls to Rooney was at least to try. What were they going to do, hang out in Chicago all day without a girl? What a waste!

Friday, August 17, 2007

The Desert Near Cross Tree

The Shooting (1967)
directed by Monte Hellman
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

The way Jack Nicholson props his black-gloved mitts on the horn of his saddle is really more memorable than his performance here; someone wrote it's just as iconic as Easy Rider, but that simply isn't so. Cultural hyperbole is a disservice to "The Shooting," which is, at its heart, a great movie about landscape from the same page as Grizzly Man. The slow-motion edits that close the movie feel dusty and disoriented; instead of an existential narrative, it's a treatment of physical fatigue.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Annie Hall, 2



Or maybe it was Play It Again, Sam I saw first. It's hard to remember. The Tony Roberts/Diane Keaton/Woody Allen team in both movies is important; Allen likes to cast competitors to his characters' love interests, usually as comic foils (Billy Crystal, most egregiously, as the devil in Deconstructing Harry; Michael Murphy, most cynically, in Manhattan), but in Sam, Tony's Dick Christie was a nice guy - maybe a little dull, but okay. His presence there takes the edge off Woody's.

In Annie Hall, Rob isn't interested in Annie romantically. Rob introduces Annie and Alvy after a game of doubles; he goes sightseeing with the couple in Alvy's old neighborhood (we learn that he and Alvy grew up together); he sits at the table with Alvy when Alvy goes to hear Annie sing. When the movie begins, Rob tries to convince Alvy to move to California; "we can play tennis outside there everyday," he says. Alvy has a smart response, but at least until the scene in LA when Rob wears a radiation suit and boasts about bedding sixteen year-old twins, Rob's casual, recurring encounters with Alvy anchor Alvy's neuroses to the sort of off-hand venting we all do in the company of friends. We believe that Alvy can be a normal guy, instead of some stand-in for a uniquely unequipped New Yorker.

Generally speaking, it's the normalcy in Annie Hall that separates it from Allen's most condescending tendencies. For example, that scene on the park bench, when Alvy and Annie comment on passersby, is sweet instead of smarmy; I like that Alvy sits casually, with his arm behind Annie's shoulders. We laugh at the jokes because they're about New Yorkers, not for them. And the jokes are told affectionately, as opposed to the later below-the-belt shots at Los Angeles that come closest to derailing the movie's essential theme.

What bothers me about the LA scenes isn't that Allen doesn't like the city, or try to; it's the director's association (not Alvy's) of what he sees as LA's cheapness and superficiality with Annie. When Annie follows Tony Lacey to the west coast, she isn't - for the first time - making her own decisions about who she is. Allen is. When Alvy gives her his books about death, Annie doesn't throw out her picture book about cats. And that, we're lead to understand, is what makes relationships so valuable: that the people you love adapt without changing who they really are. In Los Angeles, Annie becomes shallow and spiteful; she isn't exasperated with Alvy, she's dismissive of him. In that brief sequence, together at the cafe just off the boulevard, Allen betrays his heroine (only to exonerate her in his closing monologue).

Anyway, it's Annie Hall, not Alvy Singer. That makes it unique from Allen's other movies. We sympathize with her more than him.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Annie Hall, 1



It could have been Chicago as easily as New York, except that my friend Hadley played me The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve not long before he showed me Amarcord. Amarcord felt foreign to me, captivating but too much like I'd jumped too deep the first time in. The prostitute on the beach when she exhales at the camera - that strange witchy hiss - the kids masturbating together in the car. You can imagine my shocked reaction.

Amarcord was on a copied cassette tape that Hadley got somewhere, and it was letterboxed. That process made sense immediately; I asked what else he had and he said Manhattan, but that I should see Annie Hall first. So I did. I went to the central library in downtown SA and checked it out. My discovery of Woody Allen, then, is first of all synonymous with nostalgia for everything I've watched since. But after Annie Hall, I didn't go back to Fellini, or branch out in another direction. I kept watching Woody Allen movies, out of order, but until I'd seen them all. It's possible to separate my appreciation for Annie Hall specifically from that context, but there is, of course, a context.

It could have been Chicago because Chicago, like New York, was metropolitan and cold, two things San Antonio was not. Both cities had places that were open all night and black and white photographs of famous people in smart clothes, in dark clubs with elegant drinks on the table and even an elegant wash from the smoke from the cigarettes in their fingers. My father lived in New York one summer and had a few photographs he'd taken of the city. Tall buildings, crowded ferries. It was photographs that sold me, his and pictures I'd seen in books. But it was the crowds and cold that seemed so different: long coats, scarfs. I thought of all those people in winter, huddled alone on streets full of snow, then going into nightclubs or theaters to hear music or see movies, getting a sense of the city life around them in the near warmth of conversation, noise, and music (it was music first, and movies later).

Because I heard Billie Holiday on my way to listening to jazz, and not someone like Dinah Washington, New York became my preeminent mythic American history. Even today, Chicago is a city, for me, in books more than film - Saul Bellow, Stuart Dybek. My idea of New York was unique enough on the surface to not dip much beneath it, and Woody Allen confirmed that particular romanticized complacency. His idealized upper class existence seemed as good a place to start as any. He was funny and filled the streets with beautiful, smart women. But Annie Hall transcends that. This isn't an apology.

Monday, August 13, 2007

California Dew, Backlot Milk & Rain

Singin' in the Rain (1952)
directed by Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

The "Broadway Melody" sequence that prefaces Don Lockwood's ascension to talkie star (and also the end of the movie) is an odd stumble on the way out the door. Gene's pastel-shaded dramatics with the fictional gangster's moll feel "modern" just to the point of outdatedness, and, like most tributes (this to musicals past), it simply goes on too long. But one thing I always liked in "Singin' in the Rain" was a soaked Gene Kelly handing a passerby his umbrella. The man uses the umbrella immediately, in a grumpy huff, and it accounts, in shorthand, for the movie's boisterous homage to the sad story of the silents' decline (conveyed, pretty fairly, in Lina Lomant's sympathetic and helpless outrage). One guy's love affair is someone else's rainy day, and the film is sweet to both sides.

Fairy King

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)
directed by Lotte Reiniger & Carl Koch
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD with the Electric Light Orchestra





Hollywood & Fairfax

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
directed by Henry Levin
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at The Egyptian Theater

So listless that James Mason's misogynistic flirtations ring out like rocks dropped into rivers a long way down. I can accept that the special effects were awe-inspiring in 1959, but then as now it's good to remember that special effects don't get you far enough.

Flesh and the Devil (1926)
directed by Clarence Brown
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at The Silent Movie Theatre



Garbo didn't smile until Ninotchka because her smile is a shy, self-conscious charm that the on-screen persona didn't need. John Gilbert missed out on a career in talkies but there's always a price for your pleasures and how could he have thought that Greta would be an exception? His day at the altar alone must have born all the finality and morbid hilarity of Felicitas' plunge into the river - entertaining like all of life's juxtapositions and probably reminiscent of this first film of theirs and its helter-skelter moods.

Undercurrent (1946)
directed by Vincente Minnelli
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at LACMA

Robert Mitchum is not like the shark in Jaws. Less is not more. Especially when the attendant physical dramatics (swinging lantern-light, inky black storms) follow suit. Minnelli was such a society hound, to such crippling ends - its why what should have been Mitchum's film begins with a lapdog named Rummy.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Collecting Comic Books

The Simpsons Movie (2007)
directed by David Silverman
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at Oxford Studio Cinema

"The Simpsons" aren't mine on ardent terms. The show was funny, the writers well-intentioned, at their worst when they followed the lead of the derivative adult swim and let a madcap grace go manic. But this movie, for all the particulars I can't remember (something about Green Day, or a woman with a washboard), felt goofy and gentle just enough - like those lovable Springfield cats and dogs the animators like to let pad around.