Friday, November 30, 2007

Visions of Sugar Plums

The Silent Partner (1978)
directed by Daryl Duke
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

I can't even begin to guess what sort of research Christopher Plummer brought to his role in this one, except that like so many British Canadian actors let run amok inside the heads of street criminals, he plays your run-of-the-mill nutcase like Baron Von Trapp caught in his Austrian basement with an incriminating SS hat and the wrong riding crop. Plus sex in movies from the seventies is always weird, which is why the awkward romance between Elliott Gould and Susannah York is never as convincing as Gould's nerdy arrogance at his own superiority. Gould sells that inner confidence as well as anyone; the plot mechanics back him up (it's a sharp thriller), but frankly, there's too much ham on the soup bone.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Long Years

Martin (1977)
directed by George A. Romero
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Martin plays more like hometown hero Romero's first film than Night of the Living Dead; where the Pittsburgh of Night stood in for the half-rural claustrophobia of any isolated zombie invasion, Martin's Braddock suburb is the strange plight of its eponymous protagonist. The old world milieu to which Martin is banished - distrusting first generation immigrants too long ingrained in their local fights and struggles to justify their actions to anyone - becomes its own Pennsylvanian parable of abandonment and betrayal, and the misery of Martin's misunderstanding is as much Braddock's story as his own. Romero clearly has great affection for this one, but its uniqueness (it is truly that) does not redeem its cynicism, just as Tom Savinini's early effects and the crew's evident kinship find no room in the bear hug of despair's embrace. Not a "vampire movie" so much as the blood on the hands of a whole city's history.

Monday, November 26, 2007

All Tussle, No Russell

The Outlaw (1943)
directed by Howard Hughes
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

God bless Thomas Mitchell; even playing Pat Garrett, he's the drunk in the DC bar. Hughes' own best argument for his homosexuality isn't so much the epic tale of securing Rio McDonald's bustline as it is the story of Doc Holliday's love affair with Billy the Kid. Mostly they fight over who gets to carry the tobacco pouch or ride the roan or degrade young Jane. There's something perverse in watching Walter Huston laugh through the line, "I don't want her - cattle don't graze after sheep," or at the very least out of sorts (if not character!).

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

My Mistake, Elizabeth

I'm Not There (2007)
directed by Todd Haynes
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at the Manor Theatre

All you need to refute I'm Not There is Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.



But here are some other reasons to wonder at everyone who disagrees:

1. Cate Blanchett's performance is all mouth and fingers.
2. Is the monk lighting himself on fire really the skeleton key Bob's personality needs? No? Todd, what was it like to see Vietnam on TV?
3. Caught cheating at the party is the standard biopic in the face of a "far richer and more multifaceted experience than any standard biopic."
4. I can't believe AO Scott actually quotes the "live in your own time" line from the matronly black woman who feeds young Woody Guthrie - what else? - fried fish and fresh greens. I'm pretty sure "child" was in there, too. Was that before or after Woody sat picking his guitar with the two grinning black men?
5. David Cross shouting at a crucifix? Can't Will Arnett be a Dylan, too?

Take your pick, there are hundreds more. Julianne Moore was pretty funny, though.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Pancake House

Lifeforce (1985)
directed by Tobe Hooper
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

It isn't that the production design that opens Lifeforce isn't great (if there's anything inspired in these vampires from space, it's the way they hang like late autumn leaves in mid-air, suspended in zero gravity), or that Hooper doesn't understand how to escalate tension (the hallway of doors which open and close by excruciating turns to admit scientists to the room on the farthest side). What your first stop at Google Images can't tell you about the film's predominate fan base (or maybe it can) is that a pair of breasts in eighties sci-fi seemed to distract directors as often as it did their audience. All the atmosphere of the opening sequence (the look of the alien vessel, its transit in the tail of Halley's Comet), and especially that soupy spacewalk feel that lonelier ideas of deep space endorse (and the best sci-fi films propagate), go right out the airlock when the Churchill lands and the silly brunette starts killing. Dan O'Bannon wrote Dark Star and then Alien; Lifeforce should be the perfect fit, but isn't quite cogent enough, funny enough, or good enough to beg the comparison.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Texas Never Whispers

No Country for Old Men (2007)
directed by Ethan and Joel Cohen
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at Malco Ridgeway Four

In the novel, the dream is one of many things Bell keeps to himself, but he tells his wife about it in the movie. They sit at breakfast looking out a window that opens onto the plains. The old horror comes to mind, that nothing is sadder than losing your own child, and the long list of Chigurh’s victims — already half-remembered after only two hours — crowd this suspicion that the world’s purpose has eluded you. It is Tommy Lee Jones’ great moment in movies, just as the Coens’ is to have Bell’s wife there to hear it.

More here.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Cold Cases

Paperhouse (1988)
directed by Bernard Rose
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from Black Lodge Video

Paperhouse had a two year jump on Twin Peaks, so the big question is, when did David Lynch watch this chronicle of dreams as subversion of the brick-and-mortar manifestation of a child's imagination - a drawing in school, say - that allows the real world to recoup the darker drifts of sleep? No answers are offered (what about you, Rick Linklater?), but the fragile exchange between waking life and the subconscious is given rare room for a cruel leisure. Without condescending, it's the stuff a child might imagine, and does.

The Dead (1987)
directed by John Huston
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from Black Lodge Video

In service of the sentimentality (I do not mean it unkindly) of people gathered together at a time of year when we are predisposed to generosity and sympathy - the ghosts in a room we have long known, or the needlepoints framed on a wall - Huston simply jogged my memories. Certainly he does nothing here that Masterpiece Theater can't cop. I mean that not unkindly, either, but it is a criticism. At least Huston refrains from flashbacks - an easy crutch with internal narratives - and allows Gretta's confession to play out plainly. But it is more a Christmas story than an adaptation, and less good than your favorite Christmas Carol (mine's Patton's).

Sunday, November 11, 2007

The Mischievous Mind of the Errant Girl

Dementia (1955)
directed by John Parker
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

If ever a film was better suited to the names of its leads, I haven't seen it. Phantasm, perhaps, though that was so much later. Adrienne Barrett plays simply "The Gamine." Richard Barron is "Evil One." Unlike Sunrise, in which the characters' names imply the clean-slate simplicity of myth, Dementia is even more primal in its vocabulary of crude shadows and fears, with no sounds except the occasional inference of laughter, of footsteps in the dark, of an ocean wave cresting on the shore of some half-remembered nightmare. The wailing chorus of every fifties late-night sci-fi mystery (the same soundscape that seeing the little kid watch The Thing from Another World in Halloween brings to mind) is my new go-to for what I want people to hear on the film that gnaws at the mind's eye of my subconscious. If that strikes you as strange, it's exactly the impression the unique and imperative Dementia imparts.

Friday, November 09, 2007

The Two Jacks, 2

The Two Jakes (1990)
directed by Jack Nicholson
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

The rich stink is exactly what The Two Jakes, although a much better companion piece to Chinatown on DVD than it probably seemed in theaters in 1990, never musters. Nicholson assumes the role of patriarch, both as Gittes to Meg Tilly’s Kitty Berman and as director of Towne’s melodramatic script. Gittes wears sport coats cut big, without a vent in the back — more like a robe, really, to ash with cigars — and never quite emerges from them. I admire Nicholson for getting the movie made at all; his dedication to Roger Corman is one of his true charms. But Nicholson the actor was always too much of a loner to play dads. He was lean and good-looking, and then suddenly heavier and out-of-breath just snooping around in The Two Jakes. Nicholson’s early frame was a kind of reactionary privacy (the easy-to-anger “real man” of Anjelica’s fantasies); with heft, he became more of a personality, like Huston’s friend Orson Welles, and less the scrapper from Neptune than the wily interviewee, boasting — as he did to Rolling Stone last year — of his generous sexual prowess.

More here. It's the same article. Sorry.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

The Two Jacks, 1

Chinatown (1974)
directed by Roman Polanski
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

John Huston, the man as much his character, Noah Cross, is central to Chinatown. Huston’s weakness for adapting literary giants like Melville and Joyce is to me the definitive trope of a particular generation which sought to venerate movies by conquering the most universally admired of man’s many artistic pursuits. Huston died in 1987, three years before The Two Jakes was made. In Chinatown, Huston is the abiding, abhorrent anchor at the center and behind the scenes of each cruel narrative machination.

In a truly great picture, in which every moment is demonstrative of a medium at its best (what can I possibly add to the praise for Chinatown?), the moment I remember most is Noah Cross pulling his daughter Katherine from the car where her sister, Evelyn, lies dead. Katherine is hysterical, screaming, the rigor of shock upon her. Cross has been looking for Katherine for some time. As he approaches the car, his old body shudders and his eyes go wide. With his hand — and it’s the hand I remember, a meaty blinder — he covers (or consumes) Katherine’s face and eyes, then puts an arm around her waist and leads her away.

More here.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

The Fright Life Ain't No Good Life

Häxan (1922)
directed by Benjamin Christensen
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

After yesterday's bloodletting on the The Bogdanovich Chorus, I needed a comedy. Was it witchcraft that kept me from watching Häxan on Halloween? Because Häxan isn't, appearances aside, a scary film. The abuses of power it "investigates" certainly spook, but a movie like Witchfinder General conveys the fears that must have accompanied those first accusations of heresy in small towns across haunted Europe much better.

Instead, Häxan wears its social agenda of a little empathy lightheartedly, sparing no expense on the phantasmagoria enlisted by imaginative minds to damn women across generations for their shameful witchy ways. Aside from illustrating the merits of careful restoration (the richness of the image here stands in remarkable contrast to the thrice-removed damage of the Nosferatu print a week back), Häxan is formally elegant and often very beautiful to behold. The gesture of the director's hands turning the pages of a thin book suggest Christensen's technical mastery - that lighting! - and the witches' sabbat, rooftop flights, and animal transformations enforce it.

The film is funny, too, as when Christensen implies Amelia Earhart's debt to Satan or experiments on his able actresses with Inquisition-era thumbscrews. "I will not reveal the terrible confessions I forced from the young lady in less than a minute," he grins through the title cards, and the sight of the young woman laughing good-heartedly at her ordeal is argument enough for the frail perfection of the entire medium.

The day sets early now (devils everywhere), so here's a little light to find your way home:



Thanks, as always, to Syl.

Monday, November 05, 2007

The Swanhilda Cast Off from the Docks at Port Costa

Fat City (1972)
directed by John Huston
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Black Lodge Video

In the famous photographs of boxing rings, the bright lights are like humidifiers, suffusing the page with warmth and smells of the contest. The view is always a rejoinder to the weather outside, tropical from the cold of Lewiston in winter, or hotter still than the hot dry sun of Stockton, California. Robert De Niro's dominance over Raging Bull makes that most famous of boxing tales a tour-de-force two miles past too much. Fat City is clean and quiet, beautiful beyond the best evocations of rural California. Huston's eye for a bar or face could carry him further than it has to, and where are Tom Joad's pronouncements pithy enough to match these poorer splendors?

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Peepshow

The Sore Losers (1997)
directed by John Michael McCarthy
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from Robert the Bruce

I think my blog is really only allowed one recommendation of a film with "sex choreographer" in the cast and crew. Two movies like that and the readership gets uncomfortable. So I'll have to sell The Sore Losers on something other than its nudity, and since a little garage rock goes a long way, how about Memphis and the mid-south at the time of year when everything's hot, overgrown, and green? As Creepshow already attested, there are worse creative engines than EC Comics. There are certainly worse special effects out there (these are great), but McCarthy might be the kind of guy who would prefer I was just self-conscious enough watching this alone to think of it all as a guilty pleasure.

The Sometimes Happy Semantics

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
directed by Wes Anderson
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at Studio on the Square

I don't know if Wes smokes, but his protagonists do; cigarettes prop every post-Bottle Rocket epiphany, from Herman sharing coffee with Rosemary to the Whitman brothers drinking on the Bengal Lancer. In The Darjeeling Limited, many other chemicals are ingested besides, with no distinction made in characters between sobriety and the natural state. Of the many apologies said, none are for addiction. No one dresses like an idiot, either - no jumpsuits, no German accents - and if Anderson's India is as artificial as the Tenenbaum house, at least this world is consistent in opposing the stasis of the protagonists' minds (the house reinforced it). The brothers feel like adults, not kids, and the cabins on the train are not too big to be believable. If I now think of Anderson as a strange duck more than a great filmmaker, I'm happy to settle into something like appreciation for the virtues of a well-intentioned diversion taken at face value.

Or, if dear Owen likes it best, why not?

Friday, November 02, 2007

Bugs Not Hugs

Creepshow (1982)
directed by George Romero
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

To the mechanics of an education in the horror genre - the techniques and themes, the academic theories - never discount the tried-and-true experience of simply steeling one's stomach against revulsion. Creepshow, instructional in its lack of cynicism, gorged on the cast of The Fog (Tom Atkins, Adrienne Barbeau, Hal Holbrook), and refuge for Nielsen and Danson fans alike, is, in the end, appallingly gross. Tens of thousands of cockroaches gross, in numbers vast enough to sicken, repulse, and overwhelm. Refraining from using fast-forward is synonymous with finally standing up to the bully to keep your lunch money.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Sunrise

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)
directed by F. W. Murnau
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

The twentieth century never seems longer than when I think of watching a movie like Nosferatu upon its release. What could possibly have equaled the horror of seeing that creature rise from its coffin in a vaudeville hall in the middle of Germany somewhere? There are, of course, worse terrors - especially in Germany between the wars - but none of them with awe attendant hand in hand, a wonder of the inspirational sort, of witnessing a miracle and walking away. Maybe because Nosferatu is simply so old - ten years at least on most of the movies I think of that way - I am always one step ahead, or behind, drawing the curtains open or closed with both hands, peeking through.