9/7/03
Dinner time.
RAW MEAT (U.K. Title: DEATH LINE) [B-] (Sherman, 1973)
Here's the bad news: it's not as good as Dead & Buried. But it's still pretty good. Director Gary Sherman's 1973 feature is a spooky subway movie that takes place in the London Underground but features images of tunnelled emptiness that should send at least a mild shiver of recognition down the spine of any big-city dweller without the coin to take taxicabs every damn place under the sun. Like Dead & Buried, it involves a cop in over his head, but this time the cop - played in typically amiable style by Donald Pleasence - isn't in any real danger. Instead, the protagonists are a hip young couple (their shared pad displays poster tributes to Hendrix and Che Guevara) who trip over an unconscious man on their way up the subway stairs after the last train departs the station. She wants to find help; he doesn't want to get involved. And before a constable can be summoned, the body disappears.
Said disappearance winds up having something to do with plague-ridden cannibals (OK, it's really just one cannibal now) who've lived beneath London for a century following an underground disaster. This is a low-key, low-budget picture, suggesting a link between the tradition of Hammer Horror quality (Christopher Lee even makes an appearance in what amounts to a cameo) and the gory slasher and stalker films that arrived with a vengeance after Halloween's debut. (Donald Pleasence plus creepy electronic score. Hmmmm.) But the Sherman style is very much in evidence, starting with a gorgeous color-saturated opening credit sequence in which London imagery racks in and out of focus before the type appears on screen. (If I were making a film today, I'd steal this idea.) And about an hour in, there's a virtuoso tracking shot that starts with a languid 360-degree pan and goes from there - tracking backward through a window and establishing one of the film's several chief locations before closing with a slow zoom.
Pretty striking stuff - although the MGM DVD, at least, is so dark that occasionally action seems to vanish in the corners - but simultaneously very s-l-o-w. There's only so much you can do with a single plague-ridden cannibal living all by himself underground, and it comes as a relief when Sherman cuts away from his grunting, shambling antics to the aboveground investigation led by the cranky, tea-swilling Pleasence, who seems as impatient with hip young couples, diplomats, and smug MI5 types as he is with mysterious killers. Good stuff.
Viewed on DVD
9/6/03
Behind bars.
THE GOOD THIEF [A-] (Jordan, 2002)
How does Neil Jordan keep getting better and better? When he made The Crying Game, the ultimate gimmick film of the 1990s, he was already pretty good, having put Mona Lisa under his belt years before, not to mention a terribly serious (I'd say too serious) horror film, The Company of Wolves. He followed The Crying Game with a terrible misfire, Interview with the Vampire. I skipped Michael Collins, fearful of spending 133 minutes stuck in a dark room with a director I now thought of as "Hollywood" Jordan. But 1997's The Butcher Boy is a surprisingly wonderful picture, full of playful narrative tricks and yoking a truly sardonic sense of humor to a killer performance by a very young actor. Of course, he followed that up with the wretched In Dreams. And then followed that up with the lovely, understated The End of the Affair. He's a stylist who must have gained bucketloads of experience from his dreadful pictures, thereby helping him keep the good ones on target.
It doesn't hurt that I'm a sucker for a pretty picture, and Jordan here seems to be striving to create a Hollywood equivalent of a Wong Kar-Wai film. I'm not saying he gets there — Wong Kar-Wai is flat-out one of the greatest filmmakers living, and Jordan is merely increasingly excellent. But he manages to take some of the big clichés of contemporary moviemaking — the stutter-step slo-mo effect thatís so in vogue these days, and the rampant exploitation of digital post-production processes — and make them feel graceful, if not always profound. The camerawork is elaborate and deliberate, with Jordan putting it in the back seat of a car and swiveling it like a rubbernecking passenger, or having it suddenly whip around from a profile to face a character dead on. The photography is uniformly lovely. The split-second still frames that terminate a large number of sequences here could be called a distraction, but I took them as a reminder of the presence of a storyteller, indulging his satisfaction with the unspooling drama and punctuating the character notes with just a little more brio than is absolutely necessary.
Speaking of storytellers, Nick Nolte is saddled with too much narrative burden, including the obligatory expository scene in which he tells a Bible story that explicates the title of the film. (In the age of Google, I gotta wonder whatever happened to forcing the audience to do just a little bit of research for themselves.) Doing a Tom Waits impression, he grumbles and harrumphs his way from down-and-out to back-on-top, cutting off a long-standing affair with smack and eventually strutting around Monte Carlo in a perfectly fitted monkey suit. This is a very good thing: suddenly, the costume design manages to lift an enormous burden from the picture, allowing it to concentrate on deftly raising those questions specific to the heist thriller. Who knows what's going down? What do the cops think they know? And what element of the plan is about to go terribly wrong?
The Good Thief is a real heist picture, not some post-modern consideration of the same, so the film won't reward viewers who are impatient with the genre conventions it dutifully covers. Some of the dialogue just rings false (and it doesn't help that the sound recording, apparently extensively post-synced, seems to have been a very tertiary consideration). But Nolte’s titular scoundrel, clambering toward a state of grace that only movie directors can grant, is just credible enough; the appearance of a framed photograph of the actor in his youth helps give him the leverage he needs to play tragic, though we never see him in the moments of quiet reflection that you might expect. The story is always about how he bounces what remains of his energy off other people, calculating their level of credulity and then using it against them. The question is whether he can make it out of this morass without actually screwing anybody he cares about. (That includes Nutsa Kukhianidze’s 17-year-old hooker, whose confusion of her attraction to Nolte as a father figure with a desire to fuck him, makes her an avatar of redemption for the old man.) As moral quandaries go, it's a pretty good one.
Viewed on DVD
8/24/03
Never say never.
ALL THE REAL GIRLS [B+ B] (Green, 2003)
I was never quite convinced that director David Gordon Green's previous George Washington needed to be on my must-see list, nor am I convinced that I would have been any poorer a student of the films of the cinema if I hadn't checked out this little romantic drama, one of the more acclaimed releases from a typically dire first-half-of-the-year lineup. A gentle essay on young romance, All the Real Girls is uncommonly optimistic about human nature and softly reflective in a way that contemporary films hardly ever aspire to be. In that, its sensibility is almost anachronistic; I'm not sure there's a cynical moment in its 108-minute running time.
Despite Green's apparent willingness to let his actors do a little improv, the film's appeal on the whole is a little too, well, writerly for me, with characters expressing themselves in an economy of too-well-chosen words or a child verbalizing the imagery of a dream that is then reflected, over and over, in the film's overly symbolic visuals. They're gorgeous visuals, of course; all of the characters are bathed in a warm glow in almost every scene, making the North Carolina textile-factory town landscape seem ironically womblike in its general comforts, and the film is shot in scope (by Jim Orr, who also shot George Washington and Raising Victor Vargas), giving it a rich cinematic quality that most indie features these days lack the time, money or patience to pursue. But, you know, you only have to show us a scene featuring inwardly miserable clowns doing ridiculous little dances to convey the whole laughing-on-the-outside-crying-on-the-inside schism; you don't have to have the characters observe aloud how happy they are (not) in subsequent scenes unless you're ready to add layers of meaning, which Green isn't, really. And the one key confrontation between eager young lovers Paul and Noel - depicting a confession in the course of which she becomes a "real girl" in his eyes, rather than an idealization - isn't quite as convincing in the ebb and flow of its heated conversation. It feels like the big scene that has to work, to set up the third act of the picture, rather than the one that grows organically and inexorably out of the characters and situations.
On the other hand, there are an awful lot of throwaway moments that feel just like a day in the life. (I particularly liked the one where a character drinking beers out of the can remarks, in a tossed-off and quasi-macho aside, that he's spent the afternoon "pounding master cylinders.") If there is a great deal of self-consciousness in this picture (it's something that a director as young as Green appears to be may or may not be able to easily overcome), its simplicity remains a great virtue. Moreover, if you'll let yourself be lulled, there's something rewardingly hypnotic about the low-key performances, the unhurried editing rhythms, and the slow zooms and tracking shots. It reminded me of reading Proust, being taken into someone's deep conscious memories of what it was like the first time they fell in love.
Viewed on DVD
8/22/03
Three stooges.
SHANGHAI KNIGHTS [D] (Dobkin, 2003)
In the match-up pitting Jackie Chan against the Hollywood machine, Hollywood wins. This relentlessly mediocre action comedy — more or less indistinguishable from the other mediocre action movies Chan has made on his visits to L.A. — is the proof. Formulaic to the point of distraction and saddled with one of the stupidest musical scores in recent memory (not to mention the super hits of the 70s that are trotted out in a sad effort at making this shit swing), its only heart is the one worn on Jackie's sleeve and its only soul that of lovesick Owen Wilson. Even the fight sequences, which are in fact marked with the barely perceptible stamp of their real auteur, Chan himself, are oddly inert in their staging, sapped of the wit and energy that crackles through his best Hong Kong films. At some point, knocking a popular entertainment that's this inept yet willing to please is like kicking a puppy, and I have to admit that I did laugh out loud at one fight scene that takes place among a cache of precious heirlooms.
Here's the real tragedy — the DVD includes a few examples, in cruddy
workprint form, of the film's longer, Chan-choreographed action sequences
as they appeared before being trimmed to the bone for the final cut. That's
right. Jackie Chan's fight sequences were dramatically shortened before
his star vehicle was released. (I seem to remember this happening
with the Rush Hour movies, too, probably per a Brett Ratner commentary
— there's three words that never needed to go together — on
one of the DVDs.) Obviously I think this is a bad idea, but beyond that
I just don't get the logic — it's akin to deciding that a James
Bond movie has too many gadgets, or that Showgirls has too many
boobies. Are audiences really demanding more dorky romantic comedy, less
gorgeous balletic action? God help us.
Viewed on DVD
8/9/03
"Takashi Miike's Audition? I love that movie!"
DEAD & BURIED [A-] (Sherman, 1981)
Now here's a real horror movie. So downbeat and unforgettably fatalistic that it almost qualifies as film noir, director Gary Sherman's Dead & Buried was greeted on its original release without much fanfare outside of the genre community, though it was written and directed by smart people and was championed by genre specialists. Now, the scrappy young DVD label Blue Underground has given it the kind of release it deserves.
Working from a screenplay by Alien scribes Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, Sherman has a low-key angle on the small-town proceedings, giving the picture a Hammer-Horror-by-way-of-California quality. The opening sequence, in which a visiting photographer meets a nice girl on the beach (bombshell Lisa Blount, who turns up later in John Carpenter's super-creepy Prince of Darkness) in an encounter that goes terribly awry, is a gripping set-up for what turns out to be a kind of detective story, with a local sheriff (James Farentino) trying to solve a murder case that just gets weirder and weirder.
In some ways, Dead & Buried is the kind of horror movie that can't be made in Hollywood today. For starters, it would be nigh impossible to make on a similarly low budget. The mood is genuinely dark, and only gets more so as the film progresses. The only pop music on the soundtrack is the big-band ditties that accompany the appearances of undertaker Jack Albertson (an Oscar-winner in his final performance). Eliza Dushku cannot take the starring role. (Come to think of it, wouldn't mind seeing her take the Lisa Blount part in a remake.) And, maybe the most important distinction, it's really good - serious but not high-minded, meticulously crafted but not showy. No, the story doesn't hold together -- but that's only a valid complaint if you're willing to argue for another 10 minutes of the kind of hurried exposition that this film doesn't need. Yes, it has some pretty awkward passages, chief among them a longish sequence where some wayward travelers get chased around by a local flash mob. But the climax, where everything that the film has been hinting at for an hour and a half is finally revealed, is satisfactorily grim.
Considering how well it plays after 20 years, it's surprising to hear Sherman on the DVD commentary track complaining about changes that were foisted on him by one of the several entities that had an interest in the film during its making. It turns out that Sherman was ordered to shoot scenes with added violence after the picture was essentially in the can, and the financiers changed the sequence of the film, resulting in at least one significant continuity error. That knowledge makes sense of some of the film's problems, notably the one truly awful special-effects sequence that, it turns out, make-up wizard Stan Winston didn't get anywhere near.
The new DVD from Blue Underground [warning: Web site attempts to load annoying audio] is a marvelous piece of work. (Warning: the package, including the disc art itself, is laden with minor spoilers.) Aside from Winston and Robert Englund, who has a small role, the one Dead & Buried alum who seems to have enjoyed the most success in mainstream Hollywood is director of photography Steve Poster, who went on to shoot stuff like Ridley Scott's Someone to Watch Over Me, Donnie Darko, and Stuart Little 2. Every aspiring DP's low-budget work should be represented as well as this on DVD. The image is pretty (accurately) grainy, but the structure clearly resembles film grain, rather than video grain; the detail that's often filtered out in the misguided quest for a smoother DVD image has been retained. I underrated the photography on my first viewing, but a second look revealed the range of techniques and nuance that inform almost every shot. The commentary tracks feature Poster and Sherman describing the lengths the crew went to in getting exactly the right look -- flying a huge cloth flag from cliffside to diffuse sunlight in the opening sequence, or swapping purple taillights into vehicles to avoid the appearance anywhere on screen of the color red. (There's a second disc with documentary featurettes, but I would have been perfectly happy with a cheaper single-DVD release.)
Stupidly, I listened to the 5.1 Dolby Digital surround track, which suffers from some weird channel-separation decisions. Music is spread across the rear speakers, and tinny, scratchy dialogue snippets are isolated in single speakers, giving them a rat-screeching-underfoot quality that turned the head of every cat in my room. I sampled the original mono soundtrack, which is more robust and less distracting. Your mileage may vary.
Viewed on DVD
A (relatively) wholesome scene from Emanuelle in America.
EMANUELLE IN AMERICA [D] (D'Amato, 1976)
Blue Underground also released this notorious and oft-censored installment in the Black Emanuelle series, directed by the well-known schlockmeister Joe D'Amato and starring the knockout Laura Gemser as a labored metaphor for the free love movement. Emanuelle in America boasts the softcore action you'd expect, including some nude underwater frolicking and copious amounts of disinterested fondling and caressing. It also delivers the action you don't expect -- like a woman masturbating a horse (yes, this actually happens on screen) and some hardcore, ahem, inserts shot from the kind of camera angles that might have been commonplace in the 1970s but now seem rather unusual.
For what amounts to irredeemable trash, this is surprisingly watchable, with Gemser playing a winsomely naive investigative journalist who wanders through real New York locations. A little more than two-thirds of the way through, when Emanuelle stumbles across some truly vile porno torture footage that leads her to a snuff-film ring, D'Amato actually manages to generate a real sense of narrative urgency. For a truly disturbing minute or two, Emanuelle in America starts to look like the ultimate progenitor of, say, Videodrome. But the film isn't really interested in such stuff, and the issue of women being exploited, raped and murdered for the visual pleasure of rich weirdos is simply dropped. (When her editor refuses to run her photographs of the dirty deeds, Emanuelle simply quits her job and goes on vacation.) Needless to say, this makes crap like 8MM look like morally responsible filmmaking. In its workmanlike callousness, and the rare juxtaposition of extremes in both sex and violence, Emanuelle in America may be the ultimate X-rated movie.
Viewed on DVD
8/8/03
"What?"
MAY [D+] (McGee, 2002; rel. 2003)
No thank you, online horror buffs, for starting the buzz that convinced me to take a chance on May, a quirky horror film from writer/director Lucky McKee. The presence of a front-of-DVD-case rave from Aint-It-Cool-News and a back-cover blurb from Film Threat was a clue that this indie horror film's support is mostly limited to the Internet crowd. (Roger Ebert, the avuncular honorary leader of the online geek contingent, did give it a rave.) Early on, McKee displays a knack for genuinely discomfiting material involving contact lenses and animal hospitals, but such sharply focused moments are increasingly rare as he stretches his material to fill 93 minutes.
Remember back when movie characters had to be the kind of inveterate assholes who populated Carrie in order to deserve the bloody retribution of a woman scorned? In this one, all they have to do is, you know, freak out a little when your love bites break the skin and then you smear their blood all over your face and neck. As a matter of fact, McGee seems to have no insight whatsoever into actual females, having created one of the most pathetic, inexplicable and unlovable horror-film protagonists in cinema history. Think psycho bitch with the flimsiest excuses for sociopathy. As portrayed by Angela Bettis in a game but terminally uneven performance, May is like a young Carol Kane, with tics. She's a woman of few words and no social skills, driven to the brink of psychological ruin by her lazy eye. The main problem is we never get to know her; she's too far gone even as the movie begins. Her subsequent transformation from mousy fuh-reak to assured psycho bitch is too drastic and therefore unconvincing, though it's a relief to see her stuff all those twitches back in her handbag.
The characters are placed in unlikely situations (May decides it would be fun to volunteer at a day-care center for blind children, after wondering aloud, "Why are those children touching everything?") and given stupid decisions to make (like May's bringing her beloved doll, which she keeps in a badly cracked glass box, to said day-care center; no points for guessing whose palms get lacerated by glass shards). McKee doesn't have much in the way of a visual sensibility, although I'd definitely hire D.P. Steve Yedlin to make my low-budget horror movie look good. Production designer Leslie Keel does generally fine work. For the purposes of this review, I won't even mention the nonsensical editorial technique, which seems like a directorial bid for a stylistic signature that's otherwise lacking.
The dialogue is occasionally clever but never truly witty, and McGee telegraphs his own ending so far that, by the 20-minute mark, it's just a gimme anyway. An hour later, tedium fully registered, I was just wishing it was all over. How do you get all the way from script to screen with a horror movie that has no pay-off whatsoever? Anna Faris is kinda fun, in an over-the-top way, as a ditsy masochist with a weakness for hot chicks, but that's as lively as the proceedings get. A couple of tepid sex scenes and a series of rotely gory murders swiped from a lifetime of watching slasher flicks on VHS don't improve matters much.
On one of the DVD's two (!) self-congratulatory commentary tracks*, McKee traces the title character back to a short film he conceived in college. That sounds about right. My favorite moment is when Dario Argento devotee Adam (Jeremy Sisto, who plays this absolutely straight) levels his gaze at May and gives her one of those you-gotta-be-kidding-me looks and asks incredulously, "You haven't seen [Argento's] Trauma?" Come on. I haven't seen Trauma, and I'm into that shit. But it figures. The kind of guy who keeps prop knives in his bedroom is the kind of guy who proudly displays the famous torture scene from Opera on his bedroom wall is the kind of freak who makes this movie.
Viewed on DVD
*
The moment in the commentary track where McKee says his film was heavily
influenced by Robert De Niro and Taxi Driver had me laughing aloud
and running the DVD back to make sure I heard right. It's more weirdly funny
than anything in the actual film.8/1/03
Who is Le Corbeau, and why is he saying such terrible things about us?
LE CORBEAU [A] (Clouzot, 1943)
Le Corbeau, only Henri-Georges Clouzot's second feature film, feels slightly less assured than its follow-up, Quai des Orfèvres, though it may be less compromised as an expression of the director's decidedly bleak worldview. Casting a dark eye on human tendencies toward gossip and defamation, Clouzot explores the psycho-emotional havoc wreaked on a small town in the French provinces by a letter-writer whose anonymous poison-pen missives, signed "le Corbeau" (the Raven), claim to identify a wide variety of debaucherous activities on the part of various citizens. Most of the film's characters, of course, seem to have both opportunity and motive to author the letters. Even Dr. Germain (Pierre Fresnay), who's the locus of the virtiolic accusations, is a likely suspect.
Clouzot closely examines the ways that the flurry of mysterious letters arouses guilt and paranoia within the villagers, who seem to be motivated by fear and shame. The director's renowned mordant humor is on full display in a film that combines noir stylings with characters written at full soap-opera pitch. Check out the gimpy but incredibly sexy hypochondriac Denise (Ginette Leclerc), who does everything but hump Germain's leg when she lures him to her bedside to diagnose an alleged illness, or the old doctor on his way to mass who's asked whether he's religious. "I'm cautious," he responds. "When in doubt, I take out insurance. It's cheap enough."
Clouzot is also a showman on the order of Hitchcock: the sequences depicting the profane appearance of new letters in sacred places -- during a church service and amidst a funeral procession -- are staggeringly well staged and photographed. There are single images in Le Corbeau that are freighted with a more accurate sense of malevolence and dread than in, say, the Lord of the Rings movies, for all their bluster about good and evil (and their considerably high level of craft). Among contemporary films, I'd say Se7en has a similarly permeating sense of twisted moral righteousness. It all flags a little toward the end, when the proceedings hew too closely to whodunit expectations, but it's still splendidly entertaining and disquieting.
Cultural distance and well developed senses of cynicism probably help contemporary audiences easily relate to this stuff, which was considered outright scandalous by many of Clouzot's compatriots. The film was made in Nazi-occupied France, and that it was bankrolled by German distributor Continental only amplified arguments that Clouzot had committed cultural treason, making a piece of pro-Nazi propaganda that depicted the everyday Frenchman as a petty, duplicitous and malicious sort. After the war, Clouzot wound up getting banned from the French film industry - fortunately, he was reinstated a few years later, when he made the terrific Quai des Orfèvres, which actually evinces some degree of affection for its characters, haplessly duplicitous as they may be. He went on, of course, to direct Wages of Fear and Diabolique, ambitious suspense films whose impact would be felt worldwide. They also demonstrated that his dim view of human behavior was decidedly independent of Nazi influence.
Viewed on TCM7/21/03
THE REAL CANCUN [F] (de Oliviera, 2003)
They say you can have it fast, cheap, or good -- pick two. This one is fast and cheap.
The most interesting thing about The Real Cancun -- a knock-off of MTV's long-running The Real World TV series that was actually cloned by that show's cannibalistic producers -- is the circumstance under which it was made: from photography (using mainly HD cameras) to finished 35mm prints in less than seven weeks. That's some kind of record for a studio film and you might expect the finished product to convey some of the urgency --or at least amusingly reflect some of the desperation -- of such a helter-skelter production schedule in interesting ways. But the results, sad to say, are appalling.
The 16 lunkheads gathered together for a spring break adventure are 15/16ths personality-free. The only semi-well defined character is Alan, who stands apart from his compadres when he swears he never drinks and doesn't intend to start. (So it makes perfect sense that he headed to Mexico for spring break.) Everyone else is weirdly interchangeable, despite a few deliberately distinguishing characteristics. (There's the two black guys who seem extraordinarily confident with the ladies, the bimbo twins with a Playboy TV attitude, the male model who says "hi" to girls by asking if they want to make out, etc.) With a strangely irritating editorial sensibility, the filmmakers work desperately at juicing up a narrative, but mostly meet with failure. Somebody gets bitten by a jellyfish, which leads to someone else pissing in a cup and pouring the golden confection over the wound. There's a wet T-shirt contest for the ladies, ho-hum, which is then balanced by a hot body contest for the boys, yaaaawn. Whining eventually ensues, get me out of here. Here's how bland and unsalacious most of this is -- when the kids shake their groove thangs at a local hotspot, and N.E.R.D.'s lewd-and-lascivious "Lapdance" starts pumping on the soundtrack in all its nasty glory, it's the edited version of the song. Lame.
There is a funny high-mindedness to the proceedings, as if the filmmakers really believed they were performing some kind of significant act of cultural anthropology, documenting the mating ritual of the American college student circa 2003. That's actually a tenable goal, and it's true that when you're aspiring to cinema verité you're kind of stuck with what you actually get in the can. (The Real World, which forces its protagonists to live with each other long enough that they seem to actually start to drive each other bugfuck, tends to get some pretty good material.) But this particular project is too hastily conceived and executed to have time for insight. The depressing climax of the whole affair -- the ostensible too-hot-for-TV money sequence -- comes as we see a series of actual hook-ups at Hotel du MTV, asses visibly pumping away underneath bed sheets insistently drawn to neck level, each encounter taking place behind the patina of grainy surveillance-style photography. The next morning, everybody seems depressed. That about sums it up -- casual sex (and reality TV) as Sisyphean ordeal.
Viewed on DVD7/20/03
FINAL DESTINATION 2 [C+] (Ellis, 2003)
I wasn't a fan of this, despite its enjoyable, blackly comic enthusiasm for scenes of elaborate death. The arrival of New Line's special edition DVD enticed me to take a second look, and I'm still not a fan - but I appreciate the visual effects work even more than I did the first time through, thanks to the documentary features that underscore the extensive use of practical effects (that's as opposed to computer-generated effects), such as carefully constructed dummies filled with disturbingly convincing blood and organs, that went into creating the wantonly bloody punctuation for the demise of each in a string of doomed lead characters.
Unfortunately, this is a case of a movie that gets more convoluted and thus less involving as it goes along. Specifically, nothing the filmmakers can do could possibly match the elaborately conceived freeway pile-up that opens the film. This is where the DVD really shines, the huge logs that roll off the back of a semi truck hitting the highway -- with an ominous subwoofer thump that's scary as anything -- before bouncing and smashing a state trooper through the back window of his cruiser. Director David Ellis's background is in stuntwork and second-unit direction, and his love for gadgets that send cars tumbling sideways across several lanes of traffic is fully indulged here, with weirdly satisfying results. The rest of the movie isn't exactly stupid, but there's a detailed, quasi-mystical explanation for the supernatural goings-on that grows tedious, and the cast of standard-issue characters played by standard-issue actors doesn't exactly encourage you to give a shit about what happens next - unless you're the kind of grisly fuck who gets a cathartic jolt out of images of violent death.
OK, I'm guilty as charged. One of the supplements on this DVD goes into a tiny bit of detail on the Theatre du Grand Guignol, which staged live tableaux of unspeakable horror, complete with copious amounts of splatter, for 65 years' worth of Parisian audiences before it closed in 1962 - ironically or not, that's just about the time American filmmakers, emboldened by the success of Psycho, began dabbling in gore, with Herschell Gordon Lewis's famed Blood Feast coming out in 1963. (Lewis is interviewed on the DVD.) The documentary dwells on gore, and its historical precedents, because Final Destination 2 is one of the goriest American movies in recent memory. No apologia necessary here, guys. It's anybody's guess how this one got an R rating from the MPAA, but I've got to admit that I'm glad it did. When contemporary filmmakers seem prone to overuse CGI and accidentally sap any appearance of realism from their "action" films, the visceral sensations of shock, disgust and amusement delivered simultaneously by something like Final Destination 2 can seem valuable and cathartic. (An amusing extra feature shows footage of viewers of the film, who are wired to machines measuring their respiratory, perspiratory, and brain functions, as they react to key sequences.) But, crazy pile-up and occasional splatter aside, Final Destination 2's insistently relaxed jokiness makes bank by keeping the screws off the audience -- and thus minimizing its potential impact.
Viewed on DVD
7/19/03
POINT BLANK [A] (Boorman, 1967)
In this film's most indelible combination of sound and image, the revenge-bent Lee Marvin (character name: Walker) is seen striding purposefully down a white hallway, each smack of his footsteps resonating like the sound of marching armies, or of a rifle being cocked. Director John Boorman cuts away to other images, across space and time, but still the cadence of that peculiar kind of madness - clop! clop! clop! - beats relentlessly on the soundtrack, giving Marvin's rage ever-more-palpable form every time the camera alights on his steely set face. It's scary and exciting at the same time, nicely establishing Marvin as the original Terminator. (This was remade, with some semblance of wit, as the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback*, but Gibson is way too cuddly to properly inhabit the same role as Marvin.)
Back from the edge of death, Walker is pissed off at an old partner in crime who double-crossed him, took his wife, and left him to bleed to death in an Alcatraz prison cell. This turn of events is documented as the narrative flits back and forth between present day and snippets of flashback that depict Marvin's tortured frame of mind. His singlemindedness (and dysfunctionality) stems from the way he forever relives those moments of violence and betrayal; his frustration is manifest in the fact that, no matter how many members of the shadowy "Organization" from which he hopes to extract the $93,000 owed to him die under bizarre circumstances, he's no closer to the cash, or to a sense of psychological closure. By the end of the film, it's clear that he's managed to make absolutely no peace for himself - and the way Boorman continually returns to images of Marvin writhing around on the floor of that cell suggests the entire story may be the fever dream of a dying man. Best scene: A frustrated and distraught Angie Dickinson - playing Walker's wife's sister - pummels Marvin with her fists for what feels like an eternity, pounding at him like she's trying to tenderize a piece of meat. When she's done, he pauses for about half a beat, then turns and walks out of the room like nothing happened.Point Blank is a dark and colorful film, shot in a widescreen style that reveals the huge urban spaces surrounding Marvin as he combs San Francisco and Los Angeles - from Alcatraz to the flood canals of Los Angeles - that seem to reveal a gaping emptiness inside his own head. Unfortunately, the only widescreen version is an out-of-print laserdisc that was originally issued by MGM in 1993. Root for it to show up in repertory at a theater near you; the letterboxed version that shows on Turner Classic Movies is adequate, but its many dimly lit scenes are riddled with video grain. The VHS tape, cropped on both sides, isn't really an option. It's a shame that a movie so memorable - and so obviously influential, with Lee Marvin's antihero feeling every bit as contemporary as Terence Stamp's roaring madman in the much more recent The Limey - would be so unavailable in the golden age of DVD.
Viewed on TCM
* I now see that my review of Payback was a little too kind, sigh. I'll try to do better.
7/12/03
WINCHESTER '73 [A-] (Mann, 1950)
This first collaborative effort between director Anthony Mann and star Jimmy Stewart is a must for anyone who wants to understand the latter's evolution from the droll figure of Harvey and It's a Wonderful Life to a personage capable of the depths of racking psychological despair he evinced in Vertigo. Here, he plays a charismatic but grim and singleminded sharpshooter whose life is narrowly defined by his hunt for a sort of doppelganger - the smug, black-hatted criminal who killed his father. The title refers to a rare specimen of Winchester rifle, so snugly and exactly assembled that its very existence is a perfect accident that occurs only once in every thousand guns produced. This weapon is the prize in a bravura shooting contest that takes place less than 20 minutes into the film, and it becomes the focus of the story. The narrative doesn't always follow Stewart, but Stewart is always following the gun, which he knows will eventually lead him to his arch-nemesis.
Winchester '73 may be the first of the latter-day westerns, perhaps exemplified by The Searchers, that deliberately attempt to elevate the genre. It's bound up in conventions that today seem cruel or tedious, like the Indian chief portrayed by Rock Hudson (!), who manages to act both dorky and savage. But, probably working under the influence of his own down-and-dirty films noirs, Mann adds a layer of dark complexity to familiar character types. Still, it's best read as a pure, unpretentious western, celebrating bedrock American values and serving up action in wide open American spaces; in that, it functions like a well-calibrated rifle. The highlights are the tense, funny opening scenes in Dodge City; a showdown between an encircled cavalry unit and a riotous pack of determined Indians that begins with a galvanizing chase sequence as a pair of unwitting travelers are herded into the trap; and a final confrontation on the rocks that boasts sharp dialogue, psychological gamesmanship, and startling deep-focus cinematography. The film drifts a little during some detours along the way - one of which pits spitfire dancehall girl Shelley Winters against strutting outlaw Dan Duryea, who's holding her captive in a house under siege by the law.
If the narrative is a bit fragmented, Stewart has the job of holding the film together. Far from his genial western turn as Tom Destry Jr., his performance here is tinged, slightly and skillfully, with desperation and dementia. It's the work of a great actor discovering a new boldness inside, learning how to bring audiences willingly to ever-darker places found within the cavernous labyrinthine mythology of the American Everyman.
Viewed on DVD6/25/03
KING KONG, 1933 [A+] (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1933)
Back in 1994, James Berardinelli wrote a review arguing that CGI had relegated Willis O'Brien's elaborate special-effects work in King Kong to the dustbin of history - that you couldn't keep audiences on Skull Island once you had shown them Jurassic Park. He was so full of shit. (And seems to have come to his senses, judging from the substantially rewritten version now residing at his Web site.) Watching a TCM broadcast of King Kong tonight, I was struck by the visceral nature of the effects work. Does Kong look "realistic?" No. Neither, for all the careful artistry and craftsmanship that went into digitally painting the creases onto his green body, does Ang Lee's ILM-conjured Hulk. But Kong exemplifies a sort of personal expressiveness and cinematic mysticism that's all the more awesome for its apparent outmodedness.
Sophisticated viewers can actually see the fingerprints of the stop-motion animator moving across Kong's body from frame to frame - making it all the more astonishing that this sort of fingers-on-fur action created a critter with the broad range of expressions (rage, curiosity, desire, even melancholy) displayed here. Sure, some of the rear-projection effects work is obviously phony, but even that's OK. As the tethered Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) writhes and screams before the gigantic figure of Kong, she's in precisely the same position as the movie audience - awed and humbled before a god of the silver screen.
From a purely technical standpoint, what remains impressive after all these years is exactly that there were no computerized crutches for O'Brien's work. If it was to move up there on the screen, it had to be photographed, and the wide range of solutions to the problems presented is ingenious. The effects only fail completely when the film cuts to simple close-up shots of a leering Kong head, fully articulated and fully ridiculous. O'Brien's stop-motion figure is so much more expressive. I've also heard it argued that, when the ape himself isn't on screen, King Kong is a mediocre film, another judgment I'd dispute. There's nothing I know of in film history that quite matches the foreboding irony of Ann's screen test, in which her director orders her into the shadow of an unseen monster to scream, scream for her life. And what of the amazingly sexy Wray herself, dressed and half-dressed for the jungle in filmy, clingy fabric?
It all slows down when Kong is brought to civilization, with his building-climbing, window-smashing antics scaled down to match a city that seems so much smaller than the jungle. But the climb up the Empire State Building remains iconic. Textbook example of a great film. Now Peter Jackson, himself a wonder of the filmmaking world, has a chance at a remake that won't desecrate the memory of the original. Pray to whatever gods of the cinema you worship; pray for him. (Ray Harryhausen on Peter Jackson's efforts: "If anyone's going to do it, then he will." W00t!
Viewed on TCM
