A Collection Project Three-fer

Häxan (d. Benjamin Christensen) - The above still pretty much says it all, doesn't it? Christensen's 1922 documentary/sociological essay/horror phantasmagoria would find itself very lonely if you were to try and place it within a genre. Occasionally, and tediously, didactic, Häxan is nevertheless gripping for the fact that it broke all the rules of documentary filmmaking before there ever was such a thing to break, and for its deeply bizarre and unnerving horror imagery, which take the form of Black Sabbaths and devils and witches and so forth, as Christensen chronicles the history of a particular kind of supersitious thought in the Middle Ages. What's curious about these images -- which range from the plain creepy, to the ludicrous, to the darkly sexual -- is that they're filmed with such verve and creative energy that they almost convince the viewer that those witch-hunters from hundreds of years ago were maybe on to something. As a thinker, Christensen cares to teach us how not to revert back, in our own modern and self-righteous way, to old and fiendish habits; as a filmmaker, however, he was far more interested in how the world looked through those superstitious eyes.
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The Night of the Following Day (d. Hubert Cornfield) - Cornfield's DVD commentary track for this film is, for reasons it would be crass to explain, impossible to listen to. From a very shallow point of view, this is a shame, because, frankly, I'd like an explanation. For much of its length, The Night of the Following Day is a lean, precise, and vicious little crime thriller, about the kidnapping, in France, of an English heiress (Pamela Franklin) by a group of American criminals, led by Marlon Brando and Richard Boone.

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First thing's first: despite the fact that, in his parade of tight all-black get-ups, Brando looks like he's constantly on the way to, or just back from, dance class, he's absolutely terrific, playing the smartest and most moral of the kidnappers with the ease of a top-class character actor. And the role of "top-class character actor" in Night of the Following Day is filled by Richard Boone, as Satanic and horribly convincing as he's ever been (by the way, Rita Moreno, as the female kidnapper, is also excellent, and she gives one of the best stoned-out-of-her-gourd performances I've seen).

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But after a note-perfect climax (directed, I've gathered, by Boone, at Brando's insistence, due to Brando's belief that Cornfield was incompetent; in fairness the vast majority of the rest of the film doesn't bear this out), Cornfield throws in a loony-bird twist that caused my brain to silently rage "What the dick!? This was all a...wait, no, that can't be it. What? Why!?" In short, the film is like the worm Ouroboros, or the symbol for infinity, or a Moebius strip, and all that, but to no good goddamn purpose. The last few minutes of the film -- which supposedly Brando strenuously objected to -- have the strange distinction of neither ruining the ending's impact and making the viewer wish they'd been cut altogether. Narrative experimentation gone awry, is what I'm talking about, but the lion's share of the film is still well worth anyone's time.

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Paul Blart: Mall Cop (d. Steve Carr) - I implied there would be films such as this would pop up now and again. And I suppose I could pretend that my wife and I don't think Kevin James is funny, and that we didn't rent this one night because we both really wanted to see it, and that we didn't both laugh often enough at the zany antics of an overweight and socially inept mall cop who finds himself defending his turf (a mall) against a group of gun-wielding robbers (burglars?) that I eventually picked it up at a Blockbuster sale. I could do all that, but it would be a lie. I think this movie's kinda funny. Fuck you, you jerks!