The Collection Project: Furniture

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[In an attempt to breathe some life back into this blog, I'm bringing back The Collection Project, at least for the time being. I unceremoniously dumped it a while back because I found it too pointlessly restricting, but I think it will give me some direction again. Of course, in the months since dropping it, I've covered several movies that would fall under The Collection Project's rubric, and I may go back and label those posts accordingly. On the other hand, who cares?]

I think it's safe to say that one of my interests, in film and literature if not quite so much, or anyway not in the same way, in life, is violence. Not death in general, so much, although that's obviously part of it, but violence -- murder, revenge killings, self defense killings, combat, the various kinds of violent or at least unnatural death found in the horror genre -- and how it is depicted by the artist. Connected to that is an interest in how that violence is perceived by critics (moreso than by audiences, because I'm not going to be taking any polls outside of movie theaters in the near or distant future), although I mention that only in passing as it doesn't really pertain to today's film.

It's a big subject, though one that is sometimes sniffed at, or even sneered at, unless the morality of the moment is absolutely concrete and in line with the views of whoever would otherwise be doing the sneering. Another element, apart from morality, that can keep people from engaging with onscreen violence has to do with a misunderstanding of the word "violence" so that it becomes synonymous with "gore". It can be, but violence, as I'm using it here, means basically any act of aggression intended to do harm to another person. This can range from sticking a live grenade in someone's mouth to poisoning someone as they sleep. Cinematically -- and in reality, of course -- one of these acts is going to be noticed and talked about far more than the other. Which brings me to Michael Clayton.

In Tony Gilroy's 2007 film, Tom Wilkinson plays Arthur Edens, an attorney for a company called U-Conn who has a mental breakdown stemming from a sort of moral collapse, which itself stems from the fact that U-Conn is manufacturing and selling a weedkiller that they know causes cancer. The film's plot revolves around attempts to keep this secret hidden from the public, and Michael Clayton's (George Clooney) attempts to save both his own soul -- he's also an attorney, brought in by U-Conn from the outside to help them deal with the crisis -- and protect Edens, who is his friend.

Until Clayton begins to take firm steps towards moral correctness, and even after, Arthur Edens is the good-hearted, right-thinking center of Michael Clayton. He reaches his epiphany well before Clayton does, though is less able to deal with it, or its repurcussions. The primary source of those repurcussions is Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), an ambitious U-Conn executive put in charge of cleaning up this mess. She is, we learn, willing to do anything to support her company (one highlight of this very strong film, and one of the unacknowledged reasons Swinton won an Oscar for her performance, is Crowder's willingness to purge herself of all moral thought while trembling with horror as she does it -- this is a stark contrast to Catherine Zeta-Jones's probably intentionally over-the-top, but not quite buyable, Lady MacBeth turn in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic). One of the things she's willing to do is hire two hitmen (Robert Prescott and Tony Serpico) to silence Edens, who by this point has come just short of shouting out the truth about U-Conn from the rooftops.

And so. Arthur Edens is coming home one day, and is met by the hitmen. They grapple with him briefly, overpower him, and drug him.

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This all occurs in Edens' doorway, so they bring his body deeper into his apartment, one hitman at his shoulders, the other at his legs, prepping to lift him...

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...one hitman finally saying "Up", as though they were lifting a sofa, and bringing him to the bathroom.

They're nothing if not efficient, these killers. The scene is fast, and Prescott and Serpico play the hitmen as professionals, good at their jobs without a trace of psychology threatening to bust them at their seams. They've been paid well, and they get on with their work.

The method of Edens' execution is poison, which they inject into his foot with as little thought to its effects as they would if their syringe contained a mild anaesthetic.

It is not a mild anaesthetic, however, and all his killers need to do now is wait for Edens to die.

Which he does.

Though the two don't entirely match up, while thinking about this scene recently I was reminded of an actual murder I heard about -- I may have the details of it slightly wrong -- that involved a husband slowly and systematically poisoning his wife by putting a little bit of antifreeze in her, I believe, Gatorade every morning. Apart from the sad and prolonged death of that poor woman, the most horrifying feature of this case is the idea that this man woke up every morning, killed his wife a little bit, went about his day, and successfully went to sleep that night, day after day. There is a blankness in that man, as there is -- and I don't mean to connect these things too closely, since in one case a real person really died -- in the hitmen played by Prescott and Serpico. In Michael Clayton, Edens becomes an object, a piece of furniture, as I've said, to be brought down to the dumpster. It's only when the camera lingers on his corpse after the hitmen have left that any of his humanity is restored.

And this is violence. When violence disturbs in films, it's usually because much blood is spilled, or yards of guts have come unspooled, but I've never been able to shake this scene of bloodless murder in Michael Clayton since I first saw it more than three years ago. This is violence as work. This is violence as a project to be seen through to completion. This disturbs.

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POST-SCRIPT: I should have done this before, but I'd like to thank Ryan Kelly for providing the screengrabs for this post.

The Collection Project: You are Big Time!

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Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight is not exactly a young man’s film, but in some ways it is very much a young man’s screenplay. In the DVD commentary track, Anderson talks about struggling with the script almost from the start, and saying the way for him to bust through that is to put two characters in a room and get them talking. This method resulted in Hard Eight’s wonderful opening, with John (John C. Reilly) and Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) sitting in a Reno, NV diner, over coffee and cigarettes, the mysterious Sydney offering to help the sad-sack John – who’s just come from Vegas after failing to win enough money at blackjack to pay for his mother’s funeral – avoid becoming a homeless Reno reject.

As I say, this is a great scene, highlighting Reilly’s effortless comic abilities, and Anderson’s considerable gift for dialogue. It also subtly clues you into the fact that the only reason Hard Eight exists at all is because Philip Baker Hall is an actor who is alive now on this planet. Though I had, by the time Hard Eight came out on video and I was able to see it for the first time, seen Hall in Altman’s Secret Honor (as well as – and this is not insignificant – the episode of Seinfeld where Hall plays the library cop), Hall’s work in Anderson’s debut feature was still a revelation for me. Sydney is one of my favorite film characters, certainly of modern times, and Hall gives what I consider one of the great screen performances. From the beginning of the film, you know just enough about Sydney to be fascinated by him, and to admire him (so fascinating that Hard Eight is one of the films from my burgeoning movie geek years that I got my dad to watch. This sort of thing didn't always work out too well, but after watching the film I remember my dad telling me that he didn't like it at first, but the further along he got, the more he thought, to paraphrase the line he most often quoted from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, "Who is this guy??"). Sydney’s a remarkably decent person, decent in a very old-fashioned way, who appears to know more than anybody else how to get buy in towns like Reno and Vegas, and it’s this knowledge he’s offering to John. But there’s a very sharp edge to him as well, shown first when the knuckleheaded John (who is nevertheless expressing some understandable paranoia) reacts to Sydney’s offer of help by saying he’s not gay, so if Sydney’s looking for some boy hooker, he can forget it. Sydney’s response is to say no, that’s not what I’m after, and this is the last time I’m going to offer my help.

At various points throughout the film, Sydney is shown to be quietly angered and frustrated by any person or encounter that proves to him that basic civility and manners are evaporating, though his only recourse seems to be to make sure those values remain intact within himself, as well as, to the extent he’s able to control such things, John. A sticking point for Sydney is John’s friendship with Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), a flashy, loud-mouthed, low-rent dickhead who works security at one of the casinos. When Sydney and Jimmy first meet, Sydney is playing Kino by himself when John and Jimmy come by. As they do, Jimmy uses his outside voice to comment on the physical attributes of their departing waitress. When Sydney quietly objects to this behavior, Jimmy condescendingly explains that these waitresses not only enjoy such compliments, but they’re all whores anyway. To which Sydney says, “I just don’t want it coming from my table.” It’s possibly my favorite line from the movie, delivered by Hall in a way that somehow mixes civility, exasperation, and a kind of suppressed danger.

To counteract, among other reasons, John’s friendship with the loathed Jimmy, Sydney constructs an introduction between John and Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), one of those waitresses Jimmy was talking about. Clementine is typical Reno damaged goods, a nice young girl, lost, or close to being lost, to a life of being a waitress as a cover for really being a hooker. Paltrow is very good here, but it’s around the time of her introduction that Anderson’s writing methods, and his youth, start to show their negative influence. Shortly after Clementine and John first make googly eyes at each other, John calls Sydney in the middle of the night, begging for help. When Sydney arrives at the motel room where John told him they’d be, Sydney finds a terrified John, a tearful, weirdly angry and withdrawn Clementine, and another man, unconscious and bleeding on the bed. That man is or was one of Clementine’s clients, but for some reason he refused to pay her for services rendered, so she or John or both of them knocked him out, tied him to the bed, and called the guy’s wife, demanding Clementine’s fee as ransom.

This is, we can all agree, a very stupid thing to have done, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that the long scene that follows, in which Sydney announces how stupid this is, and alternately offers the best practical advice he can and refuses to help at all, feels exactly like a scene that Anderson had no map for when he began, but he kept writing it until he’d found the exit. I’ve mentioned that Anderson is an enormously gifted writer of dialogue, but if screenwriters ever put together audition reels of their best writing, Anderson should leave this bit off. All you really get here is characters saying something, and then a minute later shouting out the same question or statement or insult, slightly reworded, or, if things have gotten really tense, one character will say “Fuck you!”, and then another character will say “Fuck you!”, or words to that effect.

I criticize with love, though, because I feel like I know what he was going through. In my own humble way, of course, and I’m in no way trying to associate myself with Anderson, but I don’t think anyone who has tried their hand at fiction, either in script form or prose, doesn’t know what it’s like to hit a dead end in your story that you simply try to write your way through. It’s like a car being stuck in the mud, and you keep the wheels spinning in the hopes that something will grip. Sometimes it do, sometimes it don’t, and this scene from Hard Eight don’t. At the very least it should have been tightened up, if not ditched outright and completely rethought. But the good news is that the narrative goal of that scene (the scene has other things on its mind, to do with character, which I suppose are more or less accomplished, however clumsily) is simply to find a reason for John and Clementine to get the hell out of Reno and leave Sydney alone with Jimmy, thereby setting up Hard Eight’s brilliant final stretch. In that stretch, which I won’t describe in detail, you find out why Sydney went out of his way to help John, a stranger at the film’s beginning, and while that explanation might be a bit too neat in terms of cause and effect, Sydney remains a largely mysterious figure by the end. Less mythic, perhaps, but still mysterious, and, in any case, Hard Eight, while by no stretch Anderson’s best work, does contain my favorite last shot (or shots) out of any of his films, and those shots would have no weight, or wit, if Sydney’s myth hadn’t been shattered.

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This post is part of the Paul Thomas Anderson Blogathon, hosted by Jeremy Richey at Moon in the Gutter.

Capsule Reviews: One-Line Wonders

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I think what I'll do is, I'll blow through a few movies from my collection, limiting my thoughts on each to one sentence. The movies in question are ones that I honestly don't think I have anything more to say. This is just a bit of Collection Project house-keeping, really.
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Overnight (d. Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana) - Pure, glorious schadenfreude.

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Not Another Teen Movie (d. Joel Gallen) - I...I swear to God, I remember this thing being funny...it's not, though.

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Three Amigos (d. John Landis) - Three Amigos, on the other hand, is a friggin' hoot, and God damn anyone who says otherwise.

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Turistas (d. John Stockwell) - This is basically the same experience as any number of other professionally made modern horror films, though I will note that the moral ambiguity of the villain -- his slaughtering of American tourists is motivated by the absence of good organs for donation to needy South American patients -- is pretty badly and cynically undercut by making him a cold-hearted racist.

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Big Bad Wolf (d. Lance W. Dreesen) - I'd be curious to know if any of you guys have seen this thing, because it's fucking terrible.

The Collection Project: The Kind of Face You Hate

A little over two years ago, due to my own interest, and at the urging of a few friends, I decided to start a blog (this one!). I knew, roughly speaking, what I wanted to write about thereon (though the tone would be slow in developing), so the one thing that was really holding me back, apart from my lack of computer skills and knowledge, was a title. I wanted a good one, something interesting, and movie-related, but not obviously so, and one that in some way would reflect my interests. And I was coming up with bupkis. I'm generally bad with titles anyway, and whatever movie lines I had rattling around in my head for easy use weren't doing the trick. Nothing that worked as a title, at least..
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Then, not long after this problem began, I was watching Requiem for a Killer, the short documentary on the making of Blast of Silence on that film's Criterion DVD. Typically, the makers of those documentaries front load their films with clips from the movie in question, and Requiem for a Killer was no different. Early on, they showed the clip from Blast of Silence where writer/director/star Allen Baron, as contract killer Frankie Bono, is considering his new job, and looking at photographs of his target. Blast of Silence employs some of the best narration (written by Waldo Salt, who is here credited as Mel Davenport) I've ever encountered, using the gravelly voice of Lionel Stander to not just comment upon the action, or allow the viewer into Bono's head, but to speak to Bono, in second person, referring to Bono as "you". Most second-person narration in literature I find to be too much of a self-councious stunt, a lazy attempt to bring the reader into the book to some degree (it's similar to the whole "you're the voyeur!" idea in Hitchcock and De Palma movies, though, obviously, in those cases it's handled with much more grace). But in Blast of Silence that narration, those "you"s, are all about Frankie Bono, and the cynical, sardonic, occasionally even disgusted (it's subtle, but it's there) tone taken by Salt and Stander serve to expose Bono's blasted soul better, even, than much of what's actually on-screen.

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Though what's on-screen's nothing to sneeze at its own self. Despite the fact that Baron (who, in Blast of Silence, looks a great deal like The Hustler-era George C. Scott) has had a long directing career, he hasn't made that many films, working mostly in TV for the past 40-some years. As a result, even though it's not, Blast of Silence feels a little bit like a one-off (much of this is due to the relative unavailability of the rest of Baron's film work), like Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls. And both films have a strong ethereal, haunted quality (literally, in the case of Harvey's film) as the protagonists of both films spend a lot of time wandering around their respective environments, and through a particularly gray form of black-and-white photography. Both Frankie Bono and Candace Hilligoss as Mary in Carnival of Souls do have a purpose (of a vague sort, in Mary's case), so "wandering" may be the wrong word, but the very specific purpose behind Bono's movements are, at times, irrelevent to watching him walk through, say, Harlem, because one of the pleasures of Blast of Silence is seeing New York (and it could have been anywhere and been just as captivating) and its inhabitants captured not as extras, because a lot of them weren't, but as people who existed at the age we see them, in 1961, shopping for Christmas presents (for example). Blast of Silence nails down, for posterity, a brief record of daily existence. Not the daily struggles and existential whatevers, but just the facts of it -- this person walked past this store at this time. It's the sort of thing captured in more detail by actual documentaries, like the Maysles brothers' Salesman, but Baron did it at the service of a crime story about a lonely hitman who's about to have to pay for the way he lives.

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(By the way, Arbogast of Arbogast on Film once suggested to me that Blast of Silence would make an interesting double-bill with Frank Henenlotter's dirt cheap, New York-based horror comedy Basket Case. I haven't programmed that double-bill yet, but I have seen Basket Case, and in the way Henenlotter steals shots of tucked-away corners of that city, and long-gone storefronts, I believe I found the connection Arbogast was hinting at. If he ever reads this, he can tell me if I'm wrong, which I bet I am.)
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Anyway. So I'm watching Requiem for a Killer, and that part where Bono's looking at the picture comes on, and Lionel Stander says, in the narration, that the guy in the photograph wears a mustache to cover up for the fact that he has the mouth of a woman. This kind of face, Stander says, to Bono, is "the kind of face you hate." And there it was. The line had somehow managed to escape my notice when I was watching the actual film, but this time it buried itself in my head. No better title, I figured, could possibly be forthcoming. And here we are.

Cat People: Both Parts Must Die

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In theory, I do not mind remakes. My thinking is that remakes are essentially no different from the restaging of plays, except that they cost a lot more, and are frequently in no way necessary. Even so, if a filmmaker can bring something interesting to an already-told story, then why kick up a fuss? Over the years, we've had at least two excellent versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, David Cronenberg has improved on Kurt Neumann's already highly entertaining The Fly, and John Carpenter successfully returned to the source material, a novella by John W. Campbell, that was largely ignored in Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby's tremendous The Thing from Another World. So there's reason to be at least not quite so relentlessly negative when another remake is announced. Wait and see, be positive, all that shit. (Furthermore, the arguments against any and all remakes tend to sound like thoughtless and impotent rage. One I hear a lot is that the remake will rake in a truckful of cash, and all these young kids won't even be aware of the original, but I got news for you: superior the original may well be, but those young kids wouldn't have given a damn about it anyway.) Of course, there are any number of films -- like 2001, for instance -- whose hypothetical remakes would probably cause me to vomit in annoyance, but my exception for those films, I have to admit, is essentially arbitrary, and hypocritical.

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Where things get really hairy, however, is when the filmmaker behind the remake begins talking shit about the original. Even if the original is bad, it's a classless move, and frequently the original has at least something going for it, or nobody would want to remake it in the first place. In his collection of film essays and criticism, Harlan Ellison's Watching, an enraged (of course) Harlan Ellison, speaking on the topic of homage, throws out this:

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Was any attempt made by concerned parties, to hire a spiritualist who might pierce the veil and get Val Lewton's reaction to writer[sic]-director Paul Schrader's quote in the May-June issue of Cinefantastique, just prior to release of Schrader's remake of the 1942 Lewton-produced Cat People, that "Val Lewton's Cat People isn't that brilliant. It's a very good B-movie with one or two brilliant sequences. I mean, we're not talking about a real classic"?

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I first read that passage well before I'd seen either version of Cat People, and for whatever reason, at the time, Schrader's words came off far more snide and harsh than they do now. I mean, he does say the original is "very good", and that it has "brilliant sequences". But what particularly sticks in my craw now is the patronizing attitude towards B-movies, which I think a man like Schrader, who has a deep and abiding love for film noir, should have gotten past in the 1960s, at the latest. What, does he think the only film noirs that are truly great are those that were afforded A-movie budgets? In any case, I would be very curious to hear Schrader's thoughts on the subject now, given how history has not only elevated Lewton's Cat People, but relegated his remake to the bargain bin.

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Of course, history often gets things wrong. I've read enough great novels by forgotten writers to know that. But history was pretty much on target this time around. Personally, I would rank Lewton's Cat People somewhere in the middle of the nine horror films he produced (with massive creative and stylistic input) between 1942 and 1946, but that should be viewed less as a middling take on the film than as a testament to the very high regard in which I hold Lewton's work as a whole. Cat People was the first horror film Lewton produced at RKO, and with it the template was already clear: psychologically based horror, whether it featured supernatural elements or not, with sharp, literate writing, gorgeous, shadow-cloaked cinematography, moral complexity, ambiguity, and powerful sequences of suspense and terror. Lewton didn't cut his teeth on horror, and made these films because he was assigned to; he approached the genre as an outsider, a state of affairs that often yields fascinating results (see also Tom Alfredson, whose first horror film was the exquisite Let the Right One In, the American remake of which is coming soon).

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Summarizing Cat People at this stage strikes me as a bit pointless, and besides I hate that shit, but suffice it to say it tells the deceptively simple story of the sexless marriage of the mysterious and ethereal Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) and lunkheaded good egg Oliver Reed (Trent Smith). The "sexless" part stems from Irena's considered belief that her Serbian ancestors were evil witches, who were able to take the form of cats, primarily (only?) when in the throes of sexual passion. So because she loves Oliver, she refuses to have sex with him. Oliver takes this all pretty well, only taking the step of referring his wife to a psychiatrist (the great Tom Conway, who had all the on-screen class and charm of his more famous brother, George Sanders, but none of the off-screen assholism). Though Oliver's a sweet guy, he eventually drifts, after having a touching conversation with his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph) about how, until his relationship with Irena, who he loves, he'd never been unhappy.

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Lewton, Tourneur, and screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen keep the truth of Irena's condition -- is it psychological, or is she really what she says she is? -- ambiguous, almost to the end (all the way to the end, according to some, but it's pretty hard, lack of on-screen cat transformations notwithstanding, to psychologically explain away certain moments, and sounds), and one of the things that's so fascinating about the film, and about the performances of Simon and Smith (some would say he's wooden, but I say he's playing the character) in particular, is that often the film plays, or could have played, straight, as a snapshot of a crumbling marriage, and of Irena's mental breakdown, the kind of breakdown that would warn all concerned parties to hitch the next train out of town, before she starts shredding everything around her, cat or not cat. This is a result, no doubt, of Lewton making a horror film only because he had to, and making it about cat people because RKO already had the title. Later Lewton films would be more straightforward (though no less complex) entries into the genre, but with Cat People he was injecting his real-world concerns, interests, and phobias (he didn't like cats, or being touched) into material that, in less sophisticated hands, would have played out as a half-assed, low-grade pulp knock-off of the kind of werewolf movies that were popular at the time.

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Which is sort of funny, when you think about it -- as I said, Cat People was handed to Lewton by RKO, who said "Here's your title, now make a movie." A lazier producer would, without question, have told a thinly veiled werewolf story. That's not the story Lewton told, but guess who did tell that story? Paul Schrader. In his film (written by Alan Ormsby), Nastassja Kinski's Irena doesn't know about her true nature, and has to learn, Lawrence Talbot-like, about the family curse that dooms her to a life of cat-transformation any time she meets a guy she'd like to do sex to. Except that, apparently, this has never happened to her before, since not only is she a virgin, but she's never turned into a cat before, which means she's never experienced sexual desire before. From the standpoint of narrative logic, this makes no sense. Whatever Lewton's reasoning was (and I strongly suspect his reasoning had nothing to do with my current point), having his Irena know full well what she was not only made her a much more interesting character, but also obliterated a whole host of storytelling problems. Schrader's film rejiggers quite a few elements of the original story, saving it from being a "pointless" remake, but it perhaps should have either rejiggered fewer, or more. I can't tell which, but Schrader being Schrader, and 1982 being 1982, there was no way anyone involved in the remake was going to dump the sex-makes-her-a-vicious-cat angle. So maybe lose the idea that she's not aware of it, but of course that would have meant losing the character of Paul (Malcolm McDowell), Irena's brother, whose entire purpose, from what I can tell, is to be the one who tells her about their family origins. Well, that, and to introduce a nonsensical incest subplot (the only way they can have sex and not becomes cats is to have sex with family members, you see), which isn't consummated in any case, a fact that mitigates the film's already fairly high sleaze factor by a smidge.

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But, you know, the thing is, Schrader's Cat People isn't really all that bad. It's not. It is, in fact, a good deal better than I remembered. Kinski is wonderful, McDowell is very good, there's a nice energy and pacing in the first half or so, and, occasionally, strong images, such as those that accompany the astonishingly Last Temptation of Christ-like opening credits, and the shot of blood slowly splashing over Irena's white shoes, on its way to a floor drain. Also, the panthers in this film are very striking, which I mean sincerely. But it's still just a sexed-up, 1980s-style tweak on the werewolf legend, and, in fact, one could easily say that Paul Schrader's Cat People is just Tony Scott's The Hunger, but for werecats. Or rather, one could, if not for the fact that The Hunger came out one year later. So facts have defeated that point, but one thing I think can't be argued is that Schrader's film broke no new ground in horror cinema, and in a number of ways it's in lock-step with the formula of the genre as practiced in the 1980s. For example, Ed Begley, Jr. has the thankless role of the unfunny funny guy, which means you know he's doomed, and indeed he is. There are also a great many tits, which I have no problem with, and even, ahm, blooming from this particular story they come off as gratuitous. It's also a fairly gory film, so with your stock victims, your tits, and your gore, you have all the trappings of a more or less typical 80s horror film. No trails are blazed, whereas that's exactly what Lewton was doing in 1942. Even back then, no one was pulling as far back from genre tropes as Lewton was, and no one was creating so much dread by showing so little. And that restraint, of course, was just the tip of the iceberg.

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Which, again, I have no problem with -- the tits, gore, and lack of trailblazing, I mean -- and I wouldn't even bring it up (okay, I might, but not like this) if not for that Schrader quote in which he condescends to B-movies. Words hurt, Paul Schrader, and if you're going to express an ignorance of the true meaning of the term "B-movie" -- an ignorance I can't believe you ever actually possessed, even in 1982 -- you're probably going to be called out when you make one, which is what your Cat People is, at least going by your definition of "B-movie", which is very narrow and reductive anyway. So "trashy", I guess, is what both you and I are going for here. And no, I don't believe Paul Schrader will ever actually read this. I just got caught up in things.

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The other funny thing about all this is that you can sort of sense Schrader straining to bust out of those trashy binds, and that's not a compliment. One thing about B-movies, whether they were trashy or not, is that they often had a sense of pace, something that completely deserts Schrader's Cat People in the last half hour. The film shrugs off the sense of narrative fun and excitement it had been riding, in favor of a last quarter that just drags interminably, all to make a point about being trapped by sexual desire, which was already there anyway, and was already there in the Lewton film, too.

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Again, though: Schrader's film isn't that bad. And I wonder, if it hadn't been a remake, if history wouldn't have been kinder to it (I'm sure it has its rabid defenders, but it's unlikely they'll turn the tide). But of course, it is a remake, and that's the curse of of such films -- without the film being remade, the remake would never exist, would never even be conceived of, and unless what's being offered is of especially high quality (a not inconceivable notion, as I've shown), the remake will come and go in a blink. Profitable, maybe, but not much else can be hoped for. It's a tough road to hoe, when you think about it, especially on the screenwriting end, which must be a just about entirely thankless task. But give it a shot anyway, if you happen to feel like it. I won't bitch. Just, you know...show some respect.

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Capsule Reviews: The Shadow of Something That is Real

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He Walked by Night (d. Alfred L. Werker/Anthony Mann) - The best film noirs (films noir?) can be broken into two camps. I'm speaking very broadly, of course, but in my view those camps are the doomed, prisoner of fate, dark psychology films like Double Indemnity, and the clipped, hard-bitten police procedurals, like He Walked by Night. This latter film, directed primarily by Anthony Mann after Alfred Werker fell ill, is based on a true story about a former Army radio engineer (Richard Basehart) who, upon his return from WWII, goes on an eclectic crime spree of burglary and robbery. When pinned down, he shows no hesitation about using his gun, and, after killing one police officer and critically wounding another, he shows no remorse afterwards.

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This film's tight 79 minutes focuses mainly on the police investigation, as led by Capt. Breen (Roy Roberts) and Sgt. Brennan (Scott Brady), with special assistance from a young Jack Webb, as a kind of ballistics expert and technical jack-of-all-trades. But Basehart still stands out in his cold psychopathy, whose desire for money hardly seems to be the driving force behind his crimes, but rather -- and even then only perhaps -- a desire to simply get away with it, no matter what. On the other side, Scott Brady represents the rage of a police force struggling to bring the net (or something with more weight to it) down on the man who killed one of their own, and the whole thing drives along at a relentless pace.

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He Walked by Night precedes The Third Man by one year, which is not a non sequitor piece of trivia, as Werker and Mann's film climaxes in the vast sewers of Lost Angeles, all shadows, echoing footsteps and gunfire, and wavering flashlight beams, courtesy of John Alton's ever-striking -- but especially so here -- camera work. This needs to be on DVD, like, yesterday.

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Exposed (d. James Toback) - Toback's third film is a bit of an oddity, as it's made up of one part making-it-in-the-big-city story, and one part political thriller. The fact that these disparate chunks flow together quite smoothly is a testament to Toback's early skill and ambition, which I can't, with much confidence, claim is gone, because I've felt almost no interest in checking out what Toback's been up to since Exposed was released. But if When Will I Be Loved, which I did see, is anything to go by, then, well...

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In any case, in Exposed Nastassia Kinski stars as a young woman who, after being forced out of college by her desperately lecherous English professor (Toback himself, in a performance that seems to be pretty rich in knowing self-mockery), takes to the streets on New York, trying to make her way. A series of men -- beginning with Toback's professor -- alternately hinder her, offer her help, or lie to her. After James Russo's restaurant owner gives her a waitressing job, Ian McShane's fashion photographer gives her a huge break as a cover model, after which she finds herself being shadowed by a mysterious, and quite frankly creepy, violinist, played by Rudolf Nureyev. They begin an affair, and he confides in her that his mission in life is to kill a particular terrorist who, along with the horror he's showered on dozens, if not hundreds, of innocent strangers throughout Europe, has had a significant, and negative, impact on Nureyev's own life, and that of his family.

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This terrorist is the last link in Kinski's chain of male experience. Harvey Keitel plays the murderous Left-wing revolutionary, and it's with his appearance that I began to wonder what the film had on its mind, exactly. I suspected that whatever it was, it wasn't entirely political in nature, because while the film clearly doesn't sympathize with Keitel -- the most unambiguously decent man in the whole movie, McShane's photographer, is also the most capitalistic, in that he's rich, and seems to enjoy being so -- it also doesn't have much new to say about people like him. Keitel doesn't even show up until the film has about a half hour to go, and while he and Kinski exchange words about the folly of his way of life, they are fairly trite. They're no less true for that, but it's hard for me to believe that Toback was building towards that moment.

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Exposed ends with a rush of violence that seems arbitrary, or maybe obligatory is more on target. I don't mean that a scene of violence isn't a natural conclusion for this material, but the scene isn't imagined with much sharpness, and the staging of it is on the bland side. Even so, the film is quite strong overall, and especially involving in the way Toback stitches together the various elements of Kinski's experience. Some might complain that, when the chips are down, she's too passive, and is simply swept along by the wills of these men, but I guess that's life in the big city for you.

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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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The Last Wave (d. Peter Weir) - I'm not sure what kind of status Peter Weir currently enjoys in the hierarchy of living and working film directors, but, while I do know that he's generally admired, I feel confident that he's not admired nearly enough. The Last Wave, Weir's third full-length film, is such a unique blend of social critique -- the subject being white Australian society's casual obliteration of Aboriginal culture -- and apocalyptic horror film that I'm left wishing that, if modern horror filmmakers are going to base their careers on all the films they watched growing up, more of them had watched Weir's early work. Pairing The Last Wave with Weir's previous, obliquely hair-raising masterpiece Picnic at Hanging Rock, gives you a snapshot of a body of work in the horror genre that would most likely have been extremely formidable. Unfortunately, Weir decided to move away from that world, and make excellent films in any number of other genres.

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The Last Wave centers on the mysterious death of an Aborigine man who appears to have drowned, after a drunken fight, in a shallow puddle of water. A group of Aborigines are accused of the murder, and admit their guilt. However, their white attorney, David Burton (a very good Richard Chamberlain) wants to base his defense on the idea that the man's death was the result of his breaking of tribal laws, a defense that, if it bore fruit, would strongly effect the sentencing. Because all the men, the accused as well as the victim, are believed to be city people, and not tribal Aborigines (the fact that this is all taking place in Sydney would, alone, seem to indicate this), Burton finds little sympathy for this idea, but he's driven forward, based on scraps of evidence, as well as strange, premonitory dreams involving tribal symbols, one of the accused (ubiquitous Aboriginal actor Gulpilil), and water. Significantly, this is all happening in the midst of massive, endless rainstorms that are thoroughly soaking the entirety of Sydney, in a way that at first seems like a relief that that sun-cracked country, but soon becomes ominous.

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The Last Wave doesn't revel in the unexplainable in quite the same way Picnic at Hanging Rock does, and this is perhaps to its detriment, but working with a low budget, and therefore unable to falsely pump up his film with special effects, even if he'd been inclined to, Weir brings the same kind of quiet dread and nightmare imagery to The Last Wave as he did to the earlier film, and the overall effect is one of creeping, pervasive unease. Mr. Weir, if you have any interest in returning to your own brand of horror filmmaking, I beg you to do so. We need it badly.

Affinity #23

The Collection Project Film of the Day:
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One form of comedy I don't particularly care for is the kind that features a central character that is not only a smart-ass, but a charming one that eventually, in one way or another, wins out in the end. My basic disdain for this sort of thing at least partially explains my ambivalence towards such Chevy Chase vehicles as Fletch and Caddyshack. The latter film is, I think, particularly overrated, and I would say it's no accident that I believe the funniest person in the whole thing, by a wide margin, is Ted Knight.

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I think this kind of comedy tends to flatter its audience. The jibes and one-liners offered up by our central wiseass often go unnoticed as such by those around him, but since we laugh, that means we have one up on everybody. To go too far into this would inevitably lead me to explain the kind of comedy that I prefer -- which I guess would be the kind that doesn't do this -- and might even send me careening into the pit of Comedy Theory, which, I think we can all agree, is a screeching nightmare. So I won't do that. But I will boil this all down by pointing out something I've noticed, and something that is the heart of this kind of smart-ass comedy, which is: funny lines that are written to be spoken by someone who believes what they're saying is funny, are rarely funny. Meanwhile, lines that are written to be funny, but are spoken by someone who doesn't realize what they're saying, have a better shot at making it. Why this should be, I couldn't exactly say, although I would think a certain self-consciousness must play a big part. Whatever the case, if you don't find yourself agreeing with me, think back on some favorite comedies, and favorite lines, and do an informal tally. Perhaps I will be proven correct in your eyes. Perhaps I won't.

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As with anything, there are exceptions -- Groucho, for instance. And, of course, Bill Murray. How Murray manages to skip over this pitfall is a little hard to pin down, though I would say at his best he's able to do one kind of joke while seeming to do another. Take this line from Quick Change, which Murray co-directed with Howard Franklin. Murray, as a bank robber named Grimm, has just changed out of his clown costume, in which he robbed the bank, and into a more pedestrian outfit, so that he can more easily blend in as a hostage. In describing his ordeal to the cops, he says:

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This is what the animal said to us! He says to Ms. Cochran here: "Baby! Up your butt with a coconut!" And I think he was prepared to do it! Except I saw no coconut. He had no coconut, to my knowledge.

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On one level, Grimm is fully aware that what he's saying is absurd, but he has to deliver it sincerely. It's a neat trick. Of course, Murray's genius doesn't always come through this kind of prism, and he obviously has often gone the straight wiseass route (see Ghostbusters). But usually, when Murray is firing on all cylinders, he's playing a wiseass, yes, but he's playing a wiseass who's an asshole. This muddying of our rooting interest can work wonders.

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The clearest, and best, case in point is Groundhog Day (d. Harold Ramis). Here, Murray plays Phil Connor, who travels a long road from self-centered prick to sympathetic and empathetic nice guy, by way of reliving the same day, over and over and over again, for God knows how long. Early on, Connor is a funny wiseass, but part of what's funny about him is how obnoxious he is. Seeing prickishness at its most untethered can be quite the hoot, but there's no buffering layer of superiority over everybody, because we're still laughing at him. Even when he's being funny on purpose, at one level he's still the joke. And later, as Murray tries to achieve something, anything, worthwhile in his Moebius strip of a life, he begins to founder, and he's funny in a completely different way. If comic heroes -- the kind grounded in some form of reality -- succeed when the audience can laugh at some sort of universality, something they can recognize, then Phil Connor, and Groundhog Day's fantasy narrative, manage it, while Fletch, and Fletch, do not.

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Groundhog Day even has the kind of multi-layered joke I mentioned from Quick Change, the best being Murray's under-his-breath delivery of the line "Amen", after he's just silently said a prayer for world peace before drinking with Andie MacDowell's Rita, the woman he's trying to woo by pretending to be a better person than he is. That "Amen" never fails to make me laugh, and that one word, and Murray's performance, contains at least two jokes, or at any rate two funny things.

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And I haven't even mentioned Murray's sometimes astonishing work as an elder statesman and occasional dramatic actor (which is there in Groundhog Day anyway, and any number of other early films), nor have I brought up Ramis's The Ice Harvest, and why I think it functions as a thematic flip on Groundhog Day. For another time, then!

The Collection Project: Rotten Blood

The half-assed way in which certain classic films pay homage to their literary source material always both amuses and confuses me. In my experience, the zenith for these sorts of references was reached in Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, in which the narrator and protagonist of Robert Louis Stevenson's original story is heard being greeted off-screen, but then never appears, and is never mentioned again. Similarly, in Universal Studio and Robert Florey's 1932 adaptation of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe's brutal and bizarre chronicle of a series of murders which, it is learned, were perpetrated by an orangutan, Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, is both dismissed and represented in the form of the medical student hero named Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames, credited here as Leon Waycoff). Why Pierre? What was wrong with, at least, Auguste?

At least he's there, though, while pretty much the rest of Poe's story is gone. In the film, Poe's idea gets strained through Universal's apparent obsession with mad scientists, in this case appearing in the form of Bela Lugosi as Dr. Mirakle, a carnival showman and secret experimenter in the field of human/ape genetics. He works in the carnival for money, but his passion is finding a human female whose blood is as compatible with Erik -- Dr. Mirakle's ape -- as he can possibly find. This quest leads to the kidnapping of women, the injecting of ape blood into those women, and the eventual disposal of the women's bodies after they've died from having ape blood injected into them. After noticing the positive reaction Erik had to her when she attended their carnival performance, Mirakle soon has his eyes on Camille (Sidney Fox), believing that she will have the kind of blood he so desperately needs. As Camille is Dupin's girlfriend, the source of Mirakle's downfall is not hard to root out.

At 61 minutes, The Murders in the Rue Morgue has no more plot to summarize. The strange thing about the film is that as goofy as it is on paper (and sometimes on film, considering that Erik is presented in shadow and long-shots as a man in a vague, catch-all ape suit, and in close-up as a real chimpanzee, by way of stock footage, and referred to as a baboon), it's hard to say the film ever really steps that far wrong. It looks gorgeous, thanks to the basically infallible Karl Freund, who pulls cinematographer duties here, and it's also full of the kind of strange, and possibly not always intentional, subtexts that frequently marked Golden Age horror movies. For instance, if you check out that image posted at the top, you might see in it some of the dark sexuality that often found its way into these films, where young women in peril frequently also ended up being women bound up and strapped down.

That's Arlene Francis, by the way, and her character, and her introduction, adds a fuzzy class element to the proceedings. Dr. Mirakle finds her on a Paris bridge, watching in horror as two men engage in a knife fight (presumably over her) that ends with both their deaths. Mirakle then swoops in, pegging her as his next guinea pig, only to find later that the contents of her veins aren't what he's after. As she hangs there in his lab, near death, Mirakle rages at her, calling her blood "rotten", and "as black as your sins!" Francis's character is listed in the credits as "Woman of the Streets", and Camille is of a noticeably higher social tier than she -- so what, exactly, are Mirakle's criteria for his blood? To Mirakle, Erik, his ape, is every bit as human as these people he so despises, but perhaps, following a thought process that might be considered counter-intuitive in a person who would think like this in the first place, the people from whom blood should be poached, the people who most closely resemble our nearest animal neighbors, are the people live farthest from the wild.

Then, of course, there's the Scopes Monkey Trial, which would have been a mere seven years old when Florey's film was released. Poe's story (which was first published in 1841) could be seen to be about the dangers of a non-human pretending to be human, having learned only the most superficial behavior from a distance. As this danger leads to violent death (and one of Poe's uncomfortably imaginative murders does make its way into this film), Poe's orangutan could be a stand-in for amoral, sociopathic killers throughout history. But Poe would not have had Darwin available when he wrote his story, and while Darwin is not mention in the film, Dr. Mirakle does tell his carnival audience that humans are descended from apes like his friend Erik. These remarks are met with cries of "Heresy!" and, indeed, Mirakle is not only never able to prove his own lunatic version of Darwin, but he eventually meets his end at Erik's hands. The Scopes trial didn't sit terribly well with everybody, after all, as you might be aware. Then again, Erik still has his eyes on the decidedly human Camille, and hauls her along on his frantic escape, which, you know, sort of brings to mind Cooper and Schoedsack's King Kong, which was, at the time, still a year away.

It's amazing what they used to be able to cram into 61 minutes, isn't it?

Contagion

SPOILERS ABOUND!!

Breck Eisner's The Crazies was met with enough critical warmth that I started to think that it might actually be pretty good. Shows what a sucker I am, because the film is actually quite startlingly free of any kind of imagination, or even respect for its own scenario. Or, okay, not its own scenario, as it's a remake of George Romero's 1973 film of the same name, a film I'm also not overly keen on. However, there are moments in the Romero film I can at least look back on with admiration, while Eisner's take is like watching someone date-stamp a stack of incoming mail. You know precisely what they're doing, but have no idea why you would want to watch it.
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The Crazies, both versions, is a plague story -- more specifically, it's a quarantine story, and it is on this level that I want to focus. To dispense with the plot summary first: a bunch of people in a small rural town start to go unaccountably crazy, violently so, and the military swoops in to cordon off the joint, and to ruthlessly gun down anyone who tries to break their quarantine. Our heroes (Timothy Olyphant as the sheriff; Radha Mitchell as his wife; Danielle Panabaker as Mitchell's young friend and co-worker; Joe Anderson as Olyphant's deputy) are horrified by the brutality of this new prison-town that has sprung up around them, and seek to escape, both the military and the "crazies". So that's your story. There is much blood.
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My problem -- my main problem, because there are others -- is with the whole genre itself, or at least the way it's so often executed. Generally, and certainly in this film, filmmakers lazily settle on a black-and-white presentation for what should be a profoundly gray scenario. Just once I'd like to see a plague movie where one of the soldiers tasked with gunning down the civilians who seek to escape the quarantine take a break, rip off that goddamn gas mask, and break down sobbing. Instead, the portrayal of these characters is that of heartless automatons (often, a token "nice one" is thrown in, but in The Crazies remake, even that guy's niceness is burdened with some pretty big qualifiers) who at best thoughtlessly aim their weapon at a fleeing housewife and pull the trigger, and at worst find their inner bloodlust awakened by the job they've been handed.
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And why, might I ask, should it be assumed that our rooting interest always be with those who would break the quarantine? If they succeed, then they could very well be spreading these highly contagious and always deadly diseases to millions of other people. That's the entire reason the quarantines -- in film and in reality -- are in place. That's also the reason the fleeing housewives are being gunned down, but Eisner and his screenwriters have no interest in engaging with the logic of the story, or of their characters. The truth is that he heroes of these films, the Timothy Olyphants of the world, are usually mind-bogglingly selfish -- it is their safety that counts, and that of their loved ones. The rest of humanity can, quite honestly, fuck off. And it's not as though I don't understand the impulse to flee, but if these possibly disease-ridden people (and it's always the case that at least one of these heroes that have grouped themselves together actually does have the disease) gets shot in the head, am I supposed to think the solider holding the gun did something horribly wrong? Horrible, yes, but wrong? How many people did he just save with that bullet?
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As I say, it's a profoundly gray scenario, but almost nobody wants to engage with that side of it. Most often, they latch on to the "we are the real monsters!" idea (this is the idea on which Romero has built at least the second half of his career, and has also tried to retroactively apply to all the films he made before he thought it up), that not only means fuck-all in general, but usually means fuck-all within the very narrow confines of the individual movie. In The Crazies, as in many other similar films, the reasons for the quarantine, and the seemingly callous actions needed to keep it secure, are so plain that the filmmakers never even need to explain them (and they probably wouldn't if they thought they had to), but the story unspools as though it didn't matter. This person was shot, and that's bad. What's going through the mind of the man who pulled the trigger, or of those who gave the order for him to pull the trigger, are irrelevant.
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One recent film did actually address these issues, whether or not anyone wants to acknowledge it, and that film (today's Collection Project Film of the Day) is 28 Weeks Later (d. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo). In this sequel to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, London is recovering from the "rage virus" that eviscerated the city in the earlier film. A quarantine has been set up, but one that, due to time and increasing resources, is able to be more gentle and communal. But strict rules apply: no one is allowed to travel into the parts of London that are outside the borders of the quarantine. When someone does, two children, early in the film, what happens? They bring the virus back inside. The military discovers this breach before the children make it back, but they are not heartlessly gunned down, as those trigger-happy madmen in The Crazies would no doubt have done. As a result, though, and as I say, the virus is back inside, and it spreads, and all hell breaks loose, to the point where the military has to open fire on a swarming pack of civilians, because if any of them gets out, and goes on the run, they will be spreading doom all across Europe.
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And guess what? That's exactly what happens. When both 28 Weeks Later and The Crazies were first released, I heard much talk about the political nature of both films, and the commentary on the way we live now, but I'm not sure anyone who made those nebulous points were considering the fact that, in 28 Weeks Later, the military is absolutely correct. It is because they are defeated that we see rage-infested people shrieking past the Eiffel Tower in the last shot. The people who escaped at the end of 28 Weeks Later were, ostensibly, the characters we were rooting for, and they succeeded. And look where it got us.
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PS - I freely adapted, to the point of quoting outright, this post from comments I left over at Arbogast on Film. If you read any of this over there, then I am profoundly sorry.

The Collection Project: When it All Makes Sense

I was feeling rather lumpish last night, both physically and mentally, when suddenly, very late at night, I found myself thinking about the Coen brothers. This, in itself, is not noteworthy. If you and I were to play the "What are You Thinking?" game (that's a game, right?), and you guessed I was thinking about the Coen brothers, you'd probably be right, and sometimes I feel like this blog is just one or two posts away from turning into a full-blown Coens fansite. We're not there yet, but look, right now you're reading one of those very posts.
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The specific Coens film I found myself contemplating was Burn After Reading, from 2008. Not enormously well-loved by critics or audiences at the time, which is something the film has in common with The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading has subsequently failed to develop any kind of strong cult following, which is something the film does not have in common with The Big Lebowski. This strange little black comedy seems to have mildly befuddled or slightly disappointed just about everybody, a reaction heightened, no doubt, by the fact that it followed their top-to-bottom triumph of No Country for Old Men. Personally, I view Burn After Reading as every bit a part of their creative renaissance (for lack of a less stupid phrase, and in comparison to Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, two not-bad films that nevertheless cast die-hards like myself into a state of gloomy concern) as that previous film and their eventual follow-up, A Serious Man. In the same way that Fargo's break-out success slightly confused me -- it's a great movie, but what was it about that one that critics and audiences felt was missing from their earlier work? -- the indifferent backing away that greeted Burn After Reading's release continues to leave me puzzled. Do people still really not know what to expect from the Coen brothers? Or I suppose most people could simply not find the film's collection of selfish, deluded, even stupid, characters, mixed with a few bursts of shocking violence, not all that funny, but, again, if you're a fan going in, what's leaving you cold?
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I'm not really asking those questions, by the way (though feel free to answer!); I'm merely registering my befuddlement. And besides, it's quite possible I know the answer, which is that Burn After Reading is one of the most sublimely (to me) pointless film I've ever seen. None of the major characters -- the disgraced CIA analyst (John Malkovich); the pair of moronic gym employees (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt); their lonely, love-stricken boss (Richard Jenkins); the cocky, unfaithful, practically meat-headed US Marshal (George Clooney) -- have any clue, at any time, what they're doing, or what anyone else is doing, or why any of this is happening -- and it's well worth mentioning that the core reason any of this is happening is that Malkovich decided to angrily quit his job and write his entirely worthless memoirs. Each character gets lost in his or her own motives and wants (as opposed to needs), each has decided, incorrectly, that he or she is smart, and all but one of them loses out in the end, to the point that three of them die violently. For no good goddamn reason at all.
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In that way, Burn After Reading is of a piece with earlier Coens films like their intentionally less funny (but still sometimes intentionally funny) debut, Blood Simple, whose plot is also dependent on all the main players being utterly clueless about what's going on. In that film, cluelessness also leads to some pretty nasty violence, but not only is Blood Simple less funny, it also, like pretty much all dark crime films, comes pre-burdened (which I don't mean as a knock) with a cosmic message -- something along the lines of "Look what behaving in this way and/or associating with these people gets you." Plus, fate. Similarly, The Big Lebowski is as absurd and meaningless in its plotting as Burn After Reading, but Lebowski has a great deal of heart, which the later film is almost completely lacking. I say "almost", because I don't see how one can be fully immune to the disappointment, sadness, and touching guile of, respectively, the Malkovich (I'm thinking of his early scenes, mainly), Jenkins and Pitt characters, but the fates of those three are not only similar in their completeness, let's say, but in the way the Coens practically gloss over them. The result being that one doesn't walk away from Burn After Reading mourning those lost, so much as thinking "That was pretty messed up."
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Of all the complaints against a film, or any work of art, that particularly grate on me, the one I hear most often is "It had no point." The idea that a film, or a story, needs to have a specific "point" for it to be deemed good, or in any way worthwhile, is about as short-sighted as you can get, and this perhaps accounts for the mass indifference that greeted Burn After Reading, because, as I say, it is entirely pointless. It's a film whose story initially flows out of the offices of the CIA, but it's not a political film. It contains criminal acts, including murder, but has no message, no insight into criminal behavior or psychology, or clear satirical point of view. It's just a bunch of shit that happens, because a bunch of people weren't paying attention. And I think the ultimate summarization of Burn After Reading's towering absurdism is this quote from Joel Coen, describing the film:
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It's sort of about the Central Intelligence Agency, and physical fitness, and what happens when those two worlds collide.
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The Collection Project: Firewall

[Massive spoilers follow]

What I’d planned to do today was write up my thoughts on Ang Lee and James Schamus’s sprawling, complex Civil War epic Ride with the Devil, but then I saw those words “sprawling” and “complex”, and I was like “I don’t know about that!” Seriously, who needs that on a Wednesday?

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Thankfully, over on “The Facebooks”, I brought up the Lee film, and through a series of merry mishaps it was confused by one of my friends, who shall remain anonymous, with Jack Starret's Race with the Devil, the Satanic biker/road/chase movie, starring Lara Parker, Loretta Swit, Peter Fonda, and, far more importantly, Warren Oates. I have to admit that I have a pretty strong fondness for this film – I like its straightforward B-movie ambitions, its reasonably unique blending of the horror and chase genres, as well as the fact that the film is set (possibly for budgetary reasons) in the country, but not in the Deliverance type of country often favored by Hollywood, but rather the more common kind that has libraries and schools. So our heroes, a group of middle-aged, swingin’ 70s types on a long road trip in their motor home, should feel plenty at home in the decidedly non-alien environs where they often find themselves, but, after witnessing a Satanic human sacrifice, they’re not at home, or safe, anywhere.
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It’s a fun movie. Warren Oates is in it, you know, so let’s not forget that, and it has a nice pace, and, at least occasionally, a pretty strong sense of dread and despair. I like movies where people find themselves being relentlessly assaulted, their lives constantly at risk, because they turned their heads the wrong way, and saw something they never would have chosen to see. If handled properly, this basic idea – that in the wink of an eye, someone or something might decide to kill you, and might stop at nothing to do so, and you can be as blameless as an infant, but it won’t matter and ounce – can carry you over any number of missteps. It’s a powerful idea.
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One misstep that this well-executed idea will not carry you over, however, is a shit ending, and Race with the Devil unfortunately has one. Oates and Co. have just come out the other side of an intense road battle with the rolling coven of Satanists, and they’ve done so relatively unscathed. Everyone is giddy with relief. But then one thing leads to another, and with the typical tacked-on grimness common to the genre and the era, the film ends with the motor home pulling to a stop in a grassy field, only to suddenly be surrounded by a not-very-high rectangle of flames. Everyone panics, and we see yet more Satanists marching implacably towards them. And, it is implied, a slaughter of our heroes will ensue.
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Okay, so, two questions: 1) How in the heck did the Satanists know exactly where Oates and Co. would park their motor home? They had to set up their Rectangle of Fire booby trap before hand, and the success of that plan would be dependent on knowing where, in an unmarked field of grass, they were going to park.
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2) Why the fuck can’t they just drive the motor home through the flames? Do they think fire is made out of metal? Because it’s not. Maybe in the 1970s they thought that’s what fire was made out of. People used to be stupid, after all. It’s like in Moby-Dick, when Herman Melville keeps insisting that whales are fish, not mammals. I guess I just thought Peter Fonda was a little bit smarter than Herman Melville.

Bluebeard Devours Everything

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In a fascinating interview, conducted by Glenn Kenny, on the topic of her film Bluebeard, Catherine Breillat says, partly in reference to the enormous disparity in size between her lead actors:

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The film is also a tale about the superiority...of the grace...of young women over the power of colossal men.

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Well, sure it is -- in Breillat's version of Charles Perrault's 17th century fairy tale, Bluebeard (the extraordinary, in pretty much all cinematic senses of the word, Dominique Thomas) is, indeed, massive. I don't know the man's physical dimensions, but next to his most common screen partner here, the whispy Lola Créton as Marie-Catherine, Bluebeard's child bride, Thomas appears to be about 9'4", 582 pounds. And yet Bluebeard, the monster of folklore, who is no less monstrous in this film (yet also strangely, and intriguingly, gentle), is utterly defeated by her, bowing to her every whim, which include putting off sexual intercourse until she's some few years older, as well as giving her the opportunity -- and I'm going to be cagey here -- to tie up some loose ends, at a time when it would really be in Bluebeard's best interest to finally learn to say "No!"

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However, I think a key word in that Breillat quote above is "also", because her film is as primal, mysterious, simple, and bizarre as the best fairy tales always are. The basic story -- a young woman from a newly poor family is married off to Lord Bluebeard, a huge and powerful man who, it is rumored, habitually marries and then murders women -- can easily be read as a class-tinged showdown between good and evil, which it is. But Breillat contrasts the fairy tale with other scenes, set in the 20th century, of two young girls exploring their home's attic, and eventually settling in to read Perrault's story. The decision to read it is made by Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites), against the wishes of her older sister, Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti). Marie-Anne says the story scares her, and that she's too sensitive to the violence, but Catherine is hilariously, and eventually a bit uncomfortably, gleeful about the story's luridness, and she seems to practically know it by heart.

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These scenes of the two young sisters weave into the fairy tale bulk of Breillat's film, not just because it offers a sort of meta-fictional commentary (the young girls are named Marie-Anne and Catherine; Bluebeard's bride is Marie-Catherine, and her own sister is name Anne, played byDaphné Baiwir) on our own distance from a tale as well-known as Perrault's is, but also by simultaneously depicting how the "reader" can get lost in what they know full well is fiction.

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This last idea is executed towards the end, at a time when the real darkness of Bluebeard has begun to kick in, and when Breillat has amped up her own brand of strangeness. What the sequence achieves (and notice how I'm taking such great pains to not describe it, but if you know anything about Bluebeard's hook, you might guess what this scene involves) is not just a folding together of Breillat's two threads, but foreshadows her alarming climax, and its hints of subconscious, sociopathic violence that can be tucked away inside, well, who knows who. Anybody.

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But I don't want to go too far with all the above mumbo-jumbo, because Bluebeard is, ultimately, a rich, moody bit of strangeness that shouldn't be explained too cleanly or too readily. At its strongest, it achieves the primal, narrative grip of the Perraults and the Grimms and the Andersens of centuries ago.

The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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I'm going to cheat again (I said I was going to do this from time to time) and simply link to an old post, one about a film that is also about a powerful man, whose powers, nevertheless, fall shorter than he'd like when applied to a supposedly defenseless woman -- it's Otto Preminger's divisive (check out the comments!) Whirlpool. Here's an excerpt! To entice you!

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But this film is a bit more than the above. There is a dark sexuality to Whirlpool that, while fairly plain to see, is not actually dealt with as part of the narrative, making the whole thing all the more interesting. When Korvo initially takes Ann out for dinner, he makes a self-deprecating reference to his own less-than-pleasing physical appearance. Later, at the cocktail party, Korvo takes Ann into an empty room and hypnotizes her, with her permission. While hypnotized, Korvo is able to get Ann to perform a couple of innocuous tasks before having her take a seat, holding out his hand to her, and saying, "Take my hand, Ann." But, even hypnotized, she won't do it, and a cloud of shame and anger and disgust passes over Ferrer's face that indicates both the limits of his hypnotic abilities, and what he'd do if those abilities were stronger. An amoral man who believes himself to be ugly will do just about anything to be with a woman as beautiful as Gene Tierney.