I Hate the Sight of Blood but It's in My Veins

I have a couple of short reviews of films soon to be released on DVD and Blu-ray. Read on, you son of a bitches!

The Girl Who Knew Too Much/Evil Eye (d. Mario Bava) - In his commentary track for Mario Bava's 1963 thriller The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Tim Lucas notes an early difference between the original European cut of the film, which bears the aforementioned title, and the Samuel Z. Arkoff-shepherded American cut, which, in a reversal of the expected, is slightly longer and goes by the title Evil Eye. The star, Leticia Roman, is on a plane. In Bava's original cut, after some establishing stuff and credits, there's a hard cut to Roman and we get some narration about who she is and why she's flying to Italy. In the American cut, before the camera lands on Roman it drifts along the plane's aisle and we hear the thoughts of various other passengers. They're all mundane, everyday thoughts until we reach Roman, who is thinking about murder. It turns out her character, an American named Nora Davis, is obsessed by mystery novels, and she's simply thinking deeply about the one she's currently engrossed by. This opening, Lucas informs us on the commentary, is considered by Quentin Tarantino to be one of the greatest openings of all time, and it, Lucas goes on to say, along with other tone-lightening elements to be found in the Evil Eye cut, are missed when one watches The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

Maybe, maybe not. I have Evil Eye playing now as I write this, which I offer in the spirit of full disclosure, and because having seen neither, when I received the new Kino Lorber Blu-ray that contains both versions, I opted for The Girl Who Knew Too Much, it being a Bava film I'd never seen, and it being Bava's preferred cut, or so I've inferred, although since Bava went on to more or less dismiss the whole enterprise who can say, and, even if one could, would it matter? On top of this is the fact that, for what I presume are rescued-from-obscurity reasons, Kino gives Evil Eye preferential treatment on the cover, The Girl Who Knew Too Much snagging only a "Plus The Girl Who Knew Too Much" credit.

In any event, The Girl Who Knew Too Much is somewhat less spirited than Evil Eye (which in fairness to myself is nearly over) and a big reason for that is that Bava's cut makes Nora's obsession with mystery novels less of of a fun tone-setting idea than a plot contrivance, and, in fact, it's the film(s)'s plot that came to bug him later in life. He called the plot, which has to do with a series of murders in Rome the victims of which, all women, have last names that progress through the alphabet, hence the designation "The A-B-C Murders," the most recent of these Nora witnesses, anyway, Bava called the plot "preposterous." I guess it is, but if preposterous plots were a barrier to be avoided in making these kinds of films, I'm not sure we'd even have these kinds of films. In the end, none of that matters. What matters is what Bava does with it. That beginning to Evil Eye is pretty good and a very Hitchcockian idea, Hitchcock being the artist Bava is clearly pursuing here. There's lots of nice touches, such as Nora walking through a deserted series of hallways and rooms while the voice of, one assumes, the killer plays over a tape recorder. That bit is very stark and creepy, and not particularly light-hearted -- when Hitchcock wanted to make a light movie he tended to do so top to bottom, but Bava doesn't, or couldn't, which might explain why he removed those elements for the final version of The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Maybe he thought it was an uneasy marriage; if so, I'm not sure I agree. When Nora witnesses the murder, she sees the killer (face obscured) pull the knife from the dead woman's body, and Bava shoots this so we get the killer, the body, the street, the low brick wall, trees, the night, and we see the body move with the killer's effort to retrieve the knife. It's a terrific bit of restrained gruesomeness that adds weight to the proceedings without getting in the way of the fun. As I watch Evil Eye now I think that, surprisingly, Samuel Arkoff had the right idea. It's a better time at the pictures. Either way, John Saxon is in both versions and he's pretty young, and young John Saxon looks like Walter Koenig. So there's that too.

Limelight (d. Charlie Chaplin) - Charlie Chaplin turned 63 in 1952, the same year he released this film about an aging, alcoholic vaudeville comedian who noticed some time ago that the world no longer has much interest in him. At the beginning of the film, Chaplin's character, Calvero, is stumbling drunk into the boarding house where he lives when he discovers that another tenant, a young woman named Terry (Claire Bloom) has attempted suicide. Calvero saves her and the two become friends. Terry is a ballerina whose depression and crippling lack of confidence keep her from performing, while Calvero, even with all he knows about show business, maintains a perhaps unreasonable optimism. The two encourage each other to keep trying, to find work performing. Calvero stops drinking. He and Terry fall in love but don't do anything about it.

Such is the basic plot of Limelight, the one Chaplin masterpiece that has really struggled to be recognized as such. When it was released, Chaplin's life was in upheaval due to accusations that he was a Communist; this essentially scuttled the US release, which can only be regarded as ironic since Limelight is perhaps his least political film. It's about art, creativity, performance, the past, love, and death. It really is an immense piece of work. Watching it again today after many years, on the new Criterion Blu-ray that comes out Tuesday, I was struck most by what a confident, natural all-around actor Chaplin was, as at home in the sound era that he resisted as he was in the silent films that made him famous. His Calvero is a man battling despair and finding it both tempting to surrender as the time left to him to begin a new life on stage quickly runs out, and easy to keep going, to let his natural optimism and frothiness win out in the face of a young, beautiful, talented woman who has unaccountably given up. Chaplin is able to play all of this, from one scene to the next, within the same scene, from the beginning of the film until it ends over two hours later, without ever letting his performance seem messy or overstuffed. Simple things like Chaplin's ability to make his voice break as emotion threatens to overwhelm Calvero feel not just like good acting, but like brilliance.

The biggest criticism Limelight has had to fight against over the years is the charge that it is sentimental. Oh, it's sentimental, all right. Lots of Chaplin's films are sentimental. The problem with this accusation is that it accepts the corrupted definition of "sentimental," which sees the word only as a pejorative, and leaves behind its original, more Victorian (and Limelight is a very Victorian film in a lot of ways) meaning, which merely describes a thing or person that is nostalgic or tender or sad to large, perhaps exaggerated degree. Excessively so, one might even argue, and of course this is where the anti-sentimentality crowd gathers their ammunition. It's funny, though, how an excess of just about any other emotion is considered acceptable. No one would complain that a horror film had too much fear in it. Melodrama (which Limelight might have been had Chaplin's visual style matched his emotional pitch) has fought this same battle, but in critical circles, at least, the understanding of melodrama as a genre, or a form, won out long ago. With sentimentality, it's still not appreciated that like anything else it can be used well or badly, it can be executed well or badly. And if you think that Calvero marveling at the grace of Terry's dancing, or Chaplin and Buster Keaton, as Calvero's partner for one show, appearing together on screen for the first and only time, or Nigel Bruce, in a wonderful performance as a theater producer, simply and devastatingly delivering the line "Carry the sofa out to the wings," counts as bad sentimentality, or is bad because it is sentimental, then I guess we'll have to leave it at that. There's no talking to you.

A Monster of Death

The 70s and 80s sure were a strange time for the horror genre, both in print and on film. Various novels and films, like The Exorcist and Carrie and The Other and so on, were such huge successes, probably because we as a society were still reeling from Watergate or whatever, that they kicked open the barn doors and allowed the genre to come stampeding out and multiply, much like cattle do, you see. The point is, those who could publish your book or (more to the point, as we'll now leave books behind, though what happened there is by no means irrelevant) greenlight your movie discovered that horror was not just some disreputable niche, or rather, if it was the niche was enormous and the disrepute was something that almost everyone in the world had long ago accepted about themselves. In short, horror films were cheap to make and would always, pretty much, make a profit. The upside of this was that a lot of good films got made that otherwise would have never made it past the screenplay stage (it also meant that some talented filmmakers who were not otherwise interested in horror were able to use its commercial viability to at least get a film made, and that distance from the genre could pay off beautifully -- see William Huyck and Gloria Katz's Messiah of Evil, for instance). The downside, of course, was (well, is) that in some cases, possibly a lot of cases, quality control could become a secondary concern, so the cheapness of the genre became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  All of this led to some very bad movies, and some very strange movies, and often movies that were both.

See for example Satan's Blade, which Olive Films will be releasing on DVD and Blu-ray tomorrow. So far the only film made by director L. Scott Castillo, Jr. (who also produced and developed the story, which was then banged into a script by Thomas Cue, who also co-stars), filmed in 1980 but not released until 1984, Satan's Blade is a slasher film, as so many horror films were at the time.  It is, however, one of the oddest slasher films I've seen, given that for great big chunks it doesn't seem to want to be, or has forgotten that it's supposed to be, a slasher film, or even a horror film. At first, actually, it's a crime film. A bank is closing, at what looks to be about noon, and two masked armed robbers bust in on the two women who were left to close up the whole bank. The robbers empty the tills, don't seem terribly concerned about things such as vaults, and one of them uses a knife to pop off the buttons on the blouse worn by one of the terrified women. Anyhow, they get their money and shoot both women to death. Cut to the robbers making it back to their hideout cabin where it's revealed that they're both women themselves, if you can even believe it, and much exposition is enjoyed concerning George, an unseen third member of their crew, and how the more hardboiled of the two women wants to double-cross him. "Doesn't $50,000 sound much better divided by two?" And immediately I thought, "You did all this for, basically, less than $17,000 each?" Even if one of them double-crosses the other two (which is going to happen) that person will have committed three murders for $50,000. Which some people will do, but don't then strut around like you're some mastermind. Enjoy your one year off before you have to start delivering pizzas in Belize.

But it doesn't get that far because they're both killed, including the hardboiled one, who is stabbed by someone mysterious. The cabin where all this murder happened turns out to be a rental, one of many at what I guess is a ski resort, though I, admittedly no skier, would have to regard it as fairly shitty as ski resorts go. Shitty or not, the next day it enjoys an influx of customers, including two married couples who are friends and want to rent a cabin together, and a Bevy Of Sexy Girls, who want to ski in their nighties probably. Now, try to remember, the night before in one of these cabins a double murder has taken place. Two policemen, played by Fred Armond and someone with the name Ski Mark Ford, were shown in the murder cabin, looking at creepy symbols drawn in blood on the wall, but when asked by the managers of the ski resort if, now, the day after the murders, it's okay to rent out that same cabin to perhaps the pair of married couples, the cops say "Yeah, that should be okay, we'll keep an eye on it." While not as devoted to the art of homicide investigation as we in the civilian population might wish them to be, that their continued presence is assured has to offer some comfort. In the end, the murder cabin is rented to the Bevy Of Sexy Girls, which in some ways makes the whole thing beside the point because the story focuses on the clump of married people. These include Al (Cue) and his wife Lil (Janeen Lowe), and Lisa (Elisa R. Malinovitz), who is married to Tony (Tom Bongiorno). Tony has just passed the bar exam, and now it's time to reconnect with his wife. The problem is he's irresistible to women, and one of the Sexy Girls, named Stephanie (Stephanie Leigh Steel), has her eye on him. You can see Tony and Stephanie below:

I mean, check out Tony. I wouldn't mind knocking off a piece of that shit myself. No wonder his struggle to resist temptation and devote himself to the woman he married ends up taking up so much of Satan's Blade. Because that's what happens. We're given all the set-up of a slasher film, including the local legend about a crazy mountain man/killer, as well as a sampling of blood early on, but little effort is put into creating any kind of atmosphere of dread or suspense. Instead the question becomes, will Tony fuck Stephanie, or is he, in fact, the perfect man?

For his part, director Castillo may have wanted to inject a little more humanity into the then-burgeoning slasher subgenre than we were/are used to seeing, and good on him for having that impulse, I guess, but he spends a lot of time showing people do things like carry bags upstairs, or talk about going to bed. A scene between Al and Tony, where they stay up late getting drunk, is pitched by both actors at a level that indicates to me that neither man has ever had so much as a sip of champagne in their entire lives (although in fairness, you could say the same thing about just about every film that has ever featured someone who is supposed to be roaring drunk, including Network, and I'm pretty sure William Holden had a nip or two in his day; one film where you'll find a really aces drunk performance is Waiting for Guffman, where being badly drunk is played for both laughs and verisimilitudinous discomfort by Catherine O'Hara. Just FYI). And so on. The film is built on this sort of nonsense that is meant to be drama but is so thoughtless and absurd that you just kind of tilt your head at it. After the meeting between Stephanie and Tony pictured above, the way the film subsequently plays out means the audience is evidently meant to accept that Stephanie goes walking through the woods for literally hours. And not so she can be murdered in the woods, but just so she can not be around. Why? I'll be straight with you, I'm not sure I have an answer to that.

Eventually, murders happen, and here I'll give Satan's Blade some credit. For one thing, holding the majority of your violence until the last twenty minutes is something that even the most famous slasher films actually used to do -- see Halloween and Friday the 13th, for cryin' out loud. It's only later that the murders in such films started to be parceled out for most of the film's length. So anyway, that's not really a problem, nor is it really a problem that the gore effects are pretty weak, because you work with what you got, and not every low-budget horror film had a Tom Savini to turn to. So with my forgiving heart open to Satan's Blade, I will say that once it becomes a horror film it's, you know, it's okay. Much of it is bad, certainly, but there is one bit involving one character hiding under a bed that, considering that this was filmed in 1980, is both rather good and may have been ripped off by lots and lots of people. I don't know. I wish I could track down definitively the first time this idea was used, but my memory is for shit. If it was first used by L. Scott Castillo, Jr. in Satan's Blade, then I tip my hat to him. On top of that, the violence is surprisingly pitiless, if that turns your crank at all, and I didn't see the final twist coming. And, as twists go, this one works. In the end, none of this adds up to very much, but you take what you can get.

An Unbearable Man

In 2011, three films were released that made a strong argument, for those who needed to be persuaded, and they are legion, in favor of what someone finally decided needed to be called "slow cinema." They were Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet, Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. The Loktev film is a hypnotic parade of nothingness (not an insult) that ingeniously hinges on one rather startling incident, and Tarr's film, supposedly his last, portrays poverty, tedium, and cruelty as a combination that adds up to the Apocalypse; but it was Ceylan's 157-minute breakout almost genre/nearly crime procedural about homicide detectives searching for a dead body in the titular region of Turkey that really announced itself. This is in part because Loktev is still establishing herself, The Loneliest Planet being only her third film, and Tarr could give a fuck. Ceylan, meanwhile, had made five films prior to Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, he was known, admired, and had plenty left to give. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which includes a very long shot of an apple rolling down a hill and ends with an extensive (which doesn't meant especially graphic) autopsy entirely lacking in catharsis (not an insult), seemed to be Ceylan's way of announcing that this was the kind of filmmaker he was going to be, now that he was able.

Ceylan built upon this triumph (while also saying "no seriously I mean it") with 2014's Winter Sleep. This film became instantly notorious, or anyway a source of wariness among beleaguered film festival-goers, because of its 196-minute run time, but then people saw it at Cannes, where it went on to win the Palme d'Or, and everything was fine. Because the film, which Kino Lorber has just released on DVD and Blu-ray, is indeed quite long, this is impossible to refute, but for a film constructed mainly of a series of very long conversations and arguments, really moves. I was told it did, and I wasn't lied to. I realize my description probably makes the whole thing sound like some sort of an experiment, which it isn't -- as a drama, in a lot of ways it's pretty classical. So classical that if Ceylan had chosen to pitch his emotions a couple degrees higher (and cut out about an hour) he might have end up with a melodrama. One that is rather more overtly philosophical than perhaps we've come to expect from that form, but still: horrible strife between siblings, a marriage falling apart before our eyes, and class tensions with a potentially criminal element looming in the wings. Everything's there.

But Winter Sleep is pretty damn far from a melodrama. It's about Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), a wealthy landowner of about 60 years of age who rents property (so much that at one point he says he didn't realize another character is one of his tenants, though I'd say this claim is a dubious one) in a
mountainous region of Turkey. Smack in the middle of Aydin's land is the hotel he owns and manages with his much younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen). Near the beginning of the film, Aydin and his assistant Hidayet (Ayberk Pekcan) are out shopping for wild horses, in a manner of speaking, because one of Aydin's hotel tenants was recently disappointed to learn that the hotel does not make horses available for riding, despite including a picture of them on the website. The picture is there for local color, wild horses being common in the area, but he comes to believe this was a business miscalculation on his part. Anyway, that's what they're doing when a rock smashes the passenger window of their truck. It was thrown by a young boy, the son of Hamdi (Serhat Kilic), a local clergyman who rents his home from Aydin (and rented it previously from Aydin's father, who we gather has passed away). A subsequent encounter with first Hamdi's brother, an ex-con named Ismail (Nejat Isler) and then Hamdi himself reveals that Hamdi's meager salary has to support Ismail, Hamdi's wife and son, as well as Hamdi himself, Ismail's criminal past and hot temper leaving him unable to secure a job. On top of this, Hamdi -- who, when he finds Aydin and Hidayet outside his home confronting his brother with the broken window and the fact that the young boy's recklessness could have killed them, immediately becomes ingratiating and tries to smooth things over -- has fallen behind on the rent for various understandable reasons. Now you add the window to what he owes, even though Aydin tries to (pretends to?) brush it aside. He actually lets Hidayet be the bad guy, though Hidayet doesn't come off as muscle. He comes off as reasonable. But previously, Hamdi points out, a debt collector was sent, and his family's refrigerator and TV were taken. That's why the boy was so mad. Why was a debt collector called in? Aydin's father never went so far.

Also living with Aydin and Nihal is Aydin's sister Necla (Demet Akbag). Necla is recently divorced, and she now leads a somewhat aimless but you'd have to say comfortable existence with Aydin and Nihal. She spends her evenings on a couch behind Aydin's desk as he writes articles and essays for the local newspaper. She likes his writing, she tells him, but wonders about his ambition to publish them only in this paper she wouldn't even know existed otherwise. Aydin does have grander ambitions as a writer, however -- a former stage actor, Aydin tells the same hotel tenant who asked about horses that he plans to write a history of the Turkish theater. But he's content to publish these little essays about politics and religion and society in this small paper. His relationship with his sister is full of these genial little disagreements, one of which, involving Necla's curious theory that in order to defeat evil one must simply let it occur so that the evildoer will naturally come to feel shame and therefore change his or her behavior, is sort of the point on which all of Winter Sleep will finally turn. Sort of.

And I've barely said anything about Nihal, Aydin's wife, a character who is hardly insignificant in the film. She does charity work, raising money and donating, for local school causes. The strain between husband and wife can be noticed early when Aydin asks her for advice about a letter he received asking for money to build a school for women to indulge in their creative side. Nihal thinks other causes are more pressing, and can tell Aydin wants to grant the request because the woman's letter was so intensely (and calculatingly) flattering towards him, though Nihal bites her tongue on that note.

But as far as summary goes, I should stop there. Suffice it to say that Aydin's relationship with almost all of these people will fray and even snap over the course of Winter Sleep's three-plus hours. In addition, it should be clear that, a film built upon conversation though Winter Sleep may be, the potential for those conversations is rich. The characters talk and talk, the discussions and arguments lasting for twenty minutes at a time, and Aydin is slowly revealed, or reveals himself, to be a quietly awful person. Not an awful person who is always wrong, I would argue, because I don't believe it interests Ceylan very much to be that simplistic, and during one major blow-out between Aydin and Necla, I found my sympathies shifting every couple of minutes. Even so, Aydin is a condescending, patronizing, selfish, venal bastard. He just never gets on a chair and announces himself as such. Bilginer's performance is of a kind of impassioned naturalism that leaves you feeling no doubt that you're watching a landowner named Aydin, full stop. His co-stars match him. Kilic, as Hamdi, the tenant and imam struggling to keep his family from sinking into poverty, is a marvel as he meets and pleads with Aydin over and over again, plastering on his face a smile so desperately trying to hide its own bullshit because if Hamdi's frustrated, enraged contempt for Aydin ever showed itself, it would be all over for him, for his son, his wife, for Ismael. You can feel your fingernails digging into your palm watching Hamdi just trying to win an extra week's time.

Almost as painful (and there's a real humdinger of a scene that may make you gasp, but never mind about that one) is not exactly the big fight between Aydin and Necla, but the immediate aftermath. Ceylan seems to have a greater respect than most filmmakers, including other filmmakers who write their own scripts, as he does, for the natural emotional impact of the words his characters say. There's a minute or two of silence after Aydin and Necla have finished gutting each other, and the only time I've felt that uncomfortable after a fight is when I've had one in real life. You can feel, first, "Well, this night is fucked" and then "Well, this whole thing might be fucked." Bilginer and Akbag's stillness is the stillness of people who've been slapped, or shot. When Necla finally leaves the room, she carries the unmistakable burden of someone who has to figure out how to go to sleep now.

Winter Sleep isn't all people talking in rooms, either. It gets outside a fair bit, and the rocky, stormy landscape he favors here and in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia has a beautiful edge-of-the-world quality to it. And there's lots of room for little things -- Aydin's relationship with a young Japanese tenant at the hotel is charming and even moving -- and the scene where the wild horse that Aydin has paid to have captured and brought to him has such a violent, exhausting energy that the weight of the never-underlined metaphor, if it's even that, perhaps just the never-spoken poetry, is immense in its absence. If you get what I'm saying. But those are the touches, that's the eye, of a real filmmaker.

It Doesn't Think

About, I'd say, a quarter of the way into It Follows, the new movie from writer-director David Robert Mitchell which has so far positioned itself to comfortably be one of the maybe two serious horror films, by which I mean it's not at least 75% intended as a joke and has earned a flood of acclaim, that we are permitted to have each year, as I say, about a quarter of the way into this thing our young heroine Jay (Maika Monroe) has just had sex with her new boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary). Hugh seems like a good guy, he doesn't force her into anything, and though lately he's been acting a little bit funny, the sex was Jay's idea, and so therefore etc. But then afterwards, in the car where the deed was accomplished, Hugh suddenly leaps on her and knocks her out with chloroform. When she awakes, she's tied to a chair in what appears to be an abandoned parking garage. Hugh is there, and he tells her that, listen, I just had sex with you so that I could pass on to you this condition under which I have been burdened wherein the sufferer is followed by a supernatural creature until either A) it catches and kills the pursued, or B) the pursued has sex with someone else, thereby passing, sexually transmitted disease-style, the otherworldly danger to another. Although it should also be noted, Hugh goes on to say, that those who achieve this dissemination aren't entirely off the hook because should the disseminated-to be killed by this creature before they're able to keep the chain going, the thing will then go back to pursuing he who had recently shed himself of this misfortune, i.e., in this case, Hugh. Furthermore, Hugh tells Jay, this deadly being can and will appear as just about any person it chooses, be it a stranger or even one of Jay's loved ones -- whatever it takes, Hugh insists its motive is, that will let it get close to you, that is, Jay. Finally, it moves very slowly, so you can buy yourself some time by driving places, and, again, having sex with someone will shift the responsibility elsewhere, and if everyone keeps giving the next person along this same head's up, everything should be fine. With that done, and with the supernatural creature in the form of a nude woman appearing to helpfully prove Hugh's not making all this up, he drives Jay home where her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and friends Yara (Olivia Luccardi) and Paul (Keir Gilchrist) are on the porch waiting for her. David Robert Mitchell (the director, if you'll recall) films the drop-off by showing Hugh's car pull up to the curb as it would be seen by Kelly and the others. The car stops and Hugh gets out. We don't see Jay. He goes to the rear driver's side door and opens it. He's helping, or pulling, someone out, and he says "Don't let it touch you." Then he gets in the car and drives away, revealing, as the car moves off, Jay, clad only in her underwear, laying, folded up and somehow damaged in the street.

Say what you will about that premise, and I'll admit that as far as good ideas go it does seem a bit hinky to me, it doesn't strike me as unworkable. Before continuing I should also acknowledge that in the world of criticism it's considered either not kosher or not cricket to approach negative criticism with the goal of explaining how things should have been done. At least I think you're not supposed to do that, but maybe I'm mixing it up with something else you're not supposed to do.  But anyway, so listen: what about if David Robert Mitchell had cut all of Hugh's explanation, had cut even the sex scene, such as it currently exists, and simply left in some indication that either Jay or Hugh was going put the moves on the other, and then we cut to the car pulling up, the strange helping of Jay from the car, Hugh's now enigmatic "Don't let it touch you" (which in the film is not enigmatic at all), the car pulling away, and Jay's crumpled body. Had that been done, the audience would now share the point of view of the characters the camera, in this scene, wants us to share, that is Kelly, Yara, and Paul, none of whom heard any of Hugh's "Look, this thing follows sex-havers" speech. Allowing for the fact that yes, a malevolent supernatural creature doing anything for any reason is not comforting, as all of this pertains to films and storytelling, isn't it more effective to show the weird things happening before you explain why they're happening (if you even think it's advisable to explain them at all) than to say, in essence "A bunch of weird things are about to happen and here's what they are" before showing them? My argument is that yes, that first thing is more effective.

But It Follows is not remotely concerned with strangeness or atmosphere or even in sticking to the tiresome rules of the concept that it spent so much time tiresomely laying out. Once that concept has been locked down, the film is structured about how you'd expect: her friends rally around her to try and figure out a way to beat this thing while the possibility of taking Hugh's advice and passing this terrible fate along looms in Jay's mind, her two candidates being Paul, who's in love with her, and Greg (Daniel Zovatto), a classmate who's pretty quick off the stick when faced with supernatural terrors. So now the following should begin, although this thing doesn't so much follow as it does "walk into rooms" or "walk towards your staring face." In any case, remember that Hugh said this thing would take the form of anything that would help it get close to Jay, and so among the first forms it takes is that of a topless woman with smashed out front teeth who is in the middle of pissing herself. Oh, what a crafty plan, because that's Jay's favorite. It makes me uneasy how well this creature understands Jay. If this was a one-off mistake by the creature, like it thought "Oops I thought she liked bloody pissing ladies," that would be one thing, but with possibly one exception there is no reason to believe that Jay would ever let her guard down for any of the forms it takes, and indeed she never does. On top of this, that one exception is completely bungled because not only is the audience only told later why Jay might have been vulnerable to this form, she is not vulnerable to this form. The only reaction an audience member could be expected to have when confronted with information given in this order and accompanied by so little consequence is to think "Oh. Well, it didn't work anyway, so no big whoop."

For those who think it's necessary that a horror film have a subject, the subject of It Follows is obviously sex (it's certainly not following, I can tell you that much). And I don't agree with those detractors who accuse It Follows of Puritanism because sex can lead to all sorts of negative consequences, some of them terrifyingly negative; it's no use warning against them on one hand and pretending they don't exist on the other. So as a metaphor for these things, and more specifically the fear in people they engender, the idea behind the film is fine, but it's little more than that. Beyond it, the film doesn't seem to have a clear thought in its head, about anything. It gestures in a lot of different directions as if David Robert Mitchell understands that he can't go a whole movie without acknowledging certain things, like parents (the characters, by the way, seem to mostly be college students, or anyway of college age, who live at home). Often in the film, Jay can be heard telling her sister "Don't tell Mom." Though she's present as a character, or rather as an ambulatory sentience shaped like actress Debbie Williams, "telling Mom" in the context of this film would probably have the same effect as telling Santa would. Similarly, "going to college" in this case means precisely the same thing as "not going to college," and going to the hospital because you've been shot in the leg by your friend brings down as much heat from the police as having not been shot by anyone at all. Nothing in the film leads to any consequences that Mitchell might have to think through and factor in except sex, so I don't know, maybe the anti-Puritanicals have a point here, but in any event that premise, the sex monster business, is the one thing that Mitchell seems to have expended any effort on at all, but if he'd put enough thought into it, or the right kind of effort, he'd have ended up telling us far less about it.

The ultimate example of the thoughtlessness that simply oozes out of It Follows is the climax, the big showdown scene, which involves a plan developed by one of our heroes which nobody involved, including the audience and David Robert Mitchell, should have any reason to believe will work, but that's okay because what seems to have been the plan, this other plan (not to spoil anything, but this other plan is essentially "What if we shoot it?" which happens to be further complicated by the fact that actually the plan is "What if we shoot it again?"), all of which seems to end one way, but which the characters have apparently decided, despite having been given no evidence whatsoever to support this, ended in a different way. And listen, ambiguity is one thing, but being dumb is also one thing, and from the moment Paul says to Jay "Do you trust me?", It Follows becomes hopelessly dumb; when you consider what came before, that this bit is notably stupid is, well, notable.

There are exactly two moments in It Follows that I thought showed some promise. They're very small moments, but I like small moments. Anyway, the first one is near the beginning. Jay is in her family's above-ground pool in the backyard, and there's a bug on her wrist. Mitchell shows her look at it and then lower her arm into the water, effectively, and intentionally, drowning the insect while using less energy than it would take to open a can of soda. I wondered what this might signify (hint: nothing). The other moment is when Hugh takes Jay to the movies and they're playing a game I won't describe but which involves imagining things about the people in the theater with them. Hugh says to Jay "Are you thinking about her?" Jay asks who and Hugh says "The woman in the yellow dress." Jay doesn't know what he's talking about, she sees no such person. Hugh immediately becomes anxious and asks that they leave the theater. I wondered "Does the supernatural threat in this film appear as a woman in a yellow dress? That's interesting...I wonder what kind of eerie visuals David Robert Mitchell has planned for this." He had zero of them planned, and you might imagine that the truth of his actual idea, that the creature can appear as anything, would at best open up certain possibilities, again, visually speaking, but, again, no. If anything it froze his brain. Nothing goes anywhere or means anything or has an impact or looks or sounds or is interesting. I've seen a lot of horror movies that I liked a good deal less than many people seemed to, but rarely have I been as baffled by the discrepancy between a film's reception and the film I actually saw as I am by my experience with It Follows. And as if all that isn't bad enough, there's a scene late in the film where a character is eating a sandwich, it appears to be tuna salad, a soft, noiseless sandwich, but the chewing sounds looped in would seem to indicate a lot of lettuce, raw onion -- thick, noisy things. What I'm saying is, the foley work does not at all line up with the sandwich I was looking at. I mean for Pete's sake. Who's minding the store here?

Close the Door When I Go

The reputation of British filmmaker Carol Reed, whose career spanned the mid-1930s to the early 70s, seems now to live under two shadows that he cast himself: the one he cast as the director of 1949's The Third Man, one of the handful of unimpeachable masterpieces in English-language cinema, a film of that rare type that is both humbling to watch and deeply, accessibly enjoyable (I am prepared to push my praise of it further than this and would probably meet little resistance if I did, The Third Man being The Third Man and everything, but you know how people can be), and the shadow he cast as the director of 1968's Oliver!, the boisterous Oliver Twist musical which wears its Broadway sensibility either proudly or shamelessly, and which committed what some regard as the unpardonable sin of winning the Oscars that 2001: A Space Odyssey was denied. It's a film that I don't recall thinking was actually bad, but maybe it is. Anyway, once these things take root, they often do so permanently.

There is, of course, more to Reed's career, but at least in the US not a ton of it is readily available. The Third Man was his twenty-second feature and remains his best-known by far, and finding most of what preceded it is not exactly a breeze. The Third Man was in fact the third of three Reed masterpieces in a row, following The Fallen Idol from 1948 (a Graham Greene adaptation, as is The Third Man), and Odd Man Out from 1947. The Third Man and The Fallen Idol were both at one time released on DVD and/or Blu-ray by Criterion, but both have since gone out of print (their release of Reed's Night Train to Munich remains in print). Undaunted, Criterion has just now released Odd Man Out, an adaptation not of Graham Greene but the coincidentally named F. L. Green, to DVD and Blu-ray. Hopefully this one hangs around a while.

In his new introduction to F. L. Green's novel, first published in 1945 and which has serendipitously just been reissued by Valancourt Books (I'm afraid I haven't had time to read it yet), Irish crime writer Adrian McKinty briefly charts the influence of the tradition of American crime fiction on Odd Man Out and British fiction in general, an influence, he points out, that is hardly surprising when you consider the number of American troops present during and after the war, and what they might favor in the way of reading material. So it naturally follows that Carol Reed's film version, the script for which was co-written by Green with R. C. Sherriff, would draw upon the still more-or-less new tradition of film noir that is, when you get right down to it, practically unavoidable when telling these sorts of stories. Anyway, speaking of this style, see above, to begin with, and then see below:

And what kind of story is this exactly? Well, actually first, look at this:

From The Third Man, obviously, but notice that how much mileage Reed was able to squeeze of of this sort of framing: a woman who's made up her mind in the middle, a despairing man on the left, the two of them flanked by some kind of orderly, symmetrical structure or landscape. Despite the second shot, most of both films take place at night, though Odd Man Out is even more of the night, if you get me, than The Third Man. In Odd Man Out, James Mason plays Johnny, the leader of something called The Organization, a kind of ideological gang of criminals based in Northern Ireland. So the IRA, in other words, though the politics of any of this, or rather the specific politics, are consciously not dealt with. Because what happens is, Johnny and his gang have planned to rob a local mill, the proceeds from which will fund their cause. But Johnny, who has recently escaped from prison and is, outside of this heist, lying low, reveals to his right-hand man (Robert Beatty) that he's begun to have doubts about using violence to further their goals. In general, there is a dispassion, almost a disorientation, about Johnny as he and his men head out to pull the job, and in the course of it not only is he wounded, but he shoots and kills a mill employee who tries to stop him. Cowardice and indecision lead the men he came with, who include Cyril Cusack and Dan O'Herlihy, to leave Johnny behind. Badly hurt and verging on delirious, Johnny escapes to a row of air-raid shelter where he hides until dark. All around him, the city knows he's on the loose, they know who he is, they know what The Organization is about, and they know he's killed a man.

This sets up the rest of Odd Man Out, which it would be difficult to say is not noir, but it no longer exists as any kind of heist film you've seen before. More than a heist film, or even more than noir, Odd Man Out soon becomes a picaresque: Johnny travels through the city, trying to make it back to his home, his hideout, and to the woman who loves him (Kathleen Ryan), along the way he meets a series of people, some who don't know who he is, but many who do, and they now must decide what course of action would best satisfy their conscience, if that kind of satisfaction even occurs, or appeals, to them. This means that apart from Johnny, the central characters in a major encounter, involving two women who tend to Johnny's wound and the husband of one of them who insists the right thing to do is call the police, are gone from the film once Johnny parts company with them. And so it goes, first in the air-raid shelter, where a young couple retreats for privacy and romance until the young woman nervously, touchingly says "I don't want to"; to the British soldier who believes Johnny is drunk; to the driver of the hansom cab who doesn't even know Johnny's his passenger; to the bizarre, motley trio of fringe-dwellers that include a jittery small-time thief (F. J. McCormick) and an amoral, alcoholic painter (Robert Newton, leaving it all on the table as usual). To most of these people, those who know who he is, Johnny will ask "Did I kill that man?" He only learns the answer to that when he overhears people talking about him in another room.

A crawl of text that opens the film tells the audience that the film isn't about the politics of Northern Ireland, but rather it's about what happens to ordinary citizens when they find themselves face to face with those politics. Shockingly, this doesn't turn out to be a dodge: it really isn't about the centuries-long question of Irish independence, or the changes Michael Collins brought about, or the mess that followed his assassination, or the growing reliance on terrorism by the IRA. None of that is brought up directly, at least, but what is at question is the morality of the situation. After Johnny is wounded, James Mason doesn't have a lot of lines in the film, yet the most pointed question asked by the film is asked only by him, though he doesn't speak the words; instead, the meaning of them become stronger as his strength drains away. The question is this: beyond a certain point, can a man's dreams survive his own aggressive attempts to bring them to life? If some of the citizens Johnny encounters show a yellow streak, and you could easily argue that a bunch of them do, that's because their city has been reduced to collection of fears and suspicions where any moral choice you make could end up ruining your life. Johnny's Organization contributed to that. We know Johnny has become conscious of this because nobody he meets cares as much about the man he killed as he does. And not even Johnny could tell you why that man had to die.

Best of Luck

When Roy Scheider died in 2008, a bunch of us cinephiles or whatever got to reminiscing, as you do, and I said to my friend Greg Ferrara, formerly of Cinema Styles, currently of TCM, that in my view Scheider was a better actor than Dustin Hoffman (I assume one or the other of us had brought up Marathon Man), who had by that point been canonized several times over while Scheider was regarded by most as little more than a highly dependable actor who everybody liked. No small achievement as far as building a reputation goes, I'll grant you, but pretty small beans when set beside his performances in films like All That Jazz, Sorcerer, Jaws, and on and on. Anyway, Greg responded by saying something along the lines of "The fact that I had to stop and think about that tells me you're onto something." So you see, I was right all along. I bring this up because since he died, my belief that Scheider was one of the greats has only strengthened, as has my frustration that outside of the films already mentioned he didn't have a career filled with the kinds of roles that would place him where he truly belonged. By and large, Scheider made the kind of films which would ensure that he'd be thought of as dependable and beloved, and not much more.

But even so. In my opinion, the Dustin Hoffmans of the world would have done well to mix in more of the type of film that Scheider built a career from. There's something about being able to plug into the small films as well as the big ones, the formulaic and the innovative, that allows for Scheider's brand of breezy, virtuosic, and varied naturalism. He could move from the existential horror of Sorcerer to what I guess you could all the existential joy of All That Jazz without changing himself fundamentally, without accents or makeup, but if that's not range then what is? He played a lot of cops, too, but even within that you have seen-everything tough guys he played in The Seven-Ups and The French Connection, the brave, good-hearted, but in-over-his head police chief in Jaws, as well as, and here we come to the point, the "weary modern cop," which is a certain type, pretty much always a middle-aged guy because part of being wearily modern is seeing everything you felt a connection with fade away. Scheider plays this type in Night Game, a thriller from 1989 written by Spencer Eastman and directed by Peter Masterson. Almost completely forgotten (the cover of the VHS I used to see, but never rent, at Blockbuster way back when recently came back to me in a rush) it was recently revived via a release to Blu-ray by Olive Films, and I gotta say, it's good to have it around.

Scheider plays Mike Seaver, an ex-minor league baseball player and current Houston homicide detective who, when we meet him, is still rebounding professionally from something that happened to him on the job in Dallas. He's also just proposed to Roxy (Karen Young), his much younger girlfriend. A life of regret that is further weighed down by having seen too much on the job (much of this is to be inferred from Scheider's performance and from casting Scheider in the first place) is threatening to brighten up, in other words, except there's a serial killer on the loose. He kills blonde women, at night, and the timing, placement, and pattern of the murders, it's eventually believed, point to a connection to the Astrodome. It's to the film's credit that Seaver doesn't jump unreasonably to this conclusion, which just happens to be true; on the other hand, this film is called Night Game.

If this sounds like a dull, run-of-the-mill '80s cop thriller, well, to some degree it is. The murders, as staged by Masterson, sort of go through the motions of being suspenseful -- a woman sees someone following her, she runs, she trips or whatever, etc. The only time I cringed in sympathy or suspense during one of these scenes was when one of the victims, shoeless so that she might run better, is shown about to step on a nail. Masterson, best known then as now for The Trip to Bountiful, for which Geraldine Page won an Oscar, and the Gene Hackman/Terri Gar romantic comedy Full Moon in Blue Water, which, okay, maybe it's not well known but my brother liked it (it also receives an incongruous post-modern wink in Night Game) clearly doesn't care about that stuff. He also doesn't care that the audience is going to clue in very early that the blonde-haired Roxy fits the victim profile and so she's probably better look over her shoulder. It's not that Masterson doesn't use this -- he does, twice. But the time he puts more effort into the time it doesn't pay off than the time it finally does.

No, what Masterson cares about, and what Scheider makes possible, is all the small stuff. The "character bits" I guess they're called. The subplot about Seaver's relationship to Roxy and her mother won't stun you with its blinding newness, but these are real people whose lives move along even as the bodies pile up, because those are the day-to-day facts. Which is to say that Masterson is "saying" this, or anything else, but the little moments of life are what clearly matter to him, and which Scheider brings off without an ounce of ostentation. He just falls into it. He looks like a guy who's been doing everything that he's ever done for a very long time, but this tiredness is offset by Scheider's physical leanness and overall air of competence which, if you're on the wrong side of him, made him seem dangerous (this is why he's so effective in Marathon Man). Scheider is one of the few actors who could look just as at home clutched in a mortal struggle with a psychopath as dozing in a recliner, a half-empty can of beer nearby. Again, if that's not range...

Night Game also benefits from being set in Houston, rather than New York or Los Angeles, and from a cast that, in addition to Scheider and Young, includes Richard Bradford, Lane Smith, and Paul Gleason. Those last two combined to probably play more assholes than any other two actors during the 1980s, but actors get as much work as they did because they're good and because they're pros, as they show here. The police station, as a result of the casting and the setting, has a real idiosyncratic life to it, not one that is self-consciously quirky, but one that has built up by the real people within it. In this regard, it's a shame that Masterson was hemmed in by what either he or the studio regarded as the constraints of the genre (the myth that everyone believes in) because there's a terrific cop drama buried in here. What we get instead is a solid cop thriller that draws its strength from Scheider. And who better to leach from than a guy who couldn't fake it if you paid him?

A True April's Tale

I am going to be the next Super Man in the next Super Man movie! This is news I just got today and it is TRUE. I am NOT lying. Benm Adflemk is OUT an I am IN! It is my dream come true to play SUPER Man! The movie as you all know is called SUPER MAN: A DREAMS OF JUSTICE and it will star me as Super Man (see picture of me in my costume copyright Universal Sony):

me as Super Man

and my cat Shirley as Ultron the Robot Fiend (see picture of Shirley with special effect eyes courtesy of copyright Universal Sony):

Ultorn the Robot Feind

It is so excited to be a Movie Star. I am a Million Air now and I am going to fly to the finest countries and eat the most delicouis Chicken Meat they have. Fried chicken, other kind of chicken, it doesnt matter to me. I jus want 2 eat it all. And now I can becase I am Superm An, Moive Star of the Ages this Summer in SURPE MAN: JASMINE DAWN. See you at the movei theateers guys! POW! ZIP! BOO!







APRIL'S FOOL YOU STUPID IDIOTS! I am not a super mant! I am sitting hear in a robe! APRIL!