Nothing in the Tank

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That, up above, is how I feel. I simply have nothing to write about, and no will to do so even if I did. Have something to write about, I mean. So, in lieu of letting this blog lie fallow too long, I'm going to take the opportunity to post something that is not only lazy, but self-promoting. It's a link to an old post, one I like, and one that is about a film I own on DVD. See how many birds I just slaughtered? Like, nine.

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So here it is: from the archives, my write up of James Landis's The Sadist, from 1963, entitled To Inflict Moral Insanity Upon the Innocent. I think that you should enjoy this excerpt:

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One of the things I personally find most fascinating about the time in which The Sadist was released is not just that this was done in 1963, but that it was done in April of 1963. Cultural historians -- at least the ones with whom I have unfortunately had experience -- would be stymied by the chronology of The Sadist's filming and distribution, because, you see, cultural historians apparently believe that everyone born before they were is a total dumbshit, and the dumbshits who were adults in the 1950s and '60s (thereby having survived World War II and the Korean War, among other things) still needed the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in November 1963, to remind them that guns were sometimes used to shoot people in the head, and it was this horrifying act of public murder that allowed for the creation of films like The Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde and so on and so on. I'm sure everyone reading this has seen someone making this kind of connection, but for this connection to work someone needed to tell James Landis, who was on this particular case when Lee Harvey Oswald was still greasing machinery in New Orleans.

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A Duet of Collection Project Selections...

Sorry, only two today. Ordinarily, when I do these capsule reviews, my minimum is three, but today it's two. You know why? Because. That's why.

Where the Truth Lies (d. Atom Egoyan) - When you're new to the work of a particular filmmaker, and you have an experience early on that is as positive as my second outing with Atom Egoyan, a certain momentum builds up. That first experience was with his through-the-roof brilliant adaptation of Russell Banks's The Sweet Hereafter, and from that point, apparently, I was willing to follow him anywhere, from the positive (I think Ararat, for instance, is pretty underrated) to the vaguely disappointing (his oppressively artificial version of William Trevor's spare novel Felicia's Journey). Well, when you like a filmmaker, you take the good with the bad, but Egoyan's big-screen take on yet another novel I enjoyed, Rupert Holmes's relentlessly entertaining Where the Truth Lies, was a full-on clusterfuck. Holmes's murder mystery potboiler, set in the world as it's inhabited and experienced by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis stand-ins Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and Vince Collins (Colin Firth), is just a terrific read: suspenseful, funny, always engaging. In Egoyan's hands, Holmes's idea of humor is replaced by his own, and since Egoyan doesn't have the first clue about comedy, the burden is placed on poor Bacon and Firth to flail around like monkeys. Elsewhere, the film is just a slog, numbingly mannered and artificial in the same way Felicia's Journey was, but at least that film was more in Egoyan's wheelhouse, and Bob Hoskins was well-cast. Bacon and Firth come across as the first two guys who said yes.

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And yet I own it anyway. There might possibly be certain ancillary reasons for this -- I'm too busy to try and think what those might be, but, on an unrelated note, Alison Lohman, as the young journalist Karen O'Connor who is alternately outsmarted by, and later the one doing the outsmarting of, Morris and Collins, is perfectly winning, to the point where you think maybe she's the only one involved in the film who "got" Thompson's book, which would be strange, as it's quite an easy book to "get". But even with Lohman it feels like she showed up on set determined to be a worker, and to show everyone she was a grown up, as opposed to act in a film she believed in. Also, I think it cost, like, five dollars.

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Never Take Candy from a Stranger (d. Cyril Frankel) - This suspense film about a married couple, recently moved to a small Canadian town, battling for justice for their young daughter, who was taken advantage of by the town's elderly patriarch, comes from Hammer Studio's lesser-known stock of non-horror genre titles. And it's quite good, tackling the topic of child sexual abuse, and the broad complications, apart from the obvious, that result with more directness than pretty much any contemporary film about similar material I can think of. It also carries with it, for me, a very strong "does this remind you of anything?" vibe, particularly in the early scene when the molester's adult son (Bill Nagy) first visits the distraught parents (Gwen Watford and Patrick Allen). The son arrives cap-in-hand, full of false regret, and at one point, in a moment so believably ridiculous that you might be tempted to laugh, laments that his father briefly lost his head and "teased" their little girl. Maybe if you call it something other than what it actually is, everyone will believe it. Maybe it'll even be true. Nagy, in particular, is great at expressing a barely contained terror and helplessness that manifests itself as aggression and overwhelming myopia -- a state of mind that comes close to sweeping up the whole town. You can all decide for yourselves if this outline reminds you of any legal battle that has been in the news for the last year or so. Who am I to say?

Camera Work

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The film critic-o-sphere has been juddered off its axis recently, due to the hurricane of controversy that has whipped up over the fact that in Cyrus, the new Duplass brothers film, the camera zooms in and out a lot (the preceding sentence, I admit, is a pretty flippant way of broaching a topic I’m actually interested in). The problem, according to the film’s detractors, is that none, or at least very few, of the camera twitches and zooms employed by the Duplass brothers are justified by anything resembling a purpose. Glenn Kenny, in his not entirely negative review of Cyrus, puts it like this:
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What I saw in the film were a lot of perfectly serviceable/banal medium shots and medium closeups that were almost constantly interrupted by a sudden, jerky, lunging-forward in perspective. One second, you're looking at John C. Reilly's face as he's saying something; the next, you're looking at his eyebrow, and contemplating just how little hair it has on it, and wondering why that is. The effect, frankly, was rather like taking a sizable slug of high-proof liquor, and having it come directly back up from your stomach, and just being able to catch it all in your mouth before you projectile-vomited it. (I allow that this is a somewhat specialized analogy.) Hence, I cannot say that I found myself even a bit on board with [Karina] Longworth's...defense: "You could say that Cyrus looks ugly, but that ugliness is an artifact of a working method." What "working method" is meant here? The method of drinking a shitload of coffee before you pick up your video camera, so that your thumb hits the zoom toggle on the handle at pretty much any goddamn time? Because if you tally up the number of zooms in this picture, and examine the contexts in which they manifest themselves, it becomes pretty clear that they really have no compelling reason for being.
.Having not seen Cyrus yet, I was only able to, at best, kind of see what he was talking about. Also, not having seen Cyrus yet, I was most unwilling to talk about it here at all, because, well, what do I know about it? Then, over the weekend, I was watching At the Movies, and saw Michael Phillips and A. O. Scott’s review of the film. Scott based his entire negative response to Cyrus on those zooms, and showed a clip of Cyrus to illustrate his point, prefacing the clip by asking Phillips, and the viewer, why the camera was doing what it was doing. What the camera was doing was, in fact, zooming in arbitrarily on John C. Reilly, and then pulling back suddenly, or, when Marisa Tomei enters the scene, zooming in on her. In the case of the Tomei zoom, you might say that, well, she just got there, and the camera wants to isolate her. Which would be fine, if she wasn’t already, not only center-frame, but the only thing in the frame at all that you might want, or feel compelled, to look at.
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So I now had a better context for the negative reactions to the Duplass brothers’ style, but the main thing I thought when I watched that clip was “Oh, so it’s like Homicide.” Not Homicide, the David Mamet film, but Homicide, the TV show from the 90s that was about life on the streets. Put Andre Braugher in Cyrus, and you have everything you need to be an episode of that show, which, by the way, I stopped watching very early in its run precisely because of that fucking goddamn camera that wouldn’t fucking sit still. If memory serves, the creators, and directors, of Homicide went even further with this style, to the point that they’d have an actor in frame (let’s say it was Yaphet Kotto) talking, or drinking coffee, or thinking about life on the streets, and there’d be a cut, but the cut would be to a shot that was very close to the shot they’d just cut from. Not exactly the same shot, because this time Kotto would be a little bit to the left or right of where he had been – not geographically, but within the frame. What this implied was they had two cameras running side by side, and when it came time to edit the show they would sometimes cut between those to cameras, and I knew, as I watched those first few episodes, that they were doing so arbitrarily. I knew this because there was no reason possible for them to do that, no reason inherent to the images they were filming, or the story they were telling, that would explain those cuts. Or those Cyrus-y zooms, which Homicide (and NYPD Blue, while I’m at it) seemed to believe were as essential to visual storytelling as light, or having things to point your camera at.
.Now that I know what Glenn and other critics are talking about when they refer to the camerawork in Cyrus, I must say I am slightly confused by the fact that critics are getting so cheesed off about it now. I was cheesed off about this stuff years ago, but I’ve since become more or less resigned to it. I don’t like it any more than I used to, but this shit is everywhere – isn’t this a form of the whole “shaky-cam” movement that everybody has become so fed up with in action films? – and I have no sense that it’s going away anytime soon. The standard line on this kind of filmmaking is that it adds an “immediacy” and a “documentary feel” to the proceedings, and, in fact, this is the defense that Michael Phillips offered when A. O. Scott asked “Why?” (Although it seemed pretty clear to me that Phillips was playing Devil’s Advocate in the interest of moving the conversation along, and that he was neither ready nor willing to go to the mat for this one.) The first problem is what you mean by “immediacy”, because on its own it doesn’t mean anything. Do you mean that this kind of camerawork puts the viewer “there”, in the middle of the action? If so, then those viewers need to get both their eyes and their brain checked, because I suspect they have a fairly serious neurological disorder – for one thing, the human eye can’t “zoom”. Not only that, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a documentary that employed this kind of visual style; even Gimme Shelter betrays a steadier hand.
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More thoughtful justifications for this style, and particularly as it’s used in Cyrus, have been mounted elsewhere. In the comments section of Glenn Kenny’s review, Richard Brody says:
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The zooms in Cyrus provoke a sense of intimacy and tension, of nervousness and isolation. They're motivated by the directors' sense of mood, their emotional relationships to characters and scenes. The zooms reflect the filmmakers' distinctive feeling for the events they depict, for the texture of life. Which is to say, by their desire to see and to show things a certain way--and that desire is the essence of the cinema. And thankfully the filmmakers didn't have producers who walk around with little rule books in their pockets and ask them what the motivation for their zooms might be. Thinking about movies as closed-off dramas is indeed part of the problem.
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Yes, okay, I can see this point, in the abstract. And it might be easier to see it in a more tangible way if I didn’t know that Homicide and NYPD Blue and so on did this exact same thing, all the time, in every episode (I may not have watched much of the former, but I watched plenty of the latter), whatever the context. It was the house style – violent scenes, love scenes, comic scenes, all get the same treatment. And they all looked exactly like what I’ve seen of Cyrus. Except in Cyrus, the Duplass brothers really mean it, I guess.
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Which is unfair, because I’ve only seen a tiny bit of Cyrus, removed from any context. This is all true, and there’s no way around it. But this style is old – a good twenty years old, or more – and doesn’t signal to me any kind of individual creative stamp on the part of the Duplass brothers. It signals to me that they liked Homicide a lot. A lot of people did, but I didn't.
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Plus, I think it’s probably safe to say that when he made White Dog (which is today’s Collection Project Film of the Day, don’t you know), Sam Fuller didn’t have producers bearing rule books following him around, either, but he still moved his camera (and here I’m expanding the argument out to include not just zooms, but general camera moves, which is what this whole argument is about anyway) in a way that indicated he knew how to work the damn thing. For example, look at the screengrabs below (provided to me by Glenn Kenny, and thanks again for the help). In this shot, Fuller is introducing Keys, played by Paul Winfield. With Carruthers (Burl Ives), Keys runs an animal training business. At this point in the film, we’ve met Carruthers, and learned that the dog of the title, which has been recently taken in by Julie Sawyer (Kristy MacNicol), is, indeed, a “white dog”, which means that it was trained from a pup to attack black people. Carruthers sees little hope that the violence can be trained out of the animal, and things are looking grim. Then we get a shot of a sign, “Carruthers & Keys”. At this point, understand, we have not seen Keys before. Here’s how Fuller introduces him.

Isn’t that great? Mind you, I’m fully aware that this shot loses almost all of its power in this format, but I think you get the idea. The camera pans past the name “Carruthers” on the sign, and focuses on “Keys”, before sliding down to Keys himself. This is Keys, and he is important. This kind of wonderfully blunt elegance can only come from a filmmaker who knows what the hell he’s on about. Maybe at 34 I’m already a crotchety old bastard, but I’d much rather this than a zoom that needs to be explained away later by saying “That’s just the way they see the world.”

On Becoming a Superhero

I don’t know about you, but it wasn’t so long ago that I used to wake up in the morning, sit morosely on the side of my bed, and wonder “Why am I not a superhero yet?” The answer, I eventually realized, was a simple one: I wasn’t putting in the work! I was going to bed every night, hoping that by the time the sun rose I’d have turned into Spider-Man. It’s embarrassing to admit now, but I thought that radioactive spiders were everywhere, and, because I do not keep my home clean – I at least did that much – it would only be a matter of time before one found its way in and bit me. From there, it would simply be a matter of determining if my “webslingers” were organic, or if I’d have to make them myself. Given my lazy thinking, I was hoping for the former.
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Then one day, a friend of mine provided me with humbling inspiration, and helped me put my life on the right track. This friend works in a scientific laboratory, and he’s a big Daredevil fan. One day, he was looking at all the jars of science potion they have there, and he took one off the shelf, opened it, and poured the potion into his eyes. And guess what? He’s completely blind now, which means he’s already halfway there.
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Now I know that nobody’s going to just hand me super powers; I’ll have to take them from the cosmos, or the Earth, or the Earth’s oceans, or the Realm of the Eldritch Unknown – whatever is best for me. The best part is that I want to pass on what I’ve learned to you! I want to motivate you to get your own super powers, although if you and I live in the same city, we can’t have the same super powers, unless one of us (you) wants to be a supervillain, in which case you’d better stop reading now, because I’m not going to help anybody do that shit. In fact, I was going to save this for later, but let’s go ahead and get the “supervillain” portion of this essay out of the way now. Okay, I know that some of you are thinking “Hey, if I had a super power – like, say, I could control fire – then I could use it to burn down girls’ locker rooms and banks and so on. Can that hero nonsense! I’m gonna look out for number one, see!?” I believe that it is natural to have these thoughts. But come on, man. Don’t do that.
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Back to the point. The important thing to remember when trying to obtain a super power is this: keep a positive attitude. What you’re trying to do isn’t easy, but there are also lots of different ways to achieve your goal. For instance, there’s the radioactive spider I mentioned at the top. What you need to remember about this method of super power acquisition is that it’s pretty much pure luck. Anybody can get bitten by a spider, but that spider has to bring some pretty serious stuff to the table himself if you’re ever going to get anywhere. Of course, you could buy a spider, and a radiation machine, put the spider into the machine, and then put the spider on your arm and say “Bite my arm.” This can work. If this is where your heart takes you, then Godspeed. But what I’m trying to get at here is that there are alternatives. For instance, you could train to become an astronaut, and when you get launched into space, maybe your ship will pass through a magic cloud. It’s space, so the chances of this happening are pretty good. If NASA rejects your application for any reason, you could always stowaway on their next mission. This kind of pluckiness will serve you well in the future.

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Perhaps you want to take a more practical, hands-on approach to gaining super powers. Maybe the off-chance that there aren’t any magic clouds in space renders that option too uncertain for you. Perhaps, also, you have a great admiration for Matter-Eater Lad, from the Legion of Super Heroes, but the prospect of transforming yourself from a “Regular Joe” to someone who can consume all matter is, while enormously appealing, also quite daunting. “Where,” you must be thinking, “am I to begin?” Well, how about this? Go home and eat a bowl of soup. The next day, try a sandwich. Then you can try to be like one of those guys from the Guinness Book of World Records, who eat bicycles and cars, one tiny piece at a time (I’m pretty sure I saw somebody do that with a plane once). Once you’ve mastered this, see if you can take a bite out of a brick. If you can, then you know what? You did it, buddy. You’re there.
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There’s another option that I’m sure many of you are probably considering, which is the “superhero with no powers” route. This sounds pretty boring to me, but I guess okay, if that’s your thing. If you’d rather have a belt full of shit like marbles, and duct tape that has your name on it, then go to it. When you see me flying over your head with a hot naked girl in my arms, be sure to blow your special whistle at me. But so anyway, if you think you know best, then what you’ll need is some sort of trauma. Everybody has some trauma in their lives – the death of a loved one, the rejection of your poetry and monologues by an ignorant critical “elite” – but if you’re going to use it to shape your superhero persona, you’ll need something special. Your parents will need to be murdered by somebody wearing a snake costume (allowing you to become The Mongoose), or maybe your trauma is something you feel guilty about, like you accidentally killed your best friend in a “watch me swing this axe with my eyes closed” mishap, which would spur you to become The Lumberjack. Or no…who fights lumberjacks? You know what, never mind. This no-super-powers business is really not my thing, so you’re on your own. Good luck!
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As for the rest of you, remember: YOU CAN DO IT! Your quest has an endless number of destinations. Just walk into the ocean and see what happens, or put on a metal hat, go out during an electrical storm, and touch whatever animal happens to pass you by. This is an adventure! Enjoy!
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The Collection Project Film of the Day:
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Remember that scene in Spider-Man 3 (d. Sam Raimi) when the butler tells Harry that he's known for probably about forever that Spider-Man didn't kill Harry's dad, but he kept mum about it for some reason long enough for Harry to become a supervillain? Yeah, I own the movie anyway.

Affinity #22

The Collection Project Film of the Day:

Albert Brooks has made, by my count, three classic films (four, depending on how I feel about Defending Your Life on the day you ask me): Real Life, Lost in America and Modern Romance. I honestly believe that, in the world of comedy filmmaking, where sustaining a comic premise and making it consistently funny is a frickin' ballbuster, this is a considerable achievement. Modern Romance, which Brooks wrote with frequent collaborator Monica Johnson, is, in particular, not just a classic, but a comic masterpiece (it's this film, in fact, that led Stanley Kubrick to contact Brooks and express his deep admiration for his work, which, in turn, led to the two men developing a long distance friendship -- it ended only when Brooks casually, and naturally, suggested he visit Kubrick at his home). Watching the film again -- as I am actually doing right now as we speak -- is something of a revelation, despite the fact that I've seen it numerous times over the years.

The premise of Modern Romance is simple. Brooks plays Robert Cole, a film editor, who, as the film opens, breaks up with his on-again-off-again girlfriend Mary (Kathryn Harrold), and immediately enters a neurotic, lonely tailspin. This tailspin accounts for about the first half of the film, said half containing one of the greatest performances in comedy. This performance is delivered, of course, by Brooks, as he blunders through a number of scenes and set-pieces that could function as exquisite, self-contained sketches. The first of these involves his first night alone after the break-up. He's fortified himself with a couple of Quaaludes given to him by his assistant editor, Jay (the late, deeply lamented Bruno Kirby). So he spends the night alone, doped up, making phone calls he has no business making ("I have love for you, Ellen"), and taking calls when he should have just let the phone ring ("You're Mr. Trashcan!"). This scene lasts a good ten minutes or more --it's like the comedy version of Inglourious Basterds tavern scene -- and sets up only one bit of plot, which isn't even plot, but another joke that he pays off about fifteen minutes later. All of this, all these great, hilarious throw-away moments ("Petey, if you were a guy, he'd love you. Or if he were a bird you'd love him") that serve no purpose beyond being funny and establishing Cole's character, when the prevailing wisdom in narrative filmmaking is that if something doesn't serve the story, it has to go. Much of the first half of Modern Romance doesn't serve the story, and that's part of the reason it's so wonderful. Remember, Robert Cole is a film editor, so were he cutting Modern Romance he'd probably chop the hell out it.

Speaking of which, in the film's second half, after he's started back up with Mary, we see Robert at work, editing a "space picture" for David, a nervous and myopic director (a truly funny James L. Brooks). Robert and Jay are shown trying to add suspense to a deeply ridiculous bit of the film that features George Kennedy (as himself) shouting orders at his men, and, later, trying to add the kind of forceful sound effect ("Hawmp hawmp hawmp!") to a shot of Kennedy running down a hallway that David thinks will save the second half of the picture. Again, these scenes are long -- Brooks takes his time with them, in order to pull out all the subtle comedy from their situations, which he accomplishes through uncommonly sharp dialogue and easy, natural acting.

There are no comedies like this now, with this kind of loose structure, and the curiosity for the kind of side alleys represented by Robert's job in film editing. Brooks is often compared to Woody Allen, but even Allen -- the funny Allen -- at his best, which is considerable, is more concerned with the classic one-liner style of comedy that Allen saw perfected by his heroes, like Bob Hope. Brooks just let things be funny. His style was one of great patience and confidence.

I say "was", because following Defending Your Life, in 1991, Brooks seems to be floundering. His three subsequent films -- Mother, The Muse and Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World -- have offered diminishing returns. They're not bad films, but they are significantly less funny than the astonishing, humbling work he did from 1979, when Real Life came out, through 1991. The funniest stuff in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is when Brooks is simply recycling his old (and brilliant) stand-up act. This is all disappointing to me, as a fan, and I can only speculate as to the reason for it, but I remember reading an interview with John Cleese where he said that since he began going to therapy, he's been much happier, but also less funny. However, he said, he'd rather be happy than funny. In an article about Brooks by Bill Zehme, written in conjunction with the release of Defending Your Life, Billy Crystal relates this anecdote:

Albert Brooks had bought Rob [Reiner] some books [for his birthday]. One was Stunts and Games. And Albert said, let me read you some of these things. Then he started making them up and reading them as if they were in the book: this one's called National Football League. Get thirty of your friends together, have them donate $5 million each to buy black people who can run and hit. Or Kennedy Assassination. Pretend you see smoke coming only from the Texas Book Depository, ignoring the man with the rifle in the tree standing next to you. I've probably never seen anyone funnier in my whole life. In fact, it was so funny that he had to leave immediately afterward. I felt sad that Albert couldn't be a person; he had to leave.

I can only hope that the waning quality of Albert Brooks's comedy is somehow related to what John Cleese says happened to him. But whatever the case, Albert Brooks has made three (four?) of the absolute best film comedies in the history of the medium. I say that with full confidence. If you haven't seen any of them, start with Modern Romance. Or Real Life, or Lost in America. Whatever. Just start.

The Collection Project: Regular Guy

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King of the Ants (d. Stuart Gordon) is a strange movie, even by the standards of the man who also directed Re-Animator and Edmond. Based on a book (which I haven't read) by actor/screenwriter/cult English novelist Charles Higson, it's a crime story, of the type that features no policemen, only criminals. It stars Chris McKenna (who is quite good here) as Sean Crawley (crawl-ey, because of ants), a drifter and doer of odd jobs who appears to win the approval of fellow house painter Duke Wayne (George Wendt). Duke senses a certain level of amorality in Sean, and takes him to Ray Mathews (Daniel Baldwin, looking and sounding at times so much like his more famous brother as to make any difference negligible), a shady businessman who susses out the same level, if not more, of amorality in Sean as Duke did, and pretty soon Sean has been hired by Mathews to follow around Eric Gatley (played seemingly out of nowhere by Ron Livingston, of Office Space and Band of Brothers) and report back on whatever it is Gatley's up to.

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What Gatley's up to is investigating malfeasance, as practiced by Ray Mathews and his company, and Gatley is pretty soon so close to blowing the lid off things that Sean comes home one night to find Mathews, drunk and waiting outside his apartment. Mathews makes it clear -- in a monologue beautifully delivered by Baldwin -- to Sean that what he'd like to happen now, is he'd like Sean to kill Gatley. Sean negotiates a fee, and says okay.

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One of the things that's strange about King of the Ants, at least as a movie, if not as a part of the crime genre, is that Sean Crawley is given no background, no history, and no psychology beyond what we can glean from this story. This makes his very easy, though nervous, acceptance of the occupation "hitman" a little jarring for some. I've seen this specific complaint -- I thought he was a normal guy, why'd he find it so easy to kill that person, why doesn't he feel guilty, people don't do that -- leveled at similar stories before, such as Scott Smith's novel A Simple Plan (which was the source of the Sam Raimi film). What I might suggest is that if you find yourself unable to understand how anyone could find themselves in any way capable of killing another human being for money, then this is a good thing, and shows you have a good, basic moral foundation. I would also suggest that stories like A Simple Plan and King of the Ants aren't about you.

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Now, while Sean does agree to kill Gatley because he sees dollar signs, it's pretty obvious that he's never killed anyone before. The scene in which he does kill Gatley is, I think, a small masterpiece, and one of the most gut-churning of its kind I've encountered. "Gut-churning" not because it's particularly graphic, but because Sean is so inept and terrified -- the fact that he doesn't know what he's doing would count as a mark in his favor, if he wasn't going ahead and doing it anyway. He kills Gatley in Gatley's own kitchen, using whatever comes to hand: a statue, a flower pot. He does whatever he can to keep distance between himself and his horrible task. When he first greets Gatley, the man is wearing a hat, which flies off in the ensuing violence. When Gatley is lying on the linoleum, immobile but conscious, Sean asks (rhetorically) "Where's your hat?" He needs the hat, we learn, so that he can put it over the poor man's face (and therefore not have to look at it) before tipping the refrigerator over onto him.

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The entire stock of morality, or almost all of it, of King of the Ants can be found in this section of the film. Everything that's especially complex in that regard -- it's always unnerving when an audience finds itself wishing the killer would just grab a knife or something, so that the victim could be more quickly done away with -- is concentrated here, and when Crawley doesn't collapse from guilt, but instead aggressively, but naively, pursues the money he was promised, Gordon and Higson ditch any idea that Crawley might somehow be salvageable. The idea that he might not be the worst person on screen is soon given quite a lot of weight, but it's a little hard, while watching what follows, to forget that refrigerator crashing down, followed by Crawley saying "Where's my money?"

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What follows, by the way, is much more strangeness. As the director of Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dagon and so on, Stuart Gordon's reputation rests primarily on his career as a subversive, low-budget, gonzo-practical-effects-and-make-up horror filmmaker, and a loose adapter of a number of H. P. Lovecraft stories. Minus his early effects collaborator Brian Yuzna, Gordon is nevertheless still able to work some Brian Yuzna-esque magic on King of the Ants, when Mathews, who never really wanted to pay Crawley the $13,000 he promised, decides that the best way to deal with this suddenly annoying loose end (Crawley has worked it out so that if he dies, evidence that incriminates Mathews and his crew will go to the police) is to take him out to his ranch in the desert, and, along with Duke, Carl (the late Lionel Mark Smith, one of David Mamet's regular ensemble, and friends with both Gordon and Wendt from their Chicago theater days) and Beckett (Vernon Wells, "Wez" from The Road Warrior), beat the shit out of him with golf clubs until he turns into a vegetable.

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The first time I saw King of the Ants, this plot development was tough to swallow. Watching it again, it became easier, for a couple of reasons. One, is that I could see it working, and the other is that in the film it doesn't work. The strangest thing of all of King of the Ants's strange things is how much stuff it tries to cram into its last third. The torture of Crawley -- and the ensuing, rather alarming, hallucinations, which feature Kari Wuhrer as Gatley's widow doing all sorts of bizarre and horrible things, and looking all sorts of bizarre and horrible ways -- are the film's centerpiece. When the film breaks away from that, it becomes a revenge story and a romance, all in about a half an hour. Now consider that the object of Crawley's romance is Kari Wuhrer, and that he doesn't even meet her until that last half hour has begun (his previous hallucinations were fed by having seen her on the news following her husband's murder). It becomes tempting to think that King of the Ants might have benefited from a little streamlining. Adding to my list of gripes is the fact that one major character dies from an injury that at worst should have made them wince a little, and possibly want to lie down for a bit (I have a similar complaint about Michael Winterbottom's recent The Killer Inside Me, but that's for another time), but here causes instant death. King of the Ants isn't aiming for naturalism, but that's no excuse for the filmmakers to say, as I suspect they did here, "Fuck it, nobody'll notice, nobody cares."

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Even so, Gordon's film does manage to pack the kind of skinned-alive jolt that similarly problematic low budget films like Combat Shock and Maniac (both, also, for another time) did in the 1970s. The presence of so many familiar faces in King of the Ants does sort of rob it of the experience audiences had with those earlier films, one that led them to question what the fuck they were watching, and why the fuck they were watching it. But that's not the kind of thing I'm apt to hold against any film, and don't hold against this one. If nothing else, King of the Ants is one of those movies that almost nobody has ever heard of, so the likelihood of it being rented out of blind curiosity by any number of people ("Dude, George Wendt is in this!") who then find themselves completely blindsided by the resulting insanity, is fairly high. That's a rare enough thing these days.

The Collection Project: Burma's a Warzone

I'm not going to say very much about Rambo (d. Sylvester Stallone), because there's not much to say. But with all the talk floating throughout the internet about Stallone's upcoming The Expendables (has that title really never been used before? If not, it's a great one, and should have been), I just thought I'd point out that oh, how I do love this film. Rambo, I mean. My brother describes the ending this way: "Rambo gets on the .50 caliber and fires it until the movie's over." This nicely summarizes why it's such a good movie, I feel, but a lot of people disagree. Rambo is racist, they say. Or it something something violence doesn't solve anything.

But when did it become true that an action film's villains had to be the same race as the filmmaker, or else the movie is racist? And when did people stop going to movies at least partly to get a visceral thrill out of watching truly, bottomlessly evil people get blown all to Hell? When did this become a matter of such self-righteous chin-rubbing?

Oh, wait...I think I remember when that was. Never mind.

The Collection Project: Keep Doubting

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A young girl named Lucie escapes from...somewhere. We don't know from where, or from what, but her hair has been hacked off, she's dirty, and has clearly been beaten. She's picked up by some sort of orphanage/children's hospital, though her parents apparently cannot be tracked -- we get the sense that she wasn't running from them -- because it is here that she will stay.

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Then we see a house, and are told this is "Fifteen Years Later". A family, consisting of a mother, father, and a teenaged son and daughter, is gathering for breakfast. The mother has found a dead mouse in the plumbing, and says this explains the low water pressure. The daughter has taken a private letter from her brother, a letter from a girl, and is teasing him about it. The mother also mildly berates the boy for his indecisiveness and middling school achievements. Then the doorbell rings, and the father answers it. A young woman is there. She shoots him with a shotgun, and then stalks through the house, blasting away at the rest of the family, killing them all, but pausing, after the parents have been killed, to ask the boy "Do you know what your parents did to me?" He says he doesn't, but he, and his sister after him, are both blown to hell just the same.

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So begins Pascal Laugier's Martyrs, one of the most notorious recent horror films, and part of what some critics are calling the New French Extremity, a movement -- if such it is, which it probably isn't -- that also includes such odious films as Inside and Frontier(s) and genuinely good ones like Fat Girl and Trouble Every Day. What all these films have in common, besides being French (or French-Canadian, or Belgian) is a commitment to showing the viewer the most grotesque, horrifying, disgusting images imaginable, and to do so unflinchingly, with a minimum of gaze-aversion, as well as the atmosphere and examination of whatever world-view such images might imply. As with any genre, or subgenre, or artistic movement, the success of the New French Extremity as an idea is neither important or even calculable. If Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day is an exceptional film -- and I think it is -- but Inside and Frontier(s) are terrible -- and I'm very confident that they are -- Denis's film doesn't suddenly appear to me to be invalidated because the movement into which some critics have lumped it also contains a fair number of films I despise. I don't think "I thought Trouble Every Day was pretty great, but I sure wish it wasn't part of that whole New French Extremism thing they got going now." All of which is to say that I do my damndest to approach the films that fall under this particular umbrella with a mind that is at least partly open. And if the beginning of Martyrs, as described above, signalled anything to me, it was that something possibly interesting was up.

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The young woman is Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï), and her girlfriend Ana (Morjana Alaoui), whom she's known since they met at the hospital, is parked nearby. Ana is shocked to hear that, upon confirming that the husband and wife are the same couple who abused her in her youth, Lucie has simply slaughtered them, instead of calling the police, but Ana goes to the house anyway, where the two women go about disposing of the bodies, and, not incidentally, stumbling over the truth of why Lucie's abuse took place. Getting to that point is a relentlessly grim, shocking, unbelievably violent trip, one that made me far more uncomfortable than just about any other film of its type ever has. Martyrs is a chronicle of almost never-ending suffering and bizarre imagery, to the service of a story that regularly drops out from beneath you.

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Here's the problem with Martyrs: its story ends in a very unusual place (not so unusual that it's never been done before, as anyone who's read Lucius Shepard's The Golden knows, although Shepard actually didn't do much with the idea his story shares with Laugier's film, as in his novel that wasn't the focus), the point where we learn what, exactly, all this mind-numbing suffering has been in aid of, and why the film is called Martyrs. It's difficult to talk about that revelation -- an appropriate word -- without ruining any sense of mystery for those who haven't seen it. And the film really does maintain an air of pretty dreadful mystery, one it actually pays off, which is such a rare thing that blithely exposing it is not something I'm willing to do.

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But the problem, as I was getting ready to say before losing track, is how seriously can I ultimately take the film as a whole? A certain amount of Martyr's sadism is actually justified, but there's also a chunk midway through when Ana encounters a woman who has suffered the kind of torture Lucie did as a child, but worse, and for a much longer period of time. This sequence provides several of the film's most awful images, and it also goes absolutely nowhere. It's a red herring, a waste of ten minutes or so that did nothing but provide the film with more peeling flesh, screaming, pain, blood and bone. Like Inside, Martyrs never stops to breathe, and while I can't claim to have felt desensitized by the violence as Martyrs built to its viscera-splashed crescendo, it was also a little bit difficult to view it with the same amount of weight it would have had if the film had let up for even three goddamn minutes (another for instance: one character dies twice, when once would have been plenty).

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And yet: the ending is not nothing. This is a modern horror film that is pretty much wall-to-wall butchery, but is, finally, not actually about wall-to-wall butchery. Or so it seems, or pretends, or something. Hence my ambivalence, and hence the title of this post, "Keep Doubting", which is a line from the film -- a good one, too, in context -- and also a sort of philosophy for viewing the films of the New French Extremity and their international kin. Like the "splatterpunk" wing of horror literature, this kind of film usually comes presented as a work of intellectual and moral rigor, when in fact they're often blatantly unpracticed in both arenas. But then again, sometimes they are. It helps to be able to tell the difference. When it comes to Martyrs, I'm not sure I can. Still, at least I'm wondering about it.

The Collection Project: From Here On In, I Rag Nobody

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There are moments in Bang the Drum Slowly (d. John D. Hancock) that, frankly, I don't even like to think about. Structured around a fictional professional baseball team's season, the film features Michael Moriarty as Henry Wiggen, the pitcher, and a young, then-unknown Robert De Niro as Bruce Pearson, the team's clumsy, friendly, hayseed catcher who, early on, is diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease.

What's so affecting about Mark Harris's story (he wrote the script, as well as the source novel) is that it doesn't play as a "disease" movie, because for most of it's run-time, only a few people know of Pearson's condition, and, due to the fact that he is both clumsy and a hayseed, the catcher is ridiculed by many of the other players, and kept outside any cluster of friends within the team. Wiggen, as the team captain, does know what Pearson is going through, but can only shield and protect him so much.

At one point, the team is in the locker room, and Piney Woods (Tom Ligon) whips out his guitar and begins singing "Streets of Laredo", which, if you don't know the song, is about a dying cowboy, and includes these lyrics:

Oh, bang the drum slowly, and play the fife lowly
And play the dead march as you carry me along
Take me to the green valley and lay the earth o'er me
For I'm a poor cowboy and I know I've done wrong



At this point, it's become impossible to hide Pearson's illness from the rest of the team, and some of the players, including Wiggen, try to get Woods to stop, without indicating to Pearson why ("Try a different song" "Yeah, I don't like that song" "It's a cornball song!") without making him think more about the lyrics than he's going to anyway. Woods doesn't get it ("Why don't you join in a little, like they do, you know?") nor do some of the other players ("It sounds good!"). Alternately, the camera pushes in on Woods, and on Pearson, who De Niro plays, at this moment, as embarrassed more than anything else. He knows that, as the song lilts by, everybody is thinking about him, and his fate, and he'd rather everybody just act like a baseball team.

But the moment that absolutely destroys me is in the final game in the film, which the team is winning. They need one out, and Wiggen throws a pitch that results in a pop-up between homeplate and the pitcher's mound. Pearson rises, but loses the ball, and turns around in confusion, and exhaustion, while another player (Danny Aiello) swoops in to pick the ball out of the air. This sequence, shot in elegiac slow motion by Hancock, ends with the team celebrating, oblivious to Pearson -- who, since learning he's sick, they've collectively taken under their wing -- still standing there, a bit lost. Except for Wiggen and Coach Jaros (Phil Foster), who push through their teammates to pick up Pearson's helmet and glove -- marching together, and bending down almost as one -- and pat Pearson's back and bring him back into the fold.

I've tried several time to describe why I think this moment is among the most beautiful and heartbreaking I've ever seen, but I'm finding it very difficult to do so without making it sound like a cornball song. Just watch the film.

Bang the Drum Slowly was released in 1973; a few months later it was followed by Mean Streets, and De Niro blew up. Michael Moriarty's career would travel several strange paths before an apparent flame-out. Twenty-seven years ago, they co-starred in one of the great sports films of all time, one I can't watch without crumbling. And the film ends with a line I've tried to use as a guide for my behavior, though I imagine, ultimately, I've been no more successful than your average guy. Those words form the title of this post: "From here on in, I rag nobody." If ever there were words you could live by, that's them.

When the Wolfbane Blooms

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The rap on this year's remake of the Universal classic The Wolf Man (or The Wolfman, as the new version would have it), which was directed by Joe Johnston and written by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, seems to be that it's not enough of one thing or another. It's not crazy enough, nor is it enough fun. I've also heard conflicting reports that suggest that Johnston's film runs from the Oedipal implications of the story, and conversely embraces them too earnestly. One begins to think that this whole "criticism" deal is a bit subjective once the actual filmmaking reaches a certain level of professionalism. But in any case, and because of that, I can't argue against much or any of the preceding complaints, except for the idea that a movie like The Wolfman is stepping wrong by taking itself too seriously. In a purely literal sense, I can't deny that this new film does, indeed, take itself too seriously, but I would rephrase that, and say that The Wolfman is not ashamed of itself.

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You won't be getting much plot summary from me here, because, really, how much do you need? Benicio del Toro plays Lawrence Talbot, a man born of an English father (Anthony Hopkins) and a gypsy mother (now deceased), who fled England to New York -- at a young enough age to have since lost the accent -- to become an actor. He's summoned back by Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), his brother's fiancee. His brother, we know (or rather suspect, which suspicion is rapidly confirmed) is the guy who, in the film's prologue, was killed by a werewolf. Nobody knows this yet, and Ben Talbot is at first believed to be missing. So Lawrence goes home, where he's left a lot of unhappy memories and uncertainties regarding why his mother slit her own throat with a straight razor.

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So Talbot's back in England with his dad, there's a werewolf on the loose, and if you've seen George Waggner and Curt Siodmak's original film, you can pretty much fill in the rest. Up to a point, anyway. This remake deviates from that earlier film in a bunch of small ways, and in one big way: this time around, the werewolf that bites Talbot, thereby dooming him to a bestial existence, isn't killed that same night. It's the way of things nowadays to take a basic idea that worked in the past and then double it, but in Johnston's film this actually works pretty well. The Wolfman flirts with the idea of making the identity of this other werewolf a mystery, but gives up on it shortly after Talbot's first transformation, probably because the filmmakers realized they weren't fooling anyone. The moment of the reveal -- or rather, the moment when the last tiny shred of the audience's doubt, which was hanging on only because the movie hadn't come out and said anything yet, is finally removed -- is handled very nicely, in a moment that is genuinely chilling, and that hints not only at how badly the Talbot bloodline is screwed, but also of an evil that has roamed the moors for a very long time.

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Speaking of bloodlines and cursed families and things of that nature, like many classic horror stories, The Wolfman lays its themes right out there. Human nature is referred to as "shiftable", Talbot retreats from his own ill-fated family to hide himself in a profession that calls for him to take on other personalities (we see him playing Hamlet, no less). This subtext-laid-bare approach is an effective one, even time-honored, but doesn't get much respect these days. In the classic horror films of the '30s and '40s, such as the best of the Universal cycle and the Val Lewton films, and even up to the best of the Hammer films, there was often a lot of strangeness and subtlety to chew on afterwards, but just as often the gist of things, the meaning behind the conflict, was plain as day. This kind of storytelling is as engaging as the folktales that led the world to know what the hell "lycanthropy" was in the first place. The mindset that now leads people to sneer at this narrative device is the same one that caused everyone to begin thinking that "melodrama" was a synonym for "bad".

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All of which is not to say that The Wolfman is perfect. There's a lot of dodgy CGI, which is made all the more frustrating by the fact that there didn't need to be any CGI at all. And I should say here that I saw the director's cut, which, in a break from tradition, is actually significantly longer than the theatrical cut, with a full sixteen minutes added. In this form, the film does feel a bit thick (I wonder, though, if Max von Sydow's mysterious and welcome cameo was one of the added scenes?). And either way, the werewolf battle that is the film's unavoidable climax feels a bit tedious, as well as a sop to modern audiences (I was also amused by the fact that the filmmakers seemed to realize that when the two werewolves were flailing around, audiences might have a hard time telling who was who, so they devised a way to make the fight a "shirts vs. skins" situation).

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But the film still works. I remember reading Benicio del Toro say that when he first got into acting, his two dream roles were Che Guevara and the Wolf Man (like there's a difference!*). As Lawrence Talbot, it is true that del Toro occasionally feels like a man out of time -- he's a bit modern for 19th century England -- but boy does he sell Talbot's haunted nature, his doomed-since-birth aura. At one point, after he's completely accepted the truth of his mad situation, he pleads, to a group of men, "Kill me!" Only in a story like this, told by people who, however occasionally misguided in the telling, have the nerve to take it seriously, can those two words read as the equivalent of "Save me!"

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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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Well, what else? The original The Wolf Man (d. George Waggner) would not be held up by anyone as the crown jewel of Universal's original series of horror films, and prior to checking it out again tonight my comments here would probably be a bit more dismissive than they're actually about to be. My basic complaint had been that as Larry Talbot, Lon Chaney, Jr. is a bit of a stiff, lumbering goof. Somehow, in my previous viewings of the film, I missed two things: 1) that Chaney is not stiff, and 2) while he is a lumbering goof, that is in no way a bad thing.

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Before I talk about Chaney as Talbot, Waggner and screenwriter Curt Siodmak's film does seem to be at war with itself for quite a while, and it may be true that they never settled on an approach to the material. It's very odd to watch the many scenes in the film where the themes are being clearly stated, to hear all this dialogue about the dual nature of man and the particulars of insanity, while we already know that Talbot really is a werewolf. This is when that kind of plain-spoken attitude I was just praising can seem clumsy. In the remake, any talk of man's two-sided nature jibes perfectly with del Toro's basic, tragic demeanor, but Chaney projects a kind of soft-headed, happy simplicity, belying no trace of a tortured inner life. So when his father, John Talbot (Claude Rains), dismisses the idea of seeing mankind in terms of black and white, and that it is the appreciation of shades of gray that feeds the werewolf myth, we can't help but wonder how exactly this ties into the Larry Talbot we know whose life is burning up before our eyes.

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And this is precisely what's so wonderful about Chaney. His Talbot is just this guy. He's been disconnected from his family for eighteen years, and while his return home is rooted in sadness (his brother was killed in a hunting accident), he's happy to be forming a relationship with his dad. He likes this old town, and this big house, he'll now be living in. He thinks the girl in the antique store is pretty, and he wants to take her out on a date, to that old gypsy camp, to get their fortune told. He's a nice guy. And when that date ruins his life, he is scared shitless. He doesn't know what's happening, he doesn't want to hurt anybody -- at times, Chaney's portrayal of Talbot's terror and panic brings him close to tears. It's hard to imagine del Toro's Talbot freaking out like this. Del Toro's fear has a Gothic strength to it, a sense of resignation that indicates in his quieter moments, he has no truly happy memories to make him mourn the life that's rapidly slipping out of reach. As played by Chaney, however, Talbot is a guy who is going to specifically think about, and miss, eating a ham sandwich, drinking a beer, and listening to the Dodgers on the radio. Those are his happy times, and that's what he doesn't want to lose.

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In The Wolfman, you look at Talbot and think, "You're doomed." In The Wolf Man, you look at Talbot and think "You poor dumb bastard."

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*Alternate joke, shopworn but more to the point: "The difference between the two being that one is a blood-thirsty, animalistic maniac, and the other is the Wolf Man."