I've Only Known Careless Love

Tomorrow Criterion is releasing two fairly well-regarded cult films -- Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave and Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude. I watched both over the weekend, and was unfortunately less than enthused (I'd seen the Boyle film before, years ago, and liked it, but time has a habit, and so forth). I get into why below.



It's very possible I've said something like this before, but Danny Boyle has made several films that I wish someone else had directed. One very good example of this is Millions, a film I liked a good deal, and whose Frank Cottrell Boyce script tells a warm, sad, and funny story about childhood, fatherhood, and loss. All of this material manages to survive Boyle's direction, which is the kind of stylized about which one can only say "That is stylized." It serves no other purpose. For the most part it's also relatively restrained in that film, hence Millions finally coming out ahead. The material rises above the filmmaker.

The same cannot be said for Boyle's 1994 debut Shallow Grave, although I'm not prepared to solely blame Boyle in this case. Nobody really steps up here, which was a surprising realization for me as I watched the film this past weekend after not having looked at it in many years. I'd remembered Shallow Grave as a dark, funny, surprising crime thriller, but what it actually is, at least as far as the current version of myself is concerned, is a desperately unfunny and self-conscious crime thriller that contains a grand total of one surprising element (as opposed to one surprising thing, so that's something anyway). The story is simply this: three friends (Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox, and Christopher Eccleston) have an apartment together, and they're looking for a fourth roommate, who they think they've found in the, I guess, gruffly cool Keith Allen. But then right after he moves in, that guy dies of a drug overdose, and while going through his stuff, and before they call the cops, the three friends find the fabled box of money, which they decide to keep.

What follows -- gruesome body disposal, moral panic, the appearance of violent men who want the money back -- is meant to be, I can only assume, reminiscent of films like the Coen brothers' Blood Simple, but the thing about Boyle is that he has no style unless he's being stylized, and it feels as though, in Shallow Grave, he was still working up the courage to go as wild, or "wild," as he would eventually go. So while you have the kind of approach to hip humor that the 1990s were known for -- namely, for example, during a montage of the three leads treating roommate applicants rudely for their own enjoyment, at one point you see McGregor ride by in the background on a bicycle, because he's "weird," the kind of weird that defines the type of person who says "I'm pretty weird!" in order to mask how tedious they really are -- and an opening credits sequence during which the camera moves pretty fast, you don't have much else. You have competence, but not craft. So not Blood Simple, in other words. In that film, the Coen brothers' constructed a terrific sequence involving a dead body not being dead, crawling from the car that was carrying it to its burial site, and being retrieved by a man who suddenly finds himself willing to become a murderer, as a tractor trailer, headlights blazing, comes roaring from the distance, threatening to expose everything (to say nothing of the scrape of a shovel's blade on asphalt). The Shallow Grave equivalent is three people digging a grave when it's kind of dark.

Plus, the morals of this thing...look, all three lead characters are hopelessly unlikable. This is not noted as a demerit, although I think we are supposed to like them to the degree that we'd better find them entertaining, which I, at least, don't, but anyway, they're unlikable, okay, fine. Where I do take exception is in the way Christopher Eccleston's character proceeds towards damnation. Eccleston, and his character, is the one interesting element I mentioned earlier, and the one character in the first half who seems to possess any kind of moral compass. Despite his uneasiness about the whole enterprise, it falls on him to violently remove identifying features from the corpse prior to burial. The highlight of the whole film is later on, as the cracks in Eccleston's psyche are beginning to show, when McGregor is whining about some selfish matter involving their inability to reap any benefits due to Eccleston's rigid safety measures, and Eccleston shuts him down by simply stating "Yeah, but you didn't cut his feet off." The problem is that it soon transpires that Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge seem to honestly believe that the conscience of the group shifts to...maybe not Kerry Fox, given certain things, but maybe Ewan McGregor? AKA, the biggest asshole in the group? Only inasmuch as Eccleston becomes creepy and violent and MacGregor hasn't, but where do McGregor and Fox get off wringing their hands over two men Eccleston kills when those two men would unquestionably have killed Fox and MacGregor otherwise? And not hang-wringing in the "What do we do with the bodies??" sense, but in the "What has become of our friend??" sense. He's the only one keeping up his end of things, is what happened, you couple of cowards. Which is perhaps all part of what Hodge and Boyle are after, but if so it can be hard to tell. It seems more like they think of McGregor as some modern day Han Solo.


Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude, on the other hand, is a film that I'm fine with Ashby having directed but wish someone other than Colin Higgins had written it. Or more to the point, that Ashby had directed something else entirely. Quite the beloved and influential piece of work, Harold and Maude is nevertheless, as far as I'm concerned, a waste of talent all around. It opens with a wonderful tracking shot that follows Harold (Bud Cort) as he solemnly prepares to hang himself, to the tune of "Don't Be Shy" by Cat Stevens, who wrote all the songs for the film. Once Harold's mother (Vivian Pickles) discovers her son hanging there, she knows, and therefore reveals to us, that this is just another in a string of suicide-based hoaxes on the part of her son, who we learn is a withdrawn and death-obsessed young man who goes to the funerals of strangers just to feed his habit. At one of these, he meets Maude (Ruth Gordon), a free-spirited woman of 79 years. Over the course of the film, the young Harold will fall in love with the elderly Maude, and they will learn things about themselves, and so forth.

Harold and Maude is one of those well-made bad movies which I'm not sure really exist anymore, but used to be at least not entirely uncommon. It's a pleasure to look at, and though it's always been a surprising thing for me to admit, I really like the music of Cat Stevens (Donovan, too). This is good for me, because for about the first half hour or so, Stevens's songs are used so ruthlessly that at times it felt like I was watching an unofficial Cat Stevens rock, or folk, opera. The problem is that the film fancies itself to be something of a satire, and so we have to suffer through barely-imagined caricatures of the rich and militaristic (which are quite brave targets if you ignore the fact that for all intents and purposes, they have been basically the only targets of satire for the past 50 years or more) and then later hear from Maude what the correct and moral way to think is, just before she steals another car. Because possessions are for squares. Anyway, she has some freedom to experience and she's old, so ease off. Though Ruth Gordon no doubt felt differently, in the film Maude reeks of the patronising "old people are adorable" approach that films like, say, Make Way For Tomorrow directly refute, but which will hang around forever as everybody who gets old also gets replaced by people who think they're adorable. So that's a problem, as is Higgins's, or Ashby's (or maybe both) to cram every personality trait they don't like into one person, however conflicting and incongruous the combination may be, just so they don't have to consider the flaws of people not entirely unlike themselves. This results in Sunshine (Ellen Geer) a pretentious and self-important drama student who is, remember, called Sunshine, and who also -- and this is 1971 -- in love with the military. Because this was a pretty common stereotype back then. Yes, Sunshine only appears in one scene, but it's a pretty telling bit of evidence that we're not dealing with a film made by anybody who, at least in this case, were particularly interested in self-criticism.

I liked Cort, though. And Gordon, too, but Cort has a scene where he's explaining the moment in his life that caused him to be so morbid, and it's not the story, which is far too neat anyway, or even necessarily the way he delivers it, though that's fine, but there's a pause in between the story and and message when Harold looks at Maude with this uncomfortable stare and then very quietly laughs at the ridiculousness of it all. It's a terrific and natural bit of acting, and Cort and Gordon both serve the film better than it deserves. One thing about Harold and Maude that has long made me curious -- and I did actively resist seeing this film for many years, so you may make of that what you will -- is the knowledge that watching it was a formative experience for Wes Anderson, one of my favorite filmmakers, though I suspect too much has been made of the influence. For all his flights of whimsy and intentional artifice, Anderson has never made a film that felt as blatantly removed from actual life as Harold and Maude, and I'm including Fantastic Mr. Fox in that assessment.

Capsule Reviews: 127 Hours, Tony Manero, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

127 Hours (d. Danny Boyle) – One of the reasons I was interested in seeing Boyle’s film (which stars James Franco as real-life outdoorsy-type Aron Ralston, who became famous some years ago when a canyon climbing accident left his arm seemingly hopelessly pinned under a large rock, from which hard place he escaped by cutting off his own arm) is that it is 93 minutes long. “Oh,” thought I to myself. “What a relief. I should reward this restraint by watching the film projected onto a screen.” So something like a year and a half later, I caught the movie on HBO, and I can now state with confidence that 127 Hours is perfectly okay, if you don’t mind Danny Boyle or James Franco too much.

As it happens, I do not mind them too much, so I found the film to be a relatively painless experience. But Boyle has an ingrained jitteriness that I always have to get past in order to enjoy any of his movies. Sometimes I’m successful, but I still always have to do it. In the case of 127 Hours, I got the sense that the jitteriness was being deployed in order to achieve some kind of Koyanisqaatsi-esque global connection to Aron’s plight. This he fails to achieve, and doesn’t need to be messing around with that stuff anyway, because it’s not hard to imagine oneself partially crushed by a rock and unable to extract yourself, and think “What would I do?” Further – and this is a script thing, which Boyle wrote with Simon Beaufoy – Franco’s epiphany that he was sort of a selfish dick before a rock fell on him rings terribly hollow, probably because the conceit of 127 Hours is that Franco records everything he thinks or feels onto his little camera dealy that he brought along. Which in terms of depicting the way people live their lives these days is certainly fair enough, but on the level of using the medium of film to convey character and emotion, is kind of a bit of a rip.

Franco is fine, by the way. He’s right at home with Boyle’s aesthetic, which is maybe not the biggest compliment you can pay to an actor, but at least they mesh. Franco does not deliver the tour de force some have claimed – my goodness he acted all alone for a lot of the time! – because Boyle makes it very easy for him, in ways already covered. Franco’s, and the film’s, single best moment comes when that arm finally pulls free from the rest of his body. Boyle drops the sound and deflates the tension into anti-climax as Franco stumbles backwards, free, and totally baffled. The plan worked, but still somehow makes no sense.

Tony Manero (d. Pablo Larrain) - This Chilean film from 2008 comes with a lot of notoriety -- infamy, you might say -- due to the graphic nature of its story about a middle aged man named Raul (Alfredo Castro) who, in 1978, during the Pinchoet regime, has become obsessed with the film Saturday Night Fever, as well as brutally convinced that he himself is a South American version of John Travolta's character. The graphic stuff is supposed to be the violence, because Raul is, if not technically a serial killer, still a remorseless and casual one, but what I ultimately found most interesting about Tony Manero is how the film treats Raul's violence with the same air of insignificant digression -- note, please, that I did not say transgression -- as Raul does himself.

This isn't to say there's no savagery or satisfaction to Raul's killings, just that there might not be. He's pretty stone-faced when he goes about it, after all, and they're all a means to an end anyway. That end being the purchase of glass floor, similar to the one at the disco in Saturday Night Fever, for the stage at the beat-up little night club where he works and performs, and for which he is planning a big Tony Manero-esque dance-off (Raul also hopes to win the upcoming Tony Manero look-a-like contest for a local TV variety show). Then, too, there is the fact that the brutal-murder-with-a-tired-sigh vibe of the whole ties in with a central idea, which is that Raul can bash in the heads of whoever he wants, and with Pinochet in charge no one will notice anything amiss.

This is a good idea, or a good joke, if you prefer, but not necessarily something you'd be advised to build a whole movie on. Larrain doesn't, thankfully, and in the end Tony Manero (which, by the way, I did not find to be egregiously violent in any way, and therefore I'm baffled by its reputation; still, though, don't take the kids) is a grim little snapshot, or maybe a portrait of a week in the life of the second worst person in Chile.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (d. Brad Bird) - I wondered out loud recently how common is it for the third and fourth movies in a franchise to be the best ones. Almost never, was the aggregate answer, but the Mission: Impossible films have achieved the, at least, highly unlikely, because part three, directed by J. J. Abrams, was a lean and fun little action movie, buoyed by the inspired casting of Philip Seymour Hoffman in the Bond villain role, that trumped franchise predecessors Brian Freakin' DePalma and Goddamn John Woo For Christ's Sake, and now Brad Bird, known before strictly for his animated films for Pixar, like The Incredibles, and elsewhere, like The Iron Giant, bests even Abrams. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is simply fantastic. It really never lets up, almost at all, save for a brief period of regrouping following Bird's magnificent Dubai set-piece, but otherwise the film, which finds Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt and the rest of what's left of IMF trying to pull together what little they have after being, by necessity, cut loose by the US government, is aggressive in its desire to keep the adrenaline flowing. The group, made up of Cruise, Paula Patton, Jeremy Renner, and Simon Pegg, not only have to stop the rogue Russian "nuclear extremist" that is their enemy, but they have to do it in secret, because they've been smeared as villains in the cutting-loose process.

So that's the set up, and the movie just sings. I've heard complaints that the villain, Hendricks, is not much of a presence, which is sort of true, I guess, but two things keep me from agreeing totally. For one, the film's showdown between Hunt and Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) in a Mumbai parking garage reveals, in small doses, the character's dangerous mania pretty nicely (too little too late, perhaps, but I thought it worked). And for another thing, outside of the film's wonderful action filmmaking, which is as precise and clear and ambitious and thrilling as you could want, the film's chief pleasure for me was the group of heroes. Up to now, the Mission: Impossible series has taken some well-earned lumps for being The Tom Cruise Program, starring Tom Cruise, while the show on which they've been based was more about the team. Brad Bird, for the first time, gets that, and while Cruise is the unquestionable leader, nobody, not Patton or Pegg or Renner, is left behind. It's a good team, and the actors have great chemistry together. This is the kind of film that should have kicked off the whole franchise. I'd hate to think of them pulling the plug just when it all started working finally.

Stealing from Jonathan - DVD Edition

As I have nothing original or even really personal to offer any of you today, I am going to blatantly and remorselessly steal the topic of purchasing DVDs from Jonathan Lapper. He and I seem to run into similar obstacles, largely self-imposed, when it comes to building our DVD libraries, and both of us have gone through periods of not feeling especially proud of our collections -- for instance, I own a lot of horror movies that I don't like, such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, because I want to have a good collection of that genre (the same goes for my books, but that's another topic). I bought it because of its place in horror film history, as sad a statement as that may be, and because it had good extras. Or perhaps it should be "good" extras, because given that I don't like the film, why would I give a shit about the making of it, or its history, or any of that noise? (The original isn't as bad as any of the sequels I've seen -- in other words, Freddy Krueger never pokes anyone's eyes out and says "I'll be seeing you!" -- but it's still poorly acted, and I also think it's high time horror fans admitted that Wes Craven isn't any good. Outside of the Scream movies, all his stuff is unbearably clumsy, sometimes to the point of being painfully awkward. And the Scream films aren't any good anyhow. I know that many people long for the return to form of John Carpenter, a wish I understand, but a fair number of those same people are also eagerly awaiting Wes Craven to stage his own comeback. What would a Wes Craven comeback look like? The Last House on the Left? Spare me). I also recently bought Stuart Gordon's Dagon because it didn't cost very much, despite the fact that I'd never seen it before, and I don't like Stuart Gordon, outside of Edmond and about 45% of King of the Ants (I'll say this, though: It's better than A Nightmare on Elm Street).

Why do I do these things? Because watching Dagon or Walk Hard on a Sunday afternoon when I'm starting to completely feel the tension of the coming work-week is an idea that's a lot easier to get behind than watching 8 1/2. That's why. Pretty simple, really. And probably not worth its own blog post.

But on Friday night, I was browsing in my favorite local DVD store (which I won't name, for fear of being labeled a sell-out and losing any street cred), and after checking to see if they had any used Criterion DVDs (they do, sometimes), I alternated between browsing the horror section and the "classics" wall. I was seriously considering picking up a used copy of Sunshine, the Danny Boyle and Alex Garland SF/horror movie, and I actually was in this store specifically to pick up Angel Heart (they were out), but when I checked out the classic DVDs I realized that the money I'd set aside for this outing would have to go elsewhere, because there, in rapid succession, I found My Darling Clementine, How Green Was My Valley (which I haven't seen) and the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, all for prices it would have been ludicrous to turn my back on. Sunshine is a perfectly decent film, but it would not lend the air of genuineness and sincerity to my ever-growing DVD library that those three would. All of which begs the question: What, exactly, does it mean to be proud of one's DVD collection? They're just DVDs, they're just movies, and I had nothing to do with the making of any of them. What do I have to be proud of? I don't know, but I've been proud of making good menu choices at restaurants before, so I don't see why I should be so surprised.

Epilogue:

That was Friday night, and I didn't have time to watch any of my new DVDs that night. The next morning, my wife and I headed out of town to see my family. We came back this afternoon, and on the way, at a gas station, my wife picked up Sunshine for me. So everybody wins. And then when we got home earlier today, we watched Friday the 13th on cable. Sometimes, I really don't understand what it is I think I'm doing with my life.