The Capsule Reviews of October

Maybe I'll just write capsule reviews of everything I see in a week until I die, which I'm almost certain to do at some point.

Demon Seed (d. Donald Cammell) - I've recently become interested in the odd, brief, and temporally scattered films of Donald Cammell, though I haven't seen Wild Side, his fourth and last, which means I've only seen three, and I only like one. And that one is Demon Seed, which the documentary Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance makes clear was taken away from him in post-production, and was being steered in a direction he didn't want by the studio even before then.

But hell, it's a pretty good movie anyway. Based on an early novel by Dean Koontz, this 1977 film is about a scientist named Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver), whose brilliant work in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence have resulted in the HAL-like Proteus (voiced by Robert Vaughn). Proteus exists in many places at once, and one of those places is the scientist's home, where it can do for the homeowner pretty much whatever the homeowner needs it to do -- in addition to having a voice and brain and "eyes" all over the house, Proteus also has been outfitted with numerous robot limbs. Dr. Harris is preparing a long work trip, one that will take him away for a month, leaving alone in the house his wife Susan (Julie Christie), from whom he is separating. The reason behind that separation will become clear as the film progresses. What that progression entails, though, is Proteus essentially imprisoning Susan, threatening her with, if not death, at least torture if she does not do "his" bidding, the upshot of which is that he, Proteus, wants to impregnate Susan, so that their offspring will be both human and ingenious super-computer.

I never felt satisfied that such a thing could ever be possible, but nevertheless it's a pretty harrowing film, the discomfort I felt on behalf of Christie's Susan being at times palpable (thinking particularly of the bit with the heated floor). Christie is great here, her terror and physically arduous attempts to escape ebbing sometimes into frightened, exhausted resignation, and then swelling again into furious defiance. And as goofy as some of those robot-y arms can sometimes be, it all eventually leads to a climax that is genuinely weird and eerie, similar to Saul Bass's Phase IV in its air of vague but hugely ominous portent.

The Toolbox Murders (d. Dennis Donnelly) - This infamous slasher film, from 1978, is what I think some people might describe as "kind of sleazy." About a series of murders of women by a ski-masked killer using a different kind of tool -- claw hammer, screwdriver, nail gun -- each time, for about maybe the first half hour or forty minutes is given over almost exclusively to the slaughter of women, all living in the same apartment, and all or anyway most of them nude just before and in one case during the murder itself. The drawn-out stalking and killing of a nude woman played by future porn star Kelly Nichols pretty much single-handedly provides all the evidence for damning the subgenre a person inclined to do so could possibly want.

It becomes rather stranger somewhere around the middle point, and eventually actually sort of interesting. The plot is moved forward by the amateur investigation of these murders by two teenagers: Joey (Nicholas Beauvy), whose sister Laurie (Pamelyn Ferdin) has been kidnapped, by, Joey believes, the killer, and his friend Kent (Wesley Eure), the nephew of Vance (Cameron Mitchell), the building's owner. So with that set up out of the way, the film follows these young plucky adventurers into the very center of Hell. Which might be an overstatement, but I did not at all expect their story to go where it does, as ruthlessly as it does, and the last chunk of the film was as completely and, in my view, honestly disturbing as this sort of film is ever likely to get.

The Purge: Election Year (d. James DeMonaco) - I have now seen all three films in James DeMonaco's Purge series of "socially" "conscious" horror films, which, if I'm so dissatisfied with them, you might have count as my own damn fault. And I don't disagree, but watching all of the movies (all of which depict a "Purge Night" which is the one night of the year in the United States when all crime, including mass murder, is legal, so that people can ostensibly get it out of their system or whatever, but is really a tool for the rich to keep down the poor, you guys) I have been able to chart certain patterns. For instance, in the first two, The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy, roughly eight times each, one or more of our heroic characters (all of whom invariably want no part in the violence of Purge Night, but only want to survive, which, given they're our heroes, I will admit makes sense) are about to die, some one-night-a-year serial killer wearing an ironically patriotic mask of some sort, has a gun pointed right in their face, or a knife at their throat, but just before the killer can pull the trigger or insert the blade, another hero, unseen until now, shoots the killer and saves the first hero. Perhaps you've seen this happen one time before in another film. DeMonaco has almost made it a theme. However, in The Purge: Election Year he only does it once, but he does it on a scale that is clearly meant to trick his loyal audience into believing this is the first time he's over done something like this.

"A failure of imagination," some might call this. I would respond by saying "You're being kind; I think the truth is that DeMonaco actually doesn't give a fuck." I think he probably does hold the political beliefs he puts on screen, but I don't think he has much interest in making a really good film (or the talent to do so). He embraces his rigid formula like a lover. Even when he expands the action from the narrow scope of the first film to the more community-wide stuff in the second, and now to the sort of metaphorically national approach in this new one, everything is still exactly the same: one group of good guys, together or separately but either way eventually together, are forced from their safe spot one way or another, and have to bond together, perhaps even overcoming differences along the way, to protect each other. In this case, Presidential candidate Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell) has to be protected because she's the only one who can, if elected, put an end to Purge Night. Which, by the way: it's one thing to take your "socially" "conscious" genre device seriously, but it's another thing to use it in such a way that you seem to think Purge Night is a real thing, or at least something someone's trying to push through legislation. At one point in this film, Elizabeth Mitchell quotes Lincoln's "the better angels of our nature" in order to make us all reconsider our acceptance of this Purge Night thing, which now that I think about it is pretty reprehensible.

On top of all this, several of the main characters in The Purge: Election Year are black, including Mykelti Williamson as the owner of a little neighborhood store of the kind that is frequented by others in the community as a kind of home-away-from-home to hang out and talk with friends, etc. This store being located in a black community, the store's devotees tend to be as well, and early in the film an elderly black man says "I only care about waffles and pussy!" This is the white DeMonaco putting his finger squarely on the pulse. The Purge: Election Year is bigoted in other ways as well, in ways that are far more chickenshit than that, because DeMonaco knows his hatred for these other targets won't result in any consequences.

Also all the killers in these movies seem to have the same mask guy.

Clouds of Sils Maria (d. Olivier Assayas) - This is perhaps not the easiest film to tackle in the capsule review format. Not quite the newest film by the endlessly prolific and engaging Assayas, whose 2010 epic Carlos I consider to be one of the great masterpieces of the new century, Clouds of Sils Maria once again shows off the writer-director's breathtaking ingenuity and imagination. It tells the story of Maria Enders, a film and stage actress of great renown who, as the film opens, is on her way, by train, to attend and speak at a ceremony honoring playwright and filmmaker Wilhelm Melchior, the artist whose work she is most intimately associated with. On the way, her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) takes a call, and learns that Wilhelm has suddenly died, and the nature of the planned ceremony has now completely changed.

Which is just the beginning. There's also the specific play of Melchior's Maria is best known for, called Maloja Snake, and the role, and the attempt by a new young brilliant director to re-stage that play, evidently a two-hander featuring a love affair between a younger woman and an older woman, with Maria taking the other part, that of the older woman, which she's never played before. That part would be played by Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz), a Lindsay Lohan/Amanda Bynes-esque celebrity, gifted but supposedly impossible to work with or control. There's also Maria's relationship with Valentine, and how, or if, it mirrors Maloja Snake.

Though not a perfect film -- the footage of Ellis's talk-show appearances indicates to me that Assayas has never seen a talk show and is evidently fine with that, but still, and at times Binoche, one of the most effortlessly believable actresses alive today, is broader than I can remember ever seeing her (maybe playing drunk is just one of those things she's never got the hang of) -- Clouds of Sils Maria is still pretty terrific. For me, it was immediately engaging: I think one thing Assayas doesn't get enough credit for is the sheer originality of the stories he creates, and his ability to at once place the audience into the right part of that story to get them hooked. Also, this is consciously a very modern film -- lots of internet and iPhone stuff -- but never self-consciously so. Assayas is simply a a filmmaker who lives in the world today, and can depict it.

And finally, it's where the film eventually goes. Which is very precisely and elegantly mysterious, and exactly correct.

Everyone Who Resists Will Be Executed

Calling out films for glorifying historical monsters is something of a hobby of mine, to the point where I consider myself something of a connoisseur, so it disturbs me to the depth of my soul when I encounter the rare instance of a professional critic doing the same thing and I'm forced to bellow (as always, quietly and to myself) "You're doing it wrong!!!" Such was the case with Marshall Fine's review of Carlos, Olivier Assayas's massive, five-and-a-half hour film about Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a left-wing terrorist better known as Carlos the Jackal. In his review, Marshall Fine says things like this:

[H]ere’s my objection to “Carlos”: that, in presenting a terrorist as an action hero, it glorifies terrorism as a legitimate path of political action.

Here’s the bottom line: Would people be singing the praises of this film if it was equally well-made, just as thrilling and exciting – but was the story of Mohamed Atta? A terrorist is a terrorist. Murder is murder.

But, except, no. Carlos, which is being released on DVD tomorrow by Criterion, is not like this at all. Carlos, the character, played with a strong and subtle mix of confidence, cowardice, ruthlessness, and incompetence by Edgar Ramirez, is, in Assayas's film, ultimately a murderous fool. He's the kind of man who is ready, happily ready, to kill for his cause -- leftist struggles, mainly, in the film, in support of Palestine -- when he thinks he can get away with it, but pretty quick to shove his cause into the backseat when he thinks his own physical person is about to be driven off a cliff. As he says at one point in the film "I am a soldier, not a martyr", this in defense of his decision to sell the safety a freedom of a group of hostages taken during a raid on an OPEC conference in Vienna, with at least one of those hostages, the Saudi oil minister, pegged for execution -- this is such a certainty at one point that Carlos sits down with the man and explains why he must be killed. But then Carlos's skin is suddenly on the line, and dollar signs are in his eyes, and things change.
Any charge of glorification must come down to a few basic features of Assayas's film: Carlos's political passion, his physical attractiveness, and the associated fact that he gets laid a lot. On the first count, there's an early scene where Carlos energetically explains to his Cuban wife his new commitment to violent revolution. This turns into an argument, during which Carlos says "Behind every bullet will be an idea!" Now, depending on how awful you are, you might believe that's some pretty deep and invigorating shit, but does Assayas? And even if he does, or did, is Carlos depicted as someone for whom even that ridiculousness has any meaning? When he hurls a grenade into a drugstore (one owned by a Jew, Carlos very specifically informs the authorities at one point) and we later hear that witnesses saw women and children, after the blast, lying in pools of blood, what does "Behind every bullet will be an idea" mean, if it ever meant anything? It didn't, of course, but can it even sort of halfway sound good any longer?

Assayas's film is a masterclass in handling this kind of material without resorting to the hard sell. Indeed, it may be too subtle for its own good, to judge by the Marshall Fines and Armond Whites (he also strenuously objected to Carlos) of the world, though that's a comparison that may well be unfair to one or the other of them. But, for example, very late in the film, Carlos has grown fat, he's slow, and, most importantly, his testicles are malfunctioning. This is both historically true and artistically perfect -- a happy accident, from Assayas's point of view. We're about four-and-a-half to five hours into Carlos by the time this happens, but I imagine it wouldn't be hard to cast your mind back to the first half hour of the film, when Carlos is shown getting out of bed and standing naked in front of a full-length mirror, admiring his own physique and even briefly fondling his genitals. This scene, also, comes immediately after the aforementioned "behind every bullet" scene, and in that scene Carlos's then wife (who he will send away, with their child, and never contact again) says he's arrogant and is more interested in glory than any political ideal. So the arrogance and physique lead both to cowardice -- he's too shallow to be a martyr, perhaps -- and, you know, getting laid a lot. The rock star image that Assayas cultivates for Carlos in the film is done so specifically to tear it down. Carlos's own basking in it is part of the film's withering critique.
Carlos's extensive running time is broken into three parts, and in fact aired as a miniseries on French television (the fact that, in the US, it is regarded as a "film", rather than a piece of television -- despite the fact that it aired on IFC parallel to its theatrical release -- is further evidence of the continued, but selective, blurring of the lines between those two mediums), and part two is largely given over to the OPEC raid. This is Assayas's centerpiece -- everything that came before was building to it, everything that came after simply a falling away from it. It's Carlos's Lufthansa heist, if you will. There are several things that are key to this very long sequence, not least among them the brutal murders carried out by Carlos and one of his compatriots, Nada (Julia Hummer), and also not least of which is Nada herself. German by birth, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann's nickname, Nada, which of course means "nothing" in Carlos's native tongue, might be considered another of those historical happy accidents, like Carlos's ball troubles. The woman is a moral blank, in other words, her credentials for joining Carlos on the OPEC raid being that she did two years in prison for shooting a cop, but "unfortunately I only wounded him." She makes sure not to wound anyone she takes aim at during the raid, however, and Nada helps to condemn Carlos in a "the company you keep" sort of way. She also stirred up the most anger in me personally, with her focus on killing policemen, and, if I may be allowed a brief aside, the refusal, at the moment of her eventual capture, of the police to kill her right back. I was reminded of a college class I took in modern Irish history, and my professor discussing seeing Neil Jordan's film Michael Collins and how, during that film's depiction of Bloody Sunday, 1920, he was crying out for the IRA, under Collins, to hurry up and "kill him!", referring to one of their various targets. So thought I, with the gender pronouns reversed, as armed police, who have been fired upon, chase Nada down the street, not shooting her for some crazy reason. There is an irony in parallelling these two stories that I'm not missing, but I'm able to acknowledge that while still wishing, on film and in reality, that they'd shot her.
Anyway, Nada comes to represent what Carlos would be if his head was as fogged with terrorist furor as he lets on. Not that he's not a terrorist, because he is, but unlike many terrorists, Nada included, he's not willing to die for his cause. And his cowardice both outrages those working under him, like Nada, and just happens, because morally Carlos couldn't give a shit, saves the lives of the hostages. Nada would die and take everyone else with her. Carlos is more wily, but with greater brain function -- Nada really is, slight a figure though she strikes, pretty much a dumb animal -- comes individual limits, and Carlos's mental limit comes sooner than he's willing to admit. The OPEC raid is a spectacular failure for the cause, and for him personally, and Assayas comes close to outright mocking him during this stretch. The ludicrous bungling of the DC-9 transport, and the beautifully portrayed reaction by Ramirez to the information, delivered by the patient German pilot sadly roped into this madness, that yes, you demanded a DC-9 and you got a DC-9, but a DC-9 does not have the fuel capacity to take you where you want to go, renders Carlos a total fool. The respect he demands from everyone just crumbles, to the point where when he releases the two pilots to go rest up, and extends his hand to them to show he appreciates their honorable behavior, they both walk right by him, because they know what he is. He's a villain, first off, but the plane screw-up revealed there's not even much of a brain at work. He's a monster, but somehow not a threat to them. This is as close as Carlos comes to a real crowd-pleasing moment, and it pleased me enormously. I feel like in this moment, and with these pilots, Assayas is providing the audience an audience surrogate. Normal people get a look into Carlos's world -- a look that doesn't immediately precede their death or injury -- and show only disdain.
Time and time again, Carlos, in Carlos, is portrayed this way, his image sent up, if without humor than at least with derision. Curiously, though politics are constantly discussed by the characters, Carlos isn't quite a political film, as such. In that the politics that Carlos is trying to represent are neither embraced or rejected. They are only presented. It is the methods that are rejected, and the person at the center of the film. There's a reason Carlos is never referred to as "the Jackal", and that this fearsome nickname is never even uttered: to tear down the image, Assayas starts by stripping away the most famous part of it. What's left is just Carlos, petty, stupid, cowardly, villainous, and a killer. What's not to admire?

Cap-Syool Reviews!! Enjoy Them Now!

.

Here are some for you to read! Will you!?

Dragonwyck (d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) - This is one of Vincent Price's very early Gothic thriller/melodrama roles (it's also the first film by Mankiewicz). The story is basically that a young woman (Gene Tierney) is overwhelmed by the wealth and smoothness of distant relative and wealthy landowner, Nicholas Van Ryn (Price). Then when she marries him, she finds out he's a crazy asshole. Price is wonderful, as always, and his final breakdown is terrific -- nobody did sweaty, arrogant psychic disintegration quite like Price -- but Mankiewicz seemed a bit too concerned with making his film important -- laying on the plight-of-the-worker stuff a bit too heavy -- and therefore, in his mind (I'm wildly speculating) better than your standard genre film, and the result is that the film sags. There's a terrific efficiency to the best genre films, especially from this era (the film was made in 1946), so that when a film like Dragonwyck makes a transparent attempt to rise above them, it's hard not to see why those other films are so very good.
.

Summer Hours (d. Olivier Assayas) - This beautiful and beautifully acted French film, about a wealthy French family, whose matriarch passes away in an early scene, struggling to deal with her estate (consisting mainly of a gorgeous country home, and a sprawling collection of artwork), is not actually about family strife so much as it is about losing your past, and how much more meaningful art can be to the individual than it ever will be as art. Charles Berling, as the eldest son Frederic, gets the top marks, but as I said, everyone is superb. And for a movie with such a small, intimate story, there's an incredible pace to it, of the kind that would utterly confuse your run-of-the-mill contemporary thriller filmmaker. Carried along, no doubt, by those performances. Top shelf.

Johnny Guitar (d. Nicholas Ray) - A quite strange Western from the 1950s, featuring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge as the White Hat and the Black Hat, respectively. A lot has been made of this gender twist on the traditional Western, but the film itself doesn't hammer on any particular point: this is just the story, and these are just the characters. Mind you, its tone is less that of a Western than it is a melodrama, or "women's picture", of the kind that Douglas Sirk made at his most bombastic (which shouldn't be taken as a criticism of Sirk). But if it works, it works, so why complain about bombast, if that's the goal, and the goal is struck dead center? Besides which, any film that features Sterling Hayden and Ernest Borgnine can't be that bad. The fact that Hayden plays the title character who is also the Mysterious Stranger shouldn't confuse one into thinking that Joan Crawford isn't, in fact, the star (she's great, too, as is McCambridge). So what it is, in fact, is a genre mash-up; while that idea tends to yield horror-comedies, or horror-Westerns, or horror-SF, here we have Western-melodrama, which is actually a hybrid with a long history. All of which I suppose to say that I'm a bit curious why so many people think Johnny Guitar is so bizarre.

.

Extract (d. Mike Judge) - Each of Mike Judge's live-action films (I'm excluding Beavis and Butthed Do America, because I remember that being a bit of a sensation at the time) has taken its own sweet time finding an audience. Office Space and Idiocracy were both dumped by their studios, and each has gained cult audiences of varying degrees of healthiness. His newest film, Extract, actually got a legitimate theatrical release, and still nobody went. Nobody who did go seemed overly taken with it, and my expectations were therefore low. But I really enjoyed it, as it turns out. It's not as near-perfect as Office Space, or as occasionally riotous as Idiocracy, but unlike that latter film it also doesn't run out of steam in the last third. It's consistently genial and entertaining, bolstered by a terrific cast of outstanding deadpan comic performers -- Jason Bateman, J. K. Simmons, Kristen Wiig, Ben Affleck, and the inhumanly attractive Mila Kunis, to name a few. Mike Judge knows ordinary people, and he knows what's so funny about them.

The Children (d. Tommy Shankland) - This horror film was primarily striking to me because it plunks a family down as the only possible victims, and then begins killing them. It's quite a bit more complicated, as well as better, than that sounds, but it's still the aspect of the film that stands out most strongly for me. The gist is, over Christmas an extended family gets together to celebrate, but one of the children has contracted some sort of virus, which only seems to be spread through the other children nearby, and which turns them into blank-eyed killers. This is brutal stuff, especially when the adults start fighting back, which you do sort of hope they'll do, but for God's sake look what they're doing! It's that sort of film, with, it would seem, some deeper implications having to do with abortion, but which I haven't quite parsed, and which may not be totally parse-able.

.

Dead Snow (d. Tommy Wirkola) - This movie was fun enough, I suppose, but if you're going to make a movie that spoofs other zombie movies, don't get around to the spoofing eventually. Don't play it reasonably straight for half the movie, possibly longer, and then go all zany and madcap all of a sudden. I'd prefer a movie about zombie Nazis in the snow to be played as straight as possible, myself, but if I can't have that I'd at least like a filmmaker who can commit to a tone.

.

You know, I think I want to withdraw that "fun enough" comment. It is, in a way, but it's also sort of incompetent, and cheap, and thinly imagined. I'd forgive it a bit more if it had ended with the stirring scene of zombie butchery cut to a Finnish folk spiritual song, but they didn't stop there, and all my goodwill drained off.

.

Gamer (d. Neveldine/Taylor) - Well, it's happened. We now live in a world where you can watch a new film and not see the influence of Hitchcock, or Ford, or Welles, or Chaplin, but rather of Tony Scott. And not the Tony Scott of Crimson Tide, but the guy who made Domino and slapped those motherfucking English subtitles of lines already spoken in English by American actors all over Man on Fire. And all in service of what? A remake of The Running Man. And it's worse than the original.

.

Take me, Lord. I'm ready. I cannot breathe air with the same people who allowed Gamer to be made. With the two unconscionable bastards who made it, and who joined their last names with a meaningless backslash, Face/Off style, creating in my mind the Hellish image of a bi-headed, quadri-limbed Nether-God, who would thunder its heavy legs across the planet, leaving blasted cities and fallow land in its wake as it tossed back its slavering heads and shrieked its murderous laughter into the cosmos. Such a world is more than my feeble mind can accredit.

.

Day 37

.

I awake in the middle of the night. A ghastly storm is assaulting my home, throwing back my shuttered windows, the latches all tinfoil and twine to these blustery and soaking hands! The window....the window is open, and inviting.

.

Day 38

.

The television flickers on, unbidden by my hand or mind. Gamer is on. Michael C. Hall is dancing to "I've Got You Under My Skin" while his henchmen, in time to the music, prepare to attack Gerard Butler.

.

The open, flapping window is streaked with the chilled rains. As flaps the window, so flaps the pages of Al-Hazred's Necronomicon. A book I had destroyed. I know I did. I set it alight and flung its blazing, ashy pages into the sea's gaping throat!! How can it be here now!? And now that kid who plays Butler's controller is on the screen again...as through the window I hear the bleating of the dread Neveldine/Taylor rolling over the distant hills...

.

The window! The window!!