A Good Old-Fashioned Pants Kicking

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In many ways -- most ways, in fact -- I am like a child. By and large, you'd rather not know what I mean by that, but in regards to this post you should know that part of what I'm talking about is that when I have a day off from school (in terms of my life as an adult, this means work) I have a tendency to eat lots of sugar (cheese) and run around like a goon (lay on the couch) getting into mischief with my no-good pals (watch movies like Skyline all day long). Parents know that this can be counteracted by giving their children structure on their free days. So it is with me. As an adult, though, I've recently learned that this responsibility falls on me, which is bullshit, but whatever. The point is, I, in fact, have one of those free days coming up on Friday. Every time I find myself with an extra chunk of time to myself -- and really to myself, because my wife will be out of town, and I have no friends who might choose to visit -- I make all these plans about how I'm going to not only relax, but productively relax, by watching interesting movies I've never seen, or read, like, six books in a day, or write, and things like that. This almost never pans out because when the time comes I find myself thinking something along the lines of "Eeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhh......" as I watch a rerun of Bizarre Foods and then see what's up over on Fearnet. It's usually around this time that the microwave dings, announcing that my cheese has melted.
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But not this time! This time I'm going to kill two birds with one stone by enforcing this productive structure on my time. It will be not unlike the Night of Pain thing I did a while back, where I watched three notoriously unpleasant films back-to-back-to-back, and wrote about each one afterwards, but with two or three key differences. Here's how it'll work: starting Thursday night, I will watch a movie. Then I will write about it here. Then I will watch another movie. Then I will write about it. I will do this until I decide to go to sleep, and then pick things up again on Friday morning. I won't be restricting myself to unpleasant movies, either, but will limit myself to films I've never seen. Whether I draw exclusively from my DVD collection, or expand out to cable, DVR, OnDemand, I haven't decided. We'll see about that.
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Among the things this will achieve for me is filling in certain cinematic gaps (though it occurs to me that in order to keep up any sort of rhythm, I might have to steer clear of any film that is especially long, which eliminates a couple of possibilities; further, "filling in certain cinemtaic gaps" does not mean that I won't be watching all kinds of movies), kick this blog right in the pants because it needs it, and, frankly, possibly give me a little bit of practice for something I hope to be able to do later this year, involving a particular film festival (I should probably underline "hope to do" in that sentence). By posting this tonight, I've pretty much locked myself in to actually doing it, and therefore in a sense I've also imposed deadlines on myself -- maybe this is good practice, maybe it's not, but it's better than nothing.
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The whole deadline thing is very much an ancillary motivation. The main thing is that I like doing these sorts of things from time to time, because it can be a fun challenge. And gimmicky as this might seem, I will take the writing as seriously as I always do, even if -- again, in order to maintain a rhythm -- the posts are not as long as they might normally be. But who knows, if the my brain tells me to keep writing past the point I might have wanted to cut it off, then I'll keep writing.
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Anyway, that's it. Big announcement. Hooray. Sometime Thursday night, be here or go suck it.

Language Barrier

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In the US, the Melville film is called Le Samourai*, not The Samurai. Similarly, Bob Le Flambeur is not known as Bob the Gambler. But then again, L'armée des Ombres is more commonly known in the English-speaking world as Army of Shadows.

Truffaut's fourth feature film is known either as Jules and Jim or Jules et Jim, depending on how large a boost of self confidence the writer needs at that moment. The vast majority of Kurosawa films are known in the US by their English titles, until you reach 1970, where a small cluster of his work is known only by the Japanese titles. In the case of Dodes'ka-den, the English version would wind up being something like Chugga-Chugga, or whatever you tell your kids is the sound a train makes, so that's understandable. Virtually none of Fassbinder's films are known in America by their German titles. When it comes to Fassbinder's countryman, Werner Herzog, the same thing holds true -- what is it about German, I wonder?

None of this bothers me, mind you. Bob Le Flambeur is a better title than Bob the Gambler, after all, and the choices made about which language will carry through to the American release seems almost entirely arbitrary. Yes, some foreign language titles scan better, even to monolingual Americans such as myself, in their original French or Spanish or Russian or what have you than the English equivalent, but replacing "and" with "et" when talking about Jules and Jim is just silly. You're fooling no one.

But at least in that case, you should by now be prepared to hear either one. What really gets up my nose is when somebody takes a foreign film that is known exclusively in the US by its English title, and then digs around to find out the original title, so they can throw it out in print, or conversation. By way of example, I have very little doubt that some version of the following conversation has taken place:

Guy #1: So, what do you want to do tonight?

Guy #2: I'm in the mood for a movie. A bunch of movies, even, but I don't feel like going out.

Guy #1: No problem, we can stay in and watch a marathon of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo.

This is meant, one assumes, to solidify the speaker's place among the elite, or what they view to be the elite, and to weed out any listeners with whom the speaker may not want to associate. This is a working theory only, but I feel confident that at its core, this practice is motivated by wickedness.

This expanded version of what should have been a Facebook update has been brought to you by my having recently seen someone refer to Michael Haneke's Code Unknown as Code Inconnu.



*Sorry, this computer wouldn't let me do the two little dots over the "i".

Pha Loves Pa

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This poster is both roughly accurate, and a goddamn lie

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“I think we should make a thriller, and Mike Nichols should direct it.”
“What kind of thriller?”
“A dolphin thriller.”
“Well, who should write it?”
“It seems to me that the clear choice here is Buck Henry.”
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So, in my dreams, goes the inception of The Day of the Dolphin, the film that brought Nichols, Henry, George C. Scott, Paul Sorvino and talking dolphins into the world of the 1970s paranoid thriller. I’ve come to learn that, unfortunately, things likely played out much differently, not least because there was a novel first, and also because several directors, including Roman Polanski and Jean-Luc Godard, either were up for or actively lobbied to make the film themselves. This is an intriguing variety of filmmakers, I think you’ll agree, but I’m pretty confident not one of them could have done a better job than Mike Nichols ended up doing, which I don’t exactly mean as a compliment, because, again: talking dolphins.
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I watched The Day of the Dolphin last night after several months of letting it gather dust on my shelves, because I’d think “Well, George C. Scott, and everything…but it can’t be any good, can it?” To outright steal a phrase from John Self, the film does turn out to be any good; it’s just not many good. Nichols and Henry take an intriguingly straightforward approach to this story, and in the early goings I was more than willing to see where it took me. This low-level enthusiasm was helped along by George C. Scott, who in many ways I think is my ideal actor (this is because I believe that he's very good). Scott plays the hero, a dolphin scientist or whatever, who requires private and government funding to keep his artist/science/dolphin commune running. It is in that commune that he is teaching dolphins to talk. Or a dolphin, named Alpha, or (weary sigh) Pha, for short. I think there’s a logic behind that diminutive, something to do with making it easier for the dolphin to pronounce its name, but in that case maybe they should have gone with “Paul” and avoided all that cutesy “Pha” bullshit. Or if not “Paul”, then “Eeeeeee-eee-EEEEEEEEEE”. Anyway, long story short, some people come to take the dolphins, and The Day of the Dolphin becomes a thriller in its last thirty minutes or so.
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I liked George C. Scott a lot, but I can’t shake the feeling that he probably felt like a jackass the whole shoot, and no wonder. He has two scenes with (weary sigh) Pha where he and the dolphin talk for I’d say roughly about 71 minutes, each time. Dragging things down still further is the fact that Scott – the only real actor between him and the dolphin – is made to repeat his questions over and over (“Where’s the boat!” “PHA LOVE PA!” “Where’s the boat, Pha!?” “PHA SAY BOAT GO NOW!” or whatever the fuck the fucking dolphin says) so that any zip the dialogue may have had is quickly lost. Another casualty of scenes like this, it turns out, was my attention, because I’ll be honest: I started to drift after a while. In fact, I couldn’t really tell you what the bad guys wanted the dolphins for. I do know that the eventual plan was to kill the dolphins, because one of them could talk, but what they expected that dolphin to say and therefore necessitate its being terminated with extreme prejudice, I don’t know. In fairness, I do not doubt for a second that somebody in the film provided that information, but I didn’t hear it because that “PHA LOVE PA” shit was wearing on my last nerve and I started arguing with people on the internet about what’s to be done with bullies.
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So anyway, that’s my review of The Day of the Dolphin.

Capsule Reviews: You're Confused, Bro

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Four Lions (d. Chris Morris) - Despite the fact that I've been discussing this film at some length at another internet location over the last day or so, I'm finding it very difficult to write about Four Lions, Chris Morris's somewhat madcap comedy about a group of Muslim suicide bombers planning a major attack in London. The problem I'm having is that, while I can very easily pinpoint specific problems with the film -- and will do so shortly -- I have a larger objection to it that encompasses film in general, or Film Today, that can't be justifiably laid on Morris's doorstep. For instance, it occurs to me that, in Modern Film As It Is Practiced Today, suburbanites routinely don't get as fair a shake as Morris's terrorists do here, but what that has to do with Morris or his film, I couldn't tell you. It's just a sense of things that I have, one that I don't like.

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But how far does Morris's fairness towards his terrorists really go? Well, pretty far, all things considered, but then again not all that far. Four Lions is a comedy, remember, and if Morris's inspiration wasn't Jimmy Breslin's novel about bumblingly absurd mobsters The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, it might as well have been. There are more than four terrorists here, though there are only four at the end, and of those only three matter: Omar (Riz Ahmed), the leader, and the smartest one, and a family man with an unnervingly supportive wife; Waj (Kayvan Novak) the dim-witted nice one, on whom the film's morality ultimately hinges; and Barry (Nigel Lindsay) a radical white Londoner who converted to Islam, who is about as stupid as Waj, but more confident. Morris makes quite a bit (of all sorts of things, including comedy) out of the logical break between what they're planning and why they think it's the right thing to do, and what the reality is. We're invited to sympathize, up to a point, with these men as human beings, but it's understood that no one should be rooting for success here, and certain fatal accidents are meant to carry a certain relief, and produce laughter, which is more or less the result I experienced.

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Morris is walking a very fine line here, and I can't help but find the film slightly inorganic, as if Four Lions came into being only because Morris thought it would be awfully ballsy to make a comedy about suicide bombers. If the film had its head secured more firmly, the scenes between Omar and his wife (Preeya Kalidas) might have played better, or differently. As it is, her warmth and support and complete lack of perspective not only regarding his impending death, but the deaths of whoever is unlucky enough to find themselves within his blast radius, comes off as quite eerie, and appalling in a way that it's hard to know who to blame. Well, her, and Morris is quite evidently not pro-terrorism, but these scenes seem designed to underline the idea that Omar is just a man, and his wife is just a woman, and they love each other -- they are human -- not to underline the blood-curdling ruthlessness of their shared ideology. I can't imagine that Morris isn't aware of what's going on in these scenes, but I believe there is a tonal challenge here that he's not quite up to.

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Where the movie fully collapses for me is in the final stretch, when Morris is obliged to trot out a small cast of British counter-terrorism characters, who bumble right along with the terrorists, and who are bigoted, and have no warmth, and are merely satirical targets. The argument has been made to me that this is a film, specifically a comedy film, about the terrorists, so naturally the counter-terrorism guys won't get much focus. A fair point, except that it's hard for me to accept what Morris is implicitly dealing out here, even if he doesn't realize it, which is that it behooves us to understand the though processes and hearts and souls of those who would strap bombs to themselves, step among us, and hit the trigger, but that those who would seek to stop that from ever happening are to be looked at askance at all times.

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I Spit On Your Grave (d. Steven R. Monroe) - When Meir Zarchi's original I Spit On Your Grave was released in 1978, it was met with righteous howls of disgust by not a few people. Most famously, Roger Ebert's review fairly seethed with anger as he judged and found wanting not just Zarchi and his film, but the crowd with whom he saw it:

I wanted to turn to the man next to me and tell him his remarks were disgusting, but I did not. To hold his opinions at his age, he must already have suffered a fundamental loss of decent human feelings. I would have liked to talk with the woman in the back row, the one with the feminist solidarity for the movie's heroine.

There was a tendency at that time for some critics to assume, as they did nothing more than fulfill their professional obligations to see certain extreme horror films so that they could write about them, that the audience that surrounded them was made up entirely of either potential or currently active serial killers (see also Harlan Ellison's comments about going to see The Omen, of all things), and while Zarchi's film remains an entirely unpleasant viewing experience, Ebert's subsequent positive review of Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects makes me question from what angle he really approaches this kind of material. The guy didn't even blush.

The thing about Zarchi's film is that it could not be any less complex about its motives, or what it wants the audience to experience. The lead character (Camille Keaton) is repeatedly, and graphically, beaten and raped by a group of men. This goes on forever, and as hard as it is to watch initially, it only gets harder from there. Then, left for dead, the woman rises up and exacts just-as-brutal revenge on her attackers. Zarchi (who was supposedly inspired to make the film after witnessing a rape, a claim I've always sort of questioned) wants our horror at Keaton's prolonged suffering, followed by our feeling of grim catharsis at her vengeance. The fact that one of her attackers is mentally handicapped only adds some ambiguous spice, something all revenge films must have. And it's all just a terribly uncomfortable parade of atrocity.

So it's I guess maybe a comment on the state of something-or-other today that, when the announcement was made that there was going to be a new I Spit On Your Grave in 2010, the reaction was essentially "Oh, they're remaking that one, too?" If you could take that reaction and somehow translate it into a creative drive, then you'd have director and co-writer Steven R. Monroe's attitude towards that very remake, a film that pulls way back on the level of violence inflicted on its heroine (Sarah Butler) and turns her eventual reign of terror into a series of damn silly Saw-like torture scenes. Whatever else can be said about Zarchi's film, you can't call it silly.

But, you know, one doesn't want to sound as if one is wishing a given film could have contained more rape. Quite frankly, Monroe's film has plenty. It's just that Zarchi's film was a film of two halves -- the rape and revenge killings are inseparable, and are, in fact, all that the movie is. In the remake, rape is the launching pad. All revenge films need to get kicked off somehow, after all, and it's pretty clear that whatever imagination was being delicately portioned out in the making of this new I Spit On Your Grave, it all went to thinking up the bit with the guy who has a shotgun stuck up his ass. And apparently, in the interim between being left for dead and coming back for some scalps, Butler's character has turned into a super detective, because what she's able to pull off -- getting vital information on the private family life of one of her attackers, somehow ensuring that another attacker will step just there right when she needs him to -- is not only impressive, in a stupid sort of way, but never explained. Not that, typically, explanations are needed in a film like this, but some nod in that direction can make absurdity a bit easier to swallow.

So I think maybe I Spit On Your Grave circa 2010 was born out of a certain cynicism. In fairness, if you can score the rights to that title, it must be pretty hard to resist.

Sketches: A Rumination, Part Two

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It's difficult for me to say what, exactly, I'm hoping to say in the following self-portrait (number two in a series). Still, I do believe that this is a reasonable illustration of how the world views me -- not how I view myself, please remember, although, actually, there's not much difference, if I'm being honest.

Anyway, it's just sex, America -- try and loosen up for once! Also, you can't even say I'm racist, because almost all of the major female hair colors are represented.

Finally, I'd like to dedicate this post to my wife.

Sketches: A Rumination

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Recently, I've started branchingn out into the visual arts -- or, rather, I'm channeling more of my creative soul in that direction. Below is the first of a series of self portraits I'm working on:

Rough? Perhaps. But I feel it does have a certain energy.

Solved Nothing

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[Spoilers for The Missouri Breaks and sort of for Night Moves follow. I'd include Bonnie and Clyde as well, but, I mean, seriously.]

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When Arthur Penn died last year, it was my belief that in the wake of his passing, Bonnie and Clyde would be about the only film anyone was going to bother to remember, and that I might as well accept it (which, considering the man was dead, was exceptionally brave of me). Well, I should have known better, because while Bonnie and Clyde (1967) –a film I hate – is easily Penn’s best known film, and would appear to be his most consistently loved, and would further appear to be the one that is most likely to endure, God help us, the kind of people who are going to bother writing anything about Arthur Penn in the first place, even when he was alive, are going to have a deeper knowledge of the man’s work, and are going to appreciate more than just the poor-little-killers film that invites the audience to share in its own obliviousness.

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I hate Bonnie and Clyde. But I like Arthur Penn. Penn was a bit of a genre guy, which is always nice, even if his interest lay primarily in subverting them, or subverting what we expect and desire from those genres. His genres of choice tended to be Westerns and crime films, which are spiritually linked in a very basic way which somehow often goes unremarked upon. But listen: how many Westerns essentially double as crime films? Yes, you have your cowboys and Indians Westerns, and your historical Westerns (which Penn covered as well), and all that, but the tin star and the posse and the bad man fed just as many films as did frontier life and Cavalry uniforms.

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Such is the case, sort of, with Penn’s first feature film The Left Handed Gun (1958), and his later, commercially and critically disastrous (well I like it) The Missouri Breaks (1976). The Left Handed Gun, which stars Paul Newman as Billy the Kid, is plainly the work of a young filmmaker who desperately wishes it was already the 1970s, or at least the late 60s. In some ways, Penn is already pushing towards Bonnie and Clyde here, with its near-romanticizing of a punk kid whose claim to fame is spilling innocent blood (though probably less blood of any kind in reality than in this film). But eventually The Left Handed Gun takes a more peacenik approach to its violence, because of course – or not “of course”, because this is not an element you can necessarily bank on in films that print the legends of Billy the Kid, or, say, Jesse James – Billy finally goes “too far”, and Pat Garrett (John Dehner), who’d rather not kill the boy, finds that his hand is forced, for the greater good. No, if The Left Handed Gun has problems, which it does, it’s not due to the film collapsing under its own confused morality, but rather to the two men involved with the film who would eventually enjoy much higher profiles than Penn: Paul Newman and Gore Vidal. The film was based on Vidal’s play, and I’m willing to blame all the shortcomings on him because I hate Gore Vidal about as much as I hate Bonnie and Clyde. But the film’s real problem is its theatricality – despite the variety of locations, and the horses, and all the things you wouldn’t expect from a stage play, the damn thing still seems weirdly stage bound in the sense that it seems pitched to the back of the theater.

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Newman, who was still finding his sea-legs, doesn’t help. It’s I guess ironic that the common line on The Missouri Breaks is that Penn lost control of star Marlon Brando, who was at the “fuck it” stage of his career, and would, so the story goes, rather amuse himself on set than help whatever movie he was filming. But when I watch The Left Handed Gun, I see a young Paul Newman who is out of control, as yet unable to keep the lid on his worst instincts, and receiving no direction on how to do so from Penn, so that this great actor instead bounces around and mugs like a cartoon psycho. Meanwhile, when I watch The Missouri Breaks, I see a legitimately mad Brando who towers over everything else, and manages to raise the film up to his lunacy. Before Brando shows up, the film is a bit wearyingly ordinary: a bad rich man (John McLiam) takes to hanging horse thieves, thereby putting a group of otherwise decent horse thieves, led by Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson), on edge. But the bad rich man hires Lee Clayton (Brando), whose line of work, while never described quite in this way, is that of an assassin. And once that happens, “ordinary” is no longer a word one could logically use to describe The Missouri Breaks.

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Is any of what follows Brando’s introduction – specifically, anything that actually involves Brando and his performance – really out of control? The commercial failure of The Missouri Breaks badly stalled Penn’s career, but I’m more inclined to blame the people who didn’t go see it and the critics who didn’t give it a fair shake than either Penn or Brando. My understanding is that giving Clayton an Irish brogue was Brando’s idea. Okay, so? Brando doesn’t do a bad job with the accent, however many people claim otherwise, so where’s the problem? And Brando wears a dress at one point. Yes indeed he does (he dresses strangely throughout, but this moment would, I admit, have to count as the pinnacle of that). By the time he puts on the frontier-lady dress, Clayton has been established, partly through Brando’s performance, and partly through what Thomas McGuane’s script has him do and say, as a complete lunatic, loyal to nobody, a sadistic chessmaster, so that, to a degree the dress makes sense, and anyway, as this scene goes on and the building burns and more blood is spilled, the dress adds a Psycho-esque chill.

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Then, of course, there’s the climax to Clayton’s story, his last night on Earth, spent with a couple of horses and Penn’s patient camera, which records Clayton’s loving interaction with one horse, then stern rebuke of another, then his lilting attempt to sing himself to sleep, then sleep, the blackness, then death. I have to rank this as The Missouri Breaks’ finest hour, and possibly Penn's, and if much of what precedes Clayton’s sleep was improvised by Brando – and I don’t know that it was anyway – then bravo to him, and to Penn for seeing the worth in it all. There’s some darkly comic poetry at work here, and if this counts as out of control, then I want more of it.

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Though the connection is thin at best, when, in its early going, The Missouri Breaks seems to be about how law and order crushes otherwise peaceable thieves, or at least that the idea of "frontier justice" was an oxymoron, it plays a little bit like a wheezing version of Bonnie and Clyde (thin at best, I know, I said that, but you gotta connect these things somehow). Bonnie and Clyde. Motherfucking Bonnie and Clyde. It's a well made film, I'll grant you -- watching it again recently, I was impressed by how well it moved -- but if I had to boil my contempt for it down to one scene, it would be the part where the gang robs a bank and Clyde fires a shot at the bank guard (Russ Marker), who'd been going for his gun. In this same scene, Clyde tells a bank customer to keep his money (because he's nice like that), and later we see both the customer praising Clyde's generosity to a newspaper reporter, and the bank guard vainly posing for a photograph while he describes looking into the face of death. We're meant to laugh at this guard because, additionally, we're supposed to scorn the way he pumps up the danger in his story. In order to do this, the audience needs to forget, or not care, that not only after that robbery, but before it, Bonnie and Clyde (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) have been killing policemen by the handful. The real Bonnie and Clyde did the same thing (though, in terms of the film, I'm told this doesn't matter), so it's more than a little appalling to see the police represented in the film either as glory hounds or bumbling seekers not of justice, but of vengeance (this in the form of Denver Pyle's Sheriff Hamer, who after being humiliated by the Barrow gang, later orchestrates the ambush that will lay our heroes low).

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There's a sense that Bonnie and Clyde played to audiences who outwardly professed to abhor violence and bloodshed, but might be okay if the blood was being shed from pigs. I'm sure the film's admirers, as well as Penn and screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman, would wave their hands in the air and say "No no no no no!" if presented with the theory. But look at how the stage blood is dispensed in Bonnie and Clyde. One innocent victim, the first one Clyde kills in the film, is allowed a brutal death, with shattering glass and a blown off face. The film comes very near to making something out of this, but in order for that to really click, the pursuit by law enforcement of the Barrow gang would have achieve at least ambiguity, but it doesn't -- the cops aren't good, and we're shown this. Not only that, but the dozen or so cops who are murdered by one or another member of the Barrow gang don't get to be brutalized, and therefore humanized. All those deaths are of the grab-chest-and-fall-over variety of the Hollywood crime films and Westerns that Bonnie and Clyde is supposed to be signalling the end of. That is, of course, until Bonnie and Clyde are most cruelly ambushed by the police force, whose ranks the Barrow gang has bravely thinned. Then, Penn makes with the red paint, and how. Because these were human beings, damn it. We know this, because the manner in which their deaths are depicted invites the audience to look away. All those cops, though, well, you know. You can't make an omelette, etc.

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There's a terrible smugness to Bonnie and Clyde that I absolutely cannot stand. It flatters its audience, those who like it, in a way that, say, Sam Peckinpah, the master of moral confusion and splattered viscera, never did. It's a kids film in a lot of ways -- Clyde's gun is like a penis that one time, and so on -- and thankfully Penn would grow out of it. He would do this most notably, to my mind, and going by my incomplete experience with his work, with Night Moves (1975). Written by Alan Sharp and starring Gene Hackman, Melanie Griffith, James Woods, Jennifer Warren, and Edward Binns, Night Moves is the kind of loose, digressive detective story that, in literature, is perhaps best represented by the fiction of James Crumley. There's not a huge narrative drive to solve the mystery, and in fact for quite a while it seems that there is no mystery, once Hackman's Harry Moseby, a private detective, does right by his client (Janet Ward) by tracking down her free-spirited and often nude teenage daughter (Griffith), who has been hiding out in Florida with her stepdad (a quietly terrific John Crawford). When bodies start to appear, and motives come into question, all the plot elements that had been held in reserve -- which have to do with stuntmen and filmmaking and drugs and statutory rape -- are released in a rush towards the end, so that while Moseby is able to piece together what's been going on, he has to acknowledge that it all just fell into his lap. "I didn't solve anything," he says.

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He sure didn't, as the film's incredible and devastating final ten minutes makes clear. It takes a great deal of courage, not to mention confidence, to intentionally leave an audience as confused by why something has just happened as Penn and Sharp do at the end of Night Moves. I've said before that one of the great tragedies of the word "mystery" as it relates to genre fiction is that it has come to mean, in most people's minds, "something that is solvable." Night Moves rejects that utterly. This embracing of uncertainty is one reason why Night Moves feels like the film of an adult, or group of adults, rather than a film like Bonnie and Clyde, which was made by people who just wanted to set fire to all the shit that was older than they were.

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TIFF's Lightbox is running an Arthur Penn series in the coming weeks. All films discussed in this post, and many more besides, will be shown. The Left Handed Gun will be screened on March 27; The Missouri Breaks will screen March 28; Bonnie and Clyde on March 24, March 27 and April 6; and Night Moves on March 31.