If You Like Blogathons and Sam Raimi, Well Have I Got News for You!

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Bryce Wilson, he of Things That Don't Suck fame, just kicked off his Sam Raimi blogathon...er, yesterday. But it goes on through April 2nd, so there's still plenty of time to make up for my neglect, and I suggest you do. Raimi is quite the curious fellow, beginning his career as a filmmaker with an unabashedly drive-in sensibility, before eventually graduating, or rather switching gears to, Hollywood blockbusters. Quite surprisingly, to anyone who'd followed his career from the early years. And then, of course, came Drag Me to Hell, which might signal a return to his roots. Anyway, I'm most interested in the middle period of Raimi's work, after the Evil Dead stuff, and before Spider-Man, when he was first making his mark with the studios. I will be writing up one of those films in the next couple of days, and, sadly, I think that anyone who has any feeling for my tastes and sensibilities will probably be able to correctly guess which film I'm going to take on. I'm doing it anyway, though!

Meanwhile, check out Bryce's links for the first couple of days, as well as his own write-ups, and should you have a blog of your own, why not throw in your own two cents?

This Meaningless Carcass

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In The Magician (d. Ingmar Bergman), Max von Sydow's Albert Vogler, the titular magician and leader of Vogler's Magnetic Health Theater, doesn't speak for about a full hour of screen time. Tubal (Ǻke Fridell), the troupe's carnival barker, claims this is because Vogler is mute, but he isn't. We're given reasons to suspect this well before he actually says his first words (which, significantly, are "I hate them"), among them is the fact the his supposedly male assistant, Aman, is quite clearly a woman, and is, in fact, Manda (Ingrid Thulin), Vogler's wife. Then there's Vogler's fake beard, fake mustache, his wig...the man is a walking fraud. This, at least, is the view taken by Dr. Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand), a cold man of reason who wishes to expose Vogler's tricks, and publicly humiliate him.

Among the many things going on throughout the films of Ingmar Bergman, the most gripping thing to witness is his battle with God, his hopeless and desperate attempts to answer the question of the possibility of a divine existence. In interviews, Bergman often claimed atheistic tendencies, but his films reveal a much more complex picture -- even when a given film might refute the possibility of God, Bergman always respected that which he tried to leave behind him. And anyway, it's clear he could never really shake it. The Magician is one of the most interesting battles waged in this artistic and theistic war, as it's the one example I know of where Bergman depicts the skeptics, the rational, as venal, hateful, condescending little shits. Or not the only time, because check out that name: Vergerus. A not uncommon name among Bergman's deep cast of characters through his career, it also appears most memorably in The Serpent's Egg, where Heinz Bennent plays a man by that name who is not only a proto-Nazi (the ur-Nazi, perhaps), but whose approach to science and the rational is almost literally Satanic.

This Vergerus ain't that bad, but he's a cruel and petty man who must protect his worldview. Vogler's magic, however easily exposed (or is it? Certain things that happen in The Magician are eventually explained; others are not) allows for the possibility of belief, yes, but more importantly of emotion. "A momentary fear of death" is something he makes one man feel, in an attempt to shake the man to his core, to blast his certainty out of its comfortable hole for at least an instant. Vogler must be exposed, according to Vergerus and the other leaders of the village where Vogler has come to perform, because a failure to prove him a phony would "be a catastrophe for science", opening the world up to the possibility of God. "How out of date!" cries one of Vergerus's cronies. In The Magician, as today, the question of the universe's origin is reduced to a competition.

I don't claim to know what Bergman ultimately believed, nor do I really care. Hell, I take the man at his word. But over and over again in his films, he reveals himself to believe most in the necessity of the question. Vergerus says he detests the inexplicable; what Bergman detests is certainty.

There's No Hope for Me to Die

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While I freely admit that among the classic Universal monster movies The Wolf Man is far from the best, I also happen to think it gets a pretty unfair rap as a low-rent pretender. Among the things I especially like about that film, which was directed by George Waggner, is Lon Chaney, Jr.'s portrayal of Lawrence Talbot as a lovable lug, kind of a pleasant meathead, whose reaction to the bizarre and terrible turns his life has taken is to be scared out of his mind. There's a pathos to that which eschews the high tragedy aims of movies like Frankenstein for a more blue collar approach -- instead of tragic, The Wolf Man goes for sad.

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So on that level at least, I take The Wolf Man kind of seriously, and could probably become a bit defensive about it, should the situation warrant it. My viewing today of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (d. Roy William Neill) might be that situation. The problem is that this is a direct sequel to The Wolf Man, picking up four years after Talbot's death at the merciful hands of his father. In attempting to rob Talbot's grave, two no-goods sweep away the wolfsbane covering his body, said wolfsbane being the one thing keeping Talbot dead. So now he's not dead anymore, and he's still a werewolf. And, rather intriguingly, the plot of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man centers around Talbot's quest to die, for good.

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After linking up again with Maria Ouspenskaya, the gypsy from the previous film, Talbot begins to track the story of Dr. Frankenstein, who apparently had mastered the powers of life and death. And here I'll not that Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is more or less a direct sequel to James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein as well, with similarly injurious results. The Wolf Man and Bride of Frankenstein end on notes of real heartbreak, which the makers of this later film -- director Neill, producer Waggner, screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who also wrote The Wolf Man -- basically scribble out by reviving not only Talbot, but, obviously, Frankenstein's monster (no Dr. Frankenstein, though, he's still dead, replaced by glaze-eyed Ilona Massey as his daughter, Baroness Elsa Frankenstein). In other words, the two deaths from those films that mattered the most no long matter. Or I guess that depends on how seriously you take sequels to beloved film, and how easily you're able to separate them if you don't like where the follow up leads you. For my part, I can do that pretty easily, so I'm not overly put out by the sacrileges of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

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Instead of being angry for an hour and twelve minutes, I instead took note that this film is to The Wolf Man and the two previous Frankenstein films as The Godfather Part II is to The Godfather, in that, like the Coppola sequel, all the points made by Waggner and Whale are simply half-heartedly underlined by Neill (there's a difference, since Coppola's underlining was quite vigorous). This is not terribly uncommon among sequels, I suppose, but there's something about Chaney's Talbot going from a happy-go-lucky fellow at the beginning of the first film, to a terrified man who wants to be rid of his curse by any means necessary by the end, and then, in the next film, to a man who, no, seriously, really wants this curse taken care of, that put me in mind of Michael Corleone's light-to-dark-to-super-dark journey. So there's that, and then there's Bela Lugosi taking over the role of Frankenstein's monster from Karloff, only to remind the world that whatever his talents, Lugosi was no Karloff, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man's ending, which is so abrupt that you have to wonder if the studio said "The moment you film a castle collapsing, no matter how much left you have to shoot, you must shut down production." That's the only thing that makes any sense, at least.

No Different Than Any Other Soldier

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If there's one aspect of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (d. Nagisa Oshima) that stand out as particularly unusual -- and this from a movie about which nothing is especially usual -- is the man who made it. Or rather, the nationality of the man who made it. I don't mean that Oshima is openly critical of his country, as he'd been that before on a regular basis, but more that the film, about British POWs during WWII, being held in a Japanese prison camp in Java in 1942, depicts Japanese culture as it existed during the war as entirely alien, from the point of view of its Western protagonists.

This is the sort of thing you'd expect from Western filmmakers, such as the David Lean who made The Bridge on the River Kwai (which Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence echoes at times). But I don't believe I've ever seen a filmmaker depict his own homeland in a way that is so alienating to himself. That's the key here. After suffering days of torture at the order of camp commander Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also wrote the film's striking, Philip Glass-by-way-of-Tokyo score), the film's British heroes, Jack Celliers and John Lawrence -- played respectively by David Bowie and Tom Conti -- have a discussion about "what is wrong with them", them being the Japanese, specifically the Japanese of the crazed, honor-bound imperialism under Hirohito. In the film, the question is a good one, because while Lawrence, a sympathetic expert on the Japanese and the camp's liaison between the prisoners and Yonoi, originally believes he's the man to ask about these sorts of things, Yonoi relentlessly thwarts his clear thinking by behaving in ways that are entirely inexplicable. It's just that the idea of a white character, or a pair of white characters, looking on in dazed wonder at a culture and a race other than their own is the kind of thing that critics like to blast movies like Cry Freedom and Glory for doing. Here, the dazed alienation comes from within. Of course, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is otherwise in no conceivable way analogous to Cry Freedom or Glory, but still, there it is.

Whatever is at the root of Yonoi's actions -- which don't always make sense even to his own men -- it seems to relate to a deeply suppressed sexual attraction to Celliers, who Yonoi wants to take over as the POWs leader from Hicksley (Jack Thompson), an officer of the stiff-upper lip variety. But when Yonoi judges Celliers to be "a disappointment", nothing much is to be done from there on. As such, the entirety of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is played out in concentrated form during the films opening minutes as one of the Japanese officers, named Hara (played by Takeshi Kitano, in a terrific performance) forces Lawrence to witness the interrogation and awful abuse of a Korean guard and a Dutch POW, the former of whom, Hara maintains, raped the latter, though in this case force, it seems clear, was not used. The sexual denial of these two men, and Hara's blinkered approach to justice will be played out within Yonoi throughout the film.

I was put off by the bland claims that "nobody is right, everybody is wrong" that pop up from time to time in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, usually from the mouth of Mr. Lawrence himself, especially at the end. This is the sort of "sounds like it means something, actually doesn't" philosophizing that is typical of war films of a certain era, which one has to get used to. Fortunately, I'm used to it, and I appreciated the film's occasionally ethereal strangeness -- Sakamoto's score has a lot to do with that, but also, and interestingly, considering what I've already said about Oshima's approach to Japan, in a flashback to Celliers' child- and young adulthood, which presents life under the English crown as eerily dreamlike, and the dream's not always a good one.

So, an odd film, in other words. Odd, striking, discomfiting, provocative, and very much worth your time.

Darling, He Said in a Tender Voice

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Anyone who's heard the audiobook version of This Is Orson Welles -- which consists of the actual interviews between Welles and Peter Bogdanovich that make up the print version, with some bonus tracks -- will no doubt remember the moment when either Welles or Bogdanovich, can't remember which, brings up Make Way for Tomorrow (d. Leo McCarey). I have the audiobook on cassette, which means I haven't heard it in a long time, but I remember that when Welles talks about McCarey's film, he sounds as though he's been practically transported, the emotion almost overwhelms him, and he comes close to babbling about Make Way for Tomorrow's melancholy brilliance. Jesus, if that word's even big enough for it. As Welles said, "It would make a stone cry."

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I say the film's melancholy, but it achieves this through a gentle, consistent sense of humor; without that, I wonder if Make Way for Tomorrow might not be unbearable. The story, about an elderly couple who loses their house and is forced to split up, the wife living with the family of one child, the husband with another, the two homes located 300 miles apart, because none of their children can find their way to bring in both parents, is perfectly constructed to support a series of scenes in which the parents find themselves, not ripped, but let's say delicately wrenched, from their happy home together and placed in environments where those who would ostensibly take care of them and work towards joining them back together, subtly and explicitly make them feel unwanted, in the way, a goddamn hassle. But the couple only wants to live together again."Together for always," says the old wife, Lucy Cooper (Beulah Bondi) during a rare and expensive long distance call with her old husband Barkley Cooper (Victor Moore), in one of Make Way for Tomorrow's very best scenes.

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In some ways, Make Way for Tomorrow defeats analysis. I have no doubt that much has been written about its place in the history of the Great Depression (the Coopers lost their home to the bank, and the film was made in 1937), and still more about the film's relevance to today. But I don't care about any of that. Instead, I wonder if there have been two better performances on film than Bondi and Moore's work here. Moore's "Those places must be terrible," in reference to old age homes -- one of which he learns has been scouted out by his daughter-in-law (Fay Bainter), wife to his son George (Thomas Mitchell), with whom Lucy is staying -- is full of quietly, but barely, suppressed pain. And Bondi's whispered "I love you" as the couple takes a cab back from their last grand night out, as her husband sings an old favorite song, is as exquisitely beautiful as any delivery of those three words has ever been. And I wonder if helpless guilt has ever been more fully embodied than it is by Thomas Mitchell's George, during a crucial conversation with his mother, his body stiff and shoulders hunched, as if he's steeling himself just to get through it. Or if, as happens at the film's end, a moment of such perfect joy has ever eased so seamlessly into such crushing, inevitable sadness, in a matter of seconds.

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There's a moral to Make Way for Tomorrow, and it's stated right up front. I urge you to watch this heartbreaking film and see for yourself what it is. And then, if God willing it's not too late, heed it.

The Real, Real Truth

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In Death and the Maiden (d. Roman Polanski), Sigourney Weaver's Paulina Escobar is already angry, frustrated, and frightened when we first see her. In a dialogue-free opening, save for some radio chatter which provides plot information, we watch her as she finishes preparing dinner for her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson), but these are just the mechanics she needs to perform. As we learn, via the radio, that her husband has been appointed to head up a tribunal that will publicly try cases of torture and murder carried out by the recently overthrown dictatorship of the film's unnamed South American country, we can see Paulina's inner tremors and haunted desperation rise up, just under her skin. She was one of the tortured, and she considers the tribunal, whose goal is to merely name, not prosecute, the guilty, to be a whitewash. This is what her husband will oversee.

It gets worse. The short version is that one way or another, and for one reason or another, a man named Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley) follows Gerardo home, and Paulina recognizes the man -- or his voice, his quirks of speech, his snorting laugh -- as the man who tortured and raped her all those years ago. Soon, she's giving it back, beating Miranda, tying him up, gagging him, and putting him through any number of indignities, over Gerardo's horrified protests.

Is Miranda the man she thinks he is? This question is at the heart of Ariel Dorfman's play, on which Polanski's film is based (with a script by Dorfman and Rafael Yglesias), and it's a rather too neat way to approach questions of justice and guilt, madness and terror. The material is in danger, at every turn, of becoming schematic in its countless ambiguities, though Polanski does try to cut that with his typically perverse sense of humor ("You don't want to push him off the cliff?"), and by playing up the goofy personality of Kingsley's possible demon. It all winds up being an odd mix, but an involving one. This despite the fact that, in the end, Death and the Maiden is a filmed play, worse still a filmed modern play, which means that every five to seven minutes one character will leave the room, or ask another character to join them outside, leaving two of the three leads alone at any given time so that they can talk. Any time this happens in a filmed modern play, you can count on listening to a five to seven minute conversation -- this stuff can get as rote, structurally, as any sitcom. None of this matters if the play is especially good, or if the playwright is a master of language, but when it's only fine, as it is here, when the dialogue is merely a vehicle on which to pin bits of backstory and, I guess you'd call it characterization, well, then I think you can be excused if you choose to let the film play while you go get yourself a bowl of cereal.

Then there's the answer to it all, the real, real truth -- or not the answer, but what the characters and, rather more to the point, Dorfman and Polanski choose to do about it. The solution -- which I have to assume is Dorfman's -- is sort of insidiously gutless, and the ending is almost funny due its endless false starts. A nice shot at the very end leaves the audience something to wonder about, but the penultimate scene on the cliff is quite goony in its refusal to depict action that might have consequences. Yes, there's that shot, and those looks between characters in that shot, but we only get that because Dorfman and Polanski betray they're central character, one who betrayed not an ounce of doubt, until she was required to.

Don't Make Me Hurt You

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The question that must be answered regarding Skyline (d. The Strause Brothers) isn't whether the film is good or bad. It's bad. This much we know. The question is: how bad is it? And I'm afraid you're not going to get an answer from me, because as I watched this shamelessly derivative story of alien invasion unfold (Colin and Greg Strause don't so much nod at Spielberg's War of the Worlds as jump up and down, waving their hands feverishly, and pointing at War of the Worlds as they try not to wet their pants), I reflected on the fact that while this deeply stupid movie was critically blasted the moment it poked its head into theaters, I would much rather this rake in the hundreds of millions of dollars than something like Transformers. I mean, if a stupid movie has to be the one to make all that money, then why not Skyline?

The film is about a global catastrophe -- aliens invade the Earth and blow Los Angeles (among other cities, one assumes) all to shit, but it focuses on a small group of characters, headed by Greg Balfour, Scottie Thompson, and Donald Faison, who watch the awe-inspiring devestation from the window of Faison's (he plays a movie star) vast L. A. apartment. Like the Spielberg film, and Cloverfield, Skyline keeps its cameras well back from the action, at least at first, placing it among the distant observers. Though by no means original to the Strause Brothers, this is, I think, a wonderful technique for this kind of film, putting the audience amidst the action by keeping us far away. Much of what little success Skyline achieves can be chalked up to this (this, and to the fact that the special effects really are pretty damn good). Seeing massive, hovering spaceships and giant creatures shambling through the wreckage of L. A. essentially through the lens of a really good telescope is not that much different from how most of us experience actual catastrophes that we see reported on television, and because of this, Skyline strikes an occasional chord.

However, the film also features people saying and doing things, and this is where it all falls apart. None of the cast sparks, even a little, at any moment -- it must be said that Skyline has some of the very best shots of actors looking at things off-screen and screaming that I've seen in ages -- and the things they're made to say sometimes cross the line into embarrassing. For instance, at one point, when friends have died and our heroes are at their lowest, Scottie Thompson has to utter, with tears streaming down her face, the words "I hate L. A." Ha ha, because she thinks they're all going to die. And frankly, this is nothing compared to the actual story, the idiocy of which tends to slowly dawn on you with the same slow dread as gradually realizing you accidentally e-mailed that picture of your wang to everybody. As best I can tell, one of the many ways these aliens go about killing humans is to make them stare at a blue light. That blue light hypnotizes the person, whose eyes go white, veins darken and rise beneath their skin, and then they're sucked into the alien's...vagina face? I couldn't really tell, but anyway, they're dead afterwards. However, if something breaks your lock on that blue light, then you start to become a, in a way, sort of like a superhero. And people complain about the aliens in Signs not knowing that water is poisonous to them! But I guess I can almost see it -- staring at the blue light just long enough to get super powers, but not get killed, is the difference between getting bitten on the hand by a radioactive spider, and getting bitten in half by a radioactive shark.

In any case, this little bit of plot draws us towards the end, which has gotten some play on-line as being appealingly bonkers, but I'm not prepared to hand it that kind of credit. Foolish, yes, and crazy in an "Are you kidding me?" sort of way, but not so batshit that anyone needs to go out of their way to see it. No, by then, all of Skyline's best stuff has been left far behind, and I was left with thoughts of what might have been. What might have been could have simply been a better rip off of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, but I'd take that over Transformers or Independence Day any time. Hell, I'd take Skyline over those films as it stands. I don't care how bad it is.