Slumped

With certain life-y type situations, and moments, and what have yous, looming, I've found myself rather distracted away from not only writing on, but even thinking about, this here blog. I hasten to add, for any of you who are currently clutching at your pearls, that the life stuff that I'm referring to is nothing to get all worked up about, but as it involves surgery you can perhaps understand why my mind is elsewhere.

So that's where my head is -- or, as they say nowadays, that's where my head is located at. I just haven't felt particularly energized to write much lately, because all of my thoughts have been at least tangentially connected to getting through Wednesday, at which point I will begin two and a half weeks of work-free, medically enforced, lying around and doing nothing. It's not out of the question that, between now and then, I might actually write an actual post about something somebody might care to read, but if I don't, this is why. Similarly, after Wednesday, even though I'll be in recovery mode, I will also have a lot of free time. Mind you, I plan on reading a shitload of books and watching a pantload of movies, but one would think that all of that might inspire me, or fire a spark, or bestow upon me wings of song, so for all I know this brief lull will only preface a great blogging inferno, by which I mean the good kind of inferno. On the other hand, during at least a portion of my recovery, I will be fucked out of my shit on some mad-ass painkillers, or such is my most fervent hope. Should that turn out to be the case, I may not have it in me to post much, and if I do, please brace yourselves.

But whatever happens, this post that you are now reading is only a head's up for anybody who cares to know why the next four, five, or six days could be light on posts around here. Again, nothing to be concerned about (I have a hernia, if you must know), but it's a big enough deal to consume too much of my thinking right now. But really, don't be shocked if I post something here before Wednesday. But also don't be shocked if I don't.

Affinity #23

The Collection Project Film of the Day:
.

One form of comedy I don't particularly care for is the kind that features a central character that is not only a smart-ass, but a charming one that eventually, in one way or another, wins out in the end. My basic disdain for this sort of thing at least partially explains my ambivalence towards such Chevy Chase vehicles as Fletch and Caddyshack. The latter film is, I think, particularly overrated, and I would say it's no accident that I believe the funniest person in the whole thing, by a wide margin, is Ted Knight.

.

I think this kind of comedy tends to flatter its audience. The jibes and one-liners offered up by our central wiseass often go unnoticed as such by those around him, but since we laugh, that means we have one up on everybody. To go too far into this would inevitably lead me to explain the kind of comedy that I prefer -- which I guess would be the kind that doesn't do this -- and might even send me careening into the pit of Comedy Theory, which, I think we can all agree, is a screeching nightmare. So I won't do that. But I will boil this all down by pointing out something I've noticed, and something that is the heart of this kind of smart-ass comedy, which is: funny lines that are written to be spoken by someone who believes what they're saying is funny, are rarely funny. Meanwhile, lines that are written to be funny, but are spoken by someone who doesn't realize what they're saying, have a better shot at making it. Why this should be, I couldn't exactly say, although I would think a certain self-consciousness must play a big part. Whatever the case, if you don't find yourself agreeing with me, think back on some favorite comedies, and favorite lines, and do an informal tally. Perhaps I will be proven correct in your eyes. Perhaps I won't.

.

As with anything, there are exceptions -- Groucho, for instance. And, of course, Bill Murray. How Murray manages to skip over this pitfall is a little hard to pin down, though I would say at his best he's able to do one kind of joke while seeming to do another. Take this line from Quick Change, which Murray co-directed with Howard Franklin. Murray, as a bank robber named Grimm, has just changed out of his clown costume, in which he robbed the bank, and into a more pedestrian outfit, so that he can more easily blend in as a hostage. In describing his ordeal to the cops, he says:

.

This is what the animal said to us! He says to Ms. Cochran here: "Baby! Up your butt with a coconut!" And I think he was prepared to do it! Except I saw no coconut. He had no coconut, to my knowledge.

.

On one level, Grimm is fully aware that what he's saying is absurd, but he has to deliver it sincerely. It's a neat trick. Of course, Murray's genius doesn't always come through this kind of prism, and he obviously has often gone the straight wiseass route (see Ghostbusters). But usually, when Murray is firing on all cylinders, he's playing a wiseass, yes, but he's playing a wiseass who's an asshole. This muddying of our rooting interest can work wonders.

.

The clearest, and best, case in point is Groundhog Day (d. Harold Ramis). Here, Murray plays Phil Connor, who travels a long road from self-centered prick to sympathetic and empathetic nice guy, by way of reliving the same day, over and over and over again, for God knows how long. Early on, Connor is a funny wiseass, but part of what's funny about him is how obnoxious he is. Seeing prickishness at its most untethered can be quite the hoot, but there's no buffering layer of superiority over everybody, because we're still laughing at him. Even when he's being funny on purpose, at one level he's still the joke. And later, as Murray tries to achieve something, anything, worthwhile in his Moebius strip of a life, he begins to founder, and he's funny in a completely different way. If comic heroes -- the kind grounded in some form of reality -- succeed when the audience can laugh at some sort of universality, something they can recognize, then Phil Connor, and Groundhog Day's fantasy narrative, manage it, while Fletch, and Fletch, do not.

.

Groundhog Day even has the kind of multi-layered joke I mentioned from Quick Change, the best being Murray's under-his-breath delivery of the line "Amen", after he's just silently said a prayer for world peace before drinking with Andie MacDowell's Rita, the woman he's trying to woo by pretending to be a better person than he is. That "Amen" never fails to make me laugh, and that one word, and Murray's performance, contains at least two jokes, or at any rate two funny things.

.

And I haven't even mentioned Murray's sometimes astonishing work as an elder statesman and occasional dramatic actor (which is there in Groundhog Day anyway, and any number of other early films), nor have I brought up Ramis's The Ice Harvest, and why I think it functions as a thematic flip on Groundhog Day. For another time, then!

The Collection Project: Rotten Blood

The half-assed way in which certain classic films pay homage to their literary source material always both amuses and confuses me. In my experience, the zenith for these sorts of references was reached in Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, in which the narrator and protagonist of Robert Louis Stevenson's original story is heard being greeted off-screen, but then never appears, and is never mentioned again. Similarly, in Universal Studio and Robert Florey's 1932 adaptation of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe's brutal and bizarre chronicle of a series of murders which, it is learned, were perpetrated by an orangutan, Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, is both dismissed and represented in the form of the medical student hero named Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames, credited here as Leon Waycoff). Why Pierre? What was wrong with, at least, Auguste?

At least he's there, though, while pretty much the rest of Poe's story is gone. In the film, Poe's idea gets strained through Universal's apparent obsession with mad scientists, in this case appearing in the form of Bela Lugosi as Dr. Mirakle, a carnival showman and secret experimenter in the field of human/ape genetics. He works in the carnival for money, but his passion is finding a human female whose blood is as compatible with Erik -- Dr. Mirakle's ape -- as he can possibly find. This quest leads to the kidnapping of women, the injecting of ape blood into those women, and the eventual disposal of the women's bodies after they've died from having ape blood injected into them. After noticing the positive reaction Erik had to her when she attended their carnival performance, Mirakle soon has his eyes on Camille (Sidney Fox), believing that she will have the kind of blood he so desperately needs. As Camille is Dupin's girlfriend, the source of Mirakle's downfall is not hard to root out.

At 61 minutes, The Murders in the Rue Morgue has no more plot to summarize. The strange thing about the film is that as goofy as it is on paper (and sometimes on film, considering that Erik is presented in shadow and long-shots as a man in a vague, catch-all ape suit, and in close-up as a real chimpanzee, by way of stock footage, and referred to as a baboon), it's hard to say the film ever really steps that far wrong. It looks gorgeous, thanks to the basically infallible Karl Freund, who pulls cinematographer duties here, and it's also full of the kind of strange, and possibly not always intentional, subtexts that frequently marked Golden Age horror movies. For instance, if you check out that image posted at the top, you might see in it some of the dark sexuality that often found its way into these films, where young women in peril frequently also ended up being women bound up and strapped down.

That's Arlene Francis, by the way, and her character, and her introduction, adds a fuzzy class element to the proceedings. Dr. Mirakle finds her on a Paris bridge, watching in horror as two men engage in a knife fight (presumably over her) that ends with both their deaths. Mirakle then swoops in, pegging her as his next guinea pig, only to find later that the contents of her veins aren't what he's after. As she hangs there in his lab, near death, Mirakle rages at her, calling her blood "rotten", and "as black as your sins!" Francis's character is listed in the credits as "Woman of the Streets", and Camille is of a noticeably higher social tier than she -- so what, exactly, are Mirakle's criteria for his blood? To Mirakle, Erik, his ape, is every bit as human as these people he so despises, but perhaps, following a thought process that might be considered counter-intuitive in a person who would think like this in the first place, the people from whom blood should be poached, the people who most closely resemble our nearest animal neighbors, are the people live farthest from the wild.

Then, of course, there's the Scopes Monkey Trial, which would have been a mere seven years old when Florey's film was released. Poe's story (which was first published in 1841) could be seen to be about the dangers of a non-human pretending to be human, having learned only the most superficial behavior from a distance. As this danger leads to violent death (and one of Poe's uncomfortably imaginative murders does make its way into this film), Poe's orangutan could be a stand-in for amoral, sociopathic killers throughout history. But Poe would not have had Darwin available when he wrote his story, and while Darwin is not mention in the film, Dr. Mirakle does tell his carnival audience that humans are descended from apes like his friend Erik. These remarks are met with cries of "Heresy!" and, indeed, Mirakle is not only never able to prove his own lunatic version of Darwin, but he eventually meets his end at Erik's hands. The Scopes trial didn't sit terribly well with everybody, after all, as you might be aware. Then again, Erik still has his eyes on the decidedly human Camille, and hauls her along on his frantic escape, which, you know, sort of brings to mind Cooper and Schoedsack's King Kong, which was, at the time, still a year away.

It's amazing what they used to be able to cram into 61 minutes, isn't it?

Contagion

SPOILERS ABOUND!!

Breck Eisner's The Crazies was met with enough critical warmth that I started to think that it might actually be pretty good. Shows what a sucker I am, because the film is actually quite startlingly free of any kind of imagination, or even respect for its own scenario. Or, okay, not its own scenario, as it's a remake of George Romero's 1973 film of the same name, a film I'm also not overly keen on. However, there are moments in the Romero film I can at least look back on with admiration, while Eisner's take is like watching someone date-stamp a stack of incoming mail. You know precisely what they're doing, but have no idea why you would want to watch it.
.
The Crazies, both versions, is a plague story -- more specifically, it's a quarantine story, and it is on this level that I want to focus. To dispense with the plot summary first: a bunch of people in a small rural town start to go unaccountably crazy, violently so, and the military swoops in to cordon off the joint, and to ruthlessly gun down anyone who tries to break their quarantine. Our heroes (Timothy Olyphant as the sheriff; Radha Mitchell as his wife; Danielle Panabaker as Mitchell's young friend and co-worker; Joe Anderson as Olyphant's deputy) are horrified by the brutality of this new prison-town that has sprung up around them, and seek to escape, both the military and the "crazies". So that's your story. There is much blood.
.
My problem -- my main problem, because there are others -- is with the whole genre itself, or at least the way it's so often executed. Generally, and certainly in this film, filmmakers lazily settle on a black-and-white presentation for what should be a profoundly gray scenario. Just once I'd like to see a plague movie where one of the soldiers tasked with gunning down the civilians who seek to escape the quarantine take a break, rip off that goddamn gas mask, and break down sobbing. Instead, the portrayal of these characters is that of heartless automatons (often, a token "nice one" is thrown in, but in The Crazies remake, even that guy's niceness is burdened with some pretty big qualifiers) who at best thoughtlessly aim their weapon at a fleeing housewife and pull the trigger, and at worst find their inner bloodlust awakened by the job they've been handed.
.
And why, might I ask, should it be assumed that our rooting interest always be with those who would break the quarantine? If they succeed, then they could very well be spreading these highly contagious and always deadly diseases to millions of other people. That's the entire reason the quarantines -- in film and in reality -- are in place. That's also the reason the fleeing housewives are being gunned down, but Eisner and his screenwriters have no interest in engaging with the logic of the story, or of their characters. The truth is that he heroes of these films, the Timothy Olyphants of the world, are usually mind-bogglingly selfish -- it is their safety that counts, and that of their loved ones. The rest of humanity can, quite honestly, fuck off. And it's not as though I don't understand the impulse to flee, but if these possibly disease-ridden people (and it's always the case that at least one of these heroes that have grouped themselves together actually does have the disease) gets shot in the head, am I supposed to think the solider holding the gun did something horribly wrong? Horrible, yes, but wrong? How many people did he just save with that bullet?
.
As I say, it's a profoundly gray scenario, but almost nobody wants to engage with that side of it. Most often, they latch on to the "we are the real monsters!" idea (this is the idea on which Romero has built at least the second half of his career, and has also tried to retroactively apply to all the films he made before he thought it up), that not only means fuck-all in general, but usually means fuck-all within the very narrow confines of the individual movie. In The Crazies, as in many other similar films, the reasons for the quarantine, and the seemingly callous actions needed to keep it secure, are so plain that the filmmakers never even need to explain them (and they probably wouldn't if they thought they had to), but the story unspools as though it didn't matter. This person was shot, and that's bad. What's going through the mind of the man who pulled the trigger, or of those who gave the order for him to pull the trigger, are irrelevant.
.
One recent film did actually address these issues, whether or not anyone wants to acknowledge it, and that film (today's Collection Project Film of the Day) is 28 Weeks Later (d. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo). In this sequel to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, London is recovering from the "rage virus" that eviscerated the city in the earlier film. A quarantine has been set up, but one that, due to time and increasing resources, is able to be more gentle and communal. But strict rules apply: no one is allowed to travel into the parts of London that are outside the borders of the quarantine. When someone does, two children, early in the film, what happens? They bring the virus back inside. The military discovers this breach before the children make it back, but they are not heartlessly gunned down, as those trigger-happy madmen in The Crazies would no doubt have done. As a result, though, and as I say, the virus is back inside, and it spreads, and all hell breaks loose, to the point where the military has to open fire on a swarming pack of civilians, because if any of them gets out, and goes on the run, they will be spreading doom all across Europe.
.
And guess what? That's exactly what happens. When both 28 Weeks Later and The Crazies were first released, I heard much talk about the political nature of both films, and the commentary on the way we live now, but I'm not sure anyone who made those nebulous points were considering the fact that, in 28 Weeks Later, the military is absolutely correct. It is because they are defeated that we see rage-infested people shrieking past the Eiffel Tower in the last shot. The people who escaped at the end of 28 Weeks Later were, ostensibly, the characters we were rooting for, and they succeeded. And look where it got us.
.


PS - I freely adapted, to the point of quoting outright, this post from comments I left over at Arbogast on Film. If you read any of this over there, then I am profoundly sorry.

The Collection Project: When it All Makes Sense

I was feeling rather lumpish last night, both physically and mentally, when suddenly, very late at night, I found myself thinking about the Coen brothers. This, in itself, is not noteworthy. If you and I were to play the "What are You Thinking?" game (that's a game, right?), and you guessed I was thinking about the Coen brothers, you'd probably be right, and sometimes I feel like this blog is just one or two posts away from turning into a full-blown Coens fansite. We're not there yet, but look, right now you're reading one of those very posts.
.
The specific Coens film I found myself contemplating was Burn After Reading, from 2008. Not enormously well-loved by critics or audiences at the time, which is something the film has in common with The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading has subsequently failed to develop any kind of strong cult following, which is something the film does not have in common with The Big Lebowski. This strange little black comedy seems to have mildly befuddled or slightly disappointed just about everybody, a reaction heightened, no doubt, by the fact that it followed their top-to-bottom triumph of No Country for Old Men. Personally, I view Burn After Reading as every bit a part of their creative renaissance (for lack of a less stupid phrase, and in comparison to Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, two not-bad films that nevertheless cast die-hards like myself into a state of gloomy concern) as that previous film and their eventual follow-up, A Serious Man. In the same way that Fargo's break-out success slightly confused me -- it's a great movie, but what was it about that one that critics and audiences felt was missing from their earlier work? -- the indifferent backing away that greeted Burn After Reading's release continues to leave me puzzled. Do people still really not know what to expect from the Coen brothers? Or I suppose most people could simply not find the film's collection of selfish, deluded, even stupid, characters, mixed with a few bursts of shocking violence, not all that funny, but, again, if you're a fan going in, what's leaving you cold?
.
I'm not really asking those questions, by the way (though feel free to answer!); I'm merely registering my befuddlement. And besides, it's quite possible I know the answer, which is that Burn After Reading is one of the most sublimely (to me) pointless film I've ever seen. None of the major characters -- the disgraced CIA analyst (John Malkovich); the pair of moronic gym employees (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt); their lonely, love-stricken boss (Richard Jenkins); the cocky, unfaithful, practically meat-headed US Marshal (George Clooney) -- have any clue, at any time, what they're doing, or what anyone else is doing, or why any of this is happening -- and it's well worth mentioning that the core reason any of this is happening is that Malkovich decided to angrily quit his job and write his entirely worthless memoirs. Each character gets lost in his or her own motives and wants (as opposed to needs), each has decided, incorrectly, that he or she is smart, and all but one of them loses out in the end, to the point that three of them die violently. For no good goddamn reason at all.
.
In that way, Burn After Reading is of a piece with earlier Coens films like their intentionally less funny (but still sometimes intentionally funny) debut, Blood Simple, whose plot is also dependent on all the main players being utterly clueless about what's going on. In that film, cluelessness also leads to some pretty nasty violence, but not only is Blood Simple less funny, it also, like pretty much all dark crime films, comes pre-burdened (which I don't mean as a knock) with a cosmic message -- something along the lines of "Look what behaving in this way and/or associating with these people gets you." Plus, fate. Similarly, The Big Lebowski is as absurd and meaningless in its plotting as Burn After Reading, but Lebowski has a great deal of heart, which the later film is almost completely lacking. I say "almost", because I don't see how one can be fully immune to the disappointment, sadness, and touching guile of, respectively, the Malkovich (I'm thinking of his early scenes, mainly), Jenkins and Pitt characters, but the fates of those three are not only similar in their completeness, let's say, but in the way the Coens practically gloss over them. The result being that one doesn't walk away from Burn After Reading mourning those lost, so much as thinking "That was pretty messed up."
.
Of all the complaints against a film, or any work of art, that particularly grate on me, the one I hear most often is "It had no point." The idea that a film, or a story, needs to have a specific "point" for it to be deemed good, or in any way worthwhile, is about as short-sighted as you can get, and this perhaps accounts for the mass indifference that greeted Burn After Reading, because, as I say, it is entirely pointless. It's a film whose story initially flows out of the offices of the CIA, but it's not a political film. It contains criminal acts, including murder, but has no message, no insight into criminal behavior or psychology, or clear satirical point of view. It's just a bunch of shit that happens, because a bunch of people weren't paying attention. And I think the ultimate summarization of Burn After Reading's towering absurdism is this quote from Joel Coen, describing the film:
.
It's sort of about the Central Intelligence Agency, and physical fitness, and what happens when those two worlds collide.
.

The Collection Project: Firewall

[Massive spoilers follow]

What I’d planned to do today was write up my thoughts on Ang Lee and James Schamus’s sprawling, complex Civil War epic Ride with the Devil, but then I saw those words “sprawling” and “complex”, and I was like “I don’t know about that!” Seriously, who needs that on a Wednesday?

.
Thankfully, over on “The Facebooks”, I brought up the Lee film, and through a series of merry mishaps it was confused by one of my friends, who shall remain anonymous, with Jack Starret's Race with the Devil, the Satanic biker/road/chase movie, starring Lara Parker, Loretta Swit, Peter Fonda, and, far more importantly, Warren Oates. I have to admit that I have a pretty strong fondness for this film – I like its straightforward B-movie ambitions, its reasonably unique blending of the horror and chase genres, as well as the fact that the film is set (possibly for budgetary reasons) in the country, but not in the Deliverance type of country often favored by Hollywood, but rather the more common kind that has libraries and schools. So our heroes, a group of middle-aged, swingin’ 70s types on a long road trip in their motor home, should feel plenty at home in the decidedly non-alien environs where they often find themselves, but, after witnessing a Satanic human sacrifice, they’re not at home, or safe, anywhere.
.
It’s a fun movie. Warren Oates is in it, you know, so let’s not forget that, and it has a nice pace, and, at least occasionally, a pretty strong sense of dread and despair. I like movies where people find themselves being relentlessly assaulted, their lives constantly at risk, because they turned their heads the wrong way, and saw something they never would have chosen to see. If handled properly, this basic idea – that in the wink of an eye, someone or something might decide to kill you, and might stop at nothing to do so, and you can be as blameless as an infant, but it won’t matter and ounce – can carry you over any number of missteps. It’s a powerful idea.
.
One misstep that this well-executed idea will not carry you over, however, is a shit ending, and Race with the Devil unfortunately has one. Oates and Co. have just come out the other side of an intense road battle with the rolling coven of Satanists, and they’ve done so relatively unscathed. Everyone is giddy with relief. But then one thing leads to another, and with the typical tacked-on grimness common to the genre and the era, the film ends with the motor home pulling to a stop in a grassy field, only to suddenly be surrounded by a not-very-high rectangle of flames. Everyone panics, and we see yet more Satanists marching implacably towards them. And, it is implied, a slaughter of our heroes will ensue.
.
Okay, so, two questions: 1) How in the heck did the Satanists know exactly where Oates and Co. would park their motor home? They had to set up their Rectangle of Fire booby trap before hand, and the success of that plan would be dependent on knowing where, in an unmarked field of grass, they were going to park.
.
2) Why the fuck can’t they just drive the motor home through the flames? Do they think fire is made out of metal? Because it’s not. Maybe in the 1970s they thought that’s what fire was made out of. People used to be stupid, after all. It’s like in Moby-Dick, when Herman Melville keeps insisting that whales are fish, not mammals. I guess I just thought Peter Fonda was a little bit smarter than Herman Melville.

Bluebeard Devours Everything

.

In a fascinating interview, conducted by Glenn Kenny, on the topic of her film Bluebeard, Catherine Breillat says, partly in reference to the enormous disparity in size between her lead actors:

.

The film is also a tale about the superiority...of the grace...of young women over the power of colossal men.

.

Well, sure it is -- in Breillat's version of Charles Perrault's 17th century fairy tale, Bluebeard (the extraordinary, in pretty much all cinematic senses of the word, Dominique Thomas) is, indeed, massive. I don't know the man's physical dimensions, but next to his most common screen partner here, the whispy Lola Créton as Marie-Catherine, Bluebeard's child bride, Thomas appears to be about 9'4", 582 pounds. And yet Bluebeard, the monster of folklore, who is no less monstrous in this film (yet also strangely, and intriguingly, gentle), is utterly defeated by her, bowing to her every whim, which include putting off sexual intercourse until she's some few years older, as well as giving her the opportunity -- and I'm going to be cagey here -- to tie up some loose ends, at a time when it would really be in Bluebeard's best interest to finally learn to say "No!"

.

However, I think a key word in that Breillat quote above is "also", because her film is as primal, mysterious, simple, and bizarre as the best fairy tales always are. The basic story -- a young woman from a newly poor family is married off to Lord Bluebeard, a huge and powerful man who, it is rumored, habitually marries and then murders women -- can easily be read as a class-tinged showdown between good and evil, which it is. But Breillat contrasts the fairy tale with other scenes, set in the 20th century, of two young girls exploring their home's attic, and eventually settling in to read Perrault's story. The decision to read it is made by Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites), against the wishes of her older sister, Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti). Marie-Anne says the story scares her, and that she's too sensitive to the violence, but Catherine is hilariously, and eventually a bit uncomfortably, gleeful about the story's luridness, and she seems to practically know it by heart.

.

These scenes of the two young sisters weave into the fairy tale bulk of Breillat's film, not just because it offers a sort of meta-fictional commentary (the young girls are named Marie-Anne and Catherine; Bluebeard's bride is Marie-Catherine, and her own sister is name Anne, played byDaphné Baiwir) on our own distance from a tale as well-known as Perrault's is, but also by simultaneously depicting how the "reader" can get lost in what they know full well is fiction.

.

This last idea is executed towards the end, at a time when the real darkness of Bluebeard has begun to kick in, and when Breillat has amped up her own brand of strangeness. What the sequence achieves (and notice how I'm taking such great pains to not describe it, but if you know anything about Bluebeard's hook, you might guess what this scene involves) is not just a folding together of Breillat's two threads, but foreshadows her alarming climax, and its hints of subconscious, sociopathic violence that can be tucked away inside, well, who knows who. Anybody.

.

But I don't want to go too far with all the above mumbo-jumbo, because Bluebeard is, ultimately, a rich, moody bit of strangeness that shouldn't be explained too cleanly or too readily. At its strongest, it achieves the primal, narrative grip of the Perraults and the Grimms and the Andersens of centuries ago.

The Collection Project Film of the Day:

.

I'm going to cheat again (I said I was going to do this from time to time) and simply link to an old post, one about a film that is also about a powerful man, whose powers, nevertheless, fall shorter than he'd like when applied to a supposedly defenseless woman -- it's Otto Preminger's divisive (check out the comments!) Whirlpool. Here's an excerpt! To entice you!

.

But this film is a bit more than the above. There is a dark sexuality to Whirlpool that, while fairly plain to see, is not actually dealt with as part of the narrative, making the whole thing all the more interesting. When Korvo initially takes Ann out for dinner, he makes a self-deprecating reference to his own less-than-pleasing physical appearance. Later, at the cocktail party, Korvo takes Ann into an empty room and hypnotizes her, with her permission. While hypnotized, Korvo is able to get Ann to perform a couple of innocuous tasks before having her take a seat, holding out his hand to her, and saying, "Take my hand, Ann." But, even hypnotized, she won't do it, and a cloud of shame and anger and disgust passes over Ferrer's face that indicates both the limits of his hypnotic abilities, and what he'd do if those abilities were stronger. An amoral man who believes himself to be ugly will do just about anything to be with a woman as beautiful as Gene Tierney.