A Bird of Rarest-Spun Heaven Metal

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That's how I'll be flying to New York tomorrow. I think that's what those things are called, but anyway, yes, off to New York I go until Sunday, so things'll be quiet around here until at least Monday, if not Tuesday (or Wednesday). Feel free to poke around the archives in my absence and laugh at my many errors and occasionally jaw-dropping overuse of parentheses.

Also, the first post upon my return will, I hope, feature a new look for The Kind of Face You Hate. I'm actually perfectly happy with the current look, but I'm told by my old pal and confidant Greg Ferrara that my recent and deeply infuriating formatting problems might stem from the fact that I'm using an old template or something. Being the kind of fellow he is, he offered his kind assistance to me, a computer illiterate (basically, anyhow), and since he already designed my banner, I said sure. AND THEN I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT! But I plan to, and Greg, if you're out there, sorry I haven't contacted you, but we'll do this thing soon. Thanks again!

And thank you all very much (in my head, I said that like Dean Learner) for your patronage or whatever reading blogs is called. I shall see you all anon.

Broken Nose Can't Kill You

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The oft-cited tonal shift that occurs roughly halfway through Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, which has a thoroughly sparkling Criterion release set for May 10, is rather strikingly illustrated by the following series of images. While not exactly temporally equidistant from each other, you can nevertheless see how the film begins as a light, off-kilter romantic comedy...

...featuring Jeff Daniels in goofy mode as Charlie Driggs, a white collar type with a secret penchant for petit larceny, and the ever-airy-voiced Melanie Griffith as Lulu (or Audrey, depending on where you are in the film), an aggressively quirked and sexual young woman who pins Charlie on that larceny business and seduces him not only into bed but onto the road, where the two drink and commit various effervescent misdemeanors. It's hard at first to sympathize with Charlie, who we're told is married and has kids, who we have no reason to believe are terrible people. Yet boy he sure fell into bed with Lulu without a moments hesitation or guilt.

At any rate, those misdemeanors are committed with various levels of recklessness, and can't help but draw the attention of folks like the fellow below, played by John Sayles...

...which gives the film a certain amount of suspense, even if you happen to be rooting for the cops, as I kinda sorta was. Demme's film, however, is one of two distinct halves, and once Ray Liotta as Lulu's husband Ray, who's the kind of guy who is serious about the crimes he commits, and makes Charlie and Lulu look like pikers, arrives on the scene, the violent force of his character brings new information to light while simulatenously ratcheting up the suspense, darkening Demme and DP Tak Fujimoto's previously bright 1980s palette, and leading where, one does not know...

Not quite the frivolous, loosening-up-the-square road comedy we started with, Something Wild is loose and exact in its details, which was typical of Demme in this period, and it's as diverse as his filmography. He preceded Something Wild with both Swing Shift, starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, and his famous Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense in 1984, and followed it first with another, but quite different concert film, Swimming to Cambodia with Spalding Gray, various TV projects, and then back to colorful comedies with 1988's Married to the Mob.

Apart from proving to me that it can pay to stick with movies that annoy you (twice before, I was so put off by what I judged to be the film's solipsism that I turned it off before Liotta even showed up), Something Wild, and all 1980s Demme films really, stands as a bit of a time capsule for a particular kind of American film. The sunniness of the whole thing, in contrast to some of what's taking place on the ground, is part of it, but so is seeing the name "Tak Fujimoto" in the credits (a name I first noticed on Demme's The Silence of the Lambs), and the appearance of people like Charles Napier and, even more to the point, Kenneth Utt. The late Kenneth Utt was Demme's producing partner, and he had cameos in several of the movies he not only directed -- in Something Wild he plays the "Dad" of "Mom & Dad's", a restaurant Charlie and Lulu eat in -- but produced as well, most notably George Armitage's Miami Blues, in which Utt plays a stone-face (well, of course) but apparently grieving Hare Krishna, attended to, in a half-assed sort of a way, by Det. Hoke Mosely, played by Fred Ward, whose partner, Bill Henderson, is played by Charles Napier.

I started noticing Utt everywhere in the 80s, or anyway that's how it felt. He almost never said a word, but you don't forget a face like that. Him, and Napier, and Demme, and Fujimoto, they all seemed to be, and were, joined at the hip, and it was like a little get together every time they all showed up in the credits for the same film. A get together then, a time capsule now.

Got Down On My Knees

.Here's what a dope I am. When I first saw Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express back in college, I thought it was -- and this is a paraphrase of my thoughts, but nevertheless very accurate -- "Good, but slow." I think the deal, or my deal, was that if this is a movie about cops, why weren't they shooting more bad guys? In general, I still think shooting bad guys is a vital part of a good cop movie, but my mistake in college was to think of Chungking Express as a cop movie, which it isn't. It's a movie with cops in it, yes, but that's a very different thing. What Chungking Express actually is, is a film -- or two films, really, as Wong tells two different and only lightly connected stories -- very much like what Hollywood and some of your quirkier indie types have been trying, and failing, to make for about the past decade or more.
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What was so surprising to me on rewatching the film last night is the realization that the first story, which features Takeshi Kaneshiro as a cope named He Qiwu (or "233", after his badge number) lamenting the end of his relationship with a girl named May and his crossing of paths with a shady woman with drug connections played by Brigitte Lin, is a light thriller, and the other story, featuring Tony Leung as a cop angling in on, and then retreating from a romance with a stewardess (Valerie Chow) while never noticing the cute goofy girl (Faye Wong) who works at the food stand he frequents, is a romantic comedy. The fact that Chungking Express is a beloved (and rightly so) arthouse film that has been Criterionized while similar such American-made films tend to feature Jennifer Aniston and Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher and all that kind of thing, is I guess we'll say an interesting one.
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None of this is to say that Chungking Express is typical of either the light thriller or the romantic comedy, but of course that's sort of my point. Wong's film is a curiously mesmerizing piece of work, curious because the source of that mesmerism is hard to track. It's instantaneous, at any rate, as the pulsing, noirish music at the beginning, paired with Kaneshiro's opening narration, somehow submerges you into Chungking Express's particular environment, one that is not only alien to most Westerners, but would be curious to most Hong Kong natives, representing as it does, according to Tony Rayns on his Criterion disc commentary, "old Hong Kong". All of which seems to be setting up a quite different film than we get. While Brigitte Lin's mysteriously bewigged and be-sunglassed woman is indeed involved in crime, and is being chased even, and even shoots people, most of the first story is given over to Kaneshiro, a cop who doesn't see much crime, and his hope that by buying 30 cans of pineapple, one a day, each with an expiration date of May (after his ex, named May) 1st, which would mark the one month anniversary of their split on April 1st, she would somehow come back to him before he reached 30 cans, or their love will have expired with the pineapple.

This, you will agree, is simply unbearable quirk, as is Tony Leung's habit, in the second story, of talking to his possessions -- bars of soap, stuffed animals, washcloths. As is Faye Wong's habit of playing "California Dreamin'" by the Mamas & the Papas over and over and over and over and over and over again. And over and over again. This is the kind of quirk that earns indie romantic comedies a quick swift in the teeth. Right? Except, no, not in the case of Chungking Express. That's what I find so strange about the film. How does Wong make this stuff work? In the case of the first story, there's an element of real danger, which I guess helps, and in the second story both Tony Leung and Faye Wong are effortlessly charismatic (Tony Leung in particular has an immense presence, without needing to do anything at all). And as far as insufferable hippie bullshit goes, "California Dreamin'" is actually pretty good. So there's all that in the film's favor. But I think the real key, or as best I can guess at it anyway, to Wong's ability to bring this stuff across, stuff that in other hands would turn the film into a shrieking nightmare, is that he simply makes no big deal about it. The pineapple thing, for instance, is very important, but is treated in an almost off-hand manner. Not only that, but after a while its essential absurdity is duly noted. Similarly Leung talking to soap and all that...it's just a funny thing he does. Its not forced on us because Wong is desperate to make us love the guy. And also that: there's no desperation in Chungking Express, not in the filmmaking. It's all cool and easy and enthralling. And it looks a treat, too, having been filmed by Christopher Doyle and Andrew Lau as it was, who never quite let go of the noirish blues or the neon reds and yellows of Hong Kong nightclubs.

It's just amusing to me that Chungking Express is this arthouse darling of a movie, a designation that implies something Wong's film isn't (but other Wong films are). What Chungking Express is, is a good movie. When people say "That was a good movie", they're referring to Chungking Express.

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TIFF Lightbox will be screening Chungking Express tomorrow and running through the 27th. On the 23rd, the Lightbox will be hosting a conversation with Christopher Doyle (not accompanied by a screening of the film, as I'd mistakenly reported earlier). If you're willing and able -- and you should at least be that first one -- I suggest checking it out.

Affinity #26

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One of the true poets working in documentary film -- in fact, along with his friend Werner Herzog, perhaps the only documentary filmmaker who has poetry as one of his primary goals -- Errol Morris had created a short series of striking but roughly naturalistic films before cresting a wave with 1988's The Thin Blue Line, a film which is not only haunting in its aesthetics, and bold in its use of recreations, but also did the one thing that more exhaustingly polemical documentarians (which by my count includes pretty much all the rest of the ones who are currently working) desperately want but never actually achieve, which is that it affected a tangible change in his subject (that is, Randall Adams, the man wrongly imprisoned for murdering a police officer, received a new trial and was released based on what Morris's film revealed).

Morris has followed that up with Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and a short-lived but fascinating documentary TV series called First Person. All are imminently worthy, but Mr. Death, with its wry, but somehow mournful evisceration of one man's delusion, is my favorite. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, however, really plumbs the depths of Morris's intellect -- the way he edits the varying stories of four men with unusual interests and professions so that the words of one occasionally overlap and comment on imagery associated with another, is at times exhilarating. So exhilarating that when I first saw it, one image, of a horse's poised fetlock -- which matches the story of an animal trainer featured in the film -- is accompanied by another of Morris's subjects speaking on the nature of animals and humans and intelligence in a way that made me say something along the lines of "Holy crap."

Morris keeps going, thank God, keeping the documentary form alive and breathing while the collected mass of films with a sermon to preach listed as job number one fight an occasionally winning battle to keep it sterile and smug. Morris's basically niche profile was at least briefly raised after he won an Oscar for 2003's fascinating The Fog of War about Robert McNamara, but Morris is too odd and restlessly intellectual -- even when I think he's full of hooey -- for that profile to stay raised for long. This stuff comes and goes, though, and is ultimately ephemeral. Still, though, I wish his time in the spotlight had lasted long enough to bring about a DVD rerelease of A Brief History of Time, his amazing 1991 film about Stephen Hawking. Ah well. Surely that must be on the horizon. Right? Right??

They Hang People for This

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Watching, for the first time, the narrative revelation that almost immediately precedes this shot in the Coen brothers' Barton Fink is alarming, or was so to me. The film popped up on cable last night, and I turned it on right as Barton (John Turturro) is preparing to bed down for the night with the person who, the following morning, will form the crux of the aforementioned revelation, and I remembered in some vague way how I first reacted when I saw the film in 1991. Confusion and disbelief about sum it up, but later, when Barton asks Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), who lives down the hall, to come to his, Barton's, room, I suddenly had a flash to what I thought at this moment in 1991, which was: "When Charlie goes in there, [REDACTED] won't be there anymore." Though I was only a fledgling movie fan at the time, I'd already been conditioned to expect that kind of reverse as standard operating procedure. But if you've seen the film, you know that [REDACTED] was, indeed, still there, and that from that point on, all bets were off.

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Narrative left-turns are a bit of a dying art. Among the less imaginative, they have transformed into twist endings, which have a different impact that left-turns. Twists, even when they're effective, tend to be approached -- and this is taking as a given the unlikely possibility that you're watching the movie unaware that a twist is involved -- as a means to subvert a fairly traditional story, or add another meaning or shade or whatever. Though too often used as an example when talking about these sorts of things, The Sixth Sense fits what I mean, because, while a good film, it follows a fairly standard, which is not necessarily to say predictable, path, working as both a ghost story and a kind of detective story until the twist. Even a twist as goony as Sleepaway Camp (and I see that I'm getting further and further away from Barton Fink...) doesn't redirect the story in any way. It's a note of pure lunacy, but it's not unlike amending the joke "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side" by adding "Plus also the chicken had a dick."

Barton Fink is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, though. What Barton wakes up to is actually what he wakes up to. The repurcussions of what that discovery implies follow a logical path (well, more or less, and up to a point), but what the Coens have announced at that moment -- and I'm pegging that moment not as the moment Barton makes the discovery, but rather when Charlie sees the same thing and confirms to the audience that [REDACTED] ain't going anywhere -- is that you, the viewer, have not seen this story before. Polanski and Hammett influences notwithstanding, you won't be able to guess where we leave you once the credits start to roll. And damned if they ain't right. Barton Fink surprises. Few films do that. Few films reach a point where the audience asks itself "What could possibly happen now? What does this mean? Where is this going?"

And where does Barton Fink go?

Who saw that coming?

Lumet

. Sidney Lumet, who died yesterday at the age of 86, was and is a very important filmmaker to me. Along with Hitchcock, Kurosawa and, of course, Spielberg, Lumet was one of the first directors I knew by name. Roughly speaking, it began with my dad's appreciation (I won't say love, because I don't remember the film coming up all that often) of 12 Angry Men, which was rented on day, and watched by many in my family, and at a fairly young age I was held in that film's grip, and shocked that I was, because 12 Angry Men is black and white and nobody shoots anybody else, and it's all just twelve guys in a room arguing. It has just now occurred to me that this was at the very least an early indicator of my love of dialogue as a part of writing, as a form in and of itself.

My dad carried the torch for Lumet still further -- though since he didn't care about filmmaking, as such, I doubt my dad knew Lumet, though he liked several of his films -- by introducing his sons to Dog Day Afternoon. Primarily, the interest for him was that he knew at least one of the FBI agents involved in the actual case, but also how right the film got it, how deeply it understood not just the bank robbers played by Al Pacino and John Cazale, but also the cops, represented primarily by Charles Durning, and how this situation, a bank robbery turned hostage situation, was completely new -- there was no book to go by. Dog Day Afternoon amazed me then and amazes me still (12 Angry Men less so, because even though I still love it, it's clear that too many of Henry Fonda's arguments are complete nonsense; he'd argue for acquittal if the accused's story was anything short of "I was framed by Sasquatch"). It's relentlessly suspenseful and entertaining, and deeply human, but never easy. However you might want to Monday-morning-quarterback it, Durning's Sgt. Moretti is working his ass off to save those hostages.

Lumet made films about the law his whole career. Quite often his film's were set within the world of law enforcement and courtrooms. Lumet knew precincts and judges' chambers better than anybody. Even lesser films like Find Me Guilty take on an authenticity amidst the goofiness any time Ron Silver's judge opens his mouth, or retires to chambers. It was Lumet's drive in these films to find justice within the mess of the judicial system, to find its reason for being still intact somewhere. As a result, he regularly made films about corruption, most famously in Serpico, but also Prince of the City, Night Falls on Manhattan, and the deeply underrated Q&A from 1990, a wild, violent story of morality that features one of Nick Nolte's best performances. Even 12 Angry Men is about corruption, in the sense that an ostensibly fair system can be unconsciouly thwarted by the individuals who've been tasked to carry out the job.

As with any prolific and long-lasting professional filmmaking career, Lumet's was one of peaks and valleys. One of his best films, The Verdict, manages to simultaneously be grim, even unforgiving, and crowd-pleasing, but look at the films that bookend it: Deathtrap, Prince of the City, Just Tell Me What You Want on one side, Daniel, Garbo Talks and Power on the other. This is by no means intended as a comment on quality, but taking into account how is success gets defined in terms reputation, fairly or unfairly, Lumet had a number of dry spells. His last film, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, was considered something of a, you know, enormous comeback for him, and a surprising one. I've been following Lumet's career as long as I've been able, and even I was surprised by that one. Flawed as I find it, I, for whatever reason, did not expect a film that was, by turns, that blunt and elegantly nasty from Lumet, not by then. I'm ashamed to admit now that post-Verdict Lumet felt less to me like Q&A and more like Guilty as Sin.

But Lumet's the kind of director that gets taken for granted. The credit for Network is given entirely to Paddy Chayefsky, for instance, The Verdict is a movie that Paul Newman should have won an Oscar for, and Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico are, for too many people, Al Pacino films. Yet Lumet had an astonishly rich and varied career. He made Long Day's Journey into Night and The Wiz, for Christ's sake, and if one actor should be held up as Lumet's guy, it's not Pacino, with whom he only made two films, but Sean Connery, with whom he made five, films which, at their best, not only represented interesting shifts for Lumet, ramshackle and stylized as they are, but Connery as well (did Connery ever again, or before, play a role quite like Det. Johnson in The Offence?). Sidney Lumet was a professional filmmaker, it was his job, and he was great at it. As Michael Gough's recent passing snipped another thread to the past, so does Lumet's. The pros are all dying.

Carla Gugino Only Wants One Thing...

. ...and that's for me to get back to blogging! Soon, honey britches...soon.