Expressive Esoterica

Academy Award Nominees of 1982: Bizarro World Edition

2012-02-04T19:09:00.005-05:00

I haven't seen enough 2011 movies to adequately rant about their selections, but I'm sure the usual reservations apply. I actually don't have major problems with the Academy per se, which is what it is and functions fine and somewhat amusingly as the industry's very own employee-of-the-month award show, than the continued popular perception that the awards have some direct correlation to what actually constitute the most interesting movies in any given year (see Bill 'he don't play bass' Wyman's recent piece of asinity here, in which the Spielberg relative paucity of best director nominations is taken to mean something, for a prime example of this pernicious line of thinking) . So as an amusing time-waster, I'm in the habit of constructing my own alternate academy awards for years' past, conjuring up a nomination slate that mirrors my own tastes and includes some overlap along with a fair share of nominees who would surely cause the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to implode if they ever set foot inside. My only concession to Academy standards is to limit myself largely to Anglo-American cinema, an abominable restriction that nevertheless makes the whole project slightly more manageable. And as with the academy, token exceptions are made on a wholly random basis.

So since I can't actually construct my own 2011 slate just yet, I've decided to settle for a revision of the 1981 academy awards - the year Chariots of Fire managed to win best picture (after Roger Ebert propelled it to international attention by inventing to wholly fictitious American Critics Prize at Cannes and then reporting that Chariots, a movie he loved but which left most everyone else shrugging their shoulders). For those gnashing their teeth about how the Academy has lost its touch with the common should note that Chariots, while no flop, was hardly the populist choice, nor the critical favorite, I believe, for very many people aside from Ebert. It's almost an ideal representative for Academy middle-brow conservatism, as are many of the rest of the nominees such as On Golden Pond, Reds, and Ragtime. So the occasional hand-wringing about how the Academy somehow lost its way and made a recent turn toward insularity and aesthetic conservatism don't know what the fuck they're talking. 1981 is a fun year to challenge precisely because it so perfectly epitomizes the Academy's preferences and blind spots.

For the curious, here's a complete list of that year's nominees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/54th_Academy_Awards

Limiting myself to the Academy's options, my preferences among the major categories (plus best original score) are as follows (asterix indicates places where the Academy and I agreed on the best nominee):

Best Picture: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Best Actor: Burt Lancaster, Atlantic City

Best Actress: Susan Sarandon, Atlantic City (note: I have not seen Marsha Mason in Only When I Laugh)

Best Supporting Actor: John Gielgud, Arthur* (note: I have not seen James Coco in Only When I Laugh)

Best Supporting Actress: Maureen Stapleton, Reds* (note: have not seen Joan Hackett in -yep, you guessed it - Only When I Laugh)

Best Director: Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark

Best Original Screenplay: John Guare, Atlantic City

Best Adapted Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen and Sidney Lumet, Prince of the City

Best Cinematography: Alex Thomson, Excalibur

Best Original Score: John Williams, Raiders of the Lost Ark

Now, for my own alternate nominees.

Best Picture
Escape from New York
Polyester
The Road Warrior
They All Laughed
Thief

Best Actor
Albert Brooks, Modern Romance
James Caan, Thief
Divine, Polyester
Harrison Ford, Raiders of the Lost Ark
Ben Gazzara, They All Laughed

Best Actress
Karen Allen, Raiders of the Lost Ark
Audrey Hepburn, They All Laughed
Zoe Lund, Ms. 45
Liza Minnelli, Arthur
Dee Wallace, The Howling

Best Supporting Actor
Jack Albertson, Dead and Buried
Griffin Dunne, An American Werewolf in London
John Lithgow, Blow Out
Christopher Walken, Pennies from Heaven
Nicol Williamson, Excalibur

Best Supporting Actress
Colleen Camp, They All Laughed
Sarah Douglas, Superman II
Lisa Eichhorn, Cutter's Way
Pam Grier, Fort Apache the Bronx
Edith Massey, Polyester (yes, seriously)

Best Director
Peter Bogdanovich, They All Laughed
John Carpenter, Escape from New York
Michael Mann, Thief
George Miller, The Road Warrior
Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark

Best Original Screenplay
Peter Bogdanovich & Blaine Novak, They All Laughed
Albert Brooks & Monica Johnson, Modern Romance
David Cronenberg, Scanners
Terry Gilliam & Michael Palin, Time Bandits
John Waters, Polyester

Best Adapted Screenplay
Jay Presson Allen & Sidney Lumet, Prince of the City
Jeffrey Allen Fiskin, Cutter's Way
Michael Mann, Thief
Dennis Potter, Pennies from Heaven
John Sayles, The Howling

Best Cinematography
Jordan Cronenweth, Cutter's Way
Dean Cundey, Escape from New York
Andrew Lazlo, Southern Comfort
Gordon Willis, Pennies from Heaven
Vilmos Zsigmond, Blow Out

Best Original Score
Brian May, The Road Warrior
Jack Nietzsche, Cutter's Way
Howard Shore, Scanners
Tangerine Dream, Thief
John Williams, Raiders of the Lost Ark

De La Soul is Dead

2011-10-11T02:49:00.001-05:00

My piece on De La Soul is Dead is now up at Popmatters.com.

The Last Picture Show

2011-10-04T02:57:00.000-05:00

My article on Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show is now up at Cinespect.

"Kiss Them for Me"

2011-10-04T02:55:00.000-05:00

My blurb on Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Kiss Them for Me" is now up at Popmatters.com

Silent Souls

2011-09-17T03:03:00.000-05:00

My review of Silent Souls is now up at Cinespect.

Fordson

2011-09-09T03:01:00.000-05:00

My review of the doc Fordson: Faith Fasting Football is now up at Cinespect

Two New Pieces Up at Cinespect

2011-09-03T15:23:00.000-05:00

Red Desert

Buster Keaton

Very Belated Film Log for July 2011

2011-08-29T06:41:00.015-05:00

Little Murders (1971/d. Alan Arkin/s. Elliott Gould) Early 70s black comedy about the joys and hardships of catastrophic urban decay seems slightly out of control, as if writer Jules Feiffer and director Alan Arkin were driven authentically mad while making the movie, since almost nothing about this brutal, slapstick nihilist farce feels forced (exception: Arkin's own brief, manic cameo as a stressed out detective on the verge of a nervous collapse), even as it sputters and flails its way into desperate oblivion. It all benefits from a sense of free-floating menace, so you never know exactly exactly how rough, horrific, or hysterical its going to get. The film starts as a less-than-typical meet-cute romantic comedy, and evolves into a particularly ferocious meet-the-folks movie, before turning into a portrait of apocalyptic social collapse - just the sort of reckless, high stakes, half-drunken gamble that seems to have been inevitable in 1971 and is just about impossible to pull off now. Ugly, snide, vicious, and usually hilarious - my platonic ideal of American satire. A

Tree of Life (2011/d. Terrence Malick/s. Brad Pitt) Or, The Final Scene of The Incredible Shrinking Man Expanded to Feature Length. Mad Whitman-esque synthesis of the grand and minute distills any number of beat-hippie clichés into a concentrated state, but I love it anyway. It goes big in ways than nobody in American cinema since King Vidor or maybe D.W. Griffith have bothered. Grand folly it may be, but it's folly with a semi-noble tradition behind it. It works because Malick retains a talent for the tell-tale detail, the absurd flourish that makes everything cohere, like the nightgown floating down the river stream, or brothers mocking an invalid's gait or a boy glowering and going slightly mad from boredom and fear and resentment in the mean summer heat of the south. I submit this as one of the finest evocations of boyhood psychology ever produced in America, and not just in film. Even the cosmological slingshots make sense as a child's scattershot attempts to imagine just how much he matters in relation to the big bang. Those who criticize the voice overs proceed from the assumption that they're intended as voices of experience rather than innocence, a misreading that probably makes the difference between those who shrug and those who don't. I liked it so much I even want to find an excuse for poor little Sean Penn, stuck on the edge of everything, twiddling his thumbs for all eternity. A

The Super Cops (1974/d. Gordon Parks/ s. Ron Leibman)
Screwball fascism, 1970s buddy-cops style. Parks treats corruption and urban decay with a slap-happy glee that gives every scene a nervous buzz, as you always expect it to erupt into something more viscous than it is. Parks adapts the real-life story of two New York cops who become known as Batman & Robin thanks to their narrowly legal attempts to take on rampant crime in early 1970s New York. Stars Leibman and David Selby exhibit the comic timing of seasoned vaudevillians. Apparently, Time magazine called it 'loud and clumsy' and the Grey Lady thought it 'silly.' Yup. A-

The Box (2009/ d. Richard Kelly/ s. Cameron Diaz) Kelly follows the loopy Southland Tales with another leap into the deep end. Recovered memories of 1970s ephemera mix with classic suburban paranoia American-style. Cameron Diaz with a southern accent is the kind of directorial choice only an utter fool would make, but it takes a holy fool to sustain the feeling of dread to the bitterly ridiculous end. B+

Adventure in Iraq (1943/d. D. Ross Lederman/s. John Loder) Remake of the 1930 George Arliss film The Green Goddess suffers from a dismal reputation, but I thought it was a treat. Ostensibly WWII propaganda dealing with a Caliph's flirtation with fascism, the film entertains largely because it seems to be perpetually on the verge of forgetting its own propagandistic point. B+

Sirocco (1951/d. Curtis Bernhardt/s. Humphrey Bogart) Bogie basically remakes Casablanca to lesser but more morally ambiguous effect. Contains essential life lessons, like how you should always bring your own steak to a middle-eastern restaurant. B+

Black Swan (2010/d. Darren Aranofsky/s. Natalie Portman) Mr. One-note Aranofsky this time focuses on various farms of paranoia to the exclusion of any other conceivable affect. The single-minded intensity suits Natalie Portman's talents just fine, which is less of an insult than you might think, and it's often genuinely unnerving, but the movie's so intent on being intense that it gets monotonous. B

The New Barbarians (1983/ d. Enzo Castellari/s. Fred Williamson) Wasteland warriors ham it up in the dessicated remains of a consumer paradise. No one takes it too seriously, least of all Fred Williamson (as usual), which is why it's hard to get especially involved but also why it's hard to hold a grudge. B

Somewhere (2010/d. Sofia Coppola/s. Stephen Dorff) Another chapter in Sofia Coppola's effort to precisely communicate what it's like to be inside the head of a slightly shallow spoiled rich girl proves less insightful than The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoniette, but it's daddy issues are more direct and thus more pungent than in Lost in Translation. Dorff tries real hard, but not hard enough apparently, since the film falls apart whenever he's the only person on screen, which is far too often. B

Blackbelt (1992/d. Rick Jacobson/s. Don 'the Dragon' Wilson) Straight-to-video action film, pure early 90s vintage, and your tolerance for its particular style of insignificance will vary directly in proportion to your nostalgia for the form. See the grade for a measure of my own affection for the entire lost tradition. B-

The Quiet American (1958/d. Joseph Mankiewicz/s. Audie Murphy) Better directed and better acted than the remake (it's a draw between Caine and Redgrave, but Audie Murphy wipes the floor with Brendan Fraser), the main problem here isn't the rightward shift in politics from the Greene novel, but Mankiewicz's means of making that shift. Always a little too in love with his own words, the movie just stops dead in the last reel so Redgrave can get lectured to about the virtue of American foreign policy. A finale in which Audie Murphy achieves martyrdom while single-handily eviscerating Ho Chi Minh would have been just as much a betrayal of the novel and a lot more fun. B-

Wizard of the Lost Kingdom II (1989/d. Charles B. Griffith/s. David Carradine) So disarmingly goofy and good-natured, I really wish I could raise the grade a notch, but it also gives every indication that nobody gave a shit, since there's not a single shot that looks good nor a single edit that's not embarrassingly awkward. Still, far more watchable than it has any right to be, and around the edges one still gets a hint of the hip-beat sense of humor that made Charlie Griffith's script for A Bucket of Blood (1959) one of the glories of American screenwriting. C+

Late Night Shopping (2001/d. Saul Metzstein/s. James Lance) Recycled poses of mild-alienation among turn-of-the-century London youth proves diverting without being the least bit memorable. Intense anglophiles might want to raise the grade to a B-. Then again, they might not. C+

Legion (2009/d. Scott Charles Stewart/s. Paul Bettany) Pretty shitty, and just falls apart at the end, but I can't resist seige narratives, so until the final act I was largely amused. But then the movie just kind of says 'fuck it, I'm tired' in the last reel, and kind of makes you wonder why anyone bothered except for Dennis Quaid's probably very weary agent. C

Post Grad (2009/d. Vicky Jensen/s. Alexis Bledel) Bledel's likability keeps it watchable, but the whole thing is pretty mushy headed and aimless, like you're watching a marathon of some sappy late-80s sitcom that got canceled after four episodes. C-

Trunk to Cairo (1966/d. Menahem Golan/s. Audie Murphy) An attempt at a kind of Israeli James Bond consists largely of scenes where Audie Murphy and George Sanders sit around and discuss Middle East foreign policy. Which proves far more riveting than the attempted action sequences. C-

Alice in Wonderland (2010/d. Tim Burton/s. Mia Wasikowska) For those who always wished the book had a clearer narrative through-line. Whoever you are, wherever you are, fuck you very much. D+

Charleston (1959/d. Tulio Demicheli/s. Sylvia Pinal) Mexican musical-comedy lacking anything in terms of style or a point-of-view, with only Pinal showing much in terms of charisma. Static and dull, but with cutely terrible musical numbers that stick in the mind. D+

Dinner for Schmucks (2010/d. Jay Roach/s. Steve Carell) Much mugging and aimless improv in the form of comedy, this is the state of the art of American humor circa 2010, which is why Francis Verber, director of the French film this attempts to remake, somehow comes off looking like a genius for the first time in his life. D

Couples Retreat (2009/d. Peter Billingsley/s. Vince Vaughn) So deeply misanthropic and illustrative of the moral bankruptcy of the West that I'm fairly certain it was actually ghost-directed by Michael Haneke. F

A Star is Born

2011-08-10T13:43:00.001-05:00

My essay on Judy Garland and George Cukor's A Star is Born is up at Cinespect: The Wind Grows Colder

Cinespect Publication

2011-07-21T06:35:00.002-05:00

I have a new essay up on Cinespect. You can read it here: The High Art of Selling Out in the 21st Century

Movie Log for June 2011

2011-07-11T23:04:00.004-05:00

Reign of Terror (1949) Anthony Mann and William Cameron Menzies's ridiculously baroque rendering of the French revolution sometimes threatens to suffocate under the weight of its extreme sylization, but ultimately the film's visual imagination and dynamic narrative drive keep it alive. Every write-up of the movie describes it as a film noir take on the reign of terror, with Robespierre as the devious criminal kingpin, and Danton as the poor dupe too dumb to know what hit him (too bad they couldn't have cast Elisha Cook in the role), but actually this goes a step beyond normal noir conventions, instead belonging in the bizarre, hallucinatory and rather un-catagorizable company of Menzies's Invaders from Mars (1953) and Address Unknown (1944). Basically it's a world where every moment is a waking nightmare and every person and gesture gets blown up to horrifically gargantuan proportions - it's like Goya by way of Chester Gould. Ghoulish, silly, overwrought, and halfway brilliant. A-

Lenny (1974) Bob Fosse's celebration of the Lenny Bruce martyrdom mystique is disreputable both as history and as an ethical perspective, but Fosse's typically feverish, messy mise-en-scene makes the movie's confusions partially excusable and consistently exciting. Dustin Hoffman's live-wire windups hadn't acquired the aura of shtick yet, so they prove occasionally moving. Probably Fosse's worst film as a director, and with all the usual mannerisms, which means those who don't find drug-fueled narcissism rendered as kitsch mythos just a little bit interesting should steer clear. B+

Stryker (1983) Director Cirio Santiago was a Filipino filmmaker who made exploitation cinema's proletarian ethos into a spiritual principle, his routine made-in-Philippines action movies always showing a knack for the second-hand set-piece and an eye for the ready-made grace note, and never evincing any ambition except to get paid and go home and keep everything in focus. And Stryker is in focus (at least 90% of the time), plus it has weird little embellishments to its Mad Max-ripoff storyline, starting with the tribe of dwarfs who show up at empty moments to give a sense of purpose to the randomness that unfolds on screen. The whole movie benefits from what-the-hell plotting and what-the-fuck compositions that make me feel justified for liking this thing as much as I do. Fans of significance significantly expressed should probably avoid. B+

Reuben, Reuben (1983) English Major kitsch of a particularly solid vintage, the writerly indulgences will either delight or drive you up the wall depending on whether you find Tom Conti's lead performance as a drunken, womanizing Scottish poet charming-irritating or irritating-irritating. I'm just enough of a Liberal Arts basket case to feel the former, and though the movie might be among the worst directed 'quality' productions I've ever seen (the blocking and camerawork of almost every scene look clumsy and rushed), the pretty New England autumn setting and the evocation of a world where literary bona fides are enough to seduce every woman in sight create a charming enough fantasy world whose alarming falsity proves part of its charm. And its failure. B

Bad Boys II (2003) Michael Bay has the amoral instincts of a slapstick provocateur, an heir to Mack Sennett and Cecil B. DeMille with results that are just as hit and miss-miss-miss, but just as obnoxiously elemental to what the movies are and can be. When Bay attaches himself to any real idea or sentiment, he's as loathsome as everybody thinks (e.g., Armageddon and Pearl Harbor), but Bad Boys II is pure nihilist product, only invested in kinetics and blown-up rituals of bonhomie and goofball cop-buddy schtick that smell musty but which Bay and Smith and maybe even Martin Lawrence halfway believe in because they're too smug and rich not to. So I liked it. Or tolerated it. Or something. B-

Alienator (1990) Fred Olen Ray anti-movie, wherein Jan-Michael Vincent, is-she-really-PJ-Soles?, and assorted somebodies stalk movie clichés, including an alien bounty hunter of indeterminate gender who keeps the movie weird without letting it get too interesting. The plus is added for the sheer goofy larcenous spirit behind the half-assed light saber battle that climaxes the picture. C+

The King's Speech (2010) Watchable, oh yes, very watchable, and the cunning ruthlessness of the whole enterprise even makes it perversely interesting. A film whose every frame demonstrates the Weinstein Brothers' brilliant skill at collecting Oscars, as director Tom Hooper complies skillfully with the grand plan, clearly skirting some of the complicating ironies suggested by the storyline lest any such indulgence lead to surprise, controversy, or ambiguity. Still, everyone puts on a rather good show and seems to leap into the insulting, filthy business with more enthusiasm than I would have thought possible given the circumstances, especially the forever game Geoffrey Rush. And maybe one day I'll finally get what everybody sees in Helena Bonham Carter, but not today. Not today. C+

It's Complicated (2009) I'm as shocked as anyone that my rating for this rather ghoulish concoction starring Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, and Steve Martin isn't lower than it is, but I derived a strange sense of comfort from the complacent atrocities on display, since the movie seemed square and silly in almost precisely the same ways that geriatric rom-coms of the mid-60s starring Bob Hope/Henry Fonda/James Stewart and Lucille Ball/Lucille Ball/Maureen O'Hara did. As such the movie played like a harmless and even semi-forgivable instant relic, obsolete before it was even made, and thus more deserving of pity than scorn. Which isn't to say it doesn't suck, because it most certainly does. C

Jaws 2 (1978) Avoided this for years due to rumors of its consummate mediocrity. Rumors confirmed, though Roy Scheider approaches it with a sense of devotion and professionalism that I take as testament both to the late actor's skill and to the size of his paycheck. During the first half the movie at least attempts to replicate the original's screwball-naturalist portrait of a resort town's rhythms and idiocies, but looks and feels too second-hand to register the same pleasure and insight. C-

Taking Woodstock The ethos of a late-night songs-of-the-60s infomercial (brought to you by Time-Life Music) hosted by Peter Fonda rendered into a live-action, feature length movie. It would be hard to think of a movie less likely to impress me than one earnestly dedicated to talking about how great and wonderful and authentic the late 60s were. Such an endeavor would certainly require a director more imaginative than Ang Lee and a lead actor more expressive than Dmitri Martin to make me feel anything but utter hostility to the project. Since hippie bashing has become almost pro forma these days, the sincerity of Ang Lee's gesture should count as some kind of audacity, but it doesn't, because Lee doesn't even really seem conscious of the idea that anybody wouldn't have already bought into the mythology of Woodstock, leaving the film with no sense of purpose. It's sweet-natured, which is nice in theory, but sweetness plus stupidity just gets you new iterations of the same-old same-old. Didn't Ang Lee learn anything from the 60s? D

Movie Log for May 2011

2011-06-13T06:14:00.026-05:00

Welcome Home, Solider Boys (1972) - Or, On the Road with Travis Bickle. A very pissed-off movie about how many different ways you can dick around a group Vietnam vets before they reach for their grenades. It could have only come out of the Nixon era (since it's a defeatist form of ressentiment, as opposed to the triumphalist variety that dominated the Reagan era), but it's full of wonderfully observed character bits, and evinces a real feel for the various Nowheresvilles, USA that populate the desperate road trip that occupies what passes for a plot. Great use of the southwestern American landscape to suggest both American promise and American loneliness in the hungover aftermath of utopianism gone to pot. A-

Prince of the City (1981) - Sidney Lumet's hardboiled true crime fable, where dirty cop goes good and gets what he deserves for being such a fucking sap. Lumet fills the frame with character details built from the ground up, and the picture's length helps it accumulate a psychological weight that makes it a good deal better than the glorified Hill Street Blues episode it appears to be at first glance (not that there would be anything wrong with being a glorified Hill Street Blues episode - see the same year's Fort Apache: the Bronx for proof of that hypothesis). Treat Williams seems a little in over his head in the last third, but otherwise does work that embarrasses neither him nor me. A-

People Who Own the Dark (1976) - Leon Klimovsky and Paul Naschy cross gothic chiller with post-nuke sci-fi cautionary tale, with results that are as ideologically incoherent as they are bracingly nihilistic. Fantastic use of a castle set to build a sense of nightmarish claustrophobia and isolation throughout the first half. The wide open spaces of the last act aren't very comforting either. B+

Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942) - Tarzan meets civilization, which promptly screws him over. Innocently cynical and casually cruel in the near-best pulp tradition, it's unpretentious fun for the kids and the crazies, especially due to the skyscraper chase that climaxes the picture. B+

Gator Bait (1974) - Watchable swampsloitation sleaze, starring the agreeably leggy Claudia Jennings as a Cajun vengeance goddess wreaking all manner of very picturesque havoc against local law enforcement and their abettors. Piles on the sleazy atmosphere just a little too thick, by which I mean a lot too thick, but also the kind of movie I think one can honestly say no one makes any more, because, without Claudia Jennings as collateral, why the hell would you? B-

Fast Five (2011) State-0f-the-art American machismo circa 2011, which is to say relatively free of risk and desperation though full of recycled poses of brutality, as the movie imitates lost dreams of someone else's degenerated manhood. Vin Diesel once again seems slightly smarter than his material, a vocational habit that promises to serve him and us well into the foreseeable future. C+

Hard Candy (2005) - Ellen Page plays the plot contrivance next door, in a movie that is all contrivance all the time, with plot points and psychological perspectives displayed in the all caps style of filmmakers who think shouting it makes it more honest. So frank and earnest in its sense of righteous indignation that it's good for some camp chuckles here and there, but it's the kind of movie that dares you to discount its moral seriousness, and I'm always good for a dare. C

Piranha (2010) - Caters enthusiastically and at times imaginatively to the universal desire to see voluptuous, well-proportioned female bodies get horribly mutilated. But after a while the movie starts feeling a little gluttonous, and Aja's exuberant misanthropy seems unearned. Or maybe I just have a sentimental attachment to my own doleful misanthropy. Besides, I don't trust nihilism that's so chic and color-corrected. I detect an element of compromising narcissism at work. C-

Humpday (2009) - Jerks back and forth between treating its premise as deadpan farce and earnest treatise, a balancing act that could be graceful, but not when your movie looks as bad as this one does, or is played by actors incapable of playing the material as anything other than a sketch comedy set-up. The virtue of amateurism usually comes down to its ability to put across the seemingly eternal verities of last Saturday night with brute force, so it's unsurprising though still disappointing that the nuanced shifts demanded here seem almost comically beyond the grasp of anyone involved. C-

Get Him to the Greek (2010) - Jonah Hill knows just enough about how to take advantage of a reaction shot to make the film perpetually seem like it's going to get amusing any minute now, but Russell Brand's so-very-much-not-the-second-coming-of-Peter-Sellers mugging has a way of dashing all hopes of salvation, and when at the end the movie decides it wants to say something important about responsibility or stardom or god-knows-what, the movie loses the veneer of disreputability that kept it tolerable. D+

Seven Ways to Go to Hell: The First Seven Shots of John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness

2010-10-09T17:51:00.048-05:00

John Carpenter's best movies exemplify the virtues of American horror movies made during the 1970s and 80s, a time when any genre director worth thinking about knew the genre and its traditions, and took those traditions seriously (don't worry, this isn't going to turn into an extended exercise in high fuddy-duddyism). Carpenter and contemporaries like Joe Dante and Stuart Gordon knew the entire arc of horror movie history because they came of age at a time when cultural institutions like Shock Theater, Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, and Aurora monster model kits turned horror movie fandom into just another American pastime, like baseball or duck & cover drills. As a result, you had a generation of very self-conscious horror filmmakers who thought deeply about their antecedents yet never succumbed to the temptations of parody or mannerism. Their films very much worked within genre traditions, and extended those traditions in deeply satisfying and exciting ways.

Carpenter's films in particular couple an admirable reverence for horror film conventions with an extraordinary knack for narrative economy. Below, I've taken the first 7 shots of his 1987 film maudit, Prince of Darkness, and tried to get at some sense of what makes each of them work. I had a particular destination in mind when I started, and I was able to navigate myself there without too much trouble, but I was largely flying blind along the way. But I like to be surprised, so I liked this little exercise. Carpenter packs a lot of information into a small space, so I left out some observations that were interesting to me and might have been interesting to you, but I think I was able to give some sense of how individual choices fabricated a more or less coherent whole.

Shot 1, Still 1

Full moons have been part of horror movie syntax going at least as far back as Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man. Carpenter happily admits to falling back on cliché, but with enough skill, clichés can work as efficient shorthand, signifying ideas and history in one image. That's my way of saying that the full moon shot works. It starts the movie off on a perfect note. Well, except it's not really where the movie starts.

The real beginning occurs seconds earlier, as his minimalist, synth driven score plays under the Universal Pictures intro. I can't be sure, but I suspect he originally planned this shot as a neat graphic match with the Universal logo, cutting straight from the image of the revolving Earth to the static shot of the moon. Instead, the production company and producer credits separate the logo and the first shot. At any rate, the music and image immediately set the mood and signal the genre and, if you're hip to Carpenter's earlier films, the director. If you accidentally wandered in looking for Three Men & a Baby, you now know you're in the wrong theater.

Shot 2, Still 1

Notice how the shot carries directly over from the first image, with the light from the moon streaming through the window, forming a half circle against the door. It would be easy to cut to a close-up, but by cutting to this long shot, Carpenter keeps the first two images linked. The low-key lighting is very effective, and establishes an appropriately eerie mood, as the music score continues to pulse through the sequence. With night scenes, especially those in horror movies, a lot of contemporary filmmakers like bathing everything in blue hues (it's like a return to the silent movie convention of using blue tints to signify nighttime), but Carpenter and his cinematographer, Gary Kibbe, keep everything neutral. Also, notice the economy of the production design, and how effectively it conveys information. Thanks to the elaborate cross on the wall, hanging directly over the old man's body, the image tells us that at the very least he's a man of intense religious convictions, and the work of semiotics being what it is, we're probably already making the correct assumption that he's be a priest or minister of some kind.

Shot 3, Still 1

The film cuts to a close-up of the old man. The pattern of light changes between shots, so that where in the long shot, bright moonlight illuminates the entire right side of his face, here the light shining on him is decidedly lower-key. The change in lighting allows Kibbe to use the light to sculpt the man's face, emphasizing the tension in his jaw line, and the intensity of his upward stare. We sense this is a man with trouble on his mind.

Shot 3, Still 2

Then, in the same shot, he dies. Old religious man with trouble on his mind laying in bed wide awake in the middle of night, we hardly knew ye. Or maybe we knew a hell of a lot about you considering how little time you were on screen.

Shot 4, Still 1

Cut to shot 4, a close-up of the man's hands holding onto something. The cut conveys the idea that whatever's in his hands probably has something to do with whatever thoughts once occupied his no-longer-worried mind. Slowly but surely, his hands a fall away and reveal...

Shot 4, Still 2

... a box? Yes, a box. Or, as Roland Barthes would call it, a piece of the hermeneutic code. The contract provided by commercial narratives typically stipulate that hermeneutic riddles will resolve themselves in due time. This shot promises to tell us what's in the box if we stick around long enough. Think of this shot as a kind of promissory note offered to the spectator. It guarantees to reward our curiosity, and in return we promise not to abandon the film even if the characters grate, the style proves to be tacky, or we remember that we came to see Three Men & a Baby, not a John Carpenter movie with a down on his luck Alice Cooper. Of course, Three Men & a Baby isn't even going to explain the deal with the creepy ghost kid who suddenly pops up in the background during one scene, let alone the mystery of what's in the box in a completely different film. We're less than a minute into the movie, and the narrative ball is rolling onward.

Title Card

The title card. The only thing interesting about it (and I'm not counting this as a shot, or else I'd feel obliged to include the production company and producer credits) is that there's nothing interesting about it. Compare to the title card of Halloween or The Thing or They Live. Simple white on black design, arguably signifying starkness, possibly signifying a rush to just get the damn thing done on time and on budget.

Shot 5, Still 1

Shot 5, Still 2

Shot 5, Still 3

I really like the next sequence of image. It starts with a fairly common type of cheat that can be annoying or can be neat. This one's neat. It begins with a long shot which appears to be following the man in a white shirt. He's walking along in the middle of the frame, and gets consistently closer to the camera, which appears to be carefully tracking with his movements. So the scene is clearly about him, right? Well, not so fast.

Shot 5, Still 4

Shot 5, Still 5

Shot 5, Still 6

The shot really has two subjects, neither of which is really our man in the white shirt. The first subject is the girl on the bicycle and the second is our man in red. Unless you happen to be a big Simon & Simon fan, you probably don't realize it yet, but you're now laying eyes on the film's star, Jameson Parker. The reason this kind of cheat shot can be annoying is because it can easily be fancy misdirection that lets the director yell, "Look ma, I can move a movie camera." (Or more accurately, "Look ma, I can order my DP to order the camera operator to move a movie camera.") In other words, this kind of 'track that, now track this' trick is often just an empty flourish. Here, it conveys some interesting information, and even the man in the white shirt serves a purpose.

The girl on the bicycle becomes apparent in the third still I excerpted from the shot. She glides across the frame as the camera tracks rightward. We see the man in the white shirt briefly glance at the girl, and then turn away. He shows no particular interest in her. Now, compare to Mr. Parker's character, who sees the girl coming his way, and, as shown in the fifth still, makes the effort to turn his head and catch a glimpse of her going in the opposite direction. He's clearly interested. The man in the white shirt's brief glance helps intensify Parker's more ostentatious gesture. Before we even know this is the guy we're supposed to be watching, Carpenter and Parker are already communicating information about the character, and establishing a key personality trait. To put it simplistically, he's horny, and that's all we might guess about him from this shot, but as the film unfolds, we find this guy is a kind of obsessive, somebody with almost stalkerish tendencies who watches and obsesses over girls (or one girl in particular). This trait will directly affect how the film's plot unfolds. And Carpenter starts building up this characteristic from the very first moment the character appears on screen.

Shot 5, Still 7

Shot 5, Still 8

Parker moves down frame from the long shot and into a medium shot. We can make guesses about his character, about his location, but nothing definite yet, although the satchel over the shoulder of a man in a polo shirt routine strongly connotes "either an instructor or aging graduate student or both" to me. The shot ends with him looking to his right, our left, and anybody who's ever seen a movie edited using continuity principles knows we're about to get a point of view shot.

Shot 6, Still 1

And the point of view shot reveals a pretty, red headed female, played by Lisa Blount. Keep in mind, this is just seconds after he ogled the pretty blond on the bicycle. He seems to be a man on the prowl. Or perhaps just very deeply lonely. So Carpenter feeds us more information about what makes this guy tick, and by cutting to a shot that so prominently features the redhead, we basically know we've been introduced to the film's female protagonist, who we, knowing Hollywood narrative conventions, assume will be the hero's love interest. The notebooks under her arm (universal sign in movie image-speak for "Hi, I'm taking classes!") and her appearance suggest she's another aging graduate student, a detail that largely resolves questions about the location. Okay, one last shot, and we're done for now.

Shot 7, Still 1

Cut back to a close-up of Parker. The shot-reverse shot pattern establishes a subject-object relationship between the two characters, and underscores the intensity of his interest. In other words, Carpenter lets us know this isn't like the fleeting lust for the girl on the bicycle thing you saw less that ten seconds ago; he really digs this red headed girl. This relationship is going places. Scary, nightmarish, apocalyptic places, but places just the same.

So, a lot of information, delivered in less than two minutes of running time, during which Carpenter establishes two major characters, one incidental character, the tone and genre, and sets two different narrative wheels in motion. The writing lays out the structure, but the skill and economy of Carpenter''s direction permits him to get all the necessary information across very quickly and without much fuss. Now for the requisite auteurist interpretive leap. The concluding close-up above allows us to get a good look at Parker. Now, take another look at him. Then take a look at the fellow pictured in the right side of the image below.

That's the director, John Carpenter, as I'm sure anybody reading this post knows. Now, I'm not saying they're spitting images of one another by any means, but I think it's fair to say that when Carpenter and/or the film's casting director picked Parker, and had him grow a mustache, they picked a man who fit a certain type, one which we might fairly call the John Carpenter type: a sandy-haired, skinny fellow with a mustache. Carpenter's go to guy throughout most of the 80s was either Kurt Russell, or when Kurt Russell wasn't available, gregarious, sturdy guys like Tom Atkins or Roddy Piper. I think Russell and actors in that mold were for Carpenter idealized images of what a macho man's man was supposed to be. Parker, in contrast, plays a deeply imperfect hero, someone's who's passive and ineffectual.

All of which leads me to speculate if we have in Prince of Darkness that most prized of auteurist objects: 'the auteur's most personal film.' Carpenter made Prince of Darkness right after Big Trouble in Little China flopped, bringing his then ascending career to a halt. Back to the minors for Mr. Carpenter. Parker's character, and the entire film's moody, apocalyptic tone, can be read as expressions of Carpenter's own uncertainty about the direction of his career, the direction of Hollywood, and the direction of the horror genre in the late 1980s. Now if I could only find proof that Lisa Blount looked just like Sandy King circa 1987, then I think this argument could really work.

Halloween Horror Movie Meltdown Day 5: Homicidal (1961)

2010-10-05T22:49:00.006-05:00

William Castle doesn't get his due. His legend rests on his talent for ballyhoo, perpetuated through the oft-recycled tales of the emerg-O skeleton flying down the aisles at screenings of House on Haunted Hill, and the electrified theater seats used to fry unsuspecting patrons during key scenes of The Tingler. The usual gloss on Castle is that whatever fimmaking talent he once evinced with When Strangers Marry (1944) had long deserted him by the late 1950s, as he made what were basically cut rate kiddie movies, sloppy and silly and filmed with all the verve of an episode of My Three Sons. He doesn't even merit a mention in Sarris's The American Cinema, and I'd be the first to concede his movies are often vulgar and cheap, Homicidal being exhibit A in that particular case against him. But that vulgarity often reflects a go-for-broke recklessness that offers its own rewards. Desperate to bring infamy to his films, and to upstage Hitchcock, Castle had a way of pushing against corners and coming up with outrageous turns and images that make all the smartest deviants break out into nervous giggles because Castle had the temerity and the tastelessness to go places you figured he would have the good sense to avoid.

Homicidal is a direct steal of Hitchcock's Psycho (the title is a clue), shamelessly aping key scenes, but always giving them ghoulish, stupid twists that allow Castle to stay a few feet away from any charges that he's just being an unimaginative rip-off artist. He was an imaginative rip-off artist, after all. The movie's main gimmick involves a silly timer giving audiences a chance to chicken out and go a 'coward's corner' (theaters featured a section in the back of the theater actually designated as such) before the denouement begins. The real gimmick on display, however, is the thrill of getting away with an ostentatious play on gender that more mainstream, ostensibly respectable movies would never venture near. Castle really does out-Psycho Psycho on the level of pure shock, though I wouldn't claim it has anywhere near the same thematic richness as Hitchcock's film

Accounting for gaps in ambition and talent, the closest precursor to Homicidal isn't so much Psycho as Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. The same sense of going beyond the limits of good sense affects the movie, and every scene has a nervy quality that makes it all vaguely unhealthy. Ultimately, the movie remains a much more timid affair, and never feels as genuinely dangerous as Peeping Tom, but it's full of gotcha moments, displays of showmanship in narrative and staging that have less to do with the job of a good press agent and more to do with an honest-to-god American filmmaker worth taking seriously. Of course, there's that pesky issue of a consistent thematic core, but my failure to identify one probably just constitutes a failure of imagination.

Halloween Horror Movie Meltdown Day 4: Sting of Death (1965)

2010-10-04T16:52:00.008-05:00

Like The Tammys' "Egyptian Shumba" or Mel Ramos's Philip Morris, William Grefe's Sting of Death reveals itself to be a quintessential piece of mid-60's American kitsch, though unlike those epochal works, there's never even the slightest danger that Sting of Death will change your life. It's disposable entertainment, but entertainment it is nonetheless, and director Grefe shows more flair here than he did a year later with the agreeable but soporific Death Curse of Tartu. He's got an honest to god monster who appears throughout the final reel, one of those brilliant, makeshift, man-in-plastic-suit concoctions that low-budget filmmakers once excelled at, but stopped bothering with once they fell under the illusion that naturalism mattered with this kind of material.

The plot's something about scientists in Florida breeding mutant jellyfish, but the emotional kicks have to do with a disfigured guy's love for a pretty cipher of a girl, and his hatred of all her terribly bland cohorts. It's King Kong meets House of Frankenstein down in South Florida. Grefe evinces a bemused condescension toward youth culture, making him come off as a lower-rent William Asher. He even includes a dig at the Beatles in the script, but he's conversant enough with 60's teen movie conventions to include a musical number (courtesy of Neil Sedaka's "Do the Jellyfish") which features a panorama of mid-60's dances.

No Watusi, I don't think, but I spotted the Chicken, the Frug, and the Twist. It's a throwaway moment that expresses a square's eye view of youth fads, and it's wonderfully superfluous to the demands of the plot. A few minutes later, everybody in the scene is dead following a jellyfish attack, and their deaths occur in the same absurdly haphazard fashion as the dance number. But the lack of hysteria or any particular sense of urgency gives the movie a blissed out benevolence. Not at all good, but not at all bad either, and its goofy sanity and good cheer exemplifies precisely why I find these sorts of movies so agreeable.

Halloween Horror Movie Meltdown Day 3: Death Curse of Tartu (1966)

2010-10-03T23:40:00.007-05:00

Perfectly efficient swampsloitation horror which demonstrates no special spark of imagination, and it won't make you a better person, but it also won't make you a worse one. It benefits from a lack of pretension and a relatively sunny disposition. Now, on with the bad news: it's at its worst whenever director Grefe attempts to generate suspense, which largely amounts to him figuring out ways to drag out scenes far past the point when they should have ended. Hawks famously complained that he could kill 20 men in the time it took Peckinpah to kill one. Well, he could wipe out entire island nations in the time it takes Grefe to knock off one of his characters. This all climaxes in a chase between a girl and an alligator that takes up nearly the entire last reel. Since the chase occurs largely via Kuleshovian sleight of hand, the sequence never generates anything but tedium.

On the other hand, the Everglades locations look good, and Grefe was just smart enough to take advantage of the surroundings, shooting the movie largely in a series of medium long shots that always place the actors within the environment. The makeup effects on the title villain manage to be effectively creepy, so it even has minor use-value as a horror movie. And the acting is occasionally decent as far as these these go. An irrelevant corner of the universe, but does little to warrant outright contempt, so I'm inclined to just let it be and call it a good time. Probably does wonders for my karma.

Halloween Horror Movie Meltdown Day 2: The Astro-Zombies (1968)

2010-10-02T00:20:00.008-05:00

Great title, seriously great poster. Reasons to hope that it's essential grits-in-your-bubblegum, proto-Armageddon, proto-punk quintessence, and the sort of thing that you might mistake for a trash masterpiece if you're fried or in love or just found out Jesus Christ is your Personal Lord and Savior, right? Well, not necessarily. It's directed by Ted V. Mikels, after all. Mikels has been on my shitlist ever since I saw The Corpse Grinders (1971). That's a movie about cats that eat people. You can't screw up a movie about housecats eating their owners. Even if you screw it up, it should still work in a crazy, subterranean freakshow kind of way. In fact, screwing it up should theoretically be the best way of getting it right. But Mikels screwed it up. It's dull, bland, almost respectable. Real son of Orange County kind of stuff .

The Astro-Zombies isn't great, but it does a better job of delivering the goods than anything else I've seen by him, not because Mikels evinces any more talent here than he did there, but because John Carradine and Tura Satana grant the movie some of their estimable intelligence and weirdness. Carradine doesn't do much other than be John Carradine, but that's enough, and he manages to maintain a certain poise and professionalism throughout everything (which is more than I can say for poor Wendell Corey). Satana coveys some of the same bitch goddess swagger and sadist's humor that made her so iconic in Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat Kill!Kill! She's only working at half power here, but she still manages to take control of the frame every moment she's on screen.

I can't tell you the plot because I stopped trying to guess it once I figured out that narrative cohesion just wasn't going to constitute one of the movie's chief pleasures. It involves battery powered zombies and Tura Santana shooting men in the gut and Wendell Corey providing what counts for plot exposition as the haunted eyes of Lyndon B. Johnson look on over his shoulder.

The first half is pretty tough going, with Mikels drawing every moment out several beats past the expiration date, but proceedings pick up considerably at around the halfway mark, and there's enough random bits of weirdness (like the astro-zombie with a flashlight stuck to its head) to make it reasonably memorable. I wouldn't exactly recommend the movie, but it's relatively painless, the performers bring a scintilla of wit and class to the proceedings, and its sun-drenched shots of late 60s Los Angeles provides occasional moments of anthropological interest. If you must see one Ted V. Mikels movie before you die, it might as well be The Astro-Zombies.

Halloween Horror Movie Meltdown Day 1: Guru, the Mad Monk (1970)

2010-10-01T23:14:00.011-05:00

My month long Halloween horror movie fest, in which I watch 31 horror movies I've never seen before throughout the month of October, has to start somewhere, so why not at the bottom, with Andy Milligan's Guru the Mad Monk? I know, I know, I'm being mean. Some our most discerning critics have managed to find merit in his work, so why shouldn't I. And I've tried, Lord knows, I've tried. I've seen four of his films now, two of them multiple times. I wrote part of a seminar paper on The Ghastly Ones. I've tried looking at him as a kind of avant-gardist, a kindred spirit to the Kuchar Brothers, a man whose deadhead dreams of superstars in thrift store fancy dress evokes Andy Warhol, and whose delirious images evoke the mad, bad world of Jack Smith. But no, I just can't make myself believe it. Maybe he meant this movie as a lark, but the sense of humor that makes the Kuchar Brothers so appealing never materializes near the surface. His images lack the acid burn purity of Warhol's movies, and let's face it, his performers just aren't as beautiful as Warhol's. And while full of nonsense, Guru the Mad Monk maintains a semi-respectable veneer of narrative cohesion, never willing to embrace the kind of full on hysteria that made Jack Smith's movies so compelling.

Guru the Mad Monk, basically Milligan's Conqueror Worm knock off, is probably the best Milligan's movie I've seen, primarily because the sweet faced lug who plays hero is kind of likable, and the damsel in distress with the butch haircut actually gives a more or less credible performance, at least by the standards set by Milligan's casts. Some of the gore set pieces are kind of splendidly terrible and tasteless, and the movie reduces to a fine trailer, but like all Milligan movies I've seen, the thing's just lifeless and depressing. And yet, I expect I will give him another chance, if only because I still haven't seen Fleshpots of 42nd Street, his reputed masterpiece. And besides, I think I read The Rats are Here! The Werewolves are Coming! is being released on DVD soon, and what kind of person would I be if I passed that up?

15 Albums

2010-09-28T01:36:00.004-05:00

Responding to a tag from a friend, the task is to name 15 favorite albums. As arbitrary as ever, listed largely in the order they occurred to me. Each one, aside from being personal pleasures, are inducements to sanity and vital pieces of misinformation that make humans look better than they really are.

List

A. Pavement Crooked Rain Crooked Rain

B. Otis Redding Otis Blue

C. Yeah Yeah Yeahs Fever to Tell

D. De La Soul De La Soul is Dead

E. Duke Ellington Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band

F. Billie Holiday Lady Day: The Master Takes & Singles

G. Blondie Parallel Lines

H. Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers L.A.M.F.

I. New Order Power, Corruption & Lies

J. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook

K. Frank Sinatra The Best of the Columbia Years 1943-1952

L. The Go-Betweens Oceans Apart

M. Charlie Parker The Yardbird Suite

N. Buzzcocks Singles Going Steady

O. Phil Spector Back to Mono (1958-1969)

Notes

A. I would love Crooked Rain Crooked Rain just for the line in "Range Life" where Malkmus sings "The Stone Temple Pilots/They're elegant bachelors/They're foxy to me are they foxy to you?" but that's only one of many moments where Malkmus ambles into hilarious moments of grace.

B. I could pick any of Redding's albums from Pain in My Heart to The Immortal Otis Redding (and the last two posthumous collections, Love Man and Tell the Truth, aren't bad either), but Otis Blue has the best cover (just about the only time a record company pulled the whole 'let's put a blond white woman an album by an African-American recording artist' trick without embarrassing themselves) so I guess it wins because of that, but also because "I've Been Loving You Too Long" is the greatest vocal performance of Redding's career, and his recording of "Satisfaction" renders the Stones version absolutely useless.

C. Maybe it's too soon for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I can see how some of their mannerisms might grate, but then again maybe I can see better how their mannerisms might seem like symptoms of a rational cynicism that felt more intelligent than hope or desperation during the last decade.

D. Perhaps De La Soul is Dead should be held accountable for the proliferation of skits that have ruined many a hip hop album, but De La Soul is Dead is the first and just about the last time the skits are as funny and necessary as the songs, and the songs are very funny and very necessary.

E. The recordings collected in the Never No Lament set often sound like the summit of human civilization, every second a testament to taste, composure, and wit.

F. Billie Holiday represents the kind of human mystery that breaks my heart, because every decision she makes about phrasing and interpretation across the late 30s/early 40s recordings collected in the above set indicates a level of insight and genius neither you or I or the person in the next room can ever hope to touch, but every decision she made in her personal life was the wrong one. Maybe somebody misinformed her at a young age that they gave Nobel Prizes in self-destruction, and so she applied her considerable skill there too.

G. I love the unapologetic trashiness of Blondie, so redolent of the Bazooka Joe faux-populism of punk, and smart enough to recognize in disco merely another another expression of that sensibility, patterns of thought which all come together on Parallel Lines.

H. L.A.M.F. is the great lost punk album of 1977, a masterpiece of strung out theories about civilization and its discontented hangers-on from the New York Dolls guitarist and F.O.D.D., Johnny Thunders.

I. That New Order album makes the work of mourning in the age of mass communication sound so damn sexy.

J. Ella Fitzgerald and Cole Porter were, as the cliché goes, an ideal match of sensibilities. It's often said all the Songbooks are great, but I find the Gershwin collection relatively dull, and I think the sarcastic, mercenary temperament at the heart of many of Irving Berlin's lyrics is something she just didn't get and thus often didn't know how to phrase (I really dislike her reading of "Let's Face the Music and Dance"), but Porter's songs are guides to how to waltz through the suffering and heartbreak the world pushes at you without breaking a sweat, and that sensibility was always Fitzgerald's special benediction as a performer, so everything comes together beautifully here.

K. I know many who say the Columbia Years just aren't as interesting as the Dorsey recordings, where Sinatra found his voice, or the Capitol years, where he reconstructed it, but there's something to the smooth, lavender quality in Sinatra's sound throughout most of these songs that counts as a particular kind of perfection. And I'm as suspicious of the claims made on behalf of perfection as anybody, but sometimes perfection can be, you know, nice, and this is often very, very nice.

L. The Go-Betweens are sometimes my favorite rock band, and Oceans Apart would rarely be the album I'd name as my favorite, but I have been listening to it a lot in the past two months, and despite the most godawful mastering job I've ever encountered, I keep coming back to it rather obsessively. It was to be their last album, and it sounds like an accidental testament, a wonderful encapsulation of their sensibility and the range of their sonic ideas, which somehow the muddy mastering just renders all the more incisive.

M. Charlie Parker would be the best argument ever made on behalf of the pure pleasure of virtuosity for its own sake, except plenty of feeling and humor backs up every outburst, so I'm once again saved from having to make moral allowances for genius.

N. I've challenged myself to say something about each of these albums, but I have nothing to say about the Buzzcocks. Just that they're loudly wonderful and sublimely frivolous and very desperate.

O. And in light of recent events, let's just say my love of the Spector recordings might have a little less to do with Spector than the title of the box set would indicate, and more to do with Ronnie Spector's proto-punk goddess presence, or Darlene Love's determination to sing the only Christmas song anyone will ever need to hear, or Carole King & Gerry Goffin having the nerve to write "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)." I mean, there are dozens of reasons why I sometimes play songs from the set obsessively, and most of them have nothing to do man whose name and face graces the box. Though sure, he probably had something to do with it all. Why else would they put his face on the box?

The Pits

2010-08-31T04:25:00.024-05:00

It's time to let go of the silly humanist fairytale that kitsch is universal. Kitsch dates just as much as art does. So whenever anybody asks "what's the worst movie ever made?", it's always a dumb question, because the worst movie ever is always only the worst movie right now. Besides, the usual suspects just aren't that pernicious. Nobody seriously thinks Plan 9 from Outer Space is the world's worst movie, partly because it affords too much pleasure for that to be the case, but also because it's just too benign. It doesn't pass off adequacy as genius and it doesn't perpetuate any particular ethos of arrogance. Similarly, most low budget horror and science-fiction movies are too weird and too ready-made for avant-garde exploitation to be really bad or dangerous. But take a movie like Crazy Heart, and you have a genuinely nasty piece of business.

Nearly every shot in the movie is a cliché (check out the crane shot descending down from the tree branches, not once, but twice, and maybe some other time when I wasn't looking), and the movie recycles the most useless conventions of the singer-on-the-road movie to no apparent purpose other than getting Jeff Bridges an Oscar. What might make it the worst movie (i.e., the movie that does the best of job of pissing me off at the moment) of at least the last seven months is its earnest attempt to present banalities as real insights into the human condition. (Any movie where you feel pressed you use the phrase "the human condition" when discussing it surely can't be any good.) In text and paratext it announces its desire to be something other than mere Happy Meal commercial, exclaiming its status as an adult film about real, adult issues. Except it isn't. It's utterly unreal and pretend, a silly imposture of adult themes and situations that has nothing to say and no compelling way to say it. Nothing hangs together in it. The peculiar cadences of Bridges's performance don't respond to anything else going on in the film, and nothing links up to what might constitute a legitimate idea, or any sense of community or tradition that a movie supposedly about music and growing old should communicate.

At no point do we get a sense of why anybody connected to this felt they had to tell this story in this way. Commitment seems to be lacking, and in its place are some displays of skill, particularly on Bridges's part, but not enough skill to say anything compelling about country music, or about the 1980s (when the story is ostensibly set), or about 2009 (when the movie was made). The simple answer for why this film exists is the aforementioned one: to get Bridges his Oscar. But how much cultural capital does that really carry anymore, anyway? And even Bridges's performance lacks the wit or ingenuity of his very best work, from Bad Company to The Big Lebowski. He's always ingratiating, and eager to let you seem to gleam of good cheer and intelligence in his eye. But compare the performance Bridges gives here to its obvious model, Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies, and you see the difference between a performer intently hedging his bets to make sure the audiences like him, and an actor willing to take a performance wherever it might lead him.

Tender Mercies suffered from a deep sentimentality, but Duvall gave it an eerie edge because he chose to play everything so close to the vest. You spend the entire first half of the movie trying to decide if you can trust the guy. Bridge plays things more transparently, and he basically gives you everything he's going to give you about the character (which turns out to be both too much and not enough) in his first two minutes of screen time. In Bridges's defense, the differences in the performances are partially attributable to broad differences in working method and character, but Bridges has given tricky, opaque performances before (just check out his work in Cutter's Way), and he's almost always been funnier.

People like Jeff Bridges and I like Jeff Bridges, and so I can partially understand why people gave this movie a pass in spite of the bad writing (the relationship with Maggie Gyllenhaall never has any sense of reality to it) and the bad fimmaking (the sickly sweet cuts to close-ups of Gyllenhaall's moppet woud have given late period Norman Taurog diabetes). But great acting, like any kind of great creative expression, should express an urgency, like a kind of desperate act of survival that hacks away at all the dumb pieties that keep us on the verge of moral extinction. But nothing in this movie, including Bridges, seems necessary. The movie's only use value is as a demonstration of the utter uselessness of piety and self-importance. Give me the profane and trivial any day.

Follow-up to the Best of the Decade List

2010-08-19T14:36:00.006-05:00

Looking back over the 27 films I wrote about in my decade round-up, I feel cornered by the question of how do these films measure up. One inevitably has a fundamentally different relationship with movies that are contemporaneous, so that the very prospect of comparing Assassination of Jesse James or Tokyo Sonata to Rules of the Game or Sunrise seems a little absurd. It's not that they're unworthy, but my relationship with these movies as objects of the everyday means the stakes are different. The notion that works of art need to stand the test of time isn't fashionable at the moment, and in as much as it's a notion tied to silly ideas about 'timelessness,' I find it a dubious proposition myself. Still, time changes things, and it does take the distance of some years to detect what was truly strange, precious, and prophetic about yesterday's movies. Still, snap judgments mean something in and of themselves, as an indicator of what had meaning in its moment if no time else.

Looking over not just my top 27, but various also-rans and assorted points of interest, I'm left feeling disturbed rather than elated. There were great movies, and maybe more good movies than ever before, but I noticed some trends which I don't like, particularly the increasingly widening gulf between popular entertainment and movies worth taking seriously. The mania for remakes and tent pole pictures meant that theater screens hardly had any space for movies that weren't already known commodities. I wasn't someone who thought The Hurt Locker was any kind of masterpiece, but the idea it was a hard sell picture that most people couldn't connect to seems rather astounding for such a rather direct, even simple war movie. One of the great heartbreakers of recent years was the resounding failure of Adventureland, far and away the finest movie to come out of the whole cutie-pie teen angst and dick jokes cycle that played out in the last part of the decade in movies like Juno and Superbad. But I think it was a movie that lost people because it's tone was more ambivalent, it's humor and attitude simultaneously softer and more bitter. Not that audience taste has ever been any guarantor of quality (far from it), but in rounding up the greatest films of most any other decades, such The Searchers in 1950s or The Godfather in the 1970s or Raiders of the Lost Ark in the 1980s, one tends to run into the occasional cultural phenom.

Looking over the list of movies that most deeply moved me, I can only find correspondences with mass taste on two counts: Wall-E and Inglorious Basterds. Which may just mean I'm out of touch (whatever that means), or just deeply eccentric in my tastes, but it seems to me that audiences were more willing to settle for silly and shoddy work than ever before, as long as the film offered familiar comforts (a pattern of spectatorship set, I think, by the Star Wars prequels, movies seemingly no one liked yet everyone felt compelled to see and talk about). Yes, hectoring audiences for their bad taste is bad form, and I should hasten to add that I think critical consensus suffers from its own forms of know nothing parochialism, but the gap between what audiences liked and what people inclined to think and write about movies liked appeared to grow even vaster, a phenomena that troubles me because I still believe in film as a pop art form, often profane and messy and eager to please even at its very best. Film culture sometimes renders movies into sacred objects, a habit I sympathize with even as a strongly reject it. I like movies to have some relationship to the world, which means partly a relationship with community and commerce. But I also like movies that don't suck, which means I'm largely stuck avoiding the multiplexes, and instead reduced to monkish contemplation of DVD relics.

To cheer myself up from ramblings that I already know are a bit silly and redundant (you can find echoes all across film blogs and magazine), I thought I'd make another list of movies I liked, namely the 74 runners-up to the movies that made my countdown, thus creating a cozy list of my 100 favorite movies of the last ten years. As always, it's a list contingent on the moment, and on all the movies I haven't caught up with yet that will surely displace some of what follows.

The Runner-Ups: Other fine and wonderful movies released in the 00s.
Devils on the Doorstep
Together
The Day I Became a Woman
Ginger Snaps
Chunhyang
High Fidelity
Donnie Darko
Session 9
Southern Comfort
A.I.
Kandahar
Dogtown and Z-Boys
Suicide Club
Waking Life
Morvern Caller
Safe Conduct
Funny Ha Ha
Minority Report
The Pianist
All or Nothing
Russian Ark
The Magdalene Sisters
Last Life in the Universe
A Tale of Two Sisters
Crimson Gold
Finding Nemo
Tarnation
Coffee and Cigarettes
Dogville
All the Real Girls
Kill Bill Vol 2
Collateral
House of Flying Daggers
Innocence
Undertow
Napoleon Dynamite
The World
The Life Aquatic
Block Party
Mutual Appreciation
The Proposition
Me and You and Everyone We Know
The Squid and the Whale
Regular Lovers
4
Syndromes and a Century
Pan's Labyrinth
Black Book
Once
The Boss of It All
Wristcutters
Rescue Dawn
My Winnipeg
Boarding Gate
Grindhouse
No Country for Old Men
The Darjeeling Ltd
Flight of the Red Balloon
I'm Not There
Gone Baby Gone
Lorna's Silence
Wall-E
Let the Right One In
Happy-Go-Lucky
The Class
Changeling
A Christmas Tale
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Adventureland
Public Enemies
Mother
Where the Wild Things Are
A Serious Man
Tetro
Fantastic Mr. Fox

The Best Movie of the Aughts: Blissfully Yours

2010-07-09T21:37:00.062-05:00

Blissfully Yours, a Thai film from 2002 directed by Apichatpong Weerasethekul, is the greatest movie of the past decade. Or least it does a good job of representing what the greatest film of the decade should be and do, since I haven't seen everything, and it's possibly plausible that there's any number of contenders left to discover. But I like it a lot, and it says more about cinema's past, present, and future than most movies. It reminds us of everything we don't know about the movies, and in so doing invalidates many of the usual assumptions behind lists like mine.

List making usually presumes a certain mastery over a subject. It functions as publicity and flattery, telling people in a quick and easy manner what to pay attention to and what not to. Most end of year-decade-century lists offer little beyond the predictable, unless it's the predictably unpredictable. And I don't want to pretend I'm breaking from that pattern simply by putting an Apichatpong Weeasethekul film at the top of my list. (Apichatpong is after all the man of the cinephiliac moment, especially since his Palme d'Or win earlier this year.) But magazine editors and AFI shills praise lists for their ability to start conversations, usually a nonsense claim because such lists effectively determine the scope of people's curiosity, having a bigger effect on what people don't watch and don't talk about than what they do.

Blissfully Yours earns its place at the top of this list not simply because I love it, but because it necessarily counteracts some of the usual effects of canon making. Apichatpong's (from here on out referred to by his preferred nickname, 'Joe') movies baffle and disturb the viewer by making you feel that you're missing an important piece of the puzzle, such as sufficient knowledge of Thai cinema, or an adequate understanding of Thai culture and history, or first hand familiarity with the structural films that influenced Joe when he attended the Chicago Institute of Art. The result is a a body of work that doesn't stop you in your tracks, but sends you off scurrying in a desperate search for the movies and history that will make the seductive mysteries of Joe's films cohere. In advancing the tenets of pragmatic philosophy, William James insisted that metaphysical questions (are you chasing the squirrel around the tree, or is it chasing you?) only mattered if the choice between either side of a proposition made any difference at all to our lives as they are lived on a molecule by molecule basis. Let me argue on behalf of a pragmatic aesthetics then by insisting that one reason Blissfully Yours is the finest movie of the aughts is that it's the film that potentially has the most profound impact on how we watch movies and understand their history.

Joe's first feature film, Mysterious Object at Noon, played like an an exceptionally fine art student thesis project in its straightforward use of avant-garde film practices, and in that respect it remains Joe's most conventional film to date. Blissfully Yours followed, and by casually mixing formal experimentation with straightforward storytelling, it proves the more original and radical work. It's also deeply appealing and accessible at first glance. Blissfully Yours conveys a sense of place and time with a sensual immediacy that's almost mystical. Its hypnotic pleasures are obvious enough to anyone willing to adjust one's rhythms to those of the film.

It barely has a proper storyline. A man has a mysterious skin disease. A woman takes him into the forest so that he may bathe in spring waters that are reputed to have therapeutic properties. While there they have sex, and eventually encounter their mutual employer, who has ventured into the same forest. And it's largely as simple as all that (though that the man happens to be an illegal Burmese immigrant is a crucially important detail in the context of Thai society, one element among many that make things as complex as all that). Yet the movie feels mysterious, and it's marked by the feeling that something is always about to happen, or that something dramatic is happening just off screen. As a result, the movie is incredibly tense, and it comes as little surprise that Joe has described the film as his homage to Hitchcock, even if what literally occurs on screen appears to echo Renoir and Satyajit Ray.

What makes the movie worth arguing for is all it promises and suggests about the future of cinema and all we still don't really know about its past. Thailand has never traditionally been on most people's lists of nations with great filmmaking traditions, yet the greatness of Joe's films, and his insistence on the importance of Thai genre films in forming his own tastes (his most obscure film, The Adventures of Iron Pussy, is an homage to the Thai movies Joe saw in his youth), forces one to take Thai cinema seriously. Rather than referencing a tradition most cinephiles already know, as Wall-E (science-fiction, animation, Chaplin), No Country for Old Men (film noir, spaghetti westerns, Antonioni), and even Dogville (Brechtian theater, gangster movies, Chuck Jones's roadrunner cartoons) all do, Blissfully Yours invokes traditions that most in the West only half understand if at all. While Joe's movies suggest an important possible future for cinema (cinema as an Eastern tradition instead of a Western one, a cinema where technique functions poetically rather than expositionally, a cinema where sex and the body are treated as lyrical commonplaces and not as hysterical singularities), he also represents those aspects of film history that remain a mystery for the vast majority of Western cinephiles, myself very much included; most obviously the history of Thai cinema, but also the interrelationship between supposedly marginal experimental filmmaking and narrative cinema.

Joe plays with convention in the film's very first moment. The movie doesn't begin so much as drop in, as if to interrupt our anticipation of the film, with a scene of a man (the Burmese migrant worker) undergoing a medical examination, while two women (his employer and his girlfriend) look on. It's not just a standard in medias res kick off. The movie begins without credits, music, or even a corporate logo. It's like happening upon a book on the side of the road with its cover and front page ripped off, so that it's been shorn of all paratextual information. If you see the film for the first time on DVD, you might attempt, as I did, to back up one chapter to catch the opening credits that aren't there. The film simply breaks open before us, in a way that prevents us for getting generic bearings that might make the moment navigable. As a consequence, it's difficult to get an emotional fix on the movie and what it's doing until well into its running time. We have to figure out our own relationship with the film one scene at a time.

Despite the challenges posed by the form, the movie has a remarkable humanity and warmth. Joe avoids icy formalism by redefining old and new alienation effects, such as characters who acknowledge the presence of the camera, or the use of written reflections scribbled across the screen that locate events in an elegiac past tense, as ways of creating a sense of a shared conspiracy between him, his actors, and us, thus making the movie emotionally attractive even at its most oblique. His closest analogue historically is Jean Renoir, because of his playfulness, his profound sense of sympathy, his appreciation of the tragic dimensions of the everyday, and his intense curiosity and delight in the quotidian contingencies that constitute history . What makes Joe an original is his ability to marry Renoir's pessimistic humanism to the formally difficult, anti-humanist tendencies of his structuralist heroes, Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow.

The linkage arises rather naturally out a conceptual framework that is both politically committed and spiritually alert. The political content can be obscure, but the more one digs into Blissfully Yours and Joe's other movies, the more one runs into problems of cultural identity that are especially fraught in Thai culture, such as the hero's status as an illegal Burmese immigrant worker, or the film's preoccupation with rural Thailand and its attendant echoes of both physical redemption and political terror (radical guerrilla factions call parts of the Thai countryside their home, and the film includes a brief intimation of off-screen violence that gestures toward the danger the forest represents in some regions of Thailand). The spiritual content tends to be more on the surface, though what makes it compelling is that way it influences the formal poetics of Joe's movies as well as the narratives. Joe is quite forthright about his Buddhist beliefs, and while the role his faith plays in Blissfully Yours is subtler than in Tropical Malady or Syndromes and a Century, the associational poetics that allows Joe to get from one moment to the next already suggests the obsession with reincarnation that becomes more pronounced in subsequent films.

Few of these thoughts directly address the experience of the movie. The principle pleasure of the film results from Joe's extraordinary talent for making place and time viscerally felt. The second half of the movie conveys the heat and sensuality of its environment so exactly that one may feel the sun beating against one's neck while sitting in a darkened room. The movie is incredibly alive to realities that most filmmakers strive to ignore or render into abstractions. Most motion pictures are countenanced as distractions, events that subtract from our experience of the world. Blissfully Yours is a surplus, not a distraction from life, but the very thing itself, an experience within the world that contends with sex, violence, money, nation, nature, and history. It's a renewal of possibility, rendering strange and surprising the terrors and beauties that constitute life's limitations.

Thoughts on Recent Viewings

2010-07-01T04:25:00.000-05:00

1. Too Many Husbands (Wesley Ruggles, 1940) Screwball comedy features Jean Arthur, Fred MacMurray, and Melvyn Doulgas innocently exploring polyamorous possibilities right up to the breaking point of the Production Code. A-

2. Rosalie (W.S. Van Dyke, 1937) Eleanor Powell's feet and Cole Porter's songs struggle valiantly but vainly against an insipid plot, an insufferable Nelson Eddy, and Frank Morgan's unsettling obsession with a ventriloquist dummy. C

3. Side Street (Anthony Mann, 1949) Plot functions as pretext for star Farley Granger to get violently thrashed once a reel and for Anthony Mann to film the New York streets in all the otherworldly grandeur of their Sunday morning desolation. B+

Favorite Albums of 2009

2010-06-03T00:10:00.004-05:00

I intend to finish my favorite movies of the decade countdown by the end of the week, but in the meantime I thought I'd shift my thoughts to a very belated list of my favorite albums from last year. It strikes me one of the theoretical advantages of the blogosphere is that writers don't need to be quite so slavishly concerned with deadlines, so for instance a best of the year list need not materialize in the first week of January, when solid December releases are still trying to make their claims upon time and memory. Instead, of course, the blogosphere mere encourages a race to the finish mentality, so that it's not unusual to see sites pushing out purported favorites sometime near the end of November. At any rate, these are the releases from last year that periodically obsessed me and which still claim some hold over my attention and affections.

1. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart -s/t An album which I liked a lot on first listen, and which I came to love over the course of the year. Pungent shoegaze nostalgia that wraps its fuzz blast histrionics around singing that whimpers and whispers its way around the ear as the lyrics make desperate proclamations of adequacy and yearning.

2. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix - Phoenix Car commercial dance punk of an unusually stirring variety. Music to drive into brick walls by.

3. Primary Colours - the Horrors Like all current Brit-pop possessing any pretensions to relevancy, this channels Ian Curtis's ghost to exuberant effect, like paranoid roosters trapped in a florescent box.

4. It's Not Me, It's You - Lily Allen Snot-nosed spitfire proclamations of gender ressentiment wrapped up in the bouncy-bouncy day-glo sounds of a girl figuring out just how much the world owes her.

5. It's Blitz! - Yeah Yeah Yeahs! In which Karen O. discovers her inner disco goddess and conquers dance floors in need of a good rug shampooer.

6. My World - Lee Fields A soul legend only in the lost dreams of jaundiced archivists, he rises from the earth to produce stone cold soul that demands history's bloody head on a plate.

7. Wilco (the Album) - Wilco The joke being that not even people who like them a lot (like me) have any trouble imagining their lives without them, but their poignant superfluity, like the backyard bar-b-q philosopher who takes you aside to explain the meaning of love, money, and rock n roll because you both need and deserve to know, is their primal gift after all.

8. Embryonic - The Flaming Lips Weird noises gurgling up from the basement belonging to America's favorite square hippies next door, this is drenched in the sounds of the sad reverie of those too easily astonished at the limits of their imaginations, which is why it obsessed me for two weeks straight.

9. Rated R - Rihanna - Explorations of a superstar's distorted, jagged plane of super-existence, where every trauma takes on the scale, pathos, and bathos of an epic myth.

10. Sainthood - Tegan & Sara - Still getting into this, but sounds almost as good as the last one, and with the girls possessing great yelps in the form of voices that give me goosebumps even when the songs have nowhere in particular to go.

Love and Memory

2010-06-02T23:34:00.004-05:00

From Wikipedia's entry on the year 1327:
April 6
– Petrarch sees a woman he names Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon, which awakes in him a lasting passion. He writes a series of poems dedicated to her, which are collected into his Canzoniere ("Song Book"). This is generally considered to be the day the Renaissance began.

"I soon realized I had made no mistake in my choice of wife. I was helping her pack an overnight bag one afternoon when she said, 'Put in some tooth twine.' I knew then that a girl who called dental floss tooth twine was the girl for me." - E.B. White