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In Violation Of Every Natural Law

2009-11-30T23:46:00.001-08:00

I’m not really sure what to say about Robert Zemeckis anymore. At times a near master when it comes to comedy, to pacing, to experimentation in the field of special effects, he’s now fallen down the rabbit hole of that whole 3D mo-cap thing and seemingly abandoned the concept of focusing on story in favor of what new mind-blowing visual he can toss into his stew. I’ve seen his version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL and you know what? I don’t care. I’m not impressed by this type of thing anymore and I’d just as soon not be forced to wear those damn 3D glasses ever again. What was a fascinating gimmick when he made THE POLAR EXPRESS has now gotten old fast even if the technology has improved. Not to mention that in making A CHRISTMAS CAROL he’s gone with a story that everyone on the planet has already seen a thousand times and all this former master of screenplay structure has added to it are scenes of Jim Carrey’s Scrooge shooting around the sky like he’s on a rollercoaster. All that results from all this sound and fury is a waste of my time. This is the man who made I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND which gave the world the romantic pairing of Eddie Deezen and Wendie Jo Sperber—doesn’t he know that no technological development will ever possibly be as amazing as that? I guess I have to accept that he sees things differently from how I do. But I still don’t care.

But we still have those films from years past where the director actually decided to use human actors in front of his camera and make, you know, a movie. Years after I first saw it on opening day in 1992, I’m still not quite sure where to place DEATH BECOMES HER in his filmography. Coming between the completion of the BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy and his critical/boxoffice triumph with FORREST GUMP, DEATH BECOMES HER now plays as a stopover from one act of his career to the other. It finds him continuing to dwell in the arena of dark comedy that he had played in a few times in the past while truly pushing the boundaries of what was possible with visual effects, something he has continued to do ever since. And one thing you can certainly say about this film is that the effects this time around at the very least genuinely add to the story being told. The problem, however, is his approach to the story which proves more than a little problematic and these tonal issues were most likely the reason for certain eleventh-hour fixes that occurred. It’s certainly a well-paced, enjoyable movie to sit through but as it goes on something becomes increasingly sour about it all. I don’t think this is a case of the director and everyone involved losing interest in the story being told so much as losing control of it.

After writer Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) introduces her fiancée Dr. Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis) to famous actress Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep), the longtime rival between the two women results in Madeline marrying Ernest away from her. Years later, long after Helen has undergone a complete breakdown, Madeline and Ernest are living in wedded hell in Beverly Hills, her acting career over as she tries to hold on to her faded looks and Ernest reduced to drinking and working as a high-end mortician. When Helen reemerges as a successful author looking better than ever, Madeline’s jealousy rears its head again and she takes drastic action, courtesy of the exotic and mysterious Lisle von Rhoman (Isabella Rossellini)—a magical potion that allows the person who drinks it to have their aging process reversed and then live forever. But certain developments arising from what Ernest and Helen have planned complicate matters and though she might be immortal, her body is of considerably more fragile. Not to mention that it turns out that Madeline and Helen currently have more in common than they first realize.

It moves so fast that it certainly never becomes boring and there are genuine laughs throughout but within its technical ambition and thematic goals, DEATH BECOMES HER winds up feeling kind of empty. Actually, it’s a little strange to be saying that because watching DEATH BECOMES HER for the first time in a while, I did get a certain amount of pleasure from it. In addition to the at-times sharp humor, it’s continually engaging to look at and the actors are all game. But there’s such intelligence behind the filmmaking, such ambition, that it’s too bad that it’s not more satisfying in the end. There’s huge possibility in the material, written by Martin Donovan & David Koepp, with great amounts of clever dialogue and there’s a lot to mine in exploring the ugliness of beauty, particularly when a place like Beverly Hills comes into the picture. It’s certainly thematically consistent throughout, that’s for sure. But Zemeckis spends so much time focusing on not only the effects but the precision of every single extended take that the humor is sometimes lost in the extreme approach. There is at times extreme use of mirrors during those long shots, a concept which is attention-getting and certainly keeps a motif going but it doesn’t necessarily add to the satire or make it a more satisfying story. There are definite echoes of other Zemeckis films in its use of the passage of time as well as, more specifically, some of the ideas in the darker future portrayed in BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II, but I still wish that there was something more enriching to it. All throughout are the biggest, most opulent sets imaginable but what if it had a more naturalistic setting and paid more attention to the story but still contained the same effects?

To be perfectly fair as we’d expect from Zemeckis those effects are not only ground-breaking in how they portray “Mad” and “Hel” but they’ve also dated very well, not something you can say about every film that dotes on these things in a show-off kind of way. And some of his approach to humor, particularly during the first half, is very sharp, making it at times the rare comedy that is actually cinematic—technically, every part of the film is aces. The extended sequence where Rossellini sells the effects of the potion on Streep feels perfect in tone, performance and effects, building up with just the right pace. And even though the trip to a Beverly Hills hospital (actually, “L’Hospital Beverly Hills” as the sign tells us) feels a little scattered in how it’s put together, but it’s still hard not to appreciate how Zemeckis tosses in a split second valet parking joke in there as well as how the hospital curtains seem to intentionally resemble the famous Banana Leaf wallpaper in the Beverly Hills Hotel. That said, around this point is where things begin to go off the rails. Things become more and more frenetic as it goes on, with it finally feeling like the movie is more interested in the big climactic setpiece and chase instead of the characters who have been set up. Much of the story is also set during one of those nights that seem to go on forever which always kind of annoys me. It just feels like somewhere along the way Zemeckis drifted somewhat off-compass because he was focusing so much on the groundbreaking digital effects which would go on to win an Oscar. Some jokes scattered throughout, like the “Sweet Bird of Youth” musical aren’t as sharp as the movie seems to think they are and by the time we get to the celebrity ‘cameos’ of the climax the humor feels on the level of a sketch on an old Bob Hope special. Even the score by the usually reliable Alan Silvestri seems to consist mostly of generic licks which give the impression that he didn’t have any better ideas either. The final moments of the film make all the necessary points and conclude the story about as well as it could but when we get to the final joke it seems like it’s more interested in coming to a screeching halt than actually ending.

One additional point of interest to the film has always been the unusually large number of scenes featured in the trailer that are nowhere to be found in the finished product and with only an older full-frame DVD out there they remain unseen. An awareness of the story gives the idea that some of them were cut most likely for pacing (they might also account for that never-ending night). But the trailer also contains glimpses of things that were excised completely, particularly an entire subplot featuring Tracey Ullman as a bartender who became a sympathetic love interest for Willis and figured into the film’s ending. Her character would have led to what sounds like a gentler version of the denouement that is in the final product, both being set years in the future, one that really may have played better in a less frenetic film. Zemeckis even once said in an interview with Cinefex magazine, “The original ending was soft and didn’t keep with the tone of the picture,” a statement which indicates how much he may have veered away from the points the screenwriters had been trying to make. It could be a case of an approach to a script that is at least slightly misconceived…but considering how expertly some of it is actually put together I’m still not sure. It might be that the film winds up feeling more bitter than genuinely clever as well as the possibility of how misogynist the whole thing may be—heard from an offscreen TV as Bruce Willis is introduced in the present day section is a narrator stating, “The Beaver has always been of interest to man…it is the second largest rodent in the world,” and that may say it all in regards to what the film thinks of women. At the very least, something feels off and, ultimately, unsatisfying about the final product.

Even if the actors play things as big as the director’s approach requires, there’s no denying that each one is willing to completely throw themselves into the material. Streep is fantastic and works off Willis so well it’s interesting to think how he was actually a fairly last-minute substitute for Kevin Kline, who departed when he reportedly couldn’t come to a salary agreement with the producers. Hawn is fun in what isn’t necessarily a stereotypical ‘Goldie Hawn’ role but some of the plot structure means that she doesn’t have quite as much to work with. Isabella Rossellini, looking particularly impressive, is hypnotic to watch every time she appears and Michelle Johnson of BLAME IT ON RIO fame has one well-played scene in which her character drops her French accent without comment from anyone, one of the most nicely subtle jokes in the entire film. As good as everyone might be, the film is easily stolen by the uncredited Sydney Pollack playing the emergency room doctor examining Streep in one of his three screen roles that caught everyone’s attention back in ’92. Even if it is pretty much a ripoff of the equivalent scene in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (a film which, let’s face it, completely works as black comedy when compared to this), Pollack manages to make it work hugely well and, maybe because he’s isolated from the rest of the film, he’s able to play things more real than anyone else and he gets the most laughs as a result. I particularly like when he refers to Streep and Willis as ‘kids’ in the dialogue, a touch which sounds like it came right from him. If the whole film had been as sharp as these few minutes then maybe all the revolutionary effects wouldn’t have been so necessary.

But that’s the thing. To Robert Zemeckis, these effects are completely necessary and in his ultimate goal to push the boundaries of what’s possible to portray on the screen—which, even I’ll admit, is admirable—he loses sight of whether it’s always necessary in trying to make the best possible film. DEATH BECOMES HER has many points that either work or come very, very close to working extremely well in its portrayal of the darkness that lies under beauty. Bruce Willis’s terrific response to the possibility of immortality that begins with the ultimate question “What if I get bored?” manages to get the point across more succinctly than any episode of STAR TREK on the subject ever did. The best of Robert Zemeckis can be found in this film as well as…well, maybe not the worst but it’s all part of an approach that I’m never going to have any interest in going along with him on. His talent is still there, it’s just interested in pursuing another kind of result right now. I suppose there’s always the chance that he’ll once again develop an interest in the things that made us love his films in the first place, but I’m growing increasingly unsure of that. So it’s safe to say that whether I’m going to have any interest in seeing any more films directed by Robert Zemeckis from this point on simply remains to be seen.

The Necessity Of A Few Good Deeds

2009-11-28T19:23:00.000-08:00

Richard Fleischer’s CROSSED SWORDS, a filming of the Mark Twain classic “The Prince and the Pauper”, is totally forgotten by the world. I’m not sure if it was ever really remembered, let alone known at the time it was released—beats me why I have any recollection of its existence at all. It seems that the only notable thing about it—if this point even counts as notable—is that it seems to have been the last non-event first run film to play at Radio City Music Hall, back at the end of the days when the grand palace still ran movies on a regular basis. Looking it up, this places the film’s run there during March 1978 (nine months after it opened in the UK where it was more predictably titled, what do you know, THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER), just a few months after I actually would have seen PETE’S DRAGON in the place. I freely admit that I’ve never actually read it, but I have seen the episode of THE BRADY BUNCH where Peter runs into his exact double in the school hallway so it’s safe to say that I’m up to speed.

Produced by the legendary Salkinds—well, Alexander & Ilya Salkind along with Pierre Spengler— the team who were about to hit the world jackpot with SUPERMAN, the basic approach of the film almost gives the impression that the project could have begun as another sequel to their successful THE THREE/FOUR MUSKETEERS, but when that idea fell through they came up with a new plan. At the least, it certainly seems like an attempt to recapture that dual glory. But this time, instead of bringing on someone like director Richard Lester they hired the more workmanlike (well, at least at that point in time) Richard Fleischer, whose recent films had included SOYLENT GREEN and MR. MAJESTYK as well as the infamous MANDINGO. Scattered through the story are actors returning from the two MUSKETEERS films along with several who had also worked with Fleischer before (and, in some cases, both). It looks like the film was a commercial dud on both sides of the Atlantic and I can kind of see why. It’s tough to understand which age group it’s supposed to appeal to and its old-fashioned nature probably totally out of step with the times when it was made. Not to mention that it feels like creatively it just misses the mark, at least partly due to the ineffectual nature of the lead playing the two main roles. That said, watching it in the holiday mood, I didn’t really mind CROSSED SWORDS much at all. Coming in at just over two hours, it’s slightly overlong and a little too stodgy but its old-fashioned nature, like a 50s film that didn’t correctly update its sensibilities combined with the work of a number of artisans involved, make it kind of refreshing in this hyped up day and age. Maybe I’m just getting older and more appreciative of this sort of thing.

It's such a familiar story by now that you know the plot even if you don’t know it. Tom Canty (Mark Lester) is living a begger’s life in 15th century London with an abusive father (Ernest Borgnine who just screams “England” of course) making his life hell when one day he accidentally stumbles into the palace of King Henry VIII (Charlton Heston) where he meets the Prince of Wales (also Lester, of course) who turns out to be his exact double. Intrigued, the prince suggests they change clothes but the result of this has the actual prince thrown out into the street while Tom, unsuccessful in convincing anyone of the truth, remains in the castle. Soon the Prince meets up with Miles Hendon (Oliver Reed), a soldier-of-fortune who takes an interest in this boy’s lunatic ravings and decides to help him out. But soon fate steps in and Tom is about to be crowned the King of England with the only one who knows the truth unable to get anywhere near him.

There must be people in this world who would want to see any film in which Oliver Reed gets involved in swordfights and they will definitely want to take a look at CROSSING SWORDS, which offers plenty of looks at how the actor could truly hurl himself into those kinds of scenes. The downside of the film is that it lacks the enjoyable irreverence that marked Lester’s two MUSKETEERS films (hits in their day, now totally forgotten by the general public). Under Fleischer’s direction, CROSSED SWORDS feels a little too stodgy in comparison, less inspired. Tonally, it’s a little too unsure of itself and as far as something presumably aimed at a family audience the result winds up in the no-mans land between Disney and an old-style MGM-type approach (odd screenplay credits too—of course, Twain is mentioned, then we get “original screenplay by Berta Dominguez D. and Pierre Spengler, final screenplay by George MacDonald Fraser”). With the UK opening coming right around the time STAR WARS premiered, not to mention the eventual arrival of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK a few years later, this type of entertainment would be totally transformed away from this sort of thing. In comparison, CROSSED SWORDS really does feel like it’s from a different age, without a lot of flip anachronisms getting in the way. It isn’t able to excitement going at every moment but there is a desire to entertain and at points where the energy lags it knows enough to bring in another name actor for a guest appearance—when George C. Scott comes in for a few minutes it’s like the energy shoots up ten-fold. And there’s the amazing Oliver Reed truly giving this role his all and his increased prominence in the story as it goes on also seems to parallel how the film itself improves as it goes along. With his lovable rogue/Han Solo/Captain Jack character gaining in depth as we discover the gravity of his own personal narrative, there really is something to lock into and get involved with. The film gains a surprising amount of focus and depth late in the game, really the final quarter of the film and may be a large reason of why I feel so favorable towards it. Bringing in a few of the name stars like Raquel Welch as late as the film does, instead of cheating us by their delayed arrival, gives the feel of new elements continually being added to the story as it propels to its conclusion.

And in addition to the stars, there’s the immense amount of British talent behind the camera—it feels like a well-crafted film in the best ways of the phrase—with lots of familiar crew names from British films of this period in the credits (and Olivier Assayas is listed as one of the 3rd Assistant Directors!). The great cinematographer Jack Cardiff in particular makes it all much more visually distinguished than the somewhat flatter visuals in Lester’s films, with Scope compositions that continually made me want to pause the DVD to admire things and shots that almost resemble paintings at times—Maltin’s book even states “Jack Cardiff’s photography will suffer on TV” and having watched the DVD which correctly shows things in the 2:35:1 ratio I can believe it. There are a few effects shots here and there which were probably a big deal to accomplish in those days as well. Sometimes there’s the slight feeling of a tight budget being clamped down on by the Salkinds, at other points the film is as sumptuous as we would want it to be and that’s what comes out ahead. Maurice Jarre’s score is as majestic as you would expect as well.

Mark Lester, famous from OLIVER! which had come out a decade earlier seems rather ill-at-ease in his dual role (much younger in the book and it does feel awkward how that is presented here) and even though it does feel like he’s genuinely trying it still comes off as something that would have been more at home in a more simple, Disney-type version of the story. It probably says something that Lester switched careers after this film—he’s recently reappeared in the public eye somehow connected with Michael Jackson but I really don’t want to look up the details on any of that. Michael York would have obviously been a better choice but by this point that actor was definitely too old for it. Surrounding Lester are a variety of actors who make up for this discrepancy particularly Reed, a powerhouse in a production that is almost too genteel to hold him. He never seems to play anything for laughs and we really feel his hurt when someone has betrayed him, yet he is hugely enjoyable to watch in his numerous fight scenes throughout—when he realizes the jig is up at one point he doesn’t hesitate for a second to throw a punch and it seems like just how Reed himself would have behaved in such a situation. Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison approach their supporting roles with all the gravity and relish you would expect from them, George C. Scott chews up all the scenery in sight in his ten-minute cameo and is hugely enjoyable and Raquel Welch is well-used, looking game and not given too much dialogue to get in the way. Besides, it’s hard to hate any film in which Oliver Reed gets to play a romance with her. David Hemmings makes an effective appearance in the key role of Reed’s brother—years later the two actors also appeared in GLADIATOR, the production Reed died on. Borgnine is fun to have around even if he’s not the least bit convincing as British and we never hate him all that much anyway. Harry Andrews, one of the Krypton Elders in SUPERMAN, has a sizable role, Sybil Danning is unrecognizable as Canty’s mother and the numerous familiar British faces that pop up include PINK PANTHER veteran Graham Stark and Hammer Films mainstay Michael Ripper. In the supporting role of Princess Elizabeth, Lalla Ward actually does have genuine screen presence and it seems to say something that she is allowed the privilege of the film’s final image, helping to give the closing moments more depth than might have been expected.

That final narration is kind of like the film—part amused with itself, part earnest and it has a satisfying effect overall. Besides, who doesn’t want to see a movie where Oliver Reed fights Ernest Borgnine? And if you don’t, what kind of horrible person are you? It’s a minor footnote for everyone involved and even all Richard Fleischer’s autobiography has to say about it is a story detailing a syphilis scare that occurred on set. Considering how unknown it is, it’s pretty surprising that it even got released on DVD. It’s really not at all a bad film and was probably an appropriate choice for the role it played at Radio City. The era of films there was over and showing this, which must have seemed already out of place even then, was no doubt representative of that fact. I shouldn’t oversell it and it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to trim this thing down a little, but it hit me in the right mood. Anyone with an interest in people like Fleischer, Cardiff, Reed, a few of the others involved or just this genre in general really might want to check it out. It actually feels like a film that should be seen in a huge movie palace and these days that’s saying something.

Hope Springs Eternal

2009-11-27T17:12:00.000-08:00

The 1995 release of Pierce Brosnan’s first James Bond film, GOLDENEYE, seemed to begin a mini-tradition of bringing films in the series out right around Thanksgiving time. Pretty appropriate, actually, considering how Bond films have become a tradition themselves and it seems perfectly appropriate for a family to eat dinner then go out to the theater to see the latest film (TOMORROW NEVER DIES came out closer to Christmas, but the point still stands). I think I did it one year myself when visiting my sister in D.C. The release of the film came after a lengthy six-year absence during which the future of 007 was put into question over complex issues that involved problems with United Artists, perceived dissatisfaction with Timothy Dalton in the role and other matters. The exciting teaser trailer which played for months introducing Brosnan asking, “You were expecting someone else?” got everyone excited and it’s safe to say that the film was almost considered a smash success even before it opened. When it finally did and everyone got to actually see Brosnan in action the whole world seemed to smile in agreement. Moving on from the hard-edged approach of the Dalton films, the goal of GOLDENEYE was clearly to make the series popular again as well as restart things for a new generation—it’s not as radical as what occurred years later with CASINO ROYALE but that wasn’t what people wanted at the time. They wanted Brosnan to finally take possession of the role and that’s really all the film had in mind. Looking at it fourteen years (!!!) after it opened reveals a film that is nice and fairly enjoyable but it still bears signs of uncertainty that came along with introducing this new incarnation of the character.

Nine years after being involved in a skirmish in the Soviet Union that ended with the death of fellow agent Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean), James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is lounging around in Monte Carlo doing nothing in particular aside from being evaluated when he meets the enticing Russian beauty Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), who he suspects is up to something. He’s right, of course, and it turns out that Onatopp is in league with a mysterious crime organization named Janus with their eye on procuring an experimental military helicopter which will allow them to steal the disc named Goldeneye, designed to control several satellite weapons. The theft ends with a massacre at a Russian satellite outpost which results in an unexpected survivor, beautiful computer programmer Natalya Siminova (Izabella Scorupco). Bond is assigned by the new ‘M’ (Judi Dench) to find Goldeneye as well as find who is behind the plot and his path takes him to St. Petersburg in search of the face behind Janus where he discovers….well, not to give anything away but if someone who’s name is on the poster gets killed during the pre-credit sequence, what do you really think is going on?

Taking another look at GOLDENEYE now reveals a film that is perfectly decent and never in any way dull but still not quite as energizing as it was on opening weekend way back then. The immediacy of the post-cold war element as well as the use of computers in the plot certainly places the film at the time it was made in and while this all might slightly date the film this isn’t really a bad thing. What’s more evident is how the film seems to be struggling with figuring out exactly what this new version of the character is going to be—how funny, how serious, how much action. As a result, it winds up having a bit of a prefab feel in an attempt to make it as accessible to everyone as possible. The character of James Bond seems to be explained to us almost as much as we actually see him do stuff. It almost feels the way a Bond film really should, but somehow just misses the mark. The screenplay by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Ferstein (story by Michael France) leaves a number of things unaccounted for throughout—there’s really no reason to have Bond in Monte Carlo at the opening, let alone being ‘evaluated’—for doing what? How he spends a vacation? Of course, the powers that be clearly wanted to make all this as much of an introduction to this new Bond in the world we would expect to see him in but it feels like the film went through so many rewrites that some things got lost along the way. When Bond arrives in St. Petersburg in particular it feels like things have to tread water for about twenty minutes as characters who ultimately serve little purpose get introduced and much exposition is spoken (some of it off-camera as characters drive to a destination). Tcheky Karyo is introduced in a way that anticipates a significant role as a Russian bureaucrat but he’s dispensed with pretty quickly. Likewise Gottfried John, who does get a big introduction in the pre-credit sequence and buildup as “future iron man of Russia” General Ourumov but when he exits it happens so quickly that I literally missed it while blinking on this viewing. The film spends so little time on the details but lavishes so much attention on the stuff it assumes we want that it has Bond order drinks just so he can say “shaken, not stirred” but none of the characters wait around for them to arrive.

Along with bringing in some of the tried-and-true Bond tropes, the film includes some dialogue in the conflict between Bond and Trevelyan of the ‘we’re not so different, you and I’ that seemed to become very popular in these movies during the 90s. There’s also stuff like 007 stating ‘what keeps me alive’ in an attempt to actually dig deep into what makes the character tick. None of it seems very necessary and it’s not nearly as interesting as the film seems to think it is, although Judi Dench's much-praised banter with Brosnan as she deems him a 'sexist, mysoginist dinosaur. A relic of the cold war,' is immeasurably helped by how the two actors play this stuff. With any worries that this one would fail in the past, later Brosnan entries seemed to table these types of discussions which is probably for the best. After all, everyone has their own idea of who James Bond is and should be—my take on it might be different from yours, yours different from someone else’s. Sometimes having Bond (whoever is playing him) give a one-word, deadly grave response to something is all we’ll ever need to know about him and how he feels about what he has to do.

The special effects work is interesting in how the film comes right at that point as practical work (you know, like actual models) was quickly becoming digital and soon resulted in the Bond films looking a lot like every other blockbuster that gets made. Here, at least, some of it does feel a little old-school and helps give it a feeling like it all deserves to be seen in a theater with the biggest screen possible. Fittingly, it was the final film featuring the work of effects maestro Derek Meddings, to whom it’s dedicated. Some of the uncertainty extends to the use of violence as well with a lot of people getting machine-gunned (even for one of these films) but very little in the way of blood or squibs ever seen. There are a few points here and there where it feels like slight cuts were made to keep the PG-13—it doesn’t hurt things that much but it does feel like they weren’t quite sure how far to go with things. GOLDENEYE gets a number of things right but also quite a few wrong as well, a one-step forward, two-steps-back approach that became the norm for the Brosnan entries, each of which seemed to have different strengths and weaknesses unique to each entry. All this said, it’s still a James Bond film, with a variety of the elements that you want from one and it pretty much falls in the middle of the pack. Director Martin Campbell has a knack for giving us some grace notes throughout in the luxurious settings of places like Monte Carlo and the film does have a nice, wide-open feel to it but he did a much better job in all respects in 2006 when he introduced the next actor who played Bond in CASINO ROYALE. Still, this one isn’t an embarrassment. It’s fun, enjoyable, no doubt about that. But after it was over I felt like popping in one of the really good ones to get the full effect.

What is an embarrassment, and a very unfortunate one, is the score by Eric Serra. With composer John Barry presumably unwilling to return to the series they decided to go with a new approach by using Luc Besson’s regular composer and certainly what was heard in something like LA FEMME NIKITA is very striking. But it not only comes out all wrong it feels so lackluster in how it’s dropped into the picture, as of Serra either lost interest somewhere along the way or maybe even choked under the pressure with the score that is there coming off so sparse at times that it feels like the film is getting almost no support from it. Whether it’s the worst Bond score of all time is open to debate (Marvin Hamlisch’s THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and Michel Legrand’s NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN would also be in the running) but there are points where what is heard is as damaging to a film—any film—as I’ve ever heard from a film score. Every once in a while there’s a brief glimmer heard that sounds like it could be a genuinely modern take on Bond music, and in fairness there are a few of these moments, but they go away fast and the climax in particular winds up giving off a ‘meh’ response instead of any sort of excitement almost entirely due to the lameness of the score. Just imagine the final moment of the teaser with the actual Bond theme instead of the nothing that’s there and you can get an idea of what is sadly missing from this film. I’ve heard scuttlebutt over the years that the producers wanted to replace the score but with the release date looming there was just no time. As it is, they did have conductor John Altman put together a new version of the tank chase music, as well as the scenes leading up to it, featuring the classic theme and when this facsimile of the Bond sound suddenly appears this deep into the movie it’s like everything suddenly springs to life. Finally, it feels like the person behind this music is actually, thankfully excited that this is really a James Bond movie that they get to score. It’s not a perfect compromise considering how different it is from what’s heard during the rest of the film, but at least it’s something (for the record, both the opening song, even if it is written by Bono and The Edge, and Serra’s closing number are each pretty weak as well). Beginning with the next film, TOMORROW NEVER DIES, David Arnold was brought in to handle the duties and while his successful aping of the Barry sound has given way to a more propulsive, techno oriented approach over the years, his approach has certainly been more beneficial to the films.

People wanted to see Pierce Brosnan in this role, they were waiting for it. He’s good here, but not as strong as he would be a few films later. His more serious moments are best, with the lighter stuff seeming not quite right. Maybe I’m also not crazy about the idea of Bond wearing a sweater, as we see him right after the opening credits. To me, it makes James Bond seem more like someone who does all this as a lark on weekends, not someone who really lives this life, but maybe that’s just me. Sean Bean is a fairly decent villain, Alan Cumming is appropriately annoying as the secondary hacker bad guy but Famke Janssen is awesome, absolutely fantastic as Xenia Onatopp, taking what seems to be written as a gimmicky bad guy, best at crushing men with her thighs, and bringing a surprising intensity to it. She manages just by her quiet presence in some scenes to keep herself active even when the character isn’t much more than just a henchman. She dives headfirst into the role with such a ferocity that it makes us wish she were around more than she is. Yes, Janssen absolutely is ultra-hot as well, but plenty of beautiful women have been unable to do much with the parts they were given in these movies and there’s a reason why Janssen was able to have a career after this film. She knows how to work the camera and she knows how to get us to miss her when she’s offscreen. By comparison, Izabella Scorupco comes off as a bit of a wet blanket. Beautiful, yes, but always pouting and when held up against the insanity of Xenia Onatopp, not nearly as much fun. The film also introduced Judi Dench as ‘M’ but judging how they don’t figure out a way to bring her back for a final gag seems to mean that they didn’t quite realize what they had in her—we’re left hanging there, waiting for something and then suddenly the end credits quietly begin to roll. As a result, the closer doesn’t really have the kick it needed. Also introduced here and returning in later entries were Joe Don Baker as Jack Wade, Robbie Coltrane as Valentin Zurkovsky, Samantha Bond as Moneypenny and Michael Kitchen as Bill Tanner. Desmond Llewelyn is of course back in his legendary role as ‘Q’ and gets us to smile the instant he appears.

No one is ever going to entirely agree on all the Bond films they prefer and one of the things wrong with GOLDENEYE is that it tries to be all things to all fans. Certainly one thing that helped CASINO ROYALE succeed so well is how it totally committed to the serious, pulpy approach it took. GOLDENEYE isn’t in that league, but it does have exotic locations in far-off places, decent action, beautiful women, silly one-liners. It does enough of these things well-enough that it winds up enjoyably entertaining in the long run, something that I’m sure played great with all those families who saw it after their turkey dinners, even if it is a little hollow in spite of all its attempts at depth. It’s still surprising to think that it came out fourteen years ago. Bond will go on through the years, no matter who is playing the character and we’ll probably go on arguing about each of those films as well, trying to come to some sort of agreement as to who this character is and why we continue to obsess over them.

“Enjoy it while it lasts.”

“The very words I live by.”

You Let The Moment Fly

2009-11-21T18:09:00.000-08:00

As anyone who knows the film well might realize, the idea of a special screening of Robert Altman’s masterpiece THE LONG GOODBYE at the Hammer Museum in Westwood Village was very appropriate if only because the museum is located by the corner of Wilshire & Westwood, situated exactly where Elliott Gould’s Phillip Marlowe chases after the Mercedes driven by Nina van Pallandt’s Eileen Wade late in the film. No was I going to pass that up. The screening seems to have been held in conjunction with a recent donation from Altman’s family to UCLA including the very print were seeing that evening. I suppose there was a function held before the screening which I did not attend but did see several people who seem to have come from there. Soon after I arrived and waiting to be let in I spotted Elliott Gould, there for a post-film discussion, lurking around near the edges of the Hammer’s courtyard almost unnoticed. All I could think was, there’s Phillip Marlowe, right there. I chose not to disturb him. Incidentally, the actor just guest-starred on LAW & ORDER and it was kind of nice seeing NBC trumpet him in the promos. Once inside the Billy Wilder Theater, I soon realized that the great Vilmos Zsigmond, the legendary cinematographer on the film, was sitting right behind me. Sitting behind him was Paul Dooley, familiar from a million things, and I could hear him chatting with Zsigmond about the Robert Altman films he had appeared in—When I heard, “We were there for six months, we had Fellini’s crew,” it was easy to figure that he was talking about POPEYE. A number of other familiar people were there and I have a feeling I missed a few but Lauren Hutton was somewhere in the row in front of me and shortly before the film started I spotted Sally Kellerman walking around the packed theater looking for an open seat, a sight which seemed rather…Altmanesque. The film started soon enough (and I noticed she had indeed found a seat) and we were treated to a beautiful-looking print of a film that I’ve already seen numerous times and still can never get enough of. I might watch my DVD again before the night is through.

What exactly is it about THE LONG GOODBYE? It was somewhat notoriously hated at the time of release, trashed by fans of the detective genre with the Maltin book proclaiming that “Altman’s attitude toward the genre borders on contempt,” in terms of the film's unorthodox approach to adapting Raymond Chandler's novel. But by this point in time the film has achieved acclaim as at least a minor classic and to some people something considerably more, one that they are genuinely attached to. I know I am. The audience in the Billy Wilder Theater was clearly at least partly made up of the faithful, judging from the laughter heard right at the start as Marlowe lit his first cigarette of the movie, of course the first of many. The feeling was that everyone was settling in, ready to follow this version of the character through his travails one more time as he navigates this early 70s version of Los Angeles. Over 35 years after it was made, it seems as mysterious to the stranded-from-the-40s Phillip Marlowe as 2009 Los Angeles can seem to anyone who finds themselves there and wonders how they’re supposed to be acting from day to day. The film seems designed for anyone who has found themselves at a party like the (admittedly pretty groovy looking) beachfront barbecue that the Wades are throwing for their presumed friends who have turned up from I don’t know where. Marlowe has nothing to say to any of them, they take no interest in him and the only one who does show any interest is the dog who never stops barking in his direction—he must know something about the cat.

I’ve seen the film enough times by now that I don’t need to spend too much time thinking about the plot so instead I pay attention to various moments that make that much more of an impression when seen on the big screen. Marlowe’s reaction to the dried apricot Eileen Wade tosses him, Henry Gibson’s Dr. Verringer laying the slap on Sterling Hayden at the third “Write the CHECK, Roger,” Jack Riley’s careful rehearsing on the piano in the bar and that almost unspeakably horrific look on Nina van Pallandt’s face just before Sterling Hayden shouts “BALLS!” at her. Not to mention the continued rewards at studying Elliott Gould’s face throughout, wondering how much he’s actually revealing to someone he’s talking to, wondering how much things really are ok with him as he always says. As well as every conceivable version of the main theme famously heard at every possible point during the film (favorite unheralded version: the one heard on sitar wafting over from the girls next door outside of Marlowe’s pad, but the rendering performed by the marching band down in Mexico is strangely haunting), that one song that sticks in your head in this town, just like that girl that you never seem to forget even years after the first time you spend a few minutes desperately trying to just talk to her. Although one or two things still bug me a little even now: when we jump from the late night crime scene at the beach to Marlowe being dragged into Marty Augustine’s office, how much time has passed? An hour? A day? A week? It doesn’t matter, I suppose.

I read the Chandler book maybe over ten years ago so memories are vague but the basic plot of the novel is in the film and structure wise the changes made aren’t necessarily any greater from how most 379 page books are ever adapted down to a two hour running time. It makes me think that screenwriter Leigh Brackett, the legend who had worked with Howard Hawks on THE BIG SLEEP and RIO BRAVO, deserves more credit than she has ever received for her work here and even if the actors tossed out the script (or used it as a loose outline in a way that maybe something like CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM is now put together) it feels like Altman always had it in mind—if he was going to verge from it, he at least knew what he was verging from. It could be one reason why this film is so much stronger than certain other Altman films which don’t already have such a strong spine in place (I guess something like PRET-A-PORTER comes to mind). And it’s all in the service of not the two mysteries that Phillip Marlowe stumbles into which become one but the greater meaning of what it all means in the end. Friends betray you (“That’s what friends are for,” as someone says near the very end), women toss you aside as they drive off with “LOV YOU” on their license plate and you’re left with that memory with them still lingering in the air as you wonder what happened—the long goodbye.

And I find myself looking forward to the performances of everyone in front of the camera caught by the eye of Altman and Zsigmond, whether Sterling Hayden and Nina van Pallandt in their scenes with Gould or David Arkin muttering “I remember when people just had jobs,” Mark Rydell’s ferocious pragmatism as Marty Augustine, Ken Samson’s guard at the gate of the Malibu Colony (“I just don’t understand why I don’t understand,”) or Jo Ann Brody’s ultra-innocent Sharon Tate-ness as Augustine’s girl who has no idea what she’s in for as she asks for a Coke. Naturally, there was audience laughter at the Billy Wilder Theater as Arnold Schwarzenegger made his silent appearance as one of the goons (Altman’s proud declaration on the DVD that “Arnold never speaks of this film” was proven untrue when our Governor did just that in the official statement released at the time of the director’s death). And instead of going on for pages about the work of the lead actor here, in his first film after returning from working for Bergman, I’ll simply say that almost more so than any other screen work by an actor that I’ve ever seen, Elliott Gould gives the performance of a free man and the only example that ever needs to be offered of how good he was. I wish I could somehow be this free.

The post-film discussion with the star and Mitchell Zukoff, author of the recent “Robert Altman – An Oral Biography” (recommended) got into how Gould got involved with the film and also touched on his starring roles MASH and CALIFORNIA SPLIT (the only other times Altman and Gould worked together, not counting a few cameos). Gould talked about specifics of the production a little bit, including how he almost drowned while shooting the late night scene out in the Malibu surf and then after that they did two more takes. The talk perhaps revealed how for Gould it seems to sometimes be difficult to put the improvisatory nature of the specifics of working with Altman into words but enough of the feeling got across and more importantly he was able to express what Altman who he referred to as a “force of nature” and how he was able to provide all the creative people he worked with “life”. As a sort of summation late in the evening when trying to express how they worked together Gould simply stated, “Bob deserves all the credit.” Not much else needed to be said after that.

This is all rambling, I know, maybe kind of like the film. Maybe there’s no way to fully put into words what the work of Robert Altman and Elliott Gould here means to me and all I can do is look forward to someday getting the chance to express that by showing it to someone who’s never seen it. And I hope she likes it too. After a lousy day earlier this week all I could really do at the end was let that Williams/Mercer theme song into my head and say to myself, “It’s ok with me,” as I walked off from the day alone, imagining myself in my own homage to the end of THE THIRD MAN. No one was around to hear me when I said that, but that doesn’t really matter. When it comes right down to it, I think I love this film so much that I don’t even want to tell you. And, let it always be said, Hooray For Hollywood.

The Power Of A Demonstration

2009-11-19T19:43:00.000-08:00

Released in November 1983, William Friedkin’s DEAL OF THE CENTURY doesn’t seem to have the support of even the most die-hard fans of the director out there. I think THE GUARDIAN actually has more admirers and I’d be happy to say something nice about THE HUNTED (sadly, I have never seen THE BRINK’S JOB, which seems to be unreleased on DVD in the U.S.). But as for this Chevy Chase vehicle, it’s possible that Friedkin-philes don’t remember that DEAL even exists…or at least that Friedkin directed it. It’s tough to figure out even why he did. At this point it was a long three years after CRUSING, so maybe he was hurting for offers, maybe he needed the cash, maybe he was just looking for something to do. For the most part, it doesn’t even really seem like one of his movies. Shot in a way that could have come from some other director, it looks like any number of brightly lit comedies of the time and while it goes for the feel of dark satire, none of that really holds. Those who were around then might remember that it was sold just as a crazy Chevy Chase comedy and coming just a few months after the release of NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION, the film actually could fall in the category of comedians who were trying new things around this period, darker satires to fall in with the unease of Reagan’s recession-era first term coming out of the end of the 70s—things like John Avildsen’s NEIGHBORS and Michael Ritchie’s THE SURVIVORS certainly come to mind. There’s Richard Brooks’s own unsuccessful arms race satire WRONG IS RIGHT as well.

Chevy Chase has plenty of bad movies to his credit but whatever the quality this seems like one of the few times he tried something genuinely different--more so than UNDER THE RAINBOW and MODERN PROBLEMS, anyway. Since it’s long since forgotten it doesn’t seem to have affected his subsequent career trajectory much at all. It’s a curious film, but not very good on any level. Maybe worst of all for Friedkin, it’s simply not out there enough—it’s just too average in its mediocrity. And if there’s no level of insanity to be found in a Friedkin film, however misplaced it might turn out to be, the result comes off like there was no reason for him to show up on the set. Of course, this brings up the issue of the pure oddness of William Friedkin directing any sort of comedy, dark or light. Does he actually have any sort of sense of humor? It really just feels like an unfortunate clashing of different individuals and when it was all put together there was nothing for the studio to do but release it since there wasn’t going to be any fixing the thing.

Not to try to spend to much time on the plot, since it isn’t very much of one, DEAL focuses on Eddie Muntz (Chevy Chase) arms dealer who travels the globe and while working over Christmas down in some Central American hellhole an ambush results in him losing all his money and being shot in the foot but his luck turns around when an encounter with Harold DeVoto (Wallace Shawn) also down there working on a deal causes him to luck into an opportunity of selling a new pilotless weapon from Luckup Industries called the Peacemaker. The circumstances causes Luckup head Frank Stryker (Vince Edwards), desperate to unload the faulty device, to want to make use of Muntz’s talents and expertise but DeVoto’s beautiful wife Catherine (Sigourney Weaver) takes an interest in the deal as well and there’s still the issue of Muntz’s partner Ray Kasternak (Gregory Hines) undergoing his own breakdown/religious conversion to deal with.

As Vincent Canby said in his New York Times review, DEAL OF THE CENTURY “fails as a satire, partly because it seems to think that all it has to do to win an audience is to announce its good intentions, and partly because it's terrible.” That’s about says it all. There’s no consistent tone and, frankly, there’s no consistent anything through the running time and frankly it’s tough to know exactly what the point of DEAL OF THE CENTURY is. The darkly funny idea of weapons being offered in such a manner is hammered in pretty early on with Chase spending scenes selling weaponry like used cars which really is the one joke the film seems to have. Even when it’s told in a more elaborate way during demonstrations of the Peacekeeper it feels like we’re hearing the same punchline again and again. The pacing at least feels like Friedkin’s style in the editing (Bud S. Smith, who also cut SORCERER and CRUSING, is credited), as if stripping away the story down to its essentials, whatever that story is, but it doesn’t seem like the correct way to structure a comedy. Narration by Chase begins at his first appearance around eight minutes in, after several scenes have already occurred and it just makes things feel lopsided—why aren’t things starting there if he’s the one telling this story? It’s tough to tell from watching it if the narration was always part of the picture—maybe not and I couldn’t help but notice when the end credits rolled that Bud Yorkin was listed as producer and certainly the previous year he had been a producer on BLADE RUNNER, which itself had famous problems with a voiceover.

Ultimately, there’s not very much good I can say about it—it’s not funny or subversive in any way that sustains interest, the characters aren’t likable (or even appealingly unlikable) and there’s no real story to latch onto. If the script by Paul Brickman (RISKY BUSINESS) had one, I can’t get a hold on it and all I feel left with is the unusual site of a lead character who spends most of the film with his leg in a cast. There is an idea there in how both Muntz and Kasternak discover in their own ways how to save their soul but the film doesn’t seem to be aware of it. Even the section that work relatively well don’t have much of an effect--cutting from a ceremonial plane launch to the guys in the control booth taking the place apart as they try to fix a problem (caused by washing the plane the night before) has some twisted appeal and it’s not a bad sequence even if the effects aren’t that great—I like the appearance by the star of the hit sitcom “One’s a Crowd”—but it’s too isolated from the rest of the movie, so no momentum ever comes from it. Every now and then there’s a glimmer of imtelligence but it’s always too isolated to know what to do with it. Any darkly comic film that chooses to roll the credits with the Chipmunks playing has to make it clear what it’s about. Maybe Friedkin just thought that it would signify something, even if no one would ever be sure what.

Since we’re a number of years past Chevy Chase being a bankable movie star it seems safe to say that his biggest hits were mostly in Chevy Chase-type roles with people he was comfortable working with. Here, he feels too much out of his comfort zone, maybe an indication that he was never going to be able to move into character roles in a Murray or Aykroyd kind of way. Throughout the film Chase seems miscast, vaguely uncomfortable and he doesn’t even look very good, with a pasty, pale face and bad haircut, all things that seems to have more to do with him than the character he’s playing. Sigourney Weaver, by contrast, does look pretty great (and, for the record, at times she looks amazing and Chase looks terrible in the same shot—Richard Kline was cinematographer—so it’s fitting that they have little chemistry) but she doesn’t seem to have received much direction with a character who never really registers—they go from her pulling a gun on Chase to them being a couple in short order but we never can tell why, beyond that they’re the two lead. The film doesn’t seem to have a very high opinion of her character either based on one sequence in particular and it feels like some punches were pulled in editing to soften some of this. She does have one great moment out on the dance floor at the Arms For Peace trade show that allows her to finally cut loose and for a few seconds it almost feels as if everything is about to come alive. Gregory Hines seems to have a handle on his character somewhat better, making me believe his interest in planes and coming off as likeably cracked, battling with his own demons culminating in a scene involving a minor fender bender and a flamethrower. It’s a scene that partly because of how he plays it goes to a dark place the rest of the film seems unable to but sadly doesn’t resonate because nothing around it does. Vince Edwards is nicely oily, but Wallace Shawn is pretty damn near brilliant in his one scene, nailing the tone of the hoped-for dark satire better than anyone. Robert Cornthwaite from the original THE THING has a great moment as a General giving a speech explaining how the United States can survive a first strike from the Soviets “and retaliate, inflicting more damage on them than they inflict on us,” adding V.P. Bush has said that “far more than five percent of our population will survive.” It looks to me like that Tracey Walter is in there playing a computer technician as well even though he’s not listed in the credits. We even get a few shots of Reagan seen on TV sets (hey, just like SPIES LIKE US!) including one point which seems particularly pertinent that looks like it comes from at least several years earlier.

There seems to be considerable research involved with the weaponry which seems a little like the Friedkin approach. He probably did a lot of work on that but there has to be something more to the joke of the sickness of all this and we never get it. It just becomes a bunch of scenes of either people shouting at each other or, in the case of Chase & Weaver, simply leering at each other. Just about the funniest thing about the film is that three years after its release, when the Iran-Contra scandal was beginning to heat up, CBS scrapped a planned airing of the film due to “its relation to recent news events.” I kind of doubt anyone would have cared. DEAL OF THE CENTURY seems to acknowledge the seriousness of its subject but it has no idea how to navigate the perversity of all that for comedy. If there are any Friedkin fans who want to defend the thing, by all means go for it. But if anyone does, frankly, I’d be surprised.

A Broken Nose Ain't Gonna Kill You

2009-11-14T20:29:00.000-08:00

I’ve been feeling a little listless lately, wondering about a lot of things that I won’t go into here. With this in mind I happened to pop Jonathan Demme’s 1986 film SOMETHING WILD into the DVD player for my first full viewing in quite some time. It’s interesting how the opening title sequence consists of views of Manhattan—funkier, more low-level shots of the island than you’d get in most films (with the World Trade Center seen a few times) but it’s still surprising how little of the film actually takes place there since in memory it almost seems like one of the key New York films of the period. Maybe that’s my memory of seeing it and how it affected me at the time. One of the few lower Manhattan locations it actually uses, the small restaurant at the beginning, is located at an intersection that I can remember being right around where the old Film Forum, quickly visible in one shot, used to be. This really has nothing to do with SOMETHING WILD itself except that maybe everything about the film is a reminder of a time where there was a greater energy in the air, more of a sense of possibility. The thrill, the pop of walking down the streets of lower Manhattan in 1986, the notion that everything in the world could be right in front of you. The possibility that maybe you really would meet a girl all in black named Lulu with a Louise Brooks haircut. The idea of winding up with her in a cheap motel in Jersey just a little while later wasn’t really considered by me, but still. Looking back on it now, I’m sure that I didn’t know how good we had it in Manhattan way back then. It’s an energy that Jonathan Demme brought to his films at his best and it’s displayed here in a way as good as it ever was. It’s maybe something that was a recognizable element of films that came from Orion, one of the few byproducts of the dreaded 80s that really is missed, and its freewheeling nature could almost be as purely representative of any film which ever came from that studio. Let me put it this way: returning to it after a number of years, I found myself loving SOMETHING WILD and being extremely moved by its portrayal of possibilities, the idea of breaking off from your set routine. Maybe watching it again made me want to somehow will that feeling into existing once again.

When strait-laced financial advisor Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels) suddenly skips out on his lunch check while leaving a funky café in lower Manhattan, he’s caught by free spirit Lulu (Melanie Griffith) who instantly pegs this boring looking guy as “a closet rebel” and whisks him away in her car, not back to work like she offers, but towards the Lincoln Tunnel and off to adventure. Things proceed in a manner that is unexpected but not disliked by Charlie, including a romp in a Jersey motel but then as they drive further away from the city towards Pennsylvania, secrets about each of them are gradually revealed not least of which is Lulu’s real identity as Audrey Hankel but also the sudden appearance of ex-husband Ray Sinclair (Ray Liotta) who moves things in a direction Charlie never imagined.

With a screenplay by E. Max Frye which is continually surprising in all the right ways, the shock of SOMETHING WILD’S tone shift at the midway point could never be felt now the way it was back in ‘86, but it does certainly place it as coming after the previous year’s INTO THE NIGHT and AFTER HOURS, two other films about Reagan-era yuppies suddenly thrown into an expected darkly comic nightmare. Less surreal than AFTER HOURS, this film seems to be more merciless about the tone shift and completely acknowledging the danger at hand. This dark side was certainly comparable to David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET which had only opened six weeks before and the two could easily make an ideal double bill of the dark side hiding under Reagan’s America circa 1986. The freewheeling nature of the first half also feels more like a product of the seventies and it could easily be read as detailing how one era lead into the other—what was once innocent and not-so-innocent fun (even if it does include larceny and drunk driving) leads into something not too dissimilar (the hellish motel Ray is staying in compared with all others seen through the film), but still very nasty. But these things may only really matter on an academic level as time goes on. More important could be how the film fits in with Jonathan Demme’s continued growth as a director, fully taking control of his directorial style with a presentation of Americana, the sights and sounds that can be found on every corner, music which doesn’t represent the characters so much as this amazing world around them. Not to mention the bit players throughout that pop, many of whom certainly aren’t professional actors but they each bring such a level of humanity to their individual moments that the cumulative effect becomes rather beautiful. Almost no one is a joke in the film including Dana Preu as Audrey’s mother Peaches and familiar face Jack Gilpin as Charlie’s co-worker who takes what could be a stereotypical dweeb and makes him somehow decent (I also like how he quietly makes an appearance in the film long before actually being introduced).

And Jonathan Demme clearly loves his two leads, he loves them for all their immense quirks and foibles and it’s a credit to the script as well how it reveals their layers and what they’re willing to do, how far they’re willing to break away from what’s expected (like Charlie’s gradually changing relationship with his credit cards) more as it goes on. Demme’s perfectly happy to stop the whole film midway through for a few minutes just to let them dance and enjoy themselves as The Feelies perform Bowie’s “Fame” in a kind of peak moment, just before things suddenly change right in the middle of a shot. But more than that the film still has a relevance to me, to what the idea of being an individual can mean in the world at large. You can say you’re a rebel but what really matters is what happens when somebody calls you on it and in that you can discover how much of that rebel, that individual, you truly have in you. Ray is in many ways the opposite number of Charlie, his submerged dark half come to life in a way he never imagined (“You’re like me,” said Frank Booth to Jeffrey Beaumont in that other Fall ’86 film), just as Audrey seems to be an opposite of Lulu. She’s someone who when the truth about Charlie (to use the name of a later, lesser Demme work) comes out it reveals itself to be as much of a lie as her Lulu persona and she doesn’t like it. Of course, that doesn’t put her into the clear and even up to the end the impression given is that you never really fully get her…but as I’ve learned over the years with certain women that’s par for the course anyway. Keeping all this in mind with how we ultimately feel about Audrey/Lulu in the end, I freely admit that I’m still not entirely sure how to feel about the implications of the final shot (not counting the part involving Sister Carol, of course). Do we want Lulu back? After everything that’s happened, can we even get Lulu back?

I’ve been light on discussing the plot here, but if you’ve never seen the film it deserves to be experienced as fresh as possible. Coming in the year when TOP GUN was the biggest box-office hit, SOMETHING WILD remains a work about individuals, an act of defiance in the middle of a decade where things were beginning to get away from that concept a little too fast. It doesn’t seem to have all the answers and it does fall short of perfection—the director’s staging of the climax isn’t as expert as he might have pulled it off a few years later and that final beat involving the lead characters comes close to being a letdown, but by this point the film has done so many things right that these feel like minor points. Watching it again not only made me happy, it made me feel a little hope, a desire to wish for the possibilities that don’t always seem to be out there. I’m not sure if it’s the best film Jonathan Demme has ever made (of course, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS looms large) but it may very well be the most purely Demme of all of them, the one that is most in love with not only the idea of getting this film made, but the hope and pleasure of what could still be out there to discover.

Under Demme’s direction, the two leads do what remains some of their best work. Daniels gets you to believe that his guy in a suit really would drop everything in his life to take off for the weekend and Griffith fully sells both sides of her character—at least, the two sides that we actually get to see. Liotta is dynamite, taking control of everything around him the minute he interrupts the movie right in the middle of an extended shot of the leads dancing at the reunion. He comes off not only as genuinely dangerous, he manages to make his cackling question, “You don’t want me to tell Charlie how you spend your free periods, do you?” sound shockingly filthy. Margaret Colin is provocative and looks great in her dress as Ray’s date at the reunion, musician Su Tissue in her only acting appearance as Gilpin’s wife Peggy makes me wonder what exactly her high school memories of Ray Sinclair are and the always interesting Anna Levine from DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN and UNFORGIVEN is The Girl In 3F. Demme regulars such as Robert Ridgely, Charles Napier and Tracey Walter are in there as well as John Waters and John Sayles. ‘Sister’ Carol East makes an appearance near the end that once you’ve seen you’ll remember for the rest of your days with a smile.

The world may not still be as enjoyable funky as it is presented here but very little that’s seen actually dates it (well, maybe those Baby on Board tags). I still love much of the music throughout and even the wardrobe choices throughout haven’t dated all that much, with the exception of something Daniels is seen wearing near the end—and hey, I know that if I saw a girl looking like Lulu on the street, she’d definitely catch my eye. It might be a product of its decade, but SOMETHING WILD has held up beautifully and in a strange sort of way I found revisiting it rather moving. More than anything this was because of the cumulative effect it gave off in displaying how those possibilities might still be out there, how in realizing that ‘it’s better to be a live dog than a dead lion’ you really do need to keep moving, to maintain the willingness to be at least a little wild.

A Man Has To Have Some Vices

2009-11-09T18:36:00.000-08:00

The Cannon Films logo isn’t anywhere on DEATH WISH II but the names of Golan and Globus as producers are prominently featured, which is almost the same thing. The logo probably wasn't in use yet by them but if it were there it would make perfect sense. Coming in 1982, the film pretty much marked the beginning of the run through that decade of Charles Bronson churning out what seemed like countless vehicles for the company. DEATH WISH II has him returning to his famous role of Paul Kersey but around this time all the characters began to be the same anyway, one time after the other of Bronson gunning down as much scum as he could find. Directed by Michael Winner, who also called the shots on the first film, DEATH WISH II does have a slightly similar feel but not as much immediacy, no real point of any kind beyond the gunplay. The first was iconic, this is just kind of a Charles Bronson vehicle. And not one of the better ones. Of course, once we hit 1980 it’s safe to say that no Charles Bronson vehicle can seriously be considered one of “the better ones”. And I say that as someone who sheds a small tear every time he sees a film that opens with the Cannon logo.

Several years after the events of DEATH WISH (either two, four or five depending on conflicting dialogue that we hear), Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) is now living in Los Angeles, still working as an architect, taking care of his still semi-catatonic daughter (now played by Robin Sherwood) and dating beautiful news radio reporter Geri Nichols (Jill Ireland—who else is going to play his love interest?). Kersey is now living a life of peace, without any of the violence he experienced in the first DEATH WISH…but then we hit the five minute mark of the sequel and it all goes to hell. Kersey runs afoul of a multi-ethnic group of muggers (including one “Laurence Fishburne III” as well as Kevyn Major Howard, later in FULL METAL JACKET) and when he tries to fight back after they get his wallet they use his drivers license to fight back…invading his home in a genuinely shocking, extremely unpleasant sequence of events that results in both his housekeeper and poor daughter, who still can barely speak, both raped and ultimately killed. Kersey insists to the police that he never got a good look at the gang to make any identification but we know the truth and soon enough Kersey is pulling a gun out of hiding and preparing to track down the toughs on the mean skid row streets by himself and once the Los Angeles police is investigating the vigilante shootings they’re bringing in New York Police Detective Frank Ochoa (the returning Vincent Gardenia) as a consultant and it doesn’t take him long to figure out what’s going on.

The original DEATH WISH was set on the mean streets of New York and even if it was a piece of big ol’ hackwork there was a certain primal power to it that anyone could identify with. Certainly the image of what that city became by then was a part of it as well along with just the simple idea of the terrors of going for a walk in Central Park late at night. DEATH WISH II moves things to Los Angeles and it’s not like this city has ever been crime free but it’s just not the same thing and considering how it’s portrayed it doesn’t seem to matter where they set it anyway—it feels like they only shot the movie here because no one felt like going anywhere else. Unlike the first film in which the hoodlums were never seen again after the initial attack, this film features Kersey, who knows their faces, on the hunt for them (gee, kind of like THE BRAVE ONE) but there’s no real plotting to any of it. He just goes out into the streets (completely different parts of the city at times) and stumbles into them (not to mention helping out an innocent married couple being brutalized themselves). The first film had the gritty 70s New York atmosphere but this one just feels like a cop show of the time that got way out of hand with lots of violence and sleaze—even the actors are mostly blah L.A. types as opposed to the interesting 70s New York personalities in the first film. Unlike just seeing the characters walk out into the potentially deadly streets, it’s just not going to be the same thing seeing Paul Kersey get in his car and drive around looking for muggers. Or taking the bus or heading out of the way down to skid row for that matter, changing into different clothes (so he won’t stand out like a sore thumb in his jacket and tie) like he’s some very low-rent version of Batman or something. The location work isn’t all that special (the geography’s pretty bad as well) though we do see various points downtown and on Hollywood Boulevard, although none of it’s shot in a particularly interesting way. Worse, they don’t show enough movie theater marquees, always a bonus in these things, although we do get to see that EXCALIBUR is playing at the Chinese.

The film has the same slammed-together feel that the first film has but considerably sloppier as if Michael Winner held a contest to see which aspiring editor could bring a two-hour cut down to under 90 minutes. As a result we have plenty of scenes of people making a big deal about heading out to a nice dinner, as if it mattered, then we never get to see that scene. Other extraneous bits of dialogue occur throughout where actors say things as if they mattered (a radio station manager taking a minute of screen time to complain about ratings, for example) but they never do. Some of Kersey’s architectural work is dwelled on as if it contained some thematic significance (there was some dialogue along these lines in the first film as well) but I’m at a loss to guess what that could be. There’s very little reason to expect elegant plotting or substance from DEATH WISH II but it’s as if the film is daring people to point out how sloppy all this is, even featuring out of place comic bits like Gardenia arguing with a cab driver. It’s so fast moving that it’s never in any way boring but there’s nothing particularly exciting about any of it. As much as they’re built up, the bad guys who Kersey picks off throughout are so cartoonish (has Fishburne ever commented on his role?) that there’s no real satisfaction to let us identify with any of it so it’s all just a big whatever of a movie.

Unlike the first film and of course the source novel by Brian Garfield (who actually wrote his own sequel entitled DEATH SENTENCE which was finally filmed a few years ago) the script by David Engelbach makes no attempt to broach the seriousness of the subject in even a half-ass way. At least the first film raised these issues even if it discard them quickly—it’s like that one was set in a bad-movie version of the real world, but this can’t even try for that amount of credibility. It’s just Charles Bronson picking up his gun and heading out for the kill, with no further though given to what he’s doing other than what affects the lame plot.

There’s not much to say about the actors. Bronson is more Bronson rather than any attempt to recreate the character of Paul Kersey and not much dialogue ever emerges from his lips. Jill Ireland seems sweet as she always did even if she was never actually very good (her character is never placed in any sort of jeopardy which makes me wonder if it was a demand by Bronson to keep her from being in such unpleasant scenes). Vincent Gardenia’s character gets a cold as soon as he arrives in L.A. which at least feels like an attempt at some kind of business to play but he never possesses the same amount of credibility he had last time around. Really, none of the actors feel like they’re overexerting themselves. Anthony Franciosa gets great billing for some reason in a tiny role as the Police Commissioner who never has any bearing on the plot. Henny Youngman is seen on a TV for a few seconds and gets screen credit for it. The music is by Jimmy Page. Jimmy Page? Really? It’s at least energetic, probably the only element of the film that really is.

At least it ended soon enough and, like I said, I was never bored. It was certainly over fast enough. I had little reason to actually sit down and watch this thing and it only made matters worse to have the MGM DVD that arrived from Netflix turn out to be full frame. I highly doubt much was lost in the framing but really, doesn’t anyone have any pride when it comes to these things? The packaging even includes a 2 in the title instead of a II. Of course, all this is appropriate considering the job Michael Winner did with the movie anyway. It’s unpleasant and sloppily made but really, should it be any other way? Hey, I own a Cannon films t-shirt so that should say something about where I’m coming from. There was no joy to be found in finally sitting through DEATH WISH II both because of the nastiness onscreen and because of how lousy it was. But it had to be done. That’s all there was to it.

Without Any Batteries In Him

2009-11-07T20:47:00.000-08:00

The now-legendary Chucky, the killer doll who was first introduced in CHILD’S PLAY is pretty much ingrained in pop culture now and because of that, combined with how much more overtly comical the film’s follow-ups progressively became, it’s almost hard to remember that the original really is a crackerjack, tightly paced film which sustains its tension extremely well and, maybe best of all, offers a surprising amount of actual scares. It probably says something about how I view these things that when the more recent sequels which capitalized on the character’s comic potential came out I remember calling a friend and asking, “Did I not get the memo? When did Chucky films become this camp thing?” But look, that’s just my own take on matters like this (and it’s not like I didn’t get some enjoyment out of those films). Released on November 9, 1988, he original film was pretty straight-faced about its approach, going pretty far with the child-in-jeopardy concept--I’m tempted to say if made today it wouldn’t go quite as far but this past summer’s ORPHAN involved kids in scenes that were pretty nasty so it can still happen (I can see how this sort of thing might be problematic but, like most things, it usually depends on the approach a particular film takes). I could, however, believe that any version of CHILD’S PLAY done today would not be as tightly constructed, well-directed and well-played by actors who seem to be defiantly performing all this as real as possible. I liked it at the time and now, long after I’ve become used to things from long ago not holding up so well, I’m almost more impressed by how cleverly executed much of it really is.

If you’re reading this you probably know the plot but just in case: during one final standoff with police in a toy store just before dying, Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) better known as The Lakeshore Strangler, uses a voodoo ritual that he has learned to transfer his soul into the body of a nearby Good Guy Doll, part of a craze that is currently sweeping the nation. Somehow lost in the aftermath of the ensuing explosion, the doll in question is soon sold by a street peddler (well, homeless guy) to single mother Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks) who desperately wants the doll for a son Andy’s (Alex Vincent) birthday. Andy of course loves the doll whose name is apparently “Chucky” although when a tragic accident happens soon after Andy insists that “Chucky did it” which no one believes. On the case is Police Detective Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon) who just happens to be the one who killed Charles Lee Ray and is in no mood to listen to this kind of nonsense. Of course, we know the truth just like Andy does and Chucky will stop at nothing to get his soul into a human body once again.

Forgoing a more comical or satirical take which could plausibly be pulled from the basic premise (maybe a little like GREMLINS), the path taken by director Todd Holland (FRIGHT NIGHT) in shooting the screenplay by Don Mancini and John Lafia and Tom Holland (story by Mancini) was clearly to take the straight ahead dramatic approach, gritty enough that you could call it a thriller without sounding like you’re trying to avoid calling it a horror film, but pretty much unflinching when it comes to the horror aspects. Considering how ludicrous all this could very easily come across, the careful balance CHILD’S PLAY maintains is genuinely impressive. As tightly paced as it is (87 minutes and not a dull moment), the film succeeds in doing a very nice slow burn for an extended period through an initial suspense sequence involving Karen’s best friend played by Dinah Manoff as the film cleverly drops in clues as to what exactly is going on. There’s not much of an attempt by the film in convincing us that the killer is Andy—Alex Vincent is too cute for that—but it does hold back in revealing Chucky to us in any way other than simply as a doll. This gambit finally culminates in a terrific moment where Chucky finally shows his true face to Catherine Hicks--I can vividly remember the shock of this scene when I saw the film way back then and it still plays like gangbusters now. Photographed by Bill Butler (JAWS) the film makes very good use of how much of it seems to actually be shot on city streets, making very good use of the Chicago locations it was shot in—you can almost feel how cold it is, as well as how grimy these inner city streets are--seeing Alex Vincent innocently wander through some of these places carrying Chucky is a little unnerving all by itself.

Looking at the film for the first time I several years at a recent screening at UCLA I realized that everything doesn’t have quite the punch I remembered—mostly sections of the second act where characters are scrambling around looking for each other which feel like they could have used a little more finesse in the staging. Part of this is my own familiarity with the film, part of it is a sense every now and then that things could have even more punch than they already did. But once we move back to the apartment for the climax, I freely admit that I was hugely impressed at the skill displayed in how well this held up in staging, pacing, everything (the film editors were Roy E. Peterson and Edward Warschilka). It’s a terrific sustained work of suspense and at its best it’s still pretty scary, something I was certainly reminded of listening to the reactions of the girls sitting behind me that night at UCLA (they were cute, too. Oh well). I can believe that much of the box-office success of CHILD’S PLAY was due to not just people responding to Chucky but to how well the climax works—the series of shots as Chucky stabs through the door as Catherine Hicks tries to keep it closed is a beauty and the sequence it totally delivers in what it’s supposed to do.

As much as everyone remembers Chucky (and, of course, the voice provided by Brad Dourif) it should be noted that the film has some expert work done by the actors. Chris Sarandon (also in Holland’s FRIGHT NIGHT) correctly plays the first half of the film more as annoyed than anything else, slamming files down on desks at every opportunity and seemingly having no idea that he’s playing a cop in a killer doll movie, and brings a great deal of authority to his understandable skepticism. Catherine Hicks also plays things as totally genuine and once things begin to get shockingly serious there’s really not a false or overdone note from her the whole time (compared to her work in STAR TREK IV two years earlier where, looking at it recently, she does seem to be overdoing things). Alex Vincent as Andy is almost unnervingly good, believably cute during the normal scenes then later when his reactions go from puzzled to nervous to flat-out terrified he becomes shockingly real, almost uncomfortably so during a few moments. Even Dinah Manoff, who doesn’t get to do much as best friend Maggie Peterson, has a refreshing amount of quirk and normalcy in her performance, an indication that the film was trying to set its premise in as believably played a world as possible.

The post-film discussion at UCLA included screenwriter Don Mancini, producer David Kirschner, Chucky Designer Kevin Yagher and star Catherine Hicks (a few Chucky models were on display as well). Among the subjects brought up were the origins of the script when Mancini was still a student at that school and how he got hooked up with Kirschner. Catherine Hicks (who incidentally, looks great) talked about the problems with bonding with Alex Vincent at first as well as how she first met Yagher on the film--the two have been married since 1990 and have a daughter. The extremely real performance of Alex Vincent was discussed and the issue of how director Holland was able to get such a convincing performance when Andy thinks Chucky is coming to kill him during the mental asylum sequence was only lightly alluded to…but everyone insisted that the boy’s mother and acting coach was always on set with him through all this. We were also told that Dourif wasn’t always going to automatically provide the voice of Chucky as well—at one point director of Holland decided to experiment with a masculine-sounding female voice like the demon in THE EXORCIST and brought in PLAY MISTY FOR ME’S Jessica Walter as a possibility. Clearly, the right choice was made in the end. When asked to give an idea of what he had planned for an upcoming Chucky reboot, Mancini simply answered, “No.”

The film was actually screened on a Blu-Ray DVD which was slightly unfortunate (there aren’t any 35mm prints of CHILD’S PLAY out there?) but watching it with an energetic audience, like those cute girls, was a reminder of how effective a thriller CHILD’S PLAY really is. And I say thriller as opposed to horror movie, with all due respect, because it feels like that’s what the film really is, an extremely well-done genre piece in which the horror elements only reveal themselves when they absolutely have to. We didn’t know the character at this point so Chucky was still able to scare us and in presenting him with such expert skill the best moments throughout CHILD’S PLAY are as effective as many such films wish they could be.

Attention To Detail

2009-10-31T20:25:00.001-07:00

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH was, is and always will be totally insane. I can’t in any way call it a good movie but I’m still glad that we have this thing around. Weirdly, I haven’t even seen the movie that many times. Up until relatively recently I hadn’t even seen it since I was a kid but even though I didn’t even like it much then (yeah, even then I was already trying to be critical about things) certain moments of this lunatic piece of work always stuck with me. It never hurt that one of the main components of the film has always been a certain song which, appropriate considering it’s supposed to be from a television commercial, is virtually impossible to get out of your head once you’ve heard it. Fortunately, the film makes sure that you hear it many, many more times than just once. Somewhat infamous as the non-Michael Myers entry of the HALLOWEEN series which, considering it’s sandwiched in between all the others, only adds to the weirdness and maybe any cult following the thing has is partly due to people at the time wondering, what the hell is this thing anyway? I guess the idea was, instead of continuing with the Myers storyline, to do a continuing anthology of Halloween-related tales. I can’t defend it. I don’t want to defend it. I’m not going to try to defend it. Why the hell am I watching it again?

Just over a week before Halloween, Dr. Dan Chalis (Tom Atkins of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and NIGHT OF THE CREEPS) a hard-drinking, alimony-paying deadbeat dad is called to his hospital to treat a man who has turned up, clutching a mask and murmuring “They’re gonna kill us all.” When a mysterious individual turns up, kills the man and then proceeds to blow himself up in a car, Dr. Chalis is appropriately spooked, but doesn’t know what to do about it. Several days later, the man’s daughter Ellie Grimbridge (GET CRAZY’S Stacy Nelkin) tracks Chalis down in a bar and when the two exchange notes they determine that the last place he was headed to before being taken to the hospital was the Silver Shamrock Novelties factory located in the small northern California town of Santa Mira (for all you INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS fans). Run by Conal Cochran (the great Dan O’Herlihy) Silver Shamrock, as anyone in the film knows (except for our lead character, who is first seen trying to give his kids a few crappy non-Silver Shamrock masks as presents), is the biggest producer of Halloween masks around and their incessant advertising (“Eight more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween…”) of their three big masks suggests a national craze with each of the annoying commercials trumpeting ‘The Big Giveaway’ set to take place on Halloween night. Dan and Ellie head for Santa Mira to investigate and once they hit the mysterious town are determined to get to the bottom of things. But first, Dan needs a drink and Ellie is more than willing to get to know him a little better while they’re stuck in that motel.

Carpenter had moved on to direct other films by this point but he was certainly involved and though written & directed by Tommy Lee Wallace (Nigel Kneale reportedly wrote the first drafts, then later insisted on having his name removed) it certainly has a number of elements that makes it feel like a John Carpenter film—a conspiracy-laden storyline, roving camerawork by Dean Cundey, the steady drone of the Carpenter-Allan Howarth score, as well as the undeniable wideness of the compositions which really does make it pleasing to look at—but something about it feels slightly dumber than it all needs to be. It’s not exactly a credible storyline and the film seems intent on ratcheting things up on a very broad level—some of the supporting characters seem much more crassly played than they need to be (mostly the others staying at the motel) and Atkins’ doctor, usually in search of another drink, is a pretty unlikable lead to follow through a film. Still, I’ll freely admit that a lead character flawed to this degree actually comes off as refreshing in this day and age. The plot point of a piece of Stonehenge being stolen is one of the great screenwriting toss-offs of all time in how they don’t even attempt to explain the plausibility--fortunately, the film has an actor in Dan O’Herlihy who in giving the non-explanation “We had a time getting it here. You wouldn’t believe how we did it!” actually makes you swallow the moment due to his pure enjoyment of the situation. There’s an undeniable grossness to some of the imagery but very little of it can be called realistic, even when someone’s head is being ripped off. It’s just…bizarre and this translates to the overall tone as well.

Calling the town Santa Mira is very clever in bringing a BODY SNATCHERS vibe to things (much of the plot certainly seems like a nod in that direction) and when the two leads check into the motel things feel like a slight PSYCHO riff for a few minutes as well (since they already used the name Loomis in the first film, that’s a nice tradition to continue) and these nods to the past are cleverly woven into things. But when you think about it, have you ever been in a situation where you were staying in a motel and everyone was introducing themselves to you? When does that happen? It all feels like a fourteen year-old mentality as if it never occurred to someone to think this whole plot through. And then there’s the one from the list of biggest plot holes of all time—the movie never considers the idea of time zones in relation to the plot which leads me to believe that on the Earth it’s set on (slightly dumber and sleazier than our Earth) all of America has only one time zone. Not to mention, I want to know who Tom Atkins is calling in the last scene. But when the whole ballgame is laid out by Dan O’Herlihy, not to mention when we get to see what’s going to happen take place in one of his test rooms, the whole thing is just so nutso in every possible way it’s hard not to admire the film for its audaciousness, being willing to approach things from such a satirical and horror angle at the same time. Of course it earns its R rating but it seems designed for kids who want to see an R Rated film, to see the best possible ‘trick’ that the holiday could ever offer. There are elements throughout that I genuinely like such as the easy-listening muzak that drones on from a radio after a particularly nasty murder takes place or how the score from the original ‘immortal classic’ HALLOWEEN, playing on TV as the lead-up to the ‘Big Giveaway’, even gets to be used at one point. The main set housing the Stonehenge piece is a nicely austere bit of design as well. But, like a fourteen year-old boy, the movie seems more interested in how potentially nasty things can get instead. Part of what makes it so dumb is what makes it so weird too (I’m still not sure if I hate the design of these masks or love them, which seems like part of the point). Maybe I don’t even want a more normal version of this film. After all, what fun would that be?

If there’s any charm to be found, the lead actors certainly help. Tom Atkins is given an unpleasant character who seems too beat down in life to do much more than hang out at a bar in the middle of the day but he somehow manages to make the guy determined and likable with all of his flaws. His best moment might come when he’s sitting in that bar by himself and trying to comprehend the silly cartoon that is for some reason playing on the TV in front of him. But really, Tom Atkins is the coolest. Stacy Nelkin doesn’t get much of a part to play—and really, what is up with the romance between these two?—but she is cute and appealing, which certainly goes a long way. Dan O’Herlihy steals the movie, no question about it. He attacks his big scene with a massive amount of relish, bringing a huge amount of clarity to something which can never make any sense. His final moment, both nonsensical and consistent with everything his character has said, is a thing of beauty. According to some sources, that’s Jamie Lee Curtis as the voice of the town curfew announcer and telephone operator. It certainly sounds like her.

Did I mention that it really isn’t that good? Sure, it’s memorable and there’s definitely a reason why it stuck in my brain for so many years, but that doesn’t make it good. It needed someone in charge to really solidify the tone in order to help that happen. If Carpenter had been in charge that might have helped matters, but his films don’t display much of an interest in satirizing the consumerist culture of Reagan-era America with the happy exception of THEY LIVE, of course. So if the insane version of HALLOWEEN III:SEASON OF THE WITCH is what we’re always going to have to watch, maybe that’s for the best. Commercially speaking, they probably shouldn’t have given it the title of a HALLOWEEN sequel; maybe going for a “HALLOWEEN presents” kind of thing would have worked better. I don’t know what the answer is. I’m sure John Carpenter and Tommy Lee Wallace stopped wondering about this long ago. The series returned to the Michael Myers storyline in 1988 and Carpenter was no longer involved. Meanwhile, this film lives on, leaving the rest of us out there with that damned Silver Shamrock jingle running through our heads over and over again for all the Halloweens to come. Which just leads me to think that maybe in some ways, Conal Cochran’s plan really did come true.

“And…Happy Halloween.”

All That We Can See Is The Brain

2009-10-31T16:06:00.000-07:00

Sometimes in films the things that are scary to us, the most effective moments, turn out to be this way because they go beyond what we’re expecting for our own reasons. As a person gets older they might find themselves giving more thought to the actual behavior, as well as the responses to that behavior, that certain characters in films may have. And we might find that this happens even in films where those elements might not seem at first to be particularly important. This occurred to me recently during a Halloween season viewing of Terence Fisher’s FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED. Considered to be one of the very best (if not the best) of all films produced by Hammer, the 1969 film still plays extremely well today and while a few flaws may have occurred to me this time around what stood out for me the most was just how absolutely, positively bleak the film was. And more to the point, I found myself feeling great sorrow for female lead Anna Spengler as played by the lovely Veronica Carlson, one of the most purely beautiful of all the Hammer heroines. Yes, she and boyfriend Karl as played by Simon Ward are trafficking in a little cocaine for some badly-needed funds but not for any insidious gain--it’s simply to help out her mother who’s off in a hospital, which seems about as noble a reason as you could get (“It’s dreadful that you have to buy a life,” offers Karl in a line that still makes sense today). And it’s this one tiny flaw of theirs which allows Baron Victor Frankenstein, played once again by Peter Cushing, to take advantage of the situation, taking over their lives so that they will do everything he needs to aid in his experiments. Everything. It turns out to be a punishment which far outweighs their modest crime, certainly a greater one that they would have received if the law had gotten involved. Carlson seems to play the character as undergoing a gradual implosion through the course of the film and many have said that the film goes too far in what happens to her. I don’t know if that’s the case, but the end result is certainly an experience in which the horror is felt more than usual.

Awareness of the previous four entries is not really necessary, outside of knowing that Peter Cushing plays Baron Victor Frankenstein, continually in the search of the means to create life. By the time of this entry he is living under a pseudonym, continuing his experiments in secret. He takes a room in a boarding house run by Anna Spengler (Carlson) and once he has a piece of information about she and her boyfriend Karl (Ward) he is able to use to his advantage Karl’s position in the local insane asylum. Frankenstein, you see, is very interested in the brain of Dr. Frederick Brandt, who before he went insane, believed to have solved some of the problems that have been plaguing Dr. Frankenstein through his years of experimentation. As the young couple quickly and separately learns, Frankenstein will go to any extreme to fulfill his ultimate goal.

The characters in this particular film are drawn more vividly than they often can be in other Hammer entries and the story is stronger as well—at around 100 minutes it’s allowed to breathe a little more than those that seem locked into the 90 minute running time come hell or high water and seem to stop abruptly after a perfunctory finish. It might not be the classic Hammer of HORROR OF DRACULA but it is one of the best examples of storytelling to ever come from the studio. The screenplay is credited to Bert Batt (story by Batt and Anthony Nelson Keys) who mostly worked as an assistant director and since he has no other screenplay credits it makes the quality of this particular entry even more of a mystery but there’s definitely a force brought to it all by director Terence Fisher that is undeniable. It’s as if the best elements of previous Frankenstein entries (and other films from the studio that Fisher and Cushing were involved in, for that matter) all culminated with this one big blow-out, possibly the last one from Hammer which could be placed anywhere in shouting position of the word great. It pushes boundaries in a way that you wouldn’t expect from the fifth entry in any series and it makes you wish that films from the company could have risen to such an occasion more often.

If anything, it’s one of those films which I look at now and think that as good as it is a few of the story points could have been pushed even further. If they’d done one more rewrite by an expert hand, maybe someone who wasn’t so locked into the Hammer formula, a few of the plot developments in the home stretch might not have seemed so half baked (actually, I’ll be more generous than that—three-quarters baked). As it is, it’s like something that might have been a true genre classic but doesn’t quite get there, even if where it does wind up is pretty close. The threads in FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED do lead to a satisfying finish (one that could have concluded the series though Cushing did play the role one more time) but a number of pieces never do feel fully resolved—the cops drop out of the picture, the mother we hear about that gets the plot rolling is never seen or referred to past a certain point and the end involving the Brandts—touchingly played by DUNE’s Freddie Jones and Maxine Audley—never gets a satisfying conclusion on its own.

But it’s the pure, irredeemable nastiness of the Frankenstein character goes a long way towards making the film work so well—as presented here, the character may be the biggest bastard that Cushing ever played (“Pack! We’re leaving.”) and, yes, that includes the time that he ordered the destruction of Alderaan. Part of this has to do with the utter coldness that Cushing fearlessly brings to the role, but part of it also has to do with the character trajectory of Anna Spengler as played by Veronica Carlson. It’s her section of the plot that stays with me and her tragedy, combined with Fisher’s insistence on portraying the character of Frankenstein at his most vicious, seems to move the film as close towards greatness as it can get. It’s surprising to look at the actress’s filmography today and see how few films she really did appear in. Of course, the only ones that anyone cares about are this film, DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE and the non-Cushing entry HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN. Extremely beautiful, she’s not only very effecting here, but what the character of Frankenstein seems to do to destroy her very spirit almost instantly—I always remember the way she just stands there, silent, as her former boarders protest being ejected from the house—strikes me as just so damn sad.

The most controversial element involving Carlson is, as anyone who's seen it knows, the Baron’s genuinely shocking rape of Anna. Reports have the scene being added very late in the shooting, at the protest of the two actors involved, because the powers that be at Hammer decided the film was lacking in sex—so a rape scene presumably took care of that, unfortunate as that may be. I’m not sure that the scene (which apparently was not included during the film's original U.S. release) is necessary either for any number of reasons but it does somewhat unintentionally help to bridge this film between earlier Hammer and the somewhat more adult (read: copious amounts of nudity) entries from the studio that would begin a few years later. That the scene was added so late reportedly upset the actors in question, who felt that scenes occurring later would have been played differently by them (not the mention their dislike of including a rape scene in the first place) but even though it’s never referenced in dialogue it is consistent with Anna’s behavior at some points and really does make her continued psychological collapse more believable---not to mention, more tragic. Even her exit from the picture—sooner than we expect and definitely sooner than the character deserves—feels in line with this. It feels like a number of elements involved—to give Karl a real motivation for revenge (which itself isn’t fully dealt with), to be able to spend more time with the Brandt’s in their storyline and maybe just rewrite issues that were possibly occuring in general. But the fact is that the sadness of her face, so prevalent throughout much of the film, is what stays with me more than anything. The inferno of the climax is fairly well-staged but even with the extra running time it still feels like the very end comes in a “Well, I guess that’s it,” kind of way that was fairly common with films from Hammer which even James Bernard’s majestic score can’t fully help. I still wish that it were a little better than it is, but there’s no denying how effective it remains to this day and it continues to be rewarding to return to. I don’t know if it’s the best Hammer film that I’ve ever seen—I could say that and easily change my mind tomorrow—but it is one of the very best examples of what they were capable of.

The attention-getting fake-out opening of FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED features what we take to be some sort of monster…who is then revealed to be a normal-looking human being underneath that mask. This person in question is eventually revealed to be the greatest monster of all, much more so than the one who has his brain placed into another body ever is—as Freddie Jones portrays that creation here, when he steps forward gently saying “I mean you know harm,” it’s a moment that deserves to be remembered among the very best of the creations by all of the Frankensteins ever portrayed on film. The vivid portrayal of that evil by Peter Cushing makes what happens to Veronica Carlson’s character in the film all the more tragic—someone without a selfish bone in her body wiped out by someone who cares about her as much as he does about a fly he just swatted. It kind of kills the idea of watching this film as an enjoyable Halloween viewing experience but it does certainly remind me of the evil that can be found in people who appear to be normal—even when they’re in 60s horror films which are sometimes thought of as camp or laughable. It’s not really right that they should be remembered that way—just as what happens to Anna Spengler isn’t at all deserved. But as time goes on, I realize that few things that happen are ever really deserved anyway.

Mind The Doors

2009-10-26T21:03:00.001-07:00

The most fondly remembered British horror films of the late 60s and early 70s are usually period pieces, often from Hammer, sometimes from other places. It could be a question of why there weren’t more films set in present-day England but when Hammer began making things like STRAIGHT ON ‘TIL MORNING and DRACULA A.D. 1972 it was easy to see why (not that I don’t love A.D. 1972 in its own ridiculous way). Maybe the powers that be just didn’t know how to approach a version of the real world with the horror that they excelled at. Non-Hammer titles like CORRUPTION with Peter Cushing are problematic as well, but at least that one is slightly insane. It took Alfred Hitchcock to do something considerably more interesting with the London landscape in 1972’s FRENZY and among any other hidden gems out there would have to be Gary Sherman’s RAW MEAT (aka DEATH LINE, as it was known in England) a fairly bold, unnerving film which at the very least is considerably better than any film with the title RAW MEAT would be presumed to be. With a number of different elements at play it feels like the movie is trying a few things too many to be the genre-shattering experiment it may want to be, but maybe that feel of uncertainty is part of the point. It’s part late-show mystery, part grindhouse picture and part stylistic exercise that tries to combine different tones and defy some of the conventions that can be found in those films, resulting in a sharp turn into something bolder, more ambitious. The whole may not be as successful as some of it parts but at least it attempts to put us in a sense of genuine unease, never letting us to get too comfortable as we’re watching it.

After trolling the red light district of London, the otherwise distinguished James Manfred, OBE (THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN’s James Cossin) is attacked in an Underground station and soon after his unconscious body is discovered by young couple Alex Campbell (David Ladd), an American, and Patricia Wilson (Sharon Gurney), who insists that they go get help. He reluctantly agrees (he’s seen plenty of people lying around on the subways back home; “In New York you walk over these guys!”) but by the time they get back Manfred’s body has disappeared, with no possible way he could have gotten out. Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence) of the London police soon gets wind and begins to investigate. Though he is warned off the case by MI5 (in the person of Christopher Lee in a cameo) it soon becomes clear that what’s happening down in the Underground is worse than anyone feared, possibly being linked to the long ago cover-up of workers left to die in the construction of the station.

RAW MEAT makes its audaciousness known fairly early on when, after an introductory set of sequences that are enjoyable even if nothing unique, it suddenly takes a sharp left turn with the introduction of its main threat in a virtuoso seven-minute shot (the cinematographer was Alex Thomson) which is not only strikingly well-done, even with one or two apparently invisible edits, but contains some genuinely repulsive imagery as well (good thing I ordered in some Chinese food to watch the movie with). It also introduces us to one of the great, truly pitiful movie ‘monsters’ (played by Hugh Armstrong) an individual whose only words he knows to speak is the simple phrase ‘Mind the doors’ over and over, no doubt from hearing it from nearby train conductors (which we’ve actually heard as the first bit of dialogue at the start). Even within its modest scale the movie does a very good job of making the characters surprisingly layered—I couldn’t help but be surprised at the earnestness of Gurney’s character’s concern for the missing man and it contrasted nicely with the equally shocking nature of the underground dweller’s despair at losing his loved one. Even its portrayal of the British political system at work comes of as slightly more complex than would be expected and the minor involvement of MI5 in the context of this period reminded me of the machinations in last year’s very good THE BANK JOB, so it was surprising when one of the key players in the real-life version of that story turned up in a headline seen on a newspaper in one scene. The plotting isn’t quite as complex as it seems like it might be at one point--there is a certain amount of thinness to the story and that combined with the ambitiously long dialogue-free stretches makes it seem like the script couldn’t have been longer than 70 pages. It’s possible that some of this was done to stretch things out to feature length, like the prolonged opening credits with its jazzy main theme by Wil Malone and Jeremy Rose along with how one long shot near the very end drags out a scene of policemen walking a long, dark corridor but this steady feeling of gradualness the film has manages to somehow work.

Directed by Gary Sherman (probably best known for helming POLTERGEIST III but let's not dwell on that) and with a screenplay by Ceri Jones from Sherman’s story, RAW MEAT keeps its ambition in check, never seeming to want to expand things too much beyond its budgetary means but the structural nature of things also keeps it from breaking out too far beyond what the ambitions were. By a certain point it almost feels kind of like an extended demo reel for the director to display what he could do with actors, his camera, settings and pacing more than a full story that’s been put together. But even with this slight drawback RAW MEAT contains scenes which are genuinely startling as well as containing some pretty surprising gore for the time. Sherman is from Chicago (possibly making Ladd’s character a surrogate for him) and he makes very good use of London as well as the essential Britishness of some of the characters (such as Pleasance’s displeasure at learning his tea will now be served in bags). Looking forward to what John Landis would do in AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, the Underground is used very well, which reminds me of how another film, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (more science fiction than horror) used the setting as well. The issue of the main plot representing what the monarchy of England is kept buried for so many years down to the more working class Inspector Calhoun drunkenly ranting about the state of things makes it feel like the film is trying to be about the state of England and its past when this film was released. I’d be the wrong guy to offer a take on all this but it does give the feel of RAW MEAT being more than ‘just’ a horror film, even one that succeeds in consistently keeping us on edge.

Playing his part as if in some dryly comic BBC series that sadly doesn’t really exist, Donald Pleasence is amazingly funny and enjoyable as he continually gets flustered with having to deal with anyone who crosses his path (as he shouts at young student Ladd, “Hurry back to school, there might be a protest march for you to join!” He makes the film about his character more than it would have been otherwise and it’s hard not to wish he’d played the role again in other films. The pairing of Ladd and Gurney comes off as slightly bland in comparison, even with the girl’s sensitivity, but it feels intentional in how it feels like there’s believably not much to them. Their lack of uniqueness makes them seem much more genuine that the leads in various giallos that were made around this time and I like a few of their tiny exchanges like when he asks her if she wants to go see THE FRENCH CONNECTION. Christopher Lee gets some good dialogue in his single scene playing against Pleasence but it’s awkwardly staged as if the production couldn’t spend much time getting the two actors in the frame together. It doesn’t even feel like Lee worked a day on the film, it feels like he worked a half-day.

RAW MEAT isn’t very well-known and while the various pieces don’t always connect together in ways that make it a minor classic, the best things in it (Pleasence, the camerawork, the very sober tone) are extremely good, making it absolutely worth a look. The approach to its story means that any climactic action isn’t necessarily going to make everything better and the ending keeps a certain sense of dread hanging enough so I didn’t feel much of a sense of relief when the end credits rolled—almost at a point in a shot where they were slightly unexpected, which seemed to add to that feel. But it’s to the film’s credit that it didn’t try to convince anyone watching that everything was going to be all right. With films like this, you sometimes feel strangely reassured in knowing that the opposite is going to be the case. That’s one of the reasons we watch movies like this anyway.

Under The Soles Of Your Shoes

2009-10-21T23:17:00.001-07:00

The first image we see in Dario Argento’s INFERNO is a giant close-up of a large knife. Considering what is to come over the next few hours, this is not so surprising. But slightly unexpected in this context is its initial use, to assist in carefully moving through the pages of a certain very old book. Of course, what results from reading this book, moving through a history that is in the process of being uncovered, pretty much has the same result. The second entry in its director’s famed Three Mothers trilogy, INFERNO, which was made in 1980, has never been an easy film to pin down. Not so much a sequel to the previous entry SUSPIRIA, which it shares no main characters with, but an alternate take on several of its themes, in some ways a retelling of the earlier film but in a harsher, more minor key. While that film has the completely human presence of star Jessica Harper and its one key location of the Dance Academy for us to focus on, INFERNO hops around the map a little more, as well as seemingly experimenting with how long it can go on without actually starting the narrative we expect, as well as giving us a character who we believe will be the lead. This does eventually happen, almost by default, and it’s not necessarily the person we would have chosen. The key has to be to accept INFERNO for what it is, if only for the effect it ultimately has on us. There is art in this madness of Argento’s but he doesn’t always make it easy on us to take it in.

I could attempt a brief synopsis of the plot, but it wouldn’t be easy. While SUSPIRIA, set in Germany, told of Mater Suspiriorium, the Mother of Sighs, INFERNO moves things to New York to focus on Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness. In New York, Rose (Irene Miracle), a young poet who after reading a book by Varelli on The Three Mothers which she purchased from a nearby antiques dealer begins to suspect that her building is actually the dwelling of the Mother of Darkness and writes to her brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey), a music student in Rome, of her suspicions and fears. Both of them, as well as a number of people around them, find themselves strangely drawn to learning more about whatever is going on, leading to much carnage as one of the characters begins to become closer to the roots of this mystery.

Even less than SUSPIRIA, possibly less than any other film Argento has made, the story being told is not important. The imagery, the mood, the undeniable sense of something truly other, is. The story we expect to receive becomes delayed in starting as we follow several different characters into their own corners of the tale, leading to horrible ends that are often punctuated by fade outs which always seem reminiscent of the end of the Arbogast murder in PSYCHO. In some ways INFERNO could be looked at as a PSYCHO-type of experience if we were introduced continually to other potential lead characters after Janet Leigh who met horrible unexpected ends as well, stretching our ideas of what this narrative should be to the absolute breaking point. To say that the film makes little sense is like saying it’s also in color—an appropriate way to look at it considering how beautiful those colors are. It’s a cold, harsh film, one that barely qualifies as having any sort of sense or humanity. The logic is one of a nightmare, where a major character thinks nothing of lowering herself into some bizarre flooded ballroom in a setpiece which makes no sense in several different ways, yet is undeniably beautiful in just as many. Imagery seen throughout is left unexplained on any level but nevertheless always manages to serve as a warning that evil is definitely nearby. The lack of a real sense of place certainly ties into that. Some of the film was actually shot in New York (just like other Italian genre films from this period, usually in an interesting way) but really very little. Of course, it isn’t set in the real New York that we know (or the real Rome in those scenes, for that matter). It’s another type of reality, a world where looking for the world of the past can lead to horrible results—in some ways, the past and the supernatural could almost mean the same thing in this context and every time somebody looks for one the other gets unavoidably intertwined.

Whereas the setup and logic of SUSPIRIA could be compared to that of a fairy tale (Imagine: “Once upon a time there was a young girl who went to a strange dance school…”) INFERNO is considerably more labyrinthine in its approach (Such as, “Once upon a time there was a young woman who lived in a strange building. Oh, and she had a brother. Oh, and he…”) which muddies things a bit and taking this sort of opposite approach is a bold step that doesn’t always work (the prolonged nighttime Central Park sequence always begins to lose me a bit). Jessica Harper was such a crucially believable presence amidst all the madness of that film and the women who might possibly have had such a sensuous effect here (namely Irene Miracle and Elonora Georgi as Mark’s girlfriend in Rome) seem deliberately not given the chance to have such an effect. Instead we get Leigh McCloskey who makes next to no impression at all and it is this coldness that always makes INFERNO more of a schematic experience than anything, even as densely layered as it feels much of the time. That we have to follow him through the film means that our ultimate destination isn’t going to be completely satisfying—of course, the climax of SUSPIRIA wasn’t the strongest part of that film either but that was for different reasons(at least the lead of this film gets to actually confront somebody). INFERNO is a fascinating and, in some ways, daring work by its director but at times maybe too disjointed to entirely connect to any sort of emotional state. Still, it’s hard to deny how much the very best moments really do linger in the brain long after it concludes and at its best there is a genuine power in there.

As a way that makes it slightly frustrating, it’s also hard not to think of it as very consciously the middle chapter in a trilogy which may have been concluded at that time. There are elements (some set design, uses of color, actor Fulvio Mingozzi playing a cab driver in both films) which provide deliberate, almost subliminal echoes of SUSPIRIA, as well as tantalizing hints of what may have been yet to come of Argento had proceeded with a third entry soon after in Ania Pieroni’s brief unexplained appearance as a character listed in the credits merely as “music student” but who no doubt is supposed to be the mysterious Mother of Tears, not quite ready to take center stage. Of course, Argento finally concluded his trilogy within the past few years with MOTHER OF TEARS which I’ll admit I enjoyed more than a lot of people did but I’ll certainly admit that when compared to the first two films, coming so many years later, it just wasn’t the same.

Unlike SUSPIRIA, INFERNO never received a real theatrical release in the U.S. by Twentieth-Century Fox and didn’t play New York until a brief engagement at the Thalia in August 1986, when it received a bemused review in The New York Times. (“shot in vivid colors, with some striking angles…but the script and acting are largely routine.” They may be ineffectual, but I don’t know if ‘routine’ is really the issue here.) But as the cult of Argento has grown over here the film has achieved its own small following, evident by the packed house at the New Beverly for the midnight show on Saturday October 17th. Helping with the special night was the appearance of star Irene Miracle, Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake and Palmer who composed the film’s remarkable score (my favorite use of music in the film may me the conclusion of the Central Park sequence which, with its shots of the city skyline, comes off as some sort of perverse Gershwin moment). Also at the theater, in from Cincinnati, was Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas who is also the author of the truly astonishing Mario Bava biography All the Colors of the Dark. Bava, as it is known, was responsible for some of INFERNO’s key special effects in what turned out to be the last film he ever worked on. Despite being claimed in the past by various sources, he did not work on the famed underwater sequence, but was responsible for some of the more subtle effects of the film, such as the continuous shots of the moon, which Lucas deemed as sort of Greek Chorus to what we might perceive as the narrative. The lovely Irene Miracle, clearly enjoying herself immensely, talked about how she basically took the part for the money and that due to Argento’s health problems he wasn’t even on set at times, essentially directing by proxy. She also explained some of what might be termed the abruptness of her part’s length by saying that while she was cast thinking she had a much larger part, her own health issues at the time may have led to it being cut down. More surprisingly, she spoke of how she shot numerous scenes that did not appear in the film including “discovering a body in Central Park” which indicates that there was possibly a good deal of restructuring going on both during the shooting and the cutting (could Daria Nicolodi’s character have been expanded because of this?). Keith Emerson spoke with great enthusiasm of the process of scoring the film, including screening all of Argento’s previous films just after arriving in Rome while suffering jet lag as well as how his up tempo version of the selection from Verdi’s Nabucco that we hear during the cab ride was meant to simulate the rickety nature of riding in cabs in Rome! All three people were immensely enjoyable to listen to and afterwards most people seemed to agree that it was one of the best q&a’s that we’d ever seen at the New Beverly (You’d think it would have turned up on Youtube by now).

What we were then treated to was an absolutely gorgeous print of the film, making it clear that INFERNO is one of those films where, no matter how good the DVD looks, somehow needs to be seen in a theater, both for the dark clarity of the print, but also because it provides you with less of an escape. Even without a strong narrative, the film can be a pummeling experience, both in the immense degree of gore and in how it refuses to make it easy on how to say exactly what the hell is going to go on, if the story has already begun, if it’s ever going to begin. It feels slightly longer than it needs to be. Maybe some cutting to move a few sections along faster wouldn’t have been a terrible thing but even this feels intentional in a way to get the rhythm of the film such that it wants to stretch out certain sections to an almost agonizing degree.

The night went late, but it was a wonderful screening with the film playing just great for the packed house. As it turned out, when we emerged from the theater in what was by then close to the middle of the night a heavy fog had come down up on the city, making driving home a somewhat treacherous experience. At that late hour, you could almost believe that you would have been driving off into some strange unexpected encounter, a strange force from the past. But nothing of the sort happened and as I left that screening where I got to express my admiration to Tim Lucas for all his work over the years the power of INFERNO was undeniable. When a skeptical minor character in the film is asked what he believes he replies, “In whatever I can see and touch.” It’s a clumsy line in how it comes across and he’s off the screen soon enough, presumably as a punishment for saying it. But even though such a idea goes against what the movie ultimately tells us, the line stays with me as a reminder of such a rational belief in the face of such madness. And besides, nights like this one at the New Beverly, made so enjoyable because of the film shown as well as the people there with a tangible connection to it reveal the statement to be true.

Not At All What We Had In Mind

2009-10-15T20:32:00.000-07:00

For John Carpenter fans, 1987’s PRINCE OF DARKNESS probably falls somewhere in the middle of the pack. It doesn’t have the cult status of something like THEY LIVE and it probably shouldn’t be ranked among his very best which would obviously include HALLOWEEN and THE THING. Since the New Beverly ran it on a double bill with THE THING several weeks ago, there was really no question as to which film shown that night was the masterpiece. But in truth I liked PRINCE OF DARKNESS back when it was first released and revisiting it now I felt that it has held up extremely well, coming off at times as genuinely dark and chilling. This new print struck by Universal (the one which was going to be shown at the theater in mid-‘08 was destroyed in the fire on the lot at the time) turned out to be truly beautiful, fitting for a film that is more deserving of praise than it has received in the past. Released the year after the unfortunate and undeserved box-office failure of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS was a slight regrouping for the director at the time, an attempt to make a low-budget film without too much riding on it. With an overriding sense of seriousness in how it approaches its subject matter it feels like one of the most genuine attempts at encroaching dread that he ever went for.

Soon after discovering a mysterious cylinder in an old, nearly abandoned church in downtown Los Angeles, a Priest (Donald Pleasance) consults with former colleague Dr. Howard Birack (Victor Wong) a famed physics professor. To further study the mass inside the cylinder, Dr. Birack recruits several students, including David Marsh (Jameson Parker) and new potential girlfriend Catherine Danforth (Lisa Blount) to spend the weekend in the church but as they soon begin to discover the potential power of the liquid, the students find themselves trapped, under siege from the homeless people surrounding the church and find themselves in danger from what is both inside and outside. A recurring dream the students have when asleep (“This is not a dream…”) which features a mysterious figure at the front of the church appears to be a warning sent back from somebody in the year “one-nine-nine-nine” and they soon are forced to deal with the realization that what they are faced with is the genuine possibility of what one of them calls “old scratch knocking at the door”.

With a script credited to one Martin Quatermass (actually a pseudonym for Carpenter, paying very deliberate tribute to the Nigel Kneale character Bernard Quatermass), the overwhelming feeling of true unease in PRINCE OF DARKNESS begins immediately and doesn’t let up, complete with a continually roving camera and an incessant tub-thump to the music by Carpenter. There isn’t necessarily a real theme to the score but it also seemingly won’t stop at any point during the running time, burrowing its way into our brain, just what the movie wants to do. Setting it slightly apart from other horror films, the narrative is populated with intelligent characters, graduate students no less, who stumble into this situation even as all the signs around them say something is wrong—the numerous homeless people who are gathering (led by Alice Cooper, actually), not to mention the growing amount of worms covering a window that give the impression the building is rotting all around them. Using rational thought, they don’t notice the true danger of such things until it’s too late and all of these elements combined gradually give the film the feel of a nightmare that you just can’t wake up from. Everything in PRINCE OF DARKNESS probably shouldn’t work as well as it does—some of it would come off as downright silly in other hands—but it somehow does because of the expert pacing and mood that Carpenter maintains. Within the context of this basic scenario that the director has, after all, done before he manages to bring some unexpected elements into the mix such as how all isn’t resolved the instant the sun comes up at the end of the long night. Daytime doesn’t send the evil away and the onslaught continues, with no one coming to rescue them. And when the very nature of ‘old scratch’ comes into play in moments such as when someone is standing outside the window proclaiming, “I have a message for you and you’re not going to like it…” the scene is presented with such deadly seriousness in a yes-we-really-mean-this kind of way it’s hard not to admire the film for that audaciousness.

With Carpenter’s staging displaying a consistently well-utilized sense of space throughout the building (damn, I just love the way the Scope frame is used here), it proceeds with a careful, steady mood of dread that looking at it now feels influenced by Fulci—there’s a similarity in how the pacing seems to proceed with the gradual clicking of a metronome. That feeling of dread is what stays with you about the film more than anything, but there is humor at various points and at times a likable interplay between the characters and even some goofiness on occasion—although the Tom & Jerry cartoon featuring the devil that is briefly seen feels more like a beat out of Dante than Carpenter, although it does play like an indication that maybe we shouldn’t be taking all this too seriously, even if there is a great deal of discussion of physics.

There’s a fair amount of Hawksian camaraderie between the actors and maybe even more humor than I remembered but combined with the extensive discussion of the battle between science and religion leading to how they relate to the plot (which certainly makes this film somewhat unique) it’s also a restating of the trapped-in-a single-location RIO BRAVO/NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD device that Carpenter used as far back as ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 and maybe an attempt to see just how far he could take this concept. The opening credits to the film have always been slightly infamous in how they just won’t stop (I can still remember the groans heard on opening night every time they continued) and that lack of release, the attempt at a lack of release could be looked at as a prime component of the film itself, right up until the very end. It’s as if it’s saying the part of dread is not giving you any sense of relief—you can’t ever know if the dread is really passed or not. It’s not his best film, but Carpenter’s filmography would feel incomplete without it.

It’s tempting to say that the characters are all written and played in a colorless way but there is humanity in there, with some humor as well (“Have you seen Susan? Radiologist, glasses?”). This dry nature of the actors is somewhat appropriate and making any of them a ‘star’ role seems deliberately avoided—Jameson Parker is more or less the lead and is kept very low-key but his basic earnestness does make him likable. Top-billed Pleasence is mostly kept separate from the younger cast and plays his role as a more introverted Dr. Loomis, as if knowing that no ranting and raving will prevent the worst from happening. Dennis Dun and Victor Wong were both also in BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA—Dun is as close to comic relief as the film allows (he’s funny in a believable way, not as strict comic relief which is an important difference) and Wong proves that he can spit out all kinds of exposition, still making it somehow fascinating. Lisa Blount, in many ways the real soul of the film as the love interest and she has a very sensuousness presence as if something horrible but unspoken in her past is affecting everything she does. Character actor Peter Jason, in his first of several films for Carpenter (he’s also worked for Walter Hill numerous times), brings a sharp sense of timing and interest to his stock role and at times there’s the feeling that his director just let him do whatever he wanted when the cameras rolled, making for some nice little moments. Not all of the actors in small roles make good impressions but even in some of the stilted line readings is a sort of naturalism that makes the ongoing threat seem even more potent. Nothing about it is very slick, but it never tries to be. It’s an attempt to siphon his filmmaking style to its pure essentials—all he needs is a building, a Panavision lens, his keyboard, maybe a few actors he likes—and from that he has the undeniable talent to produce something truly effective.

“Everybody’s acting like we should really be taking this seriously,” says one skeptic when serious revelations are being discussed. It’s as if the character is speaking for us, just as we wonder how serious we’re supposed to be taking some of these grave, world-changing revelations. Dialogue throughout the film seems to be leading us down the path to help us make up our mind. “Only the corrupt are listened to now and they tell us what we want to hear,” is stated at one point, something which seems more true than it did at the time of the film’s release, which seems appropriate considering we have long since passed the future date that is alluded to within. And since we have passed that date, what does that say about how we should be viewing PRINCE OF DARKNESS? Is it a dream or is it something else? Are our dreams ever our own or are they placed there against our wishes? The film doesn’t tell us, merely offering the blunt acknowledgement that sometimes we reach for a reflection, searching in vain for that answer. And maybe that’s all we can ever do.

Tomorrow's Bacon

2009-10-12T16:59:00.001-07:00

Several weeks ago the New Beverly ran a one-night marathon of five trucker movies and while I wasn’t there for the whole thing I did come by for a few which included some interesting titles I hadn’t seen before, such as WHITE LINE FEVER and the latter day Patrick Swayze vehicle BLACK DOG which, so help me, wasn’t half bad. But the real find of the night turned out to be Richard Franklin’s 1981 suspense film ROAD GAMES, which was also a slight change of pace for the evening. Not only was it more of a straight-out thriller than a 10-4 good buddy trucker movie, it wound up surpassing all expectations for what otherwise were pretty much a few enjoyable drive-in movies. What this one turned out to be was an absolutely terrific film, at times stunningly suspenseful as well as extremely well-executed. Even if it isn’t as well known as it should be, I suppose that it helped to get Richard Franklin the job of directing PSYCHO II a few years later and though Franklin, who died in 2007 of prostate cancer, directed several more times after that it could possibly be said that he never came close to following through on the huge promise that this film showed. But at least there was this one. If you haven’t seen it, get that taken care of fast.

Truck driver Patrick Quid (Stacy Keach), working in Australia, is assigned against his protestations to deliver a shipment of meat across the desert to Perth. With his trusty Dingo by his side Quid (who always insists, “Just because I drive a truck, it does not make me a truck driver”) alleviates his boredom by making up stories to himself about all the different people he passes on the road. When news of a possible serial killer begins to pop up Quid find himself suddenly suspicious of the driver of a green van who he dubs “Smith or Jones” and soon Quid’s conversations with the attractive young hitchhiker he picks up who he calls “Hitch” (Jamie Lee Curtis) only increases his suspicions. But a continuing series of events, which manage to get certain people suspicious of Quid, only increases his questions. What really is up with the driver of the green van? Is he actually engaged in a series of games with Quid? And just how many pigs is Quid supposed to be carrying back there in his truck, anyway?

Best described as a cross between REAR WINDOW and Spielberg’s DUEL, it’s pretty easy to look at ROAD GAMES (Screenplay by Everett De Roche from a story by De Roche and Franklin) as inspired by Hitchcock, something I don’t think Franklin would have ever downplayed, but it succeeds as more than just a tribute by featuring a terrific script, expert direction and a hugely enjoyable lead performance by Stacy Keach as Quid, a very enjoyable character to follow along with in this film. In addition to the ever-growing suspense, the film has an enjoyable sense of humor throughout, mostly coming from this lead character and his interactions with people but it manages to expertly combine all of these tones—the way Keach’s interaction with the stranded housewife played by Marion Edward moves from comical bickering to a more gradual revelation of what might be going on to the fear of a character who up to that point had been comic relief who from revealing her own backstory suddenly makes her believably sympathetic. Out of nowhere, a sequence which began as archly funny has crept up and become much more serious than first realized. The film is filled with tiny little things like that.

The fact that we see the setup to one of the murders at the very beginning—the layout of the scene resembles straight out DePalma more than Hitchcock—but it doesn’t necessarily give everything away entirely, allowing us to sort everything out as gradually as Quid does. As much of a character piece as a suspense thriller-chase picture (I particularly like the quiet campfire stopover with Keach and Curtis), ROAD GAMES ratchets up the tension throughout with well-utilized devices like a car alarm that blares incessantly throughout one sequence, keeping it going right up until the very end with a fantastic climax as the ‘Games’ have one driver leading the other through a series of alleyways that get smaller and smaller, making the use of the truck all the more dangerous. It takes the concept of this one guy out there on the road to the limit, allowing him to go slightly crazy with his fatigue and genuine uncertainty over exactly what is going on, with a genuinely creepy trip into his truck with all those pigs hanging in there—are we going to find something unexpected hanging as well?—as well as some striking, sneak-up-on-you visuals that are employed by Franklin to illustrate this, all masterfully assembled. Right up to the end you can feel Franklin pulling all the strings of his narrative with a confidence that reveals somebody who learned all the absolute right lessons from Hitchcock. On the DVD extras, the late director slightly disowns the final sting saying it was what distributor Avco-Embassy wanted and he’s completely right, it does seem a little out of place for what the tone of the film is going for (a more subtle, darkly comic coda would have worked better). But the film is so good that it’s not enough to kill the fun and when those doors slam shut at the very end it’s hard not to feel a little elated at just how damn good this film was.

The New York Times review at the time of its release written by Herbert Mitgang is insultingly dismissive—it’s easy to imagine that Janet Maslin having a greater appreciation for what the film was going for and would probably have worked the word ‘witty’ into her review as well. It’s no surprise to learn that Quentin Tarantino is a big fan (one tiny dialogue exchange between the two leads seems to have turned up in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS) and ultimately ROAD GAMES is a real find, that occasional film that you find yourself looking for, the one that makes all that obsessive searching for the ever-elusive gem completely worth it. It’s not a guilty pleasure or a goofy trucker movie in the slightest. It’s a real find and a truly excellent film that deserves to be better known than it is.

For the most part it’s all Keach’s show and he’s excellent. An actor who still works after all these years quietly doing very good work (I remember being halfway into AMERICAN HISTORY X before I realized that he was playing a key supporting role) and he nails this character, making us like him with all his good-natured eccentricities and relate to him during the more hysterical moments. When under pressure he drops his pretensions to someone stating, “I’m just a truck driver,” as if admitting that his prior boasts were nothing but, we see how vulnerable he is as well, but neither he nor the film ever makes too big a deal about it. It’s a fantastic character played by a terrific actor. Is it the best film role he ever had? Even if it isn’t, it certainly ranks up there. Curtis has less screen time and as a result isn’t quite the second lead you would expect but she does pull off being both likable and a little mysterious. Even though they’re not together as much as we’d like, she and Keach have a very nice rapport together. The Dingo gives a very good performance as well. The score by Brian May (not the one from Queen, but rather the composer of the scores for MAD MAX and THE ROAD WARRIOR) is excellent as well, alternating pounding suspense with a heroic, open road fanfare throughout that only makes the film all the more endearing.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I can’t think of anything substantially bad to say about ROAD GAMES. Its complete and total enthusiasm for its genre plays like the early work of a director who should have gone on to be huge and while Franklin did get his shot (PSYCHO II is pretty good and he also helmed CLOAK & DAGGER, which I’m planning on revisiting soon) it seems like a shame that didn’t happen. It’s our loss. But ROAD GAMES is a genuinely fantastic film and it was a great idea for the New Beverly to show it, exposing it to new viewers. It’s on DVD as well, so don’t let anything stop you.

The Hell With The Past

2009-10-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

Why do I love TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN so much? Why do I feel like I could watch it over and over again? What is it about this movie that stands out for me? Is it because it displays that ultimate fantasy of being trapped in the decadent glamour of Rome in the early 60s? Is it because the film, directed by Vincente Minnelli with all the style he is famous for (in CinemaScope and Metrocolor), is so obviously a studio product yet coming as it did in the twilight of the old studio system the whole thing plays as slightly off, maybe even nuts. The 1962 movie seems to have the feel and logic of a party that you’ve stayed at way too long, just because you’ve still haven’t given up on this one particular girl, then suddenly you look up and realize that it’s 4 AM and from this point on not a thing is ever going to make sense. In a way, the film came at 4 AM of the long night of the old studio system as well—everything is breaking down, everyone is fleeing to shoot cheaper films overseas and suddenly Cyd Charisse has become downright frightening. Maybe she always was. You can’t be sure anymore.

Based on the novel by Irwin Shaw, TWO WEEKS stars Kirk Douglas as Jack Andrus, a washed up film star who while recovering in a sanitarium is summoned to Rome by his one-time favorite director, the great Maurice Kruger (Edward G. Robinson) with the promise of a small but juicy role in his latest film, being shot for a stingy Italian producer. There is no role in this production that a desperate Kruger has lowered himself to direct, but on a tight schedule to complete this production with a producer intent on pulling the plug in weeks, Kruger convinces Jack to stick around and supervise the dubbing, always a key ingredient of a film being shot over in Italy. Andrus digs in to the assignment with a sense of purpose but finding himself in Rome he also in forced to confront his past with ex-wife Carlotta (Cyd Charisse) nearby as well as the beautiful young Veronica (Daliah Lavi) who represents either the present two weeks or even a possible future as Andrus must confront his past and where he wants to go if he is go ing to be able to walk away from these two weeks.

The very title indicates a stopover, going from one place to another, only in the case of this film it’s referring to life in general, not just the place it is set in. Except for Lavi’s more innocent, free-spirited Veronica (who doesn’t like watching movies because “when I have two hours, I like to spend them my own way,”) everyone in the film, even the younger leading man played by George Hamilton, seems worn down, bitter. They drink in the parties, dinners and crowded cafes of Rome in an attempt to forget everything that has led them there but it never quite succeeds. Not to mention the fantasy of not just Rome but of Cinecitta—it could hardly be taken as a documentary of the filmmaking process in that place but the details of the crew, dubbing and actors all saying their lines in different languages expresses in a certain sense what it must have been like. The film is clearly set in the Rome of the time that was previously portrayed in Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA but it also seems very much a Hollywood attempt to capitalize on it. This duality is one of the elements that genuinely helps with the feel that the film is caught between two worlds, two lifestyles, two filmmaking approaches.

These feelings extend to the very nature of the film we’re watching, right down to the footage from the previous Minnelli/Douglas/composer David Raskin team-up THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (some sources incorrectly refer to TWO WEEKS as a sequel because of this) that is used as a film being viewed in the film, supposedly one of the previous Andrus/Kruger collaborations. As Robinson is told how great he is he sits there sighing “I was great,” it’s hard not to read him as an obvious surrogate for Minnelli, expressing his own ambivalence for what his old studio MGM, and his own career, has come to, maybe even stating what he thinks about directing the film we’re watching. “How can a man go wrong and not know why” Robinson mournfully asks at another point, such a big question that it sounds like the theme to the film is being stated but it isn’t. TWO WEEKS by a certain point is about not the defeatist asking of the question but realizing that you need to move on from that that point--face the things you got wrong, wash yourself of all your sins and regrets (literally, in the case of Jack Andrus as it turns out) before moving on, ready to face the future and whatever it will hold. Maybe it’s also because the film is not about friendship winning the day or a man saved by finding the love of a good woman but about confronting these things on your own and once that’s done you can move on, even if it is by yourself.

Does any of this matter? Am I just attracted to this film by the scenery of Rome, the ultra-wide Scope compositions of Rome, the dream of having an affair with Daliah Lavi in Rome, the moments of Kirk Douglas faced with all the beauty of Rome all around him, tortured over what he’s supposed to do next. Maybe TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN, in all lurid splendor that is on display, plays like a laugh riot with an audience, but I don’t care, even if there are elements of the story that don’t make sense on any rational level. It’s all part of the delirium that I love getting sucked into. Not to say that there aren’t a few issues—at 107 minutes it’s about a half-hour shorter than Minnelli’s SOME CAME RUNNING and there is some abruptness involving a Douglas’s relationships with a few characters in the second half (I’ve seen references out there to MGM cutting things down, but few specifics—I would imagine much of it has to do with some sequences which come near the end). But these things barely seem to matter in the phantasmagorical climax involving Douglas with Charisse madly driving in his out-of-control car through the narrow streets of Rome, a sequence as phony as it is strangely beautiful ultimately seeming flat-out expressionistic in giving us the desperate fury of what must be going through Kirk Douglas’s head.

Everything is big in this film, from the luscious score by David Raskin to the intense staging (it looks to me like one shot of Charisse watching Douglas and another man fight over her was slightly recreated by Brian DePalma in FEMME FATALE) to every single one of the performances. Kirk Douglas somehow manages to pull off seeming like an underdog yet still full of himself, providing impressionists out there with lots of material but we see enough of him working with other people on the film that we believe in his talent and intellect. This causes him to work very well with Edward G. Robinson, who has enough presence that we totally believe him as a director who can rule over a set and terrify it as well. The freshness of Lavi works well even with her inexperience, playing as the total opposite of Cyd Charisse who comes off as so scarily intense that she barely seems human. Watching her in every single bizarrely elaborate gown she wears as she preys on Douglas with what seems like enough teeth for three people it becomes clear that TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN isn’t about realism, because these kinds of nightmares that we need to face in life sometimes aren’t real anyway. It ultimately becomes so bizarre that we can’t look away. The one-note shrieking of Claire Trevor as Robinson’s wife becomes too much by a certain point in comparison—she screams more than Ava Gardner in EARTHQUAKE and eventually it feels like a type of hysteria that is out of synch with the rest of the picture. Maybe that it’s a thankless role is the point —you can hardly blame Robinson for preferring to be with Rosanna Schiaffino, who in her role as the Italian star of the film being shot doesn’t ever say a single word in English. Even when she screams, it’s in Italian so naturally it’s charming.

So why can’t I stop watching it? I still don’t have an answer to that. Maybe I see myself in Kirk Douglas’s character, maybe I’m constantly looking for my own redemption just like he is. Maybe I really do just want to go to Rome in the early 60’s, a place where the streets and cafes appear to be teeming with the most exciting kind of life ever seen—even if it is the MGM-sanctioned version of Rome (well, at least they actually shot it on location). TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN is not an easy film to see. The only video release it ever received was on laserdisc, although it does play on TCM fairly often. It’s not a film that I’m necessarily looking to share with people because I’m aware of some of its shortcomings. But sometimes the films that do feel flawed, even in all their nutso earnestness, are the ones we become attached to the most. In their flaws, we see ourselves. The films we want them to b e, the exciting lead characters we wish we were. When the title of TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN appears onscreen during the benediction of the final shot as the David Raskin score swells to its conclusion, it seems to remind us that sometimes we all need to confront the abyss of our own past during two weeks in some other town. It’s ultimately our own decision how we decide to move on from that crucial point, when we finally have the ability to say, “The hell with the past.” Of course, until that happens, it’s easier said than done.

Internal Contradictions

2009-10-02T17:36:00.001-07:00

So this is what it’s come to for the great John Boorman, director of POINT BLANK and DELIVERANCE, now making a film that gets no theatrical release in the States, not even a token opening in a few art houses. That particular film would be THE TIGER’S TAIL starring Brendan Gleeson and Kim Cattrall. I guess it was decided that even the presence of Cattrall wouldn’t get people to see it and really, I can’t imagine that fans of Samantha Jones would be all that excited about this film no matter what. I could also believe that the film’s focus on the current state of Ireland, something American audiences would have little to no awareness of, could have been as much of a reason for the lack of an opening as well. It was released in the UK at the time it was made in ’06 and I can imagine that it’s been spending the past few years waiting, hoping for some kind of theatrical release that never came. THE TIGER’S TAIL has its strong points and is consistently intriguing, but it never quite connects, ultimately feeling a little too minor and too unwilling to commit to a consistent tone that would make it seem of a complete piece. Boorman fans certainly will find elements of interest, but it just remains too frustrating in the end with maybe too much of the director going over old ground instead of saying something new. He certainly wouldn’t be the first director to do this, but it’s still a case where what he has to say doesn’t seem to warrant an entire film around it.

Wealthy Irish property developer Liam O’Leary (Brendan Gleeson) who has a loving but dissatisfied wife Jane (Kim Cattrall) and brooding, possibly communist son Declan (Briain Gleeson, real-life son of Brendan) is being honored for all his accomplishments just as he is becoming aware that his plans to build a huge stadium are being thwarted. Feeling anguish and uncertainty, he begins to believe that he is seeing his exact double on several occasions. With no one else seeing this mysterious double it is a reasonable assumption to think that it’s all in his head, but when he begins investigating these strange occurrences it leads to secrets from his past being revealed and his present life sent spiraling out of control in a way he could never have seen coming.

To the credit of THE TIGER’S TAIL it manages to continually reveal new and unexpected layers throughout, both in plot and approach. Even when the answer to the film’s initial mystery is revealed, the answer to which would be one of several possibilities for anyone watching (I’ll be careful with spoilers here--suffice it to say that Gleeson does play what is basically two characters), the direction it then heads in is still somewhat surprising and continues to be throughout. Even near the end when certain things are resolved it’s done in such a matter-of-fact way the way things seem to happen from what the characters have experienced instead of boiling over into a huge climax is actually rather refreshing. It’s never entirely clear for long stretches what kind of film THE TIGER’S TAIL even is—Mystery? Noir? Existential drama? Comedy? Deadpan satire? All of the above? This is in no way a bad thing, but in a better film the fact that this question is never quite answered wouldn’t matter. When these conflicting tones of THE TIGER’S TAIL don’t seem to resolve each other it winds up feeling like any investment we’ve placed in the story isn’t being rewarded and as a result the movie just seems to fizzle away.

With much discussion of the nature of a man’s soul, the question of who he really is and an awareness of how this world is changing around him, by a certain point it feels like the only way to read THE TIGER’S TAIL is as a personal exploration by writer/director Boorman of what kind of man he is, where he has come from and what his beloved city of Dublin has turned into. The city in question is portrayed as breaking down with roads where no traffic moves, partying teenage girls puking in the street as well as a newspaper headline saying that Ireland has the “Greatest Rich-Poor Divide In Europe”. His predicament leads O’Leary to close contact with the city’s homeless, essentially becoming one of them eventually in the film’s pursuit to show how his losing everything essentially gains him back his soul but trying to connect O’Leary’s fears with the financial state of Dublin comes off as muddled. Surprisingly, the focus on O’Leary being caught between his alienated family and the homeless that he has spent his life avoiding actually makes it a slight reworking of his forgotten 1990 comedy WHERE THE HEART IS—maybe he finally wanted to solve the problems of that film but in some ways they’re still there. There are a number of plausibility issues in the wobbly story and though the film seems meant to be a sort of fable which doesn’t subscribe to realism if it were better then such problems wouldn’t be an issue. It’s not a bad film, but it is a frustrating one.

Ultimately, THE TIGER’S TAIL has a number of elements of interest but it feels too allegorical in regards to certain subjects floating around in the director’s head, so much so that it never quite becomes satisfying. Some of it is also unpleasant as well, particularly in its disrespectful treatment of the wife played by Kim Cattrall which comes off as rather misogynist in a number of ways (I could imagine people having a problem with one scene in particular). The film’s end also leaves certain elements dangling, uncompleted to such a degree that the final shot forces us to reconsider what the entire thing is even about—thematically, not in a plot twist kind of way—and if what happens at the end was ever meant to be a rewarding revelation of how certain characters feel about each other, it doesn’t come off.

Brendan Gleeson is a very good actor but I’m not sure that this is one of his best performances. Yes, he is able to differentiate between the two people he is playing but it feels like it’s done in a fairly simplistic way, maybe unsure of the right tone, like putting on a more gravelly voice. Unlike certain other actors in the past who have played dual roles like Jeremy Irons and Nicolas Cage, you can feel how hard he’s working at it, diluting the effect as a result. Kim Cattrall isn’t bad and has some nice moments, but she’s saddled with an unfortunate Irish accent (didn’t she spend some time growing up in England?) as well as a script that doesn’t seem to have much respect for her character. The film’s best performance is easily given by Sinéad Cusack as Gleeson’s sister, someone with the biggest secrets which wind up affecting the plot greatly and she has such soul in her screen presence that she winds up responsible for most of the emotional effect that the film winds up having. Ciarán Hinds, a very good actor, feels slightly wasted in the role of Gleeson’s priest friend.

The film was shot with the digital Genesis camera with appears to give a greater looseness during some street scenes as well as some nice looks at the nighttime city skyline. But the digital look gives it all a slightly cheaper feel than it should have, at least on DVD, and the format just doesn’t seem right for this director. All throughout I kept thinking of all the beautiful looking films Boorman has made in the past which were shot on celluloid, another way that this film feels like it somehow falls short of what he’s capable of. Of course, at 76 it feels heartening that he’s still getting films made at all. While THE TIGER’S TAIL has elements that make it worth a look and it does fit in thematically with some of the director’s other works—this is definitely no piece of hackery—it’s hard not to wish that the end result were better, more enriching. John may not still have another POINT BLANK, DELIVERANCE or THE EMERALD FOREST in him but as long as he’s still in there getting films made, we can still hope.

Blinded By These City Lights

2009-09-27T21:43:00.000-07:00

“It’s a beautiful Monday here in the Big Apple,” says a disc jockey heard coming from a car radio just a few minutes into Peter Bogdanovich’s THEY ALL LAUGHED. That the voice we hear actually belongs to Bogdanovich himself makes a lot of sense. Released in 1981, THEY ALL LAUGHED really is set in a beautiful fantasy version of that city, one of the writer/director’s own making and it is unfortunate that the film has rarely been able to be seen as such. It never really had a chance to be judged on it’s own terms, marred by the horrific murder of star Dorothy Stratten by her husband soon after its completion (leading to a prolonged period of troubles for Bogdanovich, who had been involved with the young actress and emerged emotionally shattered) but in more recent years it’s been hard to watch the film and not focus on the numerous lingering shots of the World Trade Center, not to mention thinking about the now-gone Audrey Hepburn as well as John Ritter, also someone who died prematurely and on the date September 11th no less. It’s almost too much tragedy for this light, airy film to be saddled with but it provides it with a few extra layers nevertheless. I found myself slipping the DVD into the player on September 11th of this year as a small token of respect for those tragedies but also for this film which always deserved better. Looking past its looseness reveals a record on film of the Manhattan that existed at the time that is rather moving to looking at all these years later, but it’s also a fantasy version of that city where everything that happens, even the sadness, seems to flow smoothly and correctly with your own life.

The loosely plotted film—focusing on three private detectives (Ben Gazzara, John Ritter, Blaine Novak) and the women (Audrey Hepburn, Dorothy Stratten, Colleen Camp, Patti Hansen) they get mixed up with for reasons due to their job or otherwise—can be a tough one to get a hold of on first viewing. You’re trying to figure out the film’s proto-Hawksian universe not to mention the issues of who knows each other, who doesn’t know each other and just what the heck is going on. Bogdanovich wants you to pay attention to these things as you watch it to sort it all out for yourselves and if you just relax, letting that New York flavor seep into you, THEY ALL LAUGHED becomes a breath of fresh air, in some ways almost as hopeful a movie as I could imagine. Moving on from some of his earlier films which seemed to openly be about his own worship of the likes of Ford and Hawks THEY ALL LAUGHED finds its director, maybe for the first time, fully taking these influences and merging them with his own preoccupations of life, love and how these things work their way into relationships. The looseness of how we move through the city going from one character to the other reminds me of the films of Jacques Demy as well, particularly LOLA and THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (punching the two names into Google reveals that I’m not the first person to make this connection), and like that director’s work it can be left up to the individual viewer just how wistful or joyous you wish to view some of this.

There’s also the film’s own vision of New York which is a few times weirdly familiar to me as it is was shot pretty much at the time I first ever really knew the city—the scenes along Fifth Avenue ring a bell in my own memory as does the brief jaunt through the theater district near Times Square—the Music Box Theatre that Dorothy Stratten exits is playing DEATHTRAP even though we never see the marquee but it is clear that the Royale down the block is showing A DAY IN HOLLYWOOD, A NIGHT IN THE UKRAINE which I actually did see during its run there. This world is one where those mail chutes in an old office building are probably always in use (Wes Anderson interviews the director on the DVD and I can’t help but think that’s the sort of touch he responds to) and everyone who meets each other hit it off almost immediately as if they’ve been friends their whole lives. The free-wheeling nature of the camerawork and pacing combined with the apparent springtime shooting provides the film with a wonderful record of what these parts of the city looked like at the time, though in its quest to be what I imagine is Bogdanovich’s ideal representation of the city he comes from very little is ever seen that manages to date it.

Even the music we hear coming from car radios and the roller disco is all “Sing Sing Sing”, Frank Sinatra (all from the “Reprise” album including “You and Me” which also turned up in the Bogdanovich-inspired IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES a few years later) and a lot of country music which is tied into Colleen Camp’s character, a successful country singer in the club that figures in prominently. I freely admit that my own dislike for country music sometimes makes me wish it were something else that fit in more with the New York feel but the upbeat nature of these songs along with how hearing them here gives the world of this film its own unique feel. Or maybe I’ve just seen the film enough times by now that I’m used to it, but by this point I wouldn’t have it any other way. Anyway, very little ever dates the film aside from maybe Audrey Hepburn’s Yoko Ono sunglasses (that she looses them as her character softens up seems to make sense) and it really does succeed in being set somewhere out of time, in a version of this city where even heartbreak is accompanied by a sharp-witted blonde cab driver who is ready to drive out to Brooklyn for a day of raising hell. In that sense, no one ever has to encounter the sort of pain any of us ever do and the people involved in this film certainly did.

Gazzara, the world-weary but content Bogart in all this, provides the center of the film and the hopeful weariness of his increasingly touching scenes with Hepburn, in which each person seems to know exactly what’s going on without needing to say it, run counterpoint to the more frenzied activities of the younger cast members. Ritter, in what is pretty much the Bogdanovich surrogate role, is terrific throughout and his scenes with Stratten, who couldn’t be cuter, are very sweet but it’s spitfire Colleen Camp as country singer Christy Miller who really takes no prisoners in her scenes (“Why, you got a date?”) doing what has to be the best work of her career. Even the people in here who aren’t the big names the headliners are, like Patti Hansen’s cab driver and George Morfogen’s frazzled boss fit in perfectly with the ensemble (Hepburn’s son Sean Ferrer has a rather large role, in his only film appearance) and even somebody who turns up briefly for some snazzy dialogue, like Joyce Hyser in a fast-talking bit with Blaine Novak, seems like somebody in the middle of their own story. This is a New York where even someone just walking by at one point is somebody a character knows, making it the ideal version of the city that we wish were really there.

Watching it now we also have not only the losses of Stratten, Hepburn and Ritter, but every store location that Bogdanovich says on the commentary "isn't there anymore" and of course the Twin Towers which are all over the film. It makes viewing it that much more poignant and me much happier that this movie exists with a record of this New York. The portrayal of romance as Bogdanovich views it in THEY ALL LAUGHED is a hopeful one but it’s a dance that lasts only as long as the running time (“I knew that all this was too good to last.”). There’s sadness in viewing the film, which is unavoidably a result of our own awareness of what happened around its production, but there’s a degree of sadness in our own romances as well. They so rarely go the way we want them to, yet we find ourselves trapped in the dance they’re a part of anyway. The very title of the film implies that the good times are in the past, that where we are now in life once the laughter has ended is nowhere near as joyous. But we keep trying to get back to that feeling anyway in our sometimes fruitless attempts to recreate it. One thing this film is able to do while watching it is make it seem as if the happiness isn’t quite so far away.

The Air Is A Lot Better

2009-09-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

You could hardly be blamed for not noticing, but a new Peter Hyams movie snuck into theaters a few weeks ago. Well, in New York and Los Angeles anyway. Every few years something turns up at the usually desolate Chinese 6 that gets me to go there and this was one of them--a Peter Hyams movie, with Michael Douglas no less, that quietly opened on a few screens probably due to some contractual obligation. A bit of a comedown for the guy who directed CAPRICORN ONE, OUTLAND, 2010 and THE PRESIDIO among others. The film in question is BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, a remake of the 1956 Fritz Lang film from RKO of the same name which I’m fairly certain I haven’t seen. It’s not very good at all so you don’t need to know much about it, but it did get me thinking about another film helmed by Hyams that was a remake of an RKO noir, namely the 1990 NARROW MARGIN. The original film is a classic of the genre and if you haven’t seen it you should probably do something about that immediately. The remake, never coming anywhere close, is serviceable at best but in all honesty I’ve always enjoyed watching it. This sort of mid-level thriller was still being made at the time and, even if watching it again after a number of years doesn’t reveal some kind of hidden treasure it’s still a pretty enjoyable time killer, the ideal sort of thing that should be running late at night for someone who can’t sleep. Not to mention that it’s a train movie and I love train movies. Doesn’t everyone?

A blind date that Los Angeles book editor Carol Hunnicut (Anne Archer) accepts goes horribly wrong when the man in question, lawyer Michael Tarlow (the much-missed J.T. Walsh), turns out to have been working for, as well as stealing from, mob boss Leo Watts (Harris Yulin) and ends up being shot for this right in front of Carol as she hides unobserved in the next room. She immediately flees but Assistant D.A. Robert Caulfield (Gene Hackman, given the same character name Elliott Gould had in CAPRICORN ONE) and police detective Dominick Benti (M. Emmet Walsh) are able to track her down to a remote house in the Canadian mountains (meaning that there’s actually a valid reason why this was filmed in Canada). But no sooner have they gotten there then it becomes shockingly clear that Caulfield has been followed, sending him and Hunnicut on the run, ending up on a train headed for Vancouver with the killers (including James Sikking—an older version of his hitman from POINT BLANK?) on the train in search of the woman with Caulfield trying to do everything he can to keep them from finding her and, with hundreds of miles of wilderness all around them, nowhere to run even if they could get off the train.

For anyone familiar with the original it’s clear that this NARROW MARGIN, written by the director, uses the basic protecting-a-witness-on-a-train premise as a jumping off point, essentially coming up with its own story but still knowingly tossing in a few points from that film, particularly the crucial character of “the fat man” as well as one twist that certainly at least seems in the spirit of that film. It’s not an ambitious piece of work—Hyams never seems to want it to be anything more than a modern day B-movie—but it is an enjoyable one that keeps the plot moving pretty early on, from a well done truck-and-helicopter chase through the woods to the use of the train in a way that keeps the story moving, knowing enough to concentrate on this suspense and not bother with a phony romance between the two leads.

Hyams also served as director of photography as he usually does and the look is like every other film by him—sleek, low-light levels—but at this point he was still willing to put at least some light in the frame and actually the pitch-black midnight rendezvous at a remote station actually winds up being one of the best looking and staged sections of the film. Some of the potboiler elements work so well that when it reaches for more depth the results are a little mixed. Hackman gets one very good scene in particular where he tells the bad guys why he chooses to stay in his job but Archer’s big emotional moments where she lays out her life and reasons for her actions (including saying that the killing she witnessed was not “like what you see on television, it was horrible” when really, that’s exactly what it looked like) feel a little too calculated for sympathy and just make us wish we were spending more time with Hackman as he moves around the train interacting with various people, narrowly avoiding getting into more trouble. Of course, the movie isn’t about the emotions she is going through so much as it is the cat and mouse chase throughout which culminates in the dynamic climax set on top of the train which is extremely well done and exciting—there’s certainly some work by stuntmen but enough of it is actually the actors up there which completely sells it. If you can’t get some fun out of watching Gene Hackman and James Sikking fight on top of a moving train, I don’t know what to tell you. Seeing this movie again wasn’t any kind of revelation—one of the twists is tipped with an aside that’s as subtle as a sledgehammer and I never caught it before now—but it does succeed in its potboiler way more than a few of Hyams’ more ambitious efforts (I’ve never been the biggest OUTLAND guy, for one thing) and with the exception of CAPRICORN ONE it’s probably my favorite of his films—of course, some might mention that when we’re talking about Peter Hyams that isn’t saying very much. It’s not the classic that the original is, but even if that were the worst thing I could say about it that wouldn’t be so bad. For the most part, it completely gets the job done and is a reminder of how much fun a thriller set on a train can be.

This is an ideal lead for Gene Hackman, who seems slightly energized by material as if he’s looking forward to seeing how this is all going to play out. He approaches his character as an essentially decent guy (“An honest man.”), one who we genuinely like following through the film and he earns our trust. Even if only looked at as a “Gene Hackman vehicle” it definitely succeeds. His basic nature here is interesting to contrast with Anne Archer and how much anguish she projects, to a degree which might not be necessary, but she admittedly doesn’t get too many notes to play since her character is supposed to be terrified for much of the time. Still, there’s a casualness that Hackman seems to share with most of the other actors in the movie that he never shares with Archer as a result of this, something which is prevented out of necessity from the plot, and as a result we wind up liking him more even considering what she’s going through. M. Emmet Walsh is lots of fun to have around when he’s on screen (which, unfortunately, isn’t for very long) and James Sikking, given really only one scene where he has any dialogue of note, is smoothly effective as the main bad guy. Susan Hogan, who I always remember from David Cronenberg’s THE BROOD, appears in the key role of a woman on the train who becomes a little too friendly with Caulfield. The score by Bruce Broughton is sparse, maybe a little too much so and there are a number of scenes throughout that feel like they could use some extra oomph. Considering that CAPRICORN ONE has one of the all-time great kick-ass scores by Jerry Goldsmith, it’s too bad that Hyams chose the opposite musical approach with a later film like this one.

No, it’s not the original but it is the kind of programmer starring, you know, adults, which used to be a more common sight out there and setting one on a train seems so pure, so naturally cinematic. Because of this, on the rare occasion these days when one of them does get released I’m that much more interested in seeing it to find out how such a pure genre piece can work in this day and age. That’s why it’s such a shame that something like the new version of BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT comes off as such a misfire and if you haven’t gotten to see it you’re not missing very much. But Hyams’ NARROW MARGIN remake is a completely enjoyable popcorn movie that, for the most part, does what it needs to do and doesn’t stick around too much to try to do much more. And it holds up pretty well because of that.

It Won't Have To Look For Us

2009-09-22T20:12:00.001-07:00

When I think of A FISH CALLED WANDA the first thing that comes to mind is the laughter. See, I was working as an usher the summer of 1988 when it opened and I can remember, over the multiple weeks it played to packed houses, the near-hysteria that would erupt in the audience throughout the entire film. It became possible to pinpoint down to the second when the laughter would come and it was always enjoyable to watch whole sections of it because of that. It’s easy to forget now, but A FISH CALLED WANDA played for months from the summer into the fall, finally becoming the number one movie in the country a full ten weeks after it was released. And of course, the acclaim for the film led to multiple Academy Award nominations, not to mention Kevin Kline winning for Best Supporting Actor. Extremely funny throughout, the film is truly a high water mark for many of those involved, particularly star John Cleese who in his screenplay (from a story by him and director Charles Chrichton), came up with the most complete and satisfying narrative of his career, a story where the pieces satisfyingly (and, in some cases, shockingly) come together like clockwork right up until the fadeout. Probably deserving of at least minor classic status, the film’s visibility feels like it’s faded in recent years. Maybe this type of comedy has fallen out of fashion or maybe it’s possible the way the film was put together is in some way responsible. After all, it’s hard to compete with the memory of being in the middle of an entire audience laughing uproariously.

A jewel heist is organized by mastermind George Thomason (Tom Georgeson) along with Ken Pile (Michael Palin), weapons man Otto (Kevin Kline) and beautiful Wanda Gershwitz (Jamie Lee Curtis) who is pretending to be George’s lover while secretly in cahoots with Otto. Once the job is done Otto and Wanda place an anonymous call to the police which gets George arrested so they can take the money for themselves (and which Wanda secretly plans to take for herself) but George has already hidden it away. Therefore, Wanda gets the idea to become friendly with George’s barrister Archie Leach (John Cleese, taking Cary Grant’s real name for his character) and use the situation to find out where the diamonds are. Meanwhile the stuttering Ken, a staunch animal rights activist, has to deal with the one witness to the crime who could put George away.

A complicated setup and there are plenty of elements I deliberately left out but everything goes together so well it makes the film an example of screenplay construction which should probably be studied more than it is. You could say it’s essentially an Ealing Studios comedy of the sort Crichton used to make back in the 50s made even more twisted courtesy of Cleese’s Python humor along with a willingness by those involved to make it a greater degree accessible (and, let’s be honest, commercial) than these films usually are, for better or worse. The plot holds together, the characters are well-drawn in this comic style (particularly in how the different combinations wind up interacting with each other) and the movie has no qualms about taking certain things to the extreme limit in pursuit of huge, savage laughs (It’s tempting to nothing more than just list favorite scenes and lines). Not all of this will be appreciated by some people out there, but all of it works and it manages to be twisted and dark…but still all strangely likable.

Director Charles Crichton, one of the film’s Oscar nominees for his work, was in his late 70s at the time of filming and the deceptively simple style brought to the film gives it barely a single wasted shot or cut the entire time, knowing exactly where to frame certain setups to maximize the laughter. Much of the time things are played out in a single shot—he’ll never cut the shot if he can pan or tilt the camera to get the story point across—and this really lends to the feeling of the film’s four leads truly interacting with each other in their various combinations. The way this all goes together so seamlessly gives the impression that this could have been one of those films where you hear everything was pretty much cut in camera, so it’s a surprise to see so many deleted and alternate scenes on the DVD, displaying how far they had to go in tinkering with the main romance as well as the ending to find the right tone for the film. But the final product results in a construction that feels nearly airtight in addition to the laughs. And since the DVD shows us that even someone like John Cleese has to work at these things to get it just right, that gives hope for us all.

Such a narrative in a comedy feels like a lost art these days—I laughed throughout something like THE HANGOVER but a movie like that in comparison just feels like a bunch of scenes put together, as opposed to the expert construction here. And it’s not just madcap craziness either, as the film seems to have decided to make a few of these characters at least a little bit likable, particularly during Archie’s speech about how he and his fellow citizens of England are always “terrified of embarrassment” compared to the magical Wanda who is inexplicably (he thinks) attracted to him. This unabashedly endearing quality among the madness (which sometimes occurs moments later) sets WANDA apart from things like the earlier Cleese vehicle CLOCKWISE as well as the later Eric Idle vehicle SPLITTING HEIRS which also featured Cleese and at the time struck me as a unsuccessful attempt to make another WANDA-type effort. A FISH CALLED WANDA, unlike those other films, seems to be aware that the more satisfying story leads to more satisfying laughter and keeps it from being just a series of silly slapstick bits. Of course, some of the slapstick is priceless and the momentum it builds near the end up to its payoffs works hugely well.

The thing is however, compared with my memories of uproarious laughter, A FISH CALLED WANDA plays a little sparse when viewed at home. Multiple viewings always made it clear how much the film seemed to have been cut to allow for that audience laughter, maybe more so than a film usually would—the point when certain people walk in on Archie in an embarrassing situation is probably the most blatant example of this, but there are others throughout. Something like TOOTSIE, to use a very random example, can play great at home but maybe it’s the out-there broadness that causes WANDA to diminish at home and it’s never quite what I want it to be. In fairness, it doesn’t hurt the film too much in the end but it is does reveal how much this really was dependent on those audiences. That said, at it’s best A FISH CALLED WANDA is at times a hysterically funny British comedy with elements that come together to make it extremely satisfying.

The cast works wonderfully together. Cleese was very probably never better than he is here and Jamie Lee Curtis is possibly more beguiling than she ever was. The two work together very well and a certain fondness they share feels apparent, down to the laughter they seem to bring out in each other and it helps make the love story, which otherwise might be the most dreaded part of the movie, surprisingly believable and even a little touching. When Cleese is supposedly ignoring her as she talks to him during a driving scene late in the film it really looks like the actor is trying to keep from smiling, not the character. Oscar winner Kline is completely fearless in every fiber of his being as Otto and Michael Palin, who since he spends a fair amount of time in his own storyline could easily be forgotten is amazing with every bit of sadness and humiliation the character goes through. When he is desperately trying to blurt out a certain name near the end the absolute desperation in his face looks real, tragic…and absolutely hysterical. Maria Aitken has some very funny moments as Archie’s decidedly unpleasant wife and gets extra points for how she is able to spit out “Manfredjinsinjin” without missing a beat. The now-famous Stephen Fry turns up very briefly near the end. The score by John Du Prez forgoes the comedy and treats the whole things straight, varying from pounding suspense during the heist and action scenes to gentle lyricism for Archie and Wanda. The main theme heard over the end credits is extremely hummable and every time I see the film I can’t get it out of my head for days afterward.

The surprise success of the film led to a change in the career trajectory for most of those involved except for Crichton who, after his Oscar nomination for Best Director turned down all offers and chose to go out on top, dying in 1999 at the age of 89. The four stars reunited for 1997’s stillborn FIERCE CREATURES, an attempt to recapture the lightning in a bottle of WANDA that was unfortunately saddled with a weak concept and story, resulting in a film that went through so many reshoots that two directors wound up with screen credit in the end. That film is pretty much forgotten now, but A FISH CALLED WANDA is still around as one of the last great British comedies and will someday hopefully play somewhere on this planet with a large audience once again. I still get a great amount of enjoyment out of it, but it’ll never again be like seeing it with one of those audiences back in the summer of 1988.

Losing Touch With Reality

2009-09-16T22:22:00.000-07:00

Though I was taken to see Disney’s CONDORMAN in the theater when it was released way back in the summer of 1981 it’s possible that the most interesting thing about that fact is that I actually saw it on a double bill with the infamous, now-withheld SONG OF THE SOUTH. I guess this not only says something about how times have changed but also how much time has gone by. I don’t even remember very much about what I thought of CONDORMAN at the time. I suppose like most movies I saw as a kid I liked it just fine but looking at it now I’m more interested in what the Baskin-Robbins flavor Condorman Crunch that tied into the release was like. However, since I’m stuck with the actual movie I’ll just have to deal with it. There’s potential in CONDORMAN for a decent spy spoof, even one aimed at kids but it’s squandered in all the Disney blandness of that time and even some decent casting choices can’t keep this going for the full 90 minutes. There’s nothing about it worth forming a sentimental attachment to and I wouldn’t even bother with trying to show it to kids nowadays. They deserve something better.

Comic book artist and writer Woody Wilkins (Michael Crawford) is a perfectionist who has not only traveled to Paris to get a feel for where he wants to set his new book “Condorman” he also insists that anything which happens in any of his books must be tried by him first, which is why when we meet him he is attempting to fly off the Eiffel Tower in full Condorman costume (no, those aren’t wires you see there holding him up…). When his government buddy Harry (James Hampton) needs to find a civilian to handle a quick exchange in Istanbul, Woody enthusiastically dives in which results in him meeting beautiful Soviet agent Natalia Rambova (Barbara Carrera, now and forever a favorite of mine). Falling for her instantly, Woody claims to be a real spy, giving his codename as “Condorman” and soon after when Natalia chooses to defect she insists that she will only deal with the agent named Condorman on her escape. Woody works out a deal with the CIA to get them to build some genuine versions of some of the fictional hero’s gadgets but he doesn’t count on Natalia’s jealous former lover and KGB superior Krokov (Oliver Reed, as in “What the hell is Oliver Reed doing in a Disney film?”) coming after her.

The thing’s got Barbara Carrera, a score by Henry Mancini and beautiful European locations, a combo which for me is totally ideal but just about nothing in CONDORMAN maintains any interest. Directed by Charles Jarrott and written by Marc Stirdivant (inspired by Robert Sheckley’s novel “The Game of X”) the story has potential but no real juice to it and saying that it’s just a kids’ movie from Disney is no excuse—for the record, this is actually one of their earliest PG titles. There’s something wrong with any movie with location work in Paris, Monaco, Switzerland, etc. that plays so bland, not to mention one that traps you with one of the most annoying lead characters imaginable. The film continuously seems to ignore interesting paths it could go down that you wonder if they were going to be this lackadaisical with everything why didn’t they just shoot the whole thing in Burbank. The story is dull, the chase scenes are lame, the secondary bad guys are uninteresting and whole plot points feel jumped over at various points as if they just didn’t feel like going to the trouble to shoot those scenes. Any attempt at being a Bond spoof comes off as lackluster at best and even the plot point that Woody uses this opportunity to have his own designs actually made for him by the government (ridiculous, but there’s at least potential for comedy) never feels exploited in any way that ever becomes clever or fun—they couldn’t do a copy of the Q lab to go for a few laughs? There’s no real style, very little is funny (“Make it a triple” is a good line, I’ll give it that much), very little even comes close to being exciting. Even when there’s potential for conflict between the leads, the film dispenses with it as quickly as possible. All of the comic book details come off as phony as well, though I doubt anyone making it ever cared. Yeah, it’s just a Disney movie, but they made some good ones at some point, didn’t they? If I was ok with all this when I was a kid, and I think I was, I’d rather not think about it.

It’s too bad because there really is potential in a light-hearted superhero/caper combo about an artist forced into bringing his creation to real life and, so help me, it wouldn’t be a bad choice for a remake. The location work does at least give the whole thing a sense of scope and there’s one helicopter shot during the boat chase near the end (for all I know it’s second unit) in which a bad guy’s boat is revealed to be following the heroes that comes off as so purely cinematic that for a few seconds the thing actually becomes exciting. But the moment ends pretty quickly. The special effects range from blatantly visible wires holding up the stuntman in action to weak rearscreen work but if any of this succeeded in being fun how much would any of that matter? This sort of thing just worked better in the 60s than the 80s ( I guess this is where I make the obligatory DANGER: DIABOLIK reference) but either way the Disney formula at any point in time probably meant the basic approach would always have been pretty toothless.

After saying all this, it’s no real surprise that just about the best thing about the movie is the score by Henry Mancini. Yes, some of it sounds a little like pieces he never got to fit into one of the PINK PANTHER sequels (maybe they should have brought in Blake Edwards to work on the script) but it helps with the light-hearted tone more than anything that occurs on screen and the main title theme is pretty damn cool. Even a light theme for Natalia’s character comes off as reminiscent of something that the composer would have created for Audrey Hepburn back in the day and is actually rather lovely. Sadly, there was never a soundtrack album released. Since there’s not much else to say about the movie I have to point out that this 1981 film features all the credits up front, with just a card at the finale reading THE END. No end credit crawl, no nothing. If there’s another wide release film that came after this where such a close is the case I can’t think of it.

At times the lead actors seem like they’re in a very good mood, almost as if their offscreen camaraderie is bleeding over—this could be that they’re trying to be cheerful because it’s a family film or maybe everyone’s just happy to be shooting a movie in exotic locales all around Europe. You can hardly blame them, but it doesn’t mean that we’ve been saddled with a decent lead. I like Michael Crawford in Richard Lester’s THE KNACK but he’s extremely annoying here as he tries way too hard to be peppy and upbeat, shouting things like “Let’s go!” at every possible opportunity. I guess we’re supposed to like his enthusiasm but it winds up sucking all the air out of the room in scene after scene. With him in the lead he winds up being as responsible as anything else for how forced the film turns out to be. Barbara Carrera (sigh), in addition to being a much more soothing presence, is of course quite beautiful (I prefer her with darker hair, but whatever) and, particularly when she shares scenes with Oliver Reed, the two come off as so unavoidably adult in their behavior that it’s hard not to wish that they had real scenes to play. Reed seems to be putting up with all this as if appearing in a Disney film is a form of punishment by somebody. When he gets a look at Condorman in action near the end it’s hard not to read his face as wondering what the hell he’s doing in this thing. Character actor James Hampton, familiar on sight, is just about the most likable person in the whole thing--he has a decency that is genuine even in this context, with a relaxed air that gives the feeling that he’s actually willing to have some fun and not try too hard to do it.

Nostalgia has its limits. Just because I saw something when I was a kid that doesn’t mean I’m going to defend it and it sure doesn’t explain why I own it on DVD, even if it is the only way to hear the Mancini score and did I mention how beautiful Barbara Carrera is? Maybe those aren’t good reasons, but they’ll have to do. It feels like CONDORMAN had the potential to be good but was stuck in the stranglehold of whatever was happening in the Disney offices at the time and that seems to have resulted in it being as bland as possible, like the whole thing is just waiting around to fill out the running time. The Mancini fanfare occasionally almost convinces you that a really good movie is happening but the feeling never lasts. With the Anchor Bay DVD that was released a number of years ago out of print and currently fetching high prices on Ebay, one gets the feeling that Disney is keeping this film about as buried as its one time co-feature SONG OF THE SOUTH. The thing is, in this particular case, the world really isn’t missing out on anything.

Routine Procedure

2009-09-13T20:30:00.000-07:00

In case anyone’s been wondering, part of the reason I haven’t been updating as much lately is because of some very minor surgery that I had recently. It’s not the only reason for my absence but it’s a good one and even though it was minor, surgery is surgery, right? It hurts. It takes some time to recover. That’s all you need to know. But since I made it through I figured I’d take a look at Michael Crichton’s COMA since I didn’t have to worry about some kind of worst case scenario anymore. One of those many movies that somehow always slipped through the cracks for me until now COMA feels a little like a movie I’d already seen even though I hadn’t. This isn’t a criticism of it as much as a comment on how enough of it feels like it’s seeped into other films and TV shows through the years so maybe what was once shocking or surprising (if it was--hey, I don’t know) isn’t really anymore. It’s still interesting in how it tries to inject sexual politics circa 1978 into such a thriller and, ultimately, it is pretty entertaining as long as you don’t spend too much time dwelling on certain plot points.

Dr. Susan Wheeler (Geneviève Bujold) is a surgery resident at Boston General Hospital as is boyfriend Dr. Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas) who she shares a somewhat combative relationship with. When close friend Nancy (MOONRAKER’s Lois Chiles) goes into the hospital for a routine abortion something unexpected goes wrong, leaving Nancy in an irreversible coma. Soon after another young, healthy patient goes in for a routine procedure with similar tragic results and when Susan begins to investigate she encounters roadblocks in the form of a hospital staff (as well as her own boyfriend) which seems to believe that these are nothing but tragic accidents. And what does OR #8 have to do with any of this? Nancy’s actions soon catch the attention of Chief of Surgery Dr. George Harris (Richard Widmark, who is of course playing a bit role which will have no bearing on the plot, right?) but even as she begins to sense that she is in true danger, her investigation soon leads her to the door of the mysterious Jefferson Institute run by Mrs. Emerson (Elizabeth Ashley) where certain shocking answers await.

Based on the novel by Robin Cook with a screenplay by Crichton, COMA moves fast and is tightly plotted, maybe to keep one from asking certain questions as much as anything. The basic nature of the mystery seems to be figured out a little too easily in a Nancy Drew-sort of way (including the maintenance man who turns up out of nowhere to point her in the right direction) and it’s hard not to think how much of this basic conspiracy thriller framework has been used a number of times over the years (not to mention Michael Apted’s 1996 medical mystery EXTREME MEASURES) and without coming up with specific examples a number of beats in the plot just feel overly familiar in this day and age. It probably isn’t this film’s fault but it does display how much of it just isn’t very surprising anymore. That’s not to criticize the framework too much and I found myself continually surprised in minor ways like how Bujold’s lowest emotional point in the film turns out to be exactly when she becomes forced into really dealing with the danger of the situation and even some minor bits of dialogue wind up paying off in satisfying ways. That’s not to say that this is an airtight plot and for that matter I could almost imagine a doctor watching the film taking offense that Bujold’s character is the only one who seems to take a genuine concern in what is going on at this hospital—that no other doctor comes off as very worried would make parodying this film pretty easy (I’m guessing that Mad Magazine took a crack at it).

Probably more interesting is the film’s treatment of lead Bujold—she’s presented as a woman fighting her way upstream against the chauvinism around her, even with her boyfriend who she is seen arguing with not too long after the opening credits—one imagines the two of them fighting on the way home from seeing AN UNMARRIED WOMAN. Using this plot as an opportunity to explore such sexual politics is a way to make the film more than it is—when she gets rid of her heels and pantyhose to crawl around in the hospital’s air ducts the symbolism of the moment is tough to ignore and when a character says “I like a woman who drinks scotch” late in the film the implication is that her character has earned such a compliment. Of course, this may or may not be exactly what the goal should be and the nature of the climax which places her in jeopardy as opposed to someone else feels like this theme isn’t quite carried through to the end. How much Crichton was invested in this theme is tough to say considering how Bujold is seen taking a shower in one of the very first scenes in this PG film (not that I’m complaining, he crassly admitted).

Considering the current health care debate going on I was on the lookout for how the film might be relevant to today but the truth is so much of the medical world presented here, in which the idea of a medical institution that is less than honorable may actually have been genuinely shocking, feels pretty far removed from today (we hear about the Jefferson Institute being “government funded” but that seems a little ambiguous). When the chief mastermind is ranting about how the world isn’t black and white near the end the moment is hurt by how simplistic the conflict really is. It occurred to me that a remake set in today’s world which really did address how complicated today’s medical world is would be able to address such things…but it’s tough to imagine that an audience wouldn’t figure out the truth behind what is going on pretty quickly these days. If anything, the presentation of the Jefferson Institute and its eerie, austere lay out both inside and out (I imagine the building being used as part of a liberal arts college) is extremely effective and if the main point of praise to give to COMA is that it’s a decent popcorn thriller that remains engaging over thirty years after its release, then that’s certainly something.

One point of particular interest is the film’s use of the score by Jerry Goldsmith which as part of the film’s approach to its escalating pace doesn’t make its first appearance until nearly fifty minutes in. Once it’s there it barely seems to leave and while some of the stuff sounds a lot like other material Goldsmith was turning out around this time for the likes of THE OMEN, LOGAN’S RUN and even the V’Ger material for STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE it’s still an excellent piece of work and the fact remains that as far as chase music goes you can’t get much better than 70s-era Goldsmith. I should also mention that the Bujold-Douglas weekend getaway is backed up by what on the soundtrack album is titled “Love Theme From COMA” so be sure to cue that up on your next romantic night. The final moments of the movie might in other hands play as an obligatory villain-gets-comeuppance beat but in Goldsmith’s hands it works just great sending everyone off on the right moment (and, presumably, before too many questions get asked).

Whatever the other problems, Bujold does a terrific job in the lead and her inherently icy nature feels like an ideal match with this character who has to prove herself to all the men in the world. Michael Douglas wasn’t quite a movie star at this point (though he did have an Oscar for producing ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST) and his performance here feels a little like he’s being tested to see how he works on the big screen—it’s not the meatiest role but he does some god work playing not a Cary Grant to Bujold’s Audrey Hepburn but someone who the film successfully makes us unsure if he’s in on it or just unwilling to stick his neck out to help her. Elizabeth Ashley seems to be playing her first scene as if she’s one’s of the robots from WESTWORLD—she tones it down a little later on, but just a little. Richard Widmark plays what in terms of this point in his career is pretty much the Richard Widmark role as Dr. Harris, bringing more credibility to the part than someone else might have and Rip Torn is excellent in just two scenes (one with no dialogue) as the hospital’s Chief of Anesthesiology. Tom Selleck (who later starred in Crichton’s RUNAWAY) makes an early appearance as one of the unfortunate patients and Ed Harris definitely makes an impression in his first film role as a pathology resident.

Anyway, I’m recovering now and though I’m not 100% yet I’ve been out in the world, going to movies and even stopped into Tiki Ti one night. Which has nothing to do with COMA but there’s not much else to say about it anyway. It was a big hit at the time and even if the sexual politics play slightly dated today, as interesting as they are, its portrayal of the medical world still succeeds at being a little unnerving. That’s the case for me particularly after having just gone through this sort of thing so I guess that’s all it really needs to do.

The Closest We Ever Get

2009-09-08T22:57:00.000-07:00

First of all, I’d like to set the record straight on a matter. In spite of what a friend posted on Facebook, I would like to state that after seeing INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS at the Arclight on opening night I did not fall to my knees in the upstairs lobby to shake Quentin Tarantino’s hand and call him a god for making the movie. Seriously, calling anyone a god for any reason is just not part of my M.O. The falling on the knees part, yeah, that’s true. As I recall it I stated, “I bow to you, sir,” got down on my knees, shook his hand and thanked him for making this movie. He happily shook my hand and was led off into the crowd. The exhilaration I felt after seeing this film was only something I have felt a handful of times in my filmgoing life and that would include the time I drove around the city for hours in a light drizzle, almost in a daze, after seeing PULP FICTION for the very first time on opening night at the Chinese, a night where it felt like a new world was being born. That world may not be so new anymore, but that lightning bolt feeling that Tarantino brings to his films hasn’t left. That night at the Arclight, I seemed to feel it like never before. And now several weeks later, after several further viewings, I not only have greater admiration for the movie but a greater love for not only how much it displays a love of movies but for its very insistence on the very power of what movies are to us in the world and what they can represent. What does my love for this film say about me, as well as my own love of films and how they are continually playing in a projection booth somewhere in my brain? I still don’t feel like I can write a full appreciation at this point but nevertheless the film still won’t leave me (there will be liberal discussion of spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, I don’t know what to tell you). Whether or not it’s the best film of the year doesn’t really matter for me right now. But as a lover of the power of film, for me it’s the one that matters the most.

When the title of Chapter One of the film, “Once Upon A Time…In Nazi-Occupied France,” comes onscreen it is very clear what we are about to see—not the war as it occurred but as it exists in a cinema infused brain. Of course, no World War II film ever made has shown us what it was really like. Not SCHINDLER’S LIST, not THE GREAT ESCAPE, not FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO. The very opening of last year’s Jews-fight-back entry DEFIANCE tells us that the following film is “A True Story,” not even bothering to put a “Based On” at the front of that. This is a lie of course, as much of a lie as certain key plot points in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS are. The absolute truth is not what interests Tarantino and it’s his mission to get something different across, just as it’s put to German Private Butz (“Who or what is a Private Butz?”) by different parties with different agendas to not reveal exactly what was done to him. None of this interests Tarantino, quite rightly. Real history isn’t what interests Tarantino for his purposes--as far as I can tell, the greatest amount of pure fact that comes through in the final version is the extensive probing it does into the German cinema produced by Joseph Goebbels (David O.Selznick would be his opposite number, not Louis B. Mayer, as we’re told)

After hearing for years how Tarantino had his never finished “Guys on a mission” script somewhere in the pipeline it is somewhat surprising to discover how much of a supporting role they play in the film allegedly named after them. The way things are structured the Basterds wind up being spoken as legends almost as soon as we have met them. What the finished film turns out to be is not a rejiggering of the basic concept of THE DIRTY DOZEN (not to mention the 1977 THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, directed by Enzo Castellari, where this film’s title but next to nothing else came from) like we would imagine. And for all the Sergio Leone iconography, along with how ONCE UPON A TIME…IN NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE may have been a more apt title for the film (would even Tarantino have the gumption to have done that?), it can’t be looked at as the World War II that Leone himself might have made. What we get in 152 minutes in a nonstop barrage of film and world history colliding in Tarantino’s brain, spilled out onto celluloid (definitely not digital) and presented to the audience in the theater, forcing everyone watching it to sort out how fiction and (in this case, pulp) fact are supposed to go together. The film tosses out mentions of Riefenstahl and UFA as if everyone will understand the references (and why shouldn’t they?) as well as bringing references to the likes of Edwige Fenech and Antonio Margheriti into character names for seemingly no reason other than the pure fun of it.

Within all this is constant discussion of roles people are playing, disguises they must assume and simple flat-out thwarting of expectations, with characters prevented from going into the normal war movie we expect them to be involved in, holed up in a scene for nearly a half-hour where all of the expectations are irrevocably altered. Even the director’s treatment of movie star Brad Pitt is at times perverse—not only does he keep his character offscreen for long stretches, he even has the actor play nearly an entire scene from off camera with only his voice heard, not to mention keeping him away from much of the key climactic action. Not that Tarantino seems to bear any resentment from having Brad Pitt in his movie, quite the contrary. Aldo Raine becomes so enjoyable to watch that the film does wind up leaving us wanting more and, well, the simple utterance of “Gorlami” may in fact be my favorite Brad Pitt screen moment ever. As his opposite number, the acclaimed Christoph Waltz really is quite astounding as Hans Landa, possibly giving the performance of the year, and it occurred to me that much of his placement in the film’s iconography (turning up when unexpected, use of a certain pipe) bears a certain resemblance to Lee Van Cleef’s character in THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY and when these two leads finally meet late in the film it’s worth all the anticipation. But the entire cast adds immensely to the film from the likes of Diane Kruger as film star Bridget von Hammersmark and Daniel Brühl as Frederick Zoller all the way to the more unsung likes of Denis Menochet as the farmer Perrier LaPadite, the legendary Rod Taylor with a few lines as Churchill and even B.J. Novak as Utivich who seems to be using his own befuddlement at getting such a role in this film to play his response to unexpectedly getting a close look at history unfurling right in front of him. I could go on and on with a long list of all the performances I’m still looking forward to seeing again in subsequent viewings.

The theater where much of the key action winds up taking place feels meant to be a combination of the New Beverly and the Vista, two L.A. theaters Tarantino has continually expressed a fondness for in the past (at the least, he certainly goes to both of them), both modest single-screen houses that have “real respect, almost church like” as none other than Joseph Goebbels himself describes this theater. With plot points focusing on this theater and the flammability of nitrate film, instead of backing away from his interests (“Why doesn’t he make something other than a Quentin Tarantino movie?” seems to be the refrain) the director embraces them maybe more than ever before, giving us a World War II where a certain knowledge of German Cinema history makes one ideal for a covert operation (though, as it turns out, it’s still a flawed choice). We know very little about the four years Shoshanna (the extremely fetching Mélanie Laurent, excellent throughout both with dialogue and without) has spent since witnessing her family brutally massacred so we don’t know if her sentiment, “I'm French. We respect directorsin our country,” was something she learned or a feeling she would have had anyway. It doesn’t matter, of course. She says it and that automatically earns her all the respect in the world, as well it should. Not that real life has no interest for him--we can tell that the act of knowing people, of conversation, of “smoking and drinking and ordering in restaurants”, where that living can take place, is something he loves as much as Bridget von Hammersmark. Mountain climbing, of course, is just a waste of time.

The Basterds are interestingly some of the only characters in the movie named after them who have no real knowledge or opinion about films—when Aldo Raine boasts of Donnie Donowitz’s baseball bat prowess saying “It’s the closest we ever get to going to the movies,” the character’s use of the phrase is pretty casual but of course the line isn’t at all coincidental. Cinema is what matters to Tarantino so therefore it’s what matters in the universe this film is set in, possibly more than anything. To view it as a criticism, almost invalidating the movie as a result, is downplaying how crucial the very concept of it is to him. It makes me think of his extended use of Ennio Morricone music throughout. Some, but not all, are from Spaghetti Westerns but what these pieces by that composer do share is a passion for life, a type of forcefulness that has all but left film scoring in this day and age. When Shoshanna has her final encounter with Pvt. Zoller in the projection booth the haunting piece that underscores her decision and her fate, coming from a not-bad crime thriller entitled REVOLVER, it makes it clear how much the moment possibly only makes sense in a spaghetti western kind of logic but it still works beautifully. Contrasting what is going on in that booth versus her glances at the screen all to that music really says it all. Cinema is humanity. Cinema is life.

And on my third viewing of the film (at the Vista, actually) everything seemed to hit home for me, this Jewish girl telling this theater full of Nazis what is about to happen to them…tying it right into what Lt. Archie Hickox (a sharply funny performance by Michael Fassbender) had earlier said was part of Goebbels’ plan to fight that element of Hollywood. I don’t think that Tarantino is trying to turn the tables on the audience here and makes us contrast our own response to how the Nazis were cheering during the repellent NATION’S PRIDE with its faux-Eisenstein montage. With the hard cut in that film from one close-up to another that was not meant to be there he transforms not only the film, he transforms history making it not an ironic reflection but a vision of what, to him, is supposed to be. The ghostly visage of Shoshanna coming off like the Wizard of Oz, already dead but triumphant, laughing at those Nazis who “ain’t got no humanity” as they burn to death, as well they deserve to…it’s just about the most nakedly emotional insistence on what the power of cinema could be, should be, as I’ve ever seen. And the pure beauty of the image, provided by FX maestro John Dykstra, makes me want to stand on a rooftop and, using my best Aldo Raine voice, shout “Fuck CGI all to hell!” up to the stars. Because what INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS ultimately is deep down is a film about the majesty of cinema, how it can be allowed to change the world, how nothing in this world is ultimately as beautiful, as horrifying and as powerful. And whether it results in his masterpiece or not, if Tarantino wants it to change the course of world history then damn it, it will. And that’s the way it should be….Once Upon A Time…in Nazi-Occupied France.

One Success Too Many

2009-08-31T23:41:00.000-07:00

This ultra-stressful August is just about over now and during such a time where you need to find some way to breathe easy for a little while you sometimes pull out one of those comfort movies which for a few hours help things seem a little more laid back. The adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel EVIL UNDER THE SUN is just such a movie. Released in the States in 1982 it seems like one of the last quality examples of that sort of old-school entertainment where it would have been appropriate to have each of the stars featured in a box at the bottom of the poster, even if the poster didn’t really feature this. The location it’s mostly shot in certainly helps things as does the laid-back nature of the whole thing. Directed by Guy Hamilton, the man behind several of the more iconic James Bond films, you could almost say that the arch approach it takes could very well be read as an attempt by Hamilton to make an ultimate Hercule Poirot movie just as GOLDFINGER might be his initial stab at an ultimate James Bond movie. It's not at all meant to be taken seriously but the mystery holds together pretty well and it does paint a pretty enjoyable picture of the idle rich lounging around an island on vacation, doing little more than sun, drink and, well, drink. In such an environment, even the annoying matter of a murder isn’t going to stop them from putting on the appropriate evening wear.

Working for the London Trojan Insurance Company, legendary detective Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) is investigating the situation behind a diamond belonging to Sir Horace Blatt (Colin Blakely) which is revealed to be a phony. Blatt insists that a switch was made when he gave the diamond to a woman he intended to marry, who later dumped him for another man. Poirot agrees to meet Blatt at “Daphne’s Place” an exclusive hotel on a small island in the Kingdom of Tyrania run by the King’s former mistress Daphne Castle (Maggie Smith). There, Poirot meets the woman in question, the famous, much despised stage actress Arlena Marshall (Mrs. Peel herself, Diana Rigg). As it turns out, just about all of the guests (played by the likes of Nicholas Clay, Jane Birkin, James Mason, Roddy McDowell and Sylvia Miles) have their own nasty past with Arlena. In spite of this seething hatred the holiday for everyone continues, until of course one of the guests turns up strangled on the beach. This results in ending the ongoing revelry for nearly an entire scene. Urged into solving the crime at Daphne Castle’s urging, Poirot begins to question everyone, but matters are complicated when every single guest has a cast-iron alibi. Not to mention the whereabouts of Blatt’s diamond, which Poirot has yet to recover.

One thing is for sure—you can imagine anyone seeing this film wanting to immediately go vacation in the beautiful surroundings where it was filmed—not in the Mediterranean where it was set in the fictional kingdom of Tyrania but actually Majorca, Spain. At least, watching it always makes me want to go there. It’s a beautiful place to spend a few hours in a movie but more importantly Hamilton always seems to have just the right idea of how to shoot and make good use of it, adding to the feel of frivolous glamour throughout. Essentially a bitchy drawing room comedy which just happens to have a mystery element to serve as its plot, the screenplay was written by Anthony Shaffer and barely a scene goes by without at least one flamboyantly quotable line popping up (“Such a valve still has to be invented, Madam”) that will be remembered always. Director Hamilton has added to this by continually letting his actors, even bit players, have bits of business throughout and all of this combined with the continued use of Cole Porter music as the score make it all extremely enjoyable—the score continues throughout to such an extent that when long stretches finally go by without it as Poirot is investigating and then solving the crime, its absence makes us alert to the fact that we now have to pay attention. Nothing much ever appears to be at stake even after the murder and there seems to be so little concern that a killer is among the guests that everyone still turns up in formalwear for evening cocktails only hours after the body is discovered. Of course, these characters are for the most part the idle rich (observing a passing yacht Sylvia Miles offers, “Odell and I were on it once…I think.”) with little that concerns them beyond their own cash flow problems and signs of the coming war are never in evidence.

The mystery element is well mapped out, with numerous devices to aid in keeping track of things including the “noon day gun” and it gives the audience the chance to pick out certain holes in various character’s alibis (though, cleverly, not all of them). At times the film is more than willing to just sit back and let the music and images play, particularly during an extended montage of the various island activities culminating in the big discovery and except for a certain disturbing shot of a dead rabbit to foreshadow the titular evil under the sun there’s very little attempt to set the stage for such doings. You get the feeling that Guy Hamilton would have been perfectly happy to not have a murder mystery upset all of this fun, but he never lets things get at all grim--it’s just a murder among the wealthy after all, nothing to get too worked up about (even glimpses of the dead body are pretty discreet). There is a place in this film world for much more serious genre exercises but the sunny, twisted comic flavor feel that pervades this entire film thanks to its director and screenwriter, not to mention the beautiful setting, makes it an impossible film for me to dislike. And it’s extremely rewatchable as well. It’s not as good as Lumet’s MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS but it is much more fun than the grim and overlong DEATH ON THE NILE, the first time Ustinov played the character. Not to mention that it’s a good deal better than Hamilton’s previous film, the Christie-based THE MIRROR CRACK’D, which has some interesting elements in the story (all from the author) but even with the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Angela Lansbury, Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson and Kim Novak in the cast it still managed to be completely unmemorable. Either way, if Hamilton decided to learn from that misfire in order to mix the ideal cocktail of intriguing mystery and sharp one-liners in EVIL UNDER THE SUN, then the second attempt certainly paid off. Diana Rigg sings, too.

No real surprise, much of the enjoyment comes from the cast, particularly Ustinov who Poirot seems to believe that so gesture or movement can ever be too grandiose as well as the great Diana Rigg, every inch a star in every shrill, unlikable moment she spends on camera. Maggie Smith is very enjoyable as well in the role of hotel owner Daphne Castle with some nice moments with Ustinov in particular (this film would be ideal as the lighter cocktail to follow Robert Altman’s Christie-inspired GOSFORD PARK on a double bill and it would be interesting to compare the degrees of cynicism found in both). Though it’s tempting to say he is underused, James Mason in fact has one of the most enjoyable moments in the whole film as he carefully, methodically explains how he doesn’t have an alibi and there’s nothing he can do about it. Not to mention that after Elisha Cook, Jr. and Marie Windsor in THE KILLING, the concept of Mason and Miles as a married couple has to rank as one of the more unexpected unions in cinema history.

I saw it in the theater when I was a kid so there’s a certain nostalgia factor in it as well but putting that aside watching EVIL UNDER THE SUN during this time of year just seemed right. Particularly lately when things have been so crazed and hot here in Los Angeles. Peter Ustinov played Hercule Poirot several more times, on TV and in APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH, a Michael Winner film released by Cannon. If memory serves, it’s not a good movie and it seems to be forgotten now. It would be nice if there were another breezily welcoming Poirot effort like EVIL UNDER THE SUN from Hamilton and Shaffer, but this sort of thing was probably falling out of fashion by the early 80s and how many murder mysteries can be scored with non-stop Cole Porter anyway? I can understand someone wanting a more serious approach to these things—or to Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot in general, for that matter and I’m usually one of those people. But this one managed to nail the tone just right and as long as it’s there to watch maybe once a year when you need to take such a vacation to a far-off island with a fully stocked bar, it does just the trick.

“Couldn't we make this a private investigation? You know how peculiar people can be about a spot of murder.”

Adequate To The Occasion

2009-08-29T14:56:00.000-07:00

Life sometimes happens. If I could update this site much more often I would but things have been a little off-kilter lately. No point in getting into why—not much of it would be very interesting to anyone but me anyway. August should never be this stressful, but there you go. Could some of what’s occupying my attention be part of why I popped NO WAY OUT into the DVD player? There might be a woman involved in some of my thoughts leading me to continually fixate on what’s going on with that little drama, but I’m not going to get too specific. After all, I don’t know for certain how often she reads this. Maybe I should just focus on the movie, a thriller released in August 1987 that holds up pretty well for the most part. The sort of thriller that isn’t made enough these days, it’s pretty much the film version of a good book you read on an airplane, offering enough of a feel of importance when in fact it’s actually pretty trashy. But it’s still pretty damn good, making it ideal to watch on a hot August night and is also gives the feel of a slick Hollywood production that is extremely well put together in all departments.

Not an easy plot to summarize, but I’ll try to avoid explicit spoilers: Naval Officer Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) is attending an inaugural ball where he is introduced by old friend Scott Pritchard (Will Patton) to Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman). Soon after encountering Brice’s complete lack of interest Farrell meets the intriguing Susan Atwell (Sean Young) and, after an enjoyable tryst in a limo that takes them around the capital the two offer their names and begin an affair. Tom soon has to leave to go overseas but soon enough a brave rescue attempt catches the attention of Brice, who arranges for Farrell to return to Washington to work under him. It isn’t long after Farrell’s return to Susan that he discovers that she is actually Brice’s mistress. Though Farrell expresses his displeasure at the arrangement things are soon complicated when a shocking development (no spoilers!) results in Brice and Pritchard, looking for the other man she is seeing, attempting to use the situation to pretend to be looking for a KGB spy planted somewhere in the department who is thought to be imaginary. Farrell of course knows that it’s all a sham as he is placed in the impossible position of leading the search to uncover someone only he knows is himself.

Like I said, it holds up pretty well even with the change in the political climate and the now-ancient technology used in the search. Actually, the only 80s element that is almost entirely unbearable are the lousy pop songs (including a few tracks by Paul Anka) which turn up here and there. It’s pretty much a potboiler, which I mean in the best possible way, but it’s expertly put together by director Roger Donaldson (still doing good work with last year’s THE BANK JOB), screenwriter Robert Garland (the film is essentially a remake of the classic noir THE BIG CLOCK from the novel by Kenneth Fearing), legendary cinematographer John Alcott (who died before this film’s release). Garland skillfully keeps things moving with new elements continually coming up and minor political issues like the continually-discussed “phantom submarine” which never really amounts to much but gives the impression that important matters are being discussed. Particularly in the second half there’s a continually moving, continually roving camera that is never showy but constantly ratchets up the suspense and it feels like everyone is on the same page to make all this as effective as possible. Along with one infamous camera trick carried over from THE OMEN, there’s some terrific production design by J. Dennis Washington which helps a lot in convincing us of the sets that are supposed to represent the Pentagon, even if it’s impossible to swallow the climactic search through that enormous building—they try to get away with it by having Gene Hackman protest “It’s the largest building in the world!” but it still doesn’t help.

Combining those sets with extensive location work in the D.C. area it’s a film that makes very good use of the frame in almost every scene and the overall production pulls off the illusion of credibility with only a few minor missteps here and there (I don’t know, would the streets of D.C. be that deserted on Inauguration Night?) and to say that there are a few questions when the credits role is putting it mildly—I’m still wondering about the potential validity of a certain piece of evidence that Costner fabricates. But maybe that’s a moot point considering the somewhat notorious twist ending (like I said, no spoilers!) which in all honestly never bothered me much at the time and matters even less now maybe because the more I know about the world the more it becomes clear how little people in charge (I’m not even specifically talking about politics here, just the way the world is in general) really know about anything that’s going on and it’s one of a handful of things that makes NO WAY OUT a little more than just a sex-infused summer thriller. It is that very thing of course, but it’s a pretty damn good one too. Just another reminder of when popcorn movies with a smidgen of intelligence like this were more the norm. You can imagine some lame critic back in ’87 calling this a “crackerjack thriller” and getting quoted in the ads but in this case that person would be absolutely right.

Returning to this film for the first time in a while, I was struck by the presence of Kevin Costner in this role, filmed before his breakout in THE UNTOUCHABLES but held back until after its release. He’s not great in the part but his talent is clearly developing and it’s hard not to watch this and think, This guy was going to be Redford, damn it! I guess he was for a few years, but what the hell happened? After his Oscars and blockbusters I suppose the answer would be hubris, bad publicity and simple unfortunate choices. There are a handful of underrated titles sprinkled throughout his filmography which deserve more than they’ve gotten but looking at him here it’s hard not to hope a little that there’s still something else on this level that we can look forward to from him. Gene Hackman does some skillful work in an even trickier role, taking an essentially cold, unlikable person (forgetting even that he’s sort of the villain of the piece) and giving him some touches that make him recognizably human. The unpredictable energy Sean Young brings to her performance allows her to almost steal the film, taking what I would imagine is just written as ‘the girl’ and bringing oddly endearing touches which allows her presence to linger in the mind even when she’s offscreen. For all I know, the goofy touches of the character reveal her as more like the actual Sean Young than any other part she ever played (No Sean-Young-is-crazy jokes here—it’s too easy and besides, I always liked her). And yes, she’s pretty hot here too, particularly in the infamous limo scene.

In contrast, Will Patton’s shifty Scott Pritchard lets him take control of the second half making it funny and icy at the same time (I particularly like his response when Hackman throws a file folder at him) even though the nature of his character might not get by if the film were made these days (he’s revealed as gay in offhand dialogue—“I’ll be damned.” “So will he, if you believe the Old Testament,” says Fred Dalton Thompson and you know that this particular actor believes this). Watching it again, I can’t help but think that his ultra-pretentious use of Latin when he’s proving a point late in the film has been parodied somewhere—maybe Phil Hartman on a NEWSRADIO espisode. Among the character actors doing strong work through Donaldson’s direction are George Dzundza, Jason Bernard and DARKMAN’s Nicholas Worth as “Cup Breaker”. Future Oscar nominee David Paymer appears for a few moments as “Technician”. Composer Maurice Jarre contributes a mostly electronic score which fortunately only sounds blatantly 80s (so there’s one more thing which dates it) during a crucial chase scene.

It’s a slick potboiler that doesn’t require a great deal of analysis but I suppose you could say that NO WAY OUT is ultimately about what happens to men when a woman who’s a live wire beyond anything they’ve ever encountered enters their life and what can happen as a result. Total chaos, that’s what. I don’t believe that’s what the movie’s about and it’s certainly not anything which is going on in my life right now. You believe that, don’t you? Don’t you? NO WAY OUT is a product of its time but it’s a solid example of a film made for adults which can be enjoyed without feeling like you’re being insulted, something that Orion was pretty damn good at back in the 80s. And if it causes other things to come to mind…well, that’s my own business. Like I said, life sometimes happens and if you think about it that could be what NO WAY OUT is about as well.

A Loss Of Inhibitions

2009-08-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

BLIND DATE is the sort of film that you'd think would be on cable constantly but it seems to have disappeared from the airwaves in recent years. I can’t bring myself to get very worked up over this. Directed by Blake Edwards and primarily sold as the first big-screen vehicle for Bruce Willis in March 1987, the film was made near the tail end of an extremely busy decade for the director and it feels considerably less personal than even a few of his considerably broader entries from around this time. The screenplay is credited to Dale Launer (who also wrote RUTHLESS PEOPLE and DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS) and maybe it says something about its relative normalcy that unlike a number of other films which are billed as Blake Edwards’ followed by the title, this one is simply “A Blake Edwards Film” almost as if to separate it slightly from the pack. There are a few nice things in here so I don’t totally mind it but it unfortunately gets weaker as it goes on and seems to surrender to a lack of logic and, ultimately, actual laughs.

Overworked, overstressed “assistant portfolio assessor” Walter Davis (Bruce Willis), who is badly in need of a date for an important business dinner lets his brother Ted (Phil Hartman) set him up with his wife’s cousin Nadia Gates (Kim Basinger) with the simple warning to not let her drink because “she loses control.” The two tentatively hit it off but to relieve some of the awkwardness Walter picks up champagne which they share before heading to dinner. She reluctantly joins in but by the time they hit the restaurant Nadia is indeed beginning to lose control, sending Walter spiraling into a nightmare of an evening which, combined with the appearance of Nadia’s ex David (John Larroquette), may end with his life in shambles and maybe even going to jail for a very long time.

The very first scene includes Rick Dees’ show heard on the radio, featuring a parody ad for the “James Brown Car Alarm”. It’s an odd note to start a movie on, with a joke that isn’t really part of the movie. It may be a reach but looked at now this seems almost intentional, as if Edwards is saying that the humor in this movie isn’t quite going to be his, but it will be as broad as humanly possible. Something as farcically divorced from reality as A FINE MESS at least seemed like it could have been directed by no one else working and BLIND DATE, even with a few digressions, seems a bit more normal and (I can’t help but assume this was the intention) commercial by comparison, which doesn’t really go with what the material should be. The notion of Basinger easily getting drunk and losing her inhibitions might make sense in a pitch-black satire (one that would be right in this director’s wheelhouse) but doesn’t really lend itself to light romantic comedy—in one of the few interesting touches, Edwards foreshadows her condition by having her addicted to chocolate, just like Lee Remick in THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES. A little too often it feels like Edwards is playing to the cheap seats, like the early joke of Hartman boasting of how good-looking Basinger is—“I’m looking at a picture of her now,” he claims when he’s really looking at a picture of Marvin Hagler, adding “She’s a real knockout”.

Signs of a real presence behind the camera pop up through out, from the impressive long takes that play out whole scenes in one shot or the well-executed chaos of the business dinner scene that is the reason for the plot in the first place—at this early stage the movie is really popping and the entire sequence, particularly when compared to a similar section in the current THE UGLY TRUTH (yes, I saw it—trust me, there was a good reason but it was still lousy) is extremely well-executed in writing, pacing and acting. It’s also hard not to enjoy Edwards’ insistence on the running gag of Larroquette’s car crashing into numerous buildings (when it crashes into a flour factory it of course results in a veritable explosion of flour). But the whole thing seems to run out of ideas—and, in numerous ways, a reason for existing—by around the one hour mark. It’s as if the script was being made up as it was written, then when the story hit a wall sixty pages in it never occurred to anyone to go back to change things. In fairness to screenwriter Launer, the bio on his official website calls the film a “lame, slapstick piece of shit,” (his own words) also stating that the script was rewritten at different points by Edwards and Leslie Dixon.

The film could be a lighter, L.A.-set AFTER HOURS but it never reaches the heights of mania it really should and even simple logic never seems to be part of the movie’s game plan like why Willis buys champagne for her, why Basinger drinks it, or why either one of them want to ever see each other again when the night is over. If we can’t believe what they’re doing at first, how can we believe them later on when total farce has taken over? Does anyone really care whether Bruce Willis’s character gets back into music? When it moves into the third act, featuring Larroquette’s character attempting to blackmail Basinger into marriage it just feels like the wrong creative choices have been made. Even when presented with people in a large house just missing each other in farcical fashion, which you’d think Edwards could turn into a crackerjack sequence of event, it still falls flat even with doors slamming and people falling off of balconies it never hits any kind of stride. Most of the sneaking around Bruce Willis does here seems to have next to no effect in the end which makes it seem like the movie is just treading water before the climax. The end, incidentally, makes me wonder if there isn’t a rule stating that if the final scene of a romantic comedy has both leads jumping into a swimming pool the movie can’t be any good, then there should be. There’s also a mean attack dog named Rambo, so here’s an elemental Comedy Question—is it funny to have an attack dog named Rambo? Wouldn’t it be an actual joke if the big mean attack dog was named something like Princess? It just feels like another example of a number of attempts at laughs throughout that are probably a little too easy but never succeed in being all that funny. Something like that makes me really wonder if Edwards was just decided to play things a little easy this time and not go into wild flights of comic fancy like in a few of his other films.

Bruce Willis at least was able to prove that he could pop on the big screen but the role, pretty much the opposite of MOONLIGHTING’s David Addison, is a little too much of a straight man to be appropriate for him and, no surprise, he only begins to really come to life when his character begins to crack and goes nutso at a fancy party—you could also say that, since this is how we actually expect to see him it’s not as effective or funny as it should be. Basinger (who already worked with Edwards in THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN) isn’t bad and plays the drunk scenes with the appropriate recklessness but doesn’t seem quite able to fully make sense of her character. I’ve also never been crazy about how she looks here—Basinger always looked better as a blonde. Larroquette, ideally cast, works considerably better and is most effective in the scenes where his character has to act craziest. He’s also very good at screaming wildly before his car crashes into a building. Familiar character actors George Coe and Mark Blum are very good as Walter’s boss and coworker but they’re each unfortunately out of the picture by the half-hour mark. Phil Hartman has some nice moments, William Daniels gets a few funny lines during the final third, PINK PANTHER series regular Graham Stark turns up as William Daniels’s butler (his introduction seems like a conscious echo of his role in VICTOR/VICTORIA) and Edwards regular Dr. Herb Tanney appears as the minister in the final sequence, billed as Sacerdo Tanney. The score is of course by Henry Mancini but, surprisingly for him, very little about it makes any real impression. "Piano and Strings" from the PINK PANTHER soundtrack turns up in the background during the business dinner sequence, not that I've heard some of this music too many times or anything.

Set in more of a normal romantic-comedy world, as opposed to the Blake Edwards world familiar things like the PINK PANTHER movies or even the broadest jokes in something like “10”, the film is barely able to get through a couple of minutes without fashions or music turning up that scream “80s!” in the loudest way possible. The movie is disappointing not just from its lack of real laughs but also from how the director really seems to be trying to make a star vehicle more than one of his own films which results in a finished product that just feels kind of thin. There are a handful of laughs but not enough. Still, it was one of his more successful pictures from this period so maybe he was onto something. I’ve made it clear in the past how much I’ll defend some of his films that most of the world hates--and I'll go on defending them--but BLIND DATE just seems like one he had to make to keep certain people happy so he could get back to making the ones that he was really interested in. It’ll turn up on cable again eventually, but you don’t need to go out of your way to give it another look.