Snake Eyes

I keep trying to find a nice way to say this. Structurally, this film is tightly-wound clockwork. But no character in it has a single moment that feels motivated or like something a real person would ever say or do. Gary Sinise and Nicolas Cage have so little chemistry as "best friends" that twice in the story I started looking for tell-tale signs that the two were shot in different locations and cut so it seemed they were across a table from each other, or whatever. The ending is so complicatedly pat for no reason that I don't even know what to say about it... after everything seems to have come to some sort of head -- a purely by-the-books and soulless dovetailing of androids lurching from scene to scene and saying the kind of thing needed to get to the next scene, whether or not it made any sense to say -- suddenly about six random events happen all at once -- the Daily Planet-style giant metal globe rolling down the street, the hurricane, the gunshot triggering (?) the electronic doorlock, the news man running with his camera for shelter, the police van hydroplaning into the opened garage just as our heroes are about to be shot point-blank by Kevin Dunne (that is, Gary Sinise's character, who inexplicably shares a name with Kevin Dunn, who stars in this same film as a different character, who is sadly not named Gary Sineese) -- anyway it's all too much.

To its credit, the first twenty minutes, even though they're completely artificial feeling, are incredibly fun and gripping. The camera work and visual motif/theme of What the Eye Sees vs. What the Camera Sees (also playing out in the story as What the Memory Sees vs. What the Camera Saw) is innovative and provocative. But none of it ever makes up for how soulless and hollow the film remains. De Palma has always been an affectionate Hitchcock impersonator, and he and Zemeckis seem to occupy the artificial, cinema-fetishizing end of that New Hollywood spectrum, and I thought Blow Out kind of felt like "pinnacle De Palma," but if that's an example of all the fun parts of his movies-for-their-own-sake repeating-the-masters'-steps-precisely style, Snake Eyes stands as counterpoint. Here the artificiality and navel-gazing doesn't help. The Hitchcockian clockwork-thriller/tragedy-of-errors just feels like it exists to exist. The story doesn't mean anything or do anything, the characters never seem to feel things (anybody anywhere, watch this movie and tell me you really believe Nic Cage's character being heartbroken, hurt or shocked at any of the nineteen times he is surprised or betrayed by Sinise; or that the curtain-close romance between Gugino and Cage feels genuine or motivated by any previous scene in the entire story).

As someone who generally (but skeptically) enjoys and respects and deeply admires Brian De Palma, this is the film that makes me see what his detractors see when they look at his best works. This is a De Palma film, not "warts and all," but maybe just warts.

Blow Out

The A.V. Club repeatedly cites Blow Out as the unofficial king of De Palma films, and I may have let this one get a little too built up in my excitement to see it. (It didn't help that they were writing about it in such celebratory terms a full six weeks or so before the film was finally re-released by Criterion, or that it took me almost a full month after that to finally find the time to sit and watch it.) It's definitely engaging, and it's fun, and it's smart, but I'm not sure off-hand where I'd place it between good and best. But there's no denying that it's a very good film -- and man, it's surprisingly tense at parts, in both a good and bad way. On a personal note, I'm starting to feel some stressed-out anxiety about deadlines and projects and time budgeting, and this movie was probably a poor choice for the ninety-minute Relaxation Session I was sort of hoping for.

But enough with the audience's apologies and outside influences. I don't have a lot of time and I should really be at least mentioning the film's influences that struck me if I'm going to blather about anything. You can't really talk about De Palma without talking about what films influence him, can you? No wonder certain kinds of critics are in love with him and others are... less-than-in-love with him. I haven't seen Blow-Up in too long to compare the two, but I did pretty recently watch The Conversation, and it's pretty much impossible NOT to compare those films. (Note: I distinctly remember watching The Conversation about two months ago, but checking previous posts I realize I never wrote anything on it, because I think circumstances got in the way and I never finished it. Alas.) Blow Out is such a visceral ride and The Conversation is so cerebral. Both are uncomfortable in their paranoia. Harry Caul has a much more developed and three-dimensional paranoia than Jack Terry's, but both stem from being too good at their jobs and hiding from a past that involved getting someone killed. And in my memory, both films star Dennis Franz, but a little research proves that The Conversation starred Allen Garfield as Bernie the slick competitor. So let's say both films star Dennis Franz-types.

There's a lot of really striking shots here that I couldn't quite put my finger on the intent behind -- other than being striking. Similarly, there is a lot of really overt symbolism here, like driving your jeep willy-nilly through the parade of firefighters, policemen, and Uncle-Sam dressed paraders, and crashing through a storefront window into a mannequin-reenactment of a revolutionary-war era hanging. Sally screaming for help and being murdered in front of a massive American flag. The number of times telephones appear when someone is being betrayed or killed. The repeated motif of the bell icon, providing a crossover between Liberty, Telecommunications, and the city of Philadelphia. But I don't know what, specifically, to make of any of these, to be honest. I do know I haven't given them enough thought yet, and so maybe with more time or repeated viewings a connection will come to me; but with Brian De Palma, whose scenes sometimes feel like they come with neon signs reading CLEVER SET PIECE, it's also possible that the repeated motifs are there so that a motif can repeat, because that's what films do. It's entirely possible that he's built all the thematic structure he can into a piece without any of the thematic content. I kind of think there's some of that in Body Double at least, and possibly Carrie. I think that's part of why his films work so well for some and so poorly for others. The man tells interesting, excessively self-conscious stories set in excessively self-conscious movie-centric worlds, but he doesn't really say much. It's not like he says nothing, or that his films are meaningless -- far from it -- but he definitely doesn't make films whose primary intent is to say much of anything, or explore an idea very deeply. He makes films to echo smartly, and add layers and voices to pre-existing text.

Maybe Brian De Palma is the starkest, most obvious example of that phenomenon I just babbled about recently, the man who touched-up millennia-old cave art in Aboriginal Australia and said he wasn't painting, that the spirits were painting. Maybe De Palma is repainting those lines, continuing an artistic process that's still in its infancy. Remaking a film could certainly be called an example of this, but maybe a more interesting and almost as obvious example is what De Palma does -- which, for the record, isn't so novel: off the top of my head Tarantino, Scorsese, Haynes, Jarmusch all do variations of the same. "Homages," right?

It's possible there's some interesting thought there. Or it's possible I just rattled off a stream-of-consciousness game of free association through ideas and said almost nothing at all about the film Blow Out itself. Then again, it's possible that in doing so I've done exactly what De Palma would want me to: I've used this film to springboard into a talk about Film. There's an hour-long interview between De Palma and Noah Baumbach on this disc that's supposed to be pretty great. One of these nights I'll watch it, and maybe I'll have a better idea then what De Palma intended with non-specific filmic homages like this.

Mission to Mars

This is probably my third time seeing this film, including way back when (all the way back at the dawn of time, in the year 2000) when it played in theaters. I guess I'd basically describe it as equal parts entertaining and underwhelming -- not quite disappointing, and not quite exciting. The script is a bit hokey, with by-the-books dramatics and characterization, clunky exposition and backstories, all that. But the technical details, though simplistic-feeling, also have a real sense of verisimilitude to them. It feels very much like someone excitedly did a lot of really good research into realistic advances in space exploration technology and culture, but maybe hasn't spent a lot of time around real humans. In fact, for all the detail put into space suits and orbital velocities, there is no sense that life continues for any of these characters when the camera's not actively on them. They exist only as elements in this particular story, the perfect combination needed to get from Point A (a disaster involving the first astronauts on Mars, in a curiously but conveniently un-televised event) to Point B (Jim staying behind to accept the Close Encounters-style invitation to explore the cosmos in an alien ship). There is no life beyond the edges of the frame, but within the frame some reasonably exciting stuff does happen.

So -- seriously -- who is a better director for this kind of material than Brian De Palma? Apart from vague similarities to 2001, it's not full of homages to classic cinema (probably somewhere there's a wink or a nod to Hitchcock somewhere in there... right?), but the self-conscious style and the use of movie expectations to keep the story rolling along fits De Palma just fine. There's something exuberantly unambiguous and hamfisted in the storytelling, the emotions, and especially the strange, mildly unearned sentimental montage at the end, and watching this now it's hard to fault it for its obviousness or patness: it's hardly accidental or unconscious. As a story about a man solving a hundred-million-year-old puzzle and earning a chance to join the proto-human Martians somewhere out in the galaxy, it does everything you'd expect it to do, and it does an all right job of it.

For the most part the space- and Mars- and astronaut-related visual effects all look surprisingly good (I'll overlook the wrongness of the zero-G liquids), which makes the weird cartooniness inside the Martian Face structure all the more unusual, and I remember thinking before that this was just another case of You-Never-Should-Have-Put-The-Camera-Inside-The-Ship (to reference Close Encounters of the Third Kind for a second time), but I'm willing to give a tiny bit more leeway here, since it's pretty clearly meant to be some kind of a holographic representation, a CGI simulation in other words, and not a photorealistic depiction of the ancient Martian, or of the Solar System History lesson. Again, with so much of the movieness of this feeling slightly self-conscious, I'm inclined to at least wonder if it wasn't a deliberate choice, letting the alien look less than realistic (it being a film from 2000, when CGI was still coming out of its infancy, doesn't really help support this theory). What it doesn't forgive is the awkward, goofy design of the alien itself. But, whatcha gonna do.

From the perspective of writing reference, though, it was interesting to note how sharply delineated the first act info-dump is, leaping ahead in time (necessarily) and cramming as much conveniently on-the-nose dialogue into each sequence as possible. Again, it's hard to ignore the artificiality of the whole enterprise, the convenience of almost every scene (this unfortunately diminishes an otherwise memorable and dramatically exciting death scene halfway through the film -- you all know which one I mean). Again, the pieces are just too well-suited to the needs of the story, and so at no point do you really get a sense of tough choices being made even when the choices being made would ostensibly be very high-stakes, very difficult decisions.

It's a case of the cart before the horse: they had a story they needed to tell, these guys -- humans get to Mars; on Mars they find a mystery that kills three and strands one; the rescue mission gets to Mars and finds their stranded friend, from whom they learn some key pieces of the story; a challenge is posed, accepted, and met; a deep secret of the universe is revealed; and someone from the party has to be perfectly suited to make a leap of faith. To tell that story, you look at the pieces you need and you fill them out accordingly. That's plot-driven writing. In character-driven writing, you'd set up the mystery and the puzzle, and then put the wrong sorts of people in these situations, and see what they do instead. Maybe the Martian Cyclone-Worm/Spaceship-Invitation Doohickey goes unsolved for fifty more years. I don't know. The point is, this isn't character-driven. And it's okay, but... well, I guess it's clear where my preferences fall.

(Further, the story demands that when the hero leaps off a cliff we don't give too much thought to the logistics or ramifications of that: a single human alone, in some strange alien spaceship, chasing after a very alien race with completely unknown cultural and ideological -- let alone biological -- expectations, needs, or desires... do the proto-human Martian Almond Men want to eat him? study him in a zoo? is he the final step in a hundred-million-year-long experiment in evolution and xenobiology? It seems pretty weird if they just want a single human friend, doesn't it? Compound all that with the fact that this race left Mars before single-cell life on Earth had developed -- I mean, that's a pretty big head start; in the time it took amoebas to become spacefaring hominids, what changes do you think these highly advanced, genetics-mastered spaceworthy Almond Giants have undergone? What exactly is waiting out there for him, best case scenario? It's not like they're going to remember sending out a party invite when they were forced to abandon their home to an asteroid crash. Also, if I'm going to fill this long parenthetical with hole-punching, I can't walk away and not ask: when their lush green Mars was turned into a lifeless husk, why was soaring through space toward a new galaxy a better option than hopping one planet closer to the Sun and populating Earth themselves? It was worthy of their raw genetic material but it wasn't worthy of their cities and culture?)

Anyway, like I said: this story desperately doesn't want to exist beyond the edges of the frame. The characters, the technology, the mystery, and the secret origins of life on Earth. It's like the façades built for those old 1950s westerns: entire towns that were nothing but storefronts and boardwalks, held together on the backside by plywood crossbeams. If you look at it head-on, it's a beautiful, sprawling, detailed frontier town. But if you cock your head to either side and peer around the edges, beneath the surface or into the shadows, you realize how poorly supported and precarious the whole thing is.

Several cautionary tales in all those colorful metaphors, as I return now to working on my script.

Body Double

Brian De Palma films are funny creatures. A lot of his output is only made for cinephiles, with inside references and layered homages to all the classics that shaped him and shaped film. Like Hitchcock, his favorite go-to, De Palma worries over complicated camera moves and the iconography of details more than he worries over actual cinematography (which ranges wildly from gorgeous to naturalistic to flat) or performance (which ranges wildly from comedic to dramatic to hammy). His sense of pacing within a sequence is very good, but like Hitch, his sense of pacing for the story as a whole is often awkward, with fits and starts and time devoted to minor beats because they are tense at the expense of major beats that, though less tense, are actually the more important moments.

The plot itself is a pretty Hitchesque mindfuck, and that's fun, but it's a little too easy to piece together for Jake. Maybe it's that I just came off a couple of mystery films that devote time to connecting all the pieces and Body Double isn't a mystery at all, but a thriller, but when the hero makes the leap of logic and gets it right on the first try, it always smacks of a writer who doesn't care about his story so much as he cares about the scenes that make it up. Which is, like I just said, exactly what I think Hitchcock and De Palma are both guilty of. They are master scene-craftsmen who didn't always make the best actual films. Anyway, I do like the scheme, it's a nice way to update a Hitchcock-styled conspiracy and mistaken-identity story into 1970s Hollywood and add lots and lots of boobs. It's not a bad film, though, if you just roll with a couple of strange details -- like that the police don't detain Jake, or the exact method with which the "Indian" murders the woman.

A couple of funny things stick out to me, though, as clearly deliberate choices that I haven't made peace with just yet. For one, Sam's death (the dog leaps into him and they both fall off a cliff into the reservoir) is just so sudden and ludicrous and unexplained -- wasn't that his dog? who protected him no matter what? ...plus it's basically a deus ex machina no different than an elf getting you out of a dungeon, since the villain's death and the hero's salvation aren't even at the hands of the hero. For another, Holly's entire performance (and especially her comedic wake-up-shouting routine immediately after the villain has died/disappeared) -- she seems a little too dense for no reason, which makes her seem less like a character and more like a plot-contrivance; she just switches motivations on a dime to match whatever is needed of her in the moment.

The thing is, though, that both seem almost Brechtian in their design, here, as De Palma goes to great pains several times to remind you this is just a movie, after all, just a cheap, tit-filled thriller. Even Jake's claustrophobia is about as real as Scottie's acrophobia in Vertigo, with a lot of fairly preposterous nail-biting and tooth-gnashing and paralysis. But this is De Palma, doing That Hitchcock Thing, and I'm torn between the idea that he just let these things be contrived because that's how Hitchcock handles them and movies make no promises about being real, or whether he is deliberately inserting unnatural elements because this is a movie about the joy of watching movies. Either way, they stick out like a sore thumb and I haven't decided if that's okay or not, but on a single viewing I'm left wondering as to the filmmaker's motivations with them.

On the subject of Brechtian beats however, I actually did enjoy the mid-climax break from reality back into the opening scene's film shoot, the chat with the director and the hero taking charge of his own paralyzing fear. It wasn't real but it was nice, and for being such a break from reality, it was smoothly integrated and never disorienting. It was one of many nice moments in here.

Also, a final thought: in addition to all the Hitchcock stuff, this movie kept calling Chinatown to mind. It has a woman posing as someone else to frame our hero, a hero named Jake who follows people around on their day-to-day lives, a showdown at the reservoir, and even makes references to Chinatown at one point. Or maybe I've just got Chinatown on the brain.

Carrie

As to the plot, I get a little confused because Chris (a.k.a. RoboCop's partner Lewis) and her boyfriend (a.k.a. Kirstie Alley's love interest in Look Who's Talking) seem to be the only ones actually in on the prank, and maybe the annoying friend in the ballcap. I guess that means Tommy (a.k.a. The Greatest American Hero) and Sue (who looks familiar and is in things I've seen but I can't place her, so we'll call her Jessica Rabbit's Singing Voice) were actually being totally benevolent when Sue offered her boyfriend to Carrie, and when he charmed the pants off her with his blasé who-gives-a-shit-we're-all-idiots attitude, big blonde mop and easy smile. He even kissed her! More than once! And all the friends who came around and accepted the former pariah... I got confused.

I think what confuses/confused me here is that we're meant to see the story through Carrie's POV, which means we suspect everyone is conspiring to humiliate her because she suspects that. Carrie's a big sheltered dork bordering on homeschool naivete, but she's no fool, and she knows how the others view her. But there are exceptions, whose characters we step away from Carrie to view, such as her crazy mom (who we never sympathize with, even when maybe we should) and her kind-hearted teacher Miss Collins (who we always sympathize with, even when maybe we shouldn't). I think having these less subjective viewpoints led me to believe that we'd stepped away from the limited-viewpoint of Carrie's paranoia and that the conspiracy wasn't all in her head. So not until literally the moment when Sue sees the string attached to the blood bucket did I even have an inkling that this wasn't The World vs. Carrie, and it was only Chris vs. Carrie.

But by the end I get it, and as hell broke loose all over the Bates High (heh) gymnasium in all its blood-drenched, fire-hosed, flaming-inferno glory, I was trying to reassociate my sympathies to the innocents who were being telekinetically murdered. In that sense, it's an interesting take on how a single act of serious bullying not only implicates a community but how much damage it can wreak on both the victim and those around her. It's also a lot less horrory than I thought, which isn't a complaint (even in my horror-movie kick, I'd rather have a good movie than a horror movie). It's more high school melodrama with pseudo-religious witchcraftery afoot. And I'm okay with that.